Some good news from our judicial system:

No Pepper Spray on Nonviolent Protesters

An eight-person federal jury has returned a unanimous verdict for the Q-Tip Pepper Spray Eight activists/plaintiffs, finding the County of Humboldt and City of Eureka liable for excessive force in violation of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The excessive force was used by Humboldt County Sheriff's Deputies and Eureka Police Officers when they applied pepper spray with Q-tips directly to the eyes of the eight nonviolent forest defense protesters in three incidents in 1997. Three of the activists were also sprayed directly in the eyes from inches away. Two of the young women were juveniles.

Former Sheriff Dennis Lewis and current Sheriff Gary Philp also were found liable for causing the use of excessive force by setting policies allowing the unprecedented use of pepper spray on the passive demonstrators, who had locked their arms together inside metal pipes.

[.....]

The jury awarded nominal damages of only $1 to each of the plaintiffs, who made it clear all along that they weren't suing for the money, but to bring about a change of policy, to prevent the future use of pepper spray in Humboldt in the way it was used on them. They hope and expect that the verdict will reverberate far beyond rural Humboldt County to make it clear that police can not use the extremely painful pepper spray on non-violent people to coerce them to follow orders.

A year ago, when I was talking to people at conferences or those ubiquitous Bay Area techie mixers, if the conversation turned to programming languages (which it was wont to do) I would say "Javascript is the next hot programming language." People would look at me as if I had just said "gopher is going to be huge."

What I was talking about was how a few web sites like the nascent gmail.com were using some really nice Javascript wizardry to create pages that seemed incredibly more interactive than traditional HTML web pages. It's pretty obvious now, especially since the wizardry was given a name, AJAX, back in February.

It's not often I spot things like that, I'm not one of those trend-tracking types. I can actually be quite myopic: I was around the third person to add a link to del.icio.us back on September 17th 2003 (I just happened to be hanging out in the same irc channel as Joshua when he unveiled it). I totally didn't get it. I added a few links and forgot about it until December when suddenly it was the new huge thing (and by then, with more than a handful of links and three users in it, the power of "tags" was apparent).

But despite a mixed record I'd like to make another prediction now.

Just as Push came back as RSS, and Javascript came back as AJAX, I believe that Agents are finally going to have their day in the sun. They probably won't be called agents, but what I predict it that ordinary users are going to be given the capability to write scripts that execute on the remote servers of whatever service they are using. I realize this isn't exactly what Agents were intended to be, but AJAX and RSS aren't exactly Javascript and Push either, so just go with it.

Traditionally this wouldn't have worked, but the power of open source and enabled edge users is starting to sink into the general Net culture. People will write and share these scripts with each other. Host services will work to make them run efficiently because user's will demand it. It's win-win because the users will be creating new features for the service which they will enjoy and enhances the service for everyone. It's going to be beautiful.

For instance, I would write a script for Flickr that would create photo albums on the fly using specific users' streams and specific combination of tags (a bit like SmartAlbums in iPhoto). I could do this using some complex conditions. A script would be able to do anything I could do as a normal user through the point and click normal web interface, but it would be automated and running on Flickr's servers.

I will further go out on a limb and predict that Ruby on Rails is going to enable this in the beginning (although Google could start the engine on this one too). This is just a gut feeling, I've got no real reason to believe this, but I can feel it.

So there ya go, let's check back in a couple of years and see if I'm prescient or nutty.

Quick summary: I've got some code here that should let you pretty easily add custom google maps to your rails app. It's far from complete but it's enough to get you going.

It's based on work from Anselm Hook (who looks like this), which was based on work from Phil at mygmaps.com, which of course is based on Google Maps which has a copyright notice like every two lines in their obfuscated javascript code. Phil, Anselm and I are all open source for the community types but don't even try asking me about licensing, we're probably all going to hell. Come on in, the water's warm.

