Aku Aku

SF anti-war rally

@SF protest rally. It's early but there are already 1000's here. My friend Estrella brought her pompoms and is wearing my cow outfit. The sign around her neck says "Stop Mad Cowboy Disease" and she is leading cheers like "We don't like what Bush is doing, let's have some pre-emptive mooing!" and "Freedom to stand and chew our cud and not be bombed by some damn SCUD"--Dav via Danger Hiptophttp://www.danger-island.com/dav/

chessy!

A year ago I got myself addicted to Yahoo! online chess. I started out really sucking, but through a lot of practice I managed to move up to not so good. A big part of my amazing rise in ability was a java program I wrote which would let me review my previous games using the game history that Yahoo will email to you after the games.

A friend of mine Laura recently took up chess, and I just dusted off this old proggie to review one of her first winning matches. Since I had it up, I decided to package it a little nicer and release it as GPL open source code. Here it is if you're interested: ChessY!

names and bias

Ben at A.I.A.A.T.A.E. writes in a blog post about a study published in the New York Times:

Resumes submitted with 'black' names were significantly less likely to be invited in for an interview than resumes with 'white' names.

And in a subsequent posting:

Table 2, on page 30 of this paper has a table I just can't stop thinking about. It reports that if Brad submits a hundred resumes he will get 16 calls, while Rasheed can expect to get 3.

The first thought that popped into my head is, wow, I wonder what that means for my friend Jim Holt's son who was given the name Thunder Holt (I am not making this up).

Julie's Vietnamese Restaurant

Having the $4 tofu plate & iced vietnamese drip coffee at Julie's on Mission Street in the Excelsior district. Not as good as Tu Lan's and the pink chairs are strangely unsettling, but the price is right.--Dav via Danger Hiptophttp://www.danger-island.com/dav/

myLifeBits

Last night Sean and I went to the monthly BayCHI meeting at Xerox PARC for a talk by Gordeon Bell of Microsoft Research on his MyLifeBits project. This project explores how we would use terabyte computers when they become ubiquitous and can record everything we access digitally: email, web pages, tv/video, music, phone calls and other voice recordings, pictures we take, etc. We were both disappointed in the talk. The guy isn't an interesting speaker (sean kept falling asleep) and the project itself seemed not very inspired.

In fact the most worked up I got was when he casually mentioned that one of his colleagues has patented the idea of tagging a digital photo with coordinate, elevation, time, and angle information not because he has worked out something interesting about it, but just to lay patent-traps for innovators who work in the area later so he can sue them. Evil! Evil! I'm not sure if that was a Microsoft colleague or one of his VC firm colleagues. No shortage of evil in either of those camps though.

headmap blogosphere

I haven't been posting a lot lately, and that's mostly because that besides a heavy workload from my real job, I've been putting a lot of time into the headmap blogosphere project. Ben of headmap.org contacted me regarding a web project he was trying to pull together. He was quite enthusiastic and got me excited enough to dedicate most of my free time during the past two weeks to helping realize his system. The basic idea of the system is to enable an association between web data and space/time locations (mostly concentrating on geographical location at the moment). This is building on the work of Joshua at GeoURL.org but rather than create a system where there is a central data repository (as geourl.org has built) we want to enable people to maintain their own sets of geocoded data.

The first step in this was to modify the globe applet that I've had on my site to act as an interface into these private data stores. Originally the globe I used was not truly interactive, you could spin it and zoom in but that was about it, and it got its coordinate data (the pin points) as a series of lat/long pairs in the applet html parameters. I altered it to read the locations from an XML file which would associate the points with arbritary URLs, and then made the points hotlinks that would load their associated URLs in the browser when double clicked. I also added some animated rotation/zooming 'cause I thought it looked nifty, and mouseover popups that list which pins the cursor is near.

Ben wanted the system to also have a way for the pin points to be easily entered into the XML file that the globe applet reads. So as a proof of concept I wrote a Moveable Type plugin that, in conjunction with a MT plugin Joshua wrote, an alteration to the MT entry form templates and some javascript, allows the MT blogger to use the globe to indicate a lat/long with which to associate a particular blog posting (and thus have a globe applet on their blog site that geocodes their blog posts as an alternative index).

