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Went to a Callaghan family BBQ today. This is my scottish family on my biological mothers side (I was adopted and only met them 7 years ago).Daniel is the guy in the lei with the new degree in geology or geography(something like that). Other pics are my mother and sister, a niece, thegrandmother, an uncle and an aunt.
--Dav via Danger Hiptophttp://www.danger-island.com/dav/
Today a new peer to peer application was announced: WASTE (my mirror).
WASTE is a software product and protocol that enables secure distributed communication for small (on the order of 10-50 nodes) trusted groups of users.WASTE is designed to enable small companies and small teams within larger companies to easily communicate and collaborate in a secure and efficient fashion, independent of physical network topology.
First off, I -love- the name choice. At first I thought perhaps they unwittingly made a reference to Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, one of my all time favorite books, but when I saw their icon choice I knew it was an intentional reference. In the book the name is thought to be an acronym standing for We Await Silent Trystero Empire and the symbol for Trystero is a muted trumpet. This icon seems to lack the mute, however. Here's a quote from the book (lifted from a /. post)
"Last night, she might have wondered what undergrounds apart from the couple she knew of communicated by WASTE system. By sunrise she could legitimately ask what undergrounds didn't....[H]ere were God knew how many citizens, deliberately choosing not to communicate by U.S. Mail. It was not an act of treason, nor possibly even of defiance. But it was a calculated withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery. Whatever else was being denied them out of hate, indifference to the power of their vote, loopholes, simple ignorance, this withdrawal was their own, unpublicized, private. Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world."
After installing I set up my first trusted private network with some other folks from irc. The documentation and GUI interface are a little clunky (but completely usable). We managed to get public encryption keys exchanged and all got connected without too many problems, although the lack of clear documentation caused some confusion as to how things were working.
I think this is an exciting (although not unexpected) development. The answer to the problem of being able to participate in file sharing networks and not worry about the RIAA or MPAA freaking out on you is to limit the networks to more or less your existing real world network of friends. This brings file sharing back to the level of things that were better tolerated like tape trading, but with the efficiency of the Internet. This was a pretty obvious solution, and this implementation is a great start. It offers decent cryptography that makes adding someone to the network not difficult, but not trivial either, so the network trust level is decent. It doesn't have swarming downloads (ala bittorrent) but the best thing about WASTE is that it is open source so this will undoubtedly be added later.
I can see other directions this can go. It could be the killer app that brings FOAF-like structure (along with crypto) to the masses. If the ability to manage connections to multiple WASTE networks is added it could become a major part of your daily network interface routine. A serious alternative network within the Internet. I just wish it weren't written in C++, hacking C++ makes me a bit nasueous after yummy years of Java.
Imagine something that is friendster + waste + foaf + weighted vectors + hop control. You have multiple trusted p2p network. One for work where you can share internal files with co-workers. One for group of friends A, another for friends group B. In each network you can share only the files you have specified for that group. Additionally you might allow one degree of spearation friends from people in group A to see you group A shared files, except for Alice in group A because she links to anyone and you don't trust her friend network as much. For your group B friends you allow sharing up to three degrees of separation (perhaps because group B only sees less sensitive material).
The increasing frequency, intensity and duration of earthquakes in Tokyo is freaking out Mie, which is freaking out me. I don't like to think about the sort of what-ifs towards which all the seismic activity leads...
This past weekend Mie met up with a friend of my other housemate, Cheu (who is traipsing around Brazil at the moment), while out at Sputnik in Tokyo: DrDave's Blog: Met Mie @ Sputnik
Mie gave me a demonstration of her neat blogging system which allows her to do everything from her cell... snap pix, type text and send the whole along with GPS info, to be displayed automatically on her weblog...Not to be technologically outdone, I used my new camera to shoot my first mini-movie (I resized and decreased the actual quality to avoid clogging the bandwidth), here featuring Mie simultaneously showing her blogging and dancing abilities...
Ha ha, she really is quite talented :)
I took a long afternoon nap today, brought on by a dire lack of sleep in the last few days. I dreamt that I was at Burning Man hanging out in a large tent with Ben Hammersley, Niobe from Matrix 2: Reloaded, some jumpy guy who looked kinda like Johnny Knoxville and an odd little kid. It had been snowing, which would be just a weird dream thing since we were in the desert, but the weather gets weird at Burning Man so I wasn't too surprised. The Johnny Knoxville guy was acting really tweaked out and Ben was sitting down on a couch spacily watching a sci-fi movie called Cousceau 2000 on a television. I sat down by Ben and asked him if that guy was OK and Ben explained that the dude was alright, he had just taken too much "liquid methamphetimine" and indicated a half-empty gallon milk jug filled with a clear liquid. I asked him what it was like, and Ben replied "It's like 30 decibels in my ears at 120 BPM, thump! thump! thump!" I asked him if I could try some and he asked me if I wanted the "O.E. or S.E. variety" and that's when I woke up.
I'm not even sure if "liquid methamphetimine" is a real drug, and have no idea what special properties the O.E. or S.E. varieties might have.
After waking I wondered if I dreamt about Ben Hammersley because I was supposed to write up a couple of sections for his new O'Reilly book Weblog Hacks for over a month now and had kept procrastinating. I described parts of the dream and that potential analysis to some people on the #infoanarchy irc channel and they told me the book got cancelled! I hope slack ass blog hackers who had been slow to cough up the goods didn't have anything to do with that.
Last night I went to the Red Elvises show at Slim's. They put on a great show. These guys are fun, down-to-earth and talented russian surf guitar musicians ("Kick-ass Rock'n'Roll from Siberia") most famous because they provided the music for the excellent indie film Six String Samurai (I'm told, haven't actually seen it myself).
A number of my friends were there also: Sean, Lani, Jason and Ahn Chi (on left in pic) and I even saw Sarah from my tuesday night dive-bar group. Click the photo above to see more of Sean's pictures from the show.
I'd definitely catch them live again, they were thoroughly entertaining and got the audience dancing consistently. Sean says it was the best show he'd seen in San Francisco, but it wasn't quite that far up there for me (that level of adulation goes to Kinky @ Justice League and several acts at Sleazefest West (especially The Roofies)).
This morning I made a few more changes to the blogpost.pl script being used to post to TokyoTidbits.com. It now uses @navi to display the maps because according to Paul of in-duce this mapping system better matches the coordinates produced by Mie's phone. And rather than linking directly to the @navi map for the coordinates, I pass it to a simple new cgi script which uses browser frames to display the photo, the GPS information and the map at the same time. Actually it is two cgi scripts: gpsjpg and gpsjpg_details
You can see it all in action here:
Tokyo Tidbits: First posting with GPS!
Click on the [location info] link below the first photo.