I started with Anselm who had taken cues from Phils work to get a Drupal-ized version working for CivicMaps.org. He had posted some samples, which were a bit screwy at first but he worked with me to get a cleaned up version that comes down to three files: inner.html, data.xml and xform.xsl. The idea is that inner.html would be included in another html file like this:

<iframe src="http://myhost.com/inner.html" width="600" height="400" scrolling="no" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" ></iframe>

but for testing you can just load inner.html directly.

You should be able to drop all three files into a directory on your web server, edit the xml to make sure it's pointing to the right place for the xsl and the icon pngs, edit the html to make sure it's pointed in the right place for the xml, and then load inner.html in your browser. You can figure it out from there.

So what I did was take this and replace the need for a data.xml file with the ability to create the pinpoint xml dynamically in a Ruby on Rails application. You can try it out by downloading this GMoR.zip file and unzipping it in your rails application directory. It should create the following files (you should make sure you didn't happen to have anything of the same name that would get overwritten):

app/views/gmap/gmap.rhtml
app/views/gmap/inner.rhtml
app/controllers/gmap_controller.rb
app/helpers/gmap_helper.rb
lib/GmapLocation.rb
lib/GmapMap.rb
public/man.png
public/xform.xsl

To see the default map, just load http://yourrailsbox.com:3000/gmap/gmap (if you're using WebBrick anyhow).

To make your own map, edit gmap.rhtml to change the properties of the GmapMap and GmalLocation objects created there.

I just got all this working, so I'm sure there's bugs. I wanted to post it anyhow though, since I'm not sure when I'll have time to play with it more. I suppose if it were cleaned up it would be good to make it a gem-installed generator. Maybe some day.

Just kidding about the Beatles track, it's really not that exciting. But, here:

Gospel truth: Infrared to reveal 9,000-year secrets

A vast array of previously unintelligible ancient Greek and Roman manuscripts - including works by classical writers such as Sophocles, Euripides and Hesiod - will be read for the first time using infrared light.

The technique will increase the number of accounted-for ancient manuscripts by one-fifth, and may even lead to the unveiling of some lost Christian gospels...

There are a few examples of lost ancient knowledge that was only rediscovered over a 1000 years later, who knows what these texts might contain that's been lost for millenia? Those examples were mostly in the maths (and sorry I can't remember what they were well enough to get a link for them right now) and these texts appear to be mostly literature (epic poems and plays) and random quotidian papers but it still will likely greatly increase our knowledge of ancient Greco-Egyptian civilization and who knows where that might lead...

They've got robo-exo skeletons now that can give the wearer added strength:

New Scientist Technology - Bionic suit offers wearers super-strength

Two control systems interact to help the wearer stand, walk and climb stairs. A "bio-cybernic" system uses bioelectric sensors attached to the skin on the legs to monitor signals transmitted from the brain to the muscles. It can do this because when someone intends to stand or walk, the nerve signal to the muscles generates a detectable electric current on the skin's surface. These currents are picked up by the sensors and sent to the computer, which translates the nerve signals into signals of its own for controlling electric motors at the hips and knees of the exoskeleton. It takes a fraction of a second for the motors to respond accordingly, and in fact they respond fractionally faster to the original signal from the brain than the wearer's muscles do. "The motors respond faster to signals from the wearer's brain than their own muscles"

I wonder if you could use this trick to control robotic "angel" wings that fold up or extend according to how you flex some muscle. Specifically some muscle other than your arms, like say when you ball your fists tightly they extend and otherwise stay folded?

This is so cyberpunk.

Sweat Ship: Team Plans Offshore Assault on L.A. Coders :: LAVoice.org :: LOS ANGELES SPEAKS

Three San Diego entrepreneurs plan to start a cut-rate outsourcing plant for software development three miles off the coast of Los Angeles aboard a used cruise ship moored in international waters.

Wired with a fat T3 pipe fed by microwave, SeaCode would employ 600 developers - the bulk of them non-U.S. citizens - who could crank out code around the clock at a lower cost and higher rate of efficiency than their American counterparts