Another developer on the project has written a CGI that takes site location information from a web form and appends it to the XML file.

Recently at Ben's suggestion I added code that will allow the person who puts the globe applet on their web site to indicate an external website that takes lat/long information as part of a URL and have the globe user's selected point insterted into the URL and loaded in the browser. Thus you can use the globe as an interface into mapquest or a weather service (or any other web service that uses lat/long coordinates).

Ben has gathered a great group of people on this system, who have put a lot of serious thought into a location aware semantic web and how it could be used by our society (such as Andy Hook of p2pMap.org who had already mapped the GeoURL.org dataset onto his own modified version of the globe applet). Frankly I'm honored to be involved in my own small way. There's a lot of potential uses and implentations of this general idea that will be fun to explore.

The main thing about this system is actually the dataset though. We want to work out a useful way to allow people to attach location (and later time/duration, emotional, etc) associations to whatever datasets they want to publish (such as sacred places, photo albums, nuclear dumping sites, hot tub locations, chupacabra sitings, -whatever-, and share these datasets with others to view or modify.

There's some other interesting projects that can be derived from this. For instance building on the idea I had last month, I started envisioning a brokered peer to peer system that allows all of the applet users (the people who have loaded the site's applet into their browsers) to be networked together. They could share their own physical location and see all of the other user's locations marked on their globe. Interactions between users could be marked by animated arcs between the relative pin points, processing power could be shared (between the browser machines and the broker service running at the applet hosts too).

In fact the ideas just on what to add to the applet are coming faster than I can code them, and the applet is really incidental to the true system. We're looking for people interested in helping out. Visit the project homepage, join the mailing list, use the applet on your own site (there's full installation instructions at the site), get involved!

high stakes crisis diplomacy

Tonight I went to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club where John Boykin was speaking on high stakes crisis diplomacy and promoting his book Cursed is the Peacemaker (I think the Bush administration could use some pointers in this subject). The book details the amazing efforts of a true american hero, Philip Habib of the U.S. Foreign Service, to avert a disastorous war in Beirut in the summer of 1982.

Boykin is an articulate and compelling speaker, who obviously has dedicated a significant (over a decade) amount of time into researching his subject. Of course, Ariel Sharon is the anatgonist in the book. History has shown him to be a "one trick pony," basically a warmonger eager to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization no matter the cost. Boykin points out that in the recent media attention of Sharon's statement that he should have killed Arafat when he had the chance in 1982, that the chance he refers to is when Arafat and the rest of the P.L.O. were evacuated out of Israeli seige of Beirut under the protection of Italian, French and U.S. soldiers. Sharon's contempt for the United States during this war is outlined clearly in the book. At one point during the seige when Israeli tanks had surrounded the presidential palace in Beirut and Habib protested such treatment of a legal soverign government, within hours Sharon instead moved the tanks to surround the American consulate several miles east.

In the end, Habib succeeds in preventing a massive bloodbath in the streets of Beirut, despite being forbidden from speaking directly to the P.L.O., being constantly undermined by Ariel Sharon's defiant trickery, and lacking proper support from the U.S. government (who fired his boss Alexander Haig in the midst of the negotiations creating political turmoil back home). Unfortunately as soon as the international peace keeping troops were pulled out of the region, Sharon went though with his planned massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon where over 2000 palestinian refugees were killed. Many of this number were women and children, who were utterly helpless since any P.L.O. militia members had been escorted out of the country under the negotiated terms of the end of conflict. In fact none of the number killed that night could be confirmed as members of the P.L.O..

Sharon's actions in 1982 are widely considered by Isarelis to be the worst blunder in the nation's history, and his subsequent rise to being elected Prime Minister is the best political comeback in recent international history. The rise was fueled by the current Israeli population's desire for military solutions as opposed to diplomatic solutions as championed by american hero Philip Habib.

