Aku Aku

daniel's graduation bbq

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/

w.a.s.t.e.

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 Since they could not have withdrawn into a vacuum (could they?), there had to exist the separate, silent, unsuspected world."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).

quakes and shakes

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...

• March 13
  
• May 12
  
• May 17
  
• Last night
  

multitalented mie

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 :)

ben hammersley on liquid meth

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.

red elvises @ slim's

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)).

gps details for tokyo tidbits

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.

Matrix Reloaded, The (2003)

Matrix Reloaded, The (2003)

Like just about everyone else in America, I saw this movie in the theater last week. I've gotten mixed reviews from my friends, and I suppose my review is somewhat mixed too. Bottom line is I liked it. Pros were the story development (especially along the philosophical/theological lines) and the action/effects (of course). The main con in my mind is that many of the fight scenes were too long and the effects were not as consistently seemless as in the last movie. Many people disliked the "cave rave" scene but I actually enjoyed it although I have to admit it made no sense whatsoever. Just looked like a great party to me :)

The thing about the Matrix is that it's really about taking japanese anime inspiration and bringing it to life. There was no mistaking the anime feel this time. I can't find the reference now, but I have read earlier that when the Wachowski brothers pitched the movie to studios, they showed them graphic animations depicting a cyberpunkish superhero. The first movie was just setting the stage for the real story about this hero.

gps tagged jpegs

If you click on the image above, you will be shown a map which indicates where (in Tokyo) the photo was taken.

Mie's cellphone can tag each photo she takes with the latitude/longitude coordinates. Last night she tried sending a geotagged jpeg for the first time, so this morning I started researching how to get the coordinates out of the jpeg. It turns out that the data is stored in EXIF headers.

First I opened up the jpeg in a hex editor to look at the binary data. I could see some information in there, but nothing that was obviously GPS data.

Next I used a windows program called Photo Studio which displayed all of the EXIF information including the GPS coordinates. So I knew the coordinates were in there.

Next I looked around for tools or programmer's libraries that would allow me to read this data from my blogpost.pl script (the script that lets Mie post the photos to her blog). There were a number available but it was a pain to find something that worked.

1. The perl Image::Info module can read some of the EXIF data, but for some reason it fails to parse the GPS EXIF data.
2. I found a python script called exifdump.py that also failed to output the GPS data.
3. I found a python library called EXIF.py which was able to parse the GPS coordinates, however it was python 2.x code and my server only has python 1.5. It would have been a pain to upgrade because of dependency issues, so I kept looking.
4. I fooled around with trying to write a quick C program to extract just the GPS data. That got tedious though, so I decided to look around some more for a pre-built tool.
5. Finally, I found a java library/util called metadata-extractor which seems to parse every bit of data it can from the jpeg, including all of the GPS data!

Now I was in business. I hacked in a call to the java util in blogpost.pl and also some code which causes each geo-coded image to be hot linked to a japanese version of mapquest called mapfan. A better system would take a look at the coordinates and link to whatever map system was appropriate (mapquest or tiger for US and European locations) but for right now the only person using geo-tagged jpegs with my blogpost.pl (that I know of) is Mie, and her phone only works in Japan.

I'm thinking that maybe what would be best is to fix Image::Info perl module so that it gets the GPS data, then make a moveable type plugin which automatically handles any geo-tagged jpegs (rather than handling it in the blospost.pl). The plugin could also decide what map service to link to.

But I've got to get ready to go to a wedding, so that's it for now...

goa gil report

I had a great time at the weekend trance party, although there were some serious problems with the entertainment organization. The party officially started on Saturday, but Toni and I drove up Friday evening to get a good camping spot for our tribe. It was nice to get there early before the music started and spend a night actually camping in quiet dark woods, because usually I only go camping during these parties and the music is going all night. The only other people there on Friday night and Saturday morning were the event organizers. They were all down in the meadow setting up the DJ stage and the decorations. We camped up on a ridge above the meadow so were were all by ourselves. Saturday morning we took walks through the woods which were beautiful at this time of year. Everything was a bright green with yellowish tints.

The organizers had told us not to start a campfire, however on Saturday morning we met a man named Singer who lived up on the ridge, down a small footpath from our campsite. He told us that he would actually like us to keep a campfire burning because he wants to burn away as much dry wood as possible before the fire season starts. Singer was a very interesting and wise man, he shared many stories about the things he learned from living up in the forest for twenty years. He was no Ted Kaczynski though, as he had a firm grasp on physics, biology and how to use technology to enable man to live more in harmony with nature.

It was nice to have the campfire on Saturday night because the people bringing the sound system didn't show up on time. The music was supposed to start around 5PM but by nightfall there was still no music. By this time the meadow below was full of the tents of new arrivals and our friends had shown up at our camp. Many people had gotten lost because the directions had been wrong. To get the directions to the party you had to call a certain number at a certain time and listen to a voice mail message. The guy who left the message had mistakenly swapped the driving distances on two of the roads involved. The place is very hard to get to; it's way up in the mountain along difficult, narrow and often unmarked roads. I hadn't gotten lost because I had actually been to this place last October for another Goa Gil party so I just needed to be reminded of some road names and ignored the distances. It got quite cold down in the meadow at night since there were no lights, no fires and no music to dance to. But up on the ridge it was a little warmer plus we had a fire going.

We assumed the sound system people were lost too. By midnight there was still no music. By 3AM there was still no music. At 5AM, just after the sun came up, the music started. Apparently what happened was the original sound system had truck problems so they never made it. Sometime during the night someone from the party actually left, drove back to San Francisco (at least a 3.5 hour drive) and came back with another sound system. I hear many people got angry with the event organizers down in the meadow, especially the Russian and Israeli groups (they're always at these events) who made a big ruckus and left. Our night wasn't so bad sitting around the fire chatting amongst friends and meeting new people who noticed our fire up in the woods and climbed up to join us.

But it was wonderful when the music started at daybreak on Sunday. Most of my tribe decided to stay an extra night, hoping that they'd keep the music going through Sunday night to make up for missing Saturday night, but they shut it down at dusk. It was an atypical trance party since the nights were all quiet, but I still had a great time and I'm looking forward to the next one.