You can read more about the Summer of '82 at this link: RAND
[[[latitude=33.61664908622742]]] [[[longitude=35.95215386238101]]]

clarion alley

Clarion Alley in the Mission district, where almost every square centimeter is covered with murals. There is a music video shoot going on at the moment. One photo is not from the alley but it is within a block; I'll buy a tall Asahi for whoever is first to point out which one and where it actually is :)--Dav via Danger Hiptophttp://www.danger-island.com/dav/

modern drunkard

Modern Drunkard 86 Rules of Boozing
14. If you offer to buy a woman a drink and she refuses, she does not like you.
15. If you offer to buy a woman a drink and she accepts, she still might not like you.
16. If she buys you a drink, she likes you.
28. If you can't afford to tip, you can't afford to drink in a bar. Go to the liquor store.
41. Anyone on stage or behind a bar is fifty percent better looking.
44. Being drunk is feeling sophisticated without being able to say it.

yosemite vrml fly-through

All this work on location systems reminded me of this VRML representation of Yosemite National Park I found after my trip there in July of 1998. It let's you "fly through" the valley, with the trails marked in red, streams in blue and roads in black. There is a way to attach markers to points in the VRML map, and I always meant to put some in and connect them to photographs I took during my trip there. I can supposedly also create a tour track that will trace the steps of the hike I took.

I never got around to doing any of that, but I figured I'd blog the VRML system itself now that I remembered it. Of course you'll need a VRML viewer to play with this. The U.S. Gub'ment has a good site for getting you into all that: VRML Plugin and Browser Detector. I have the full valley set installed on my server, if you have a VRML viewer you can just load this link, but be warned it is over 2MB in size.
[[[latitude=37.1882248]]] [[[longitude=-119.7700958]]]

Designed By a Tree

I love this concept of creating a font which is carved into a tree and then updated yearly by capturing how the tree has modified it by growing.

 

 

 

Food Delivery 2021

Ran across an interesting project which at initial glance is about food delivery called Free Food. As I explain below, that's free as in speech not beer.

The creator of it, Noah Levenson, has a pretty good intro video:

Given the project name, at first I thought it was about getting food that would be thrown out distributed to hungry folks, but watching the video, it became clear that this is more about being able to order food directly from verified local restaurants on a decentralized trust network and avoiding the (almost criminally) inefficient middle man services like DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, etc. The README for the project explains the goals well and has a quick run down on why the middle man food "delivery" apps/services are so bad.

Using a decentralized network (think BitTorrent more than BitCoin) it allows for restaurants owners to verify their ownership of a particular local restaurant and publish their menus. This protects against the type of unauthorized listings and other fakery that the middle man services engage in, so you know you're dealing with the real restaurant. Hungry people can find the menus of nearby restaurants and place orders. Reference implementations of the diner and restaurant clients are shown, although I didn't see the source for them available. Presumably the restaurant uses its existing delivery staff for the delivery, or you can pick up.

This is an interesting project, particularly because it's potential goes well beyond just restaurant delivery. Really any resource that can benefit from decentralized (no valueless middle man required) localized (relevant to you, where you are now) discovery can benefit from this type of system. In theory a delivery drivers could advertise themselves as resources and the system could do the matchmaking. Since the network is decentralized this would mean they wouldn't have to share their fee with a middle man network provider.

I'd definitely give this a shot if it started up in my area. In the meantime there is a better sort of food delivery service that I've been using lately and have been quite happy with. It is called Club Feast (use my referral code dav1 if you try it out!). While it still is a middle man service, they have a twist on it that should benefit both the restaurants and the delivery drivers. It requires you to order your meals hours in advance (it used to be the previous day but in the past month they have been able to move it up to same day). This allows the restaurant and delivery network time to optimize the food preparation and the routes. It is a subscription service, which means you sign up for a certain number of meals a week and pre-pay for them as credits. It lets unused credits stack up and you can pause, so it is fair to the subscriber. The meal credits themselves are $7 each, so the meals are inexpensive although limited to what the restaurant decides to make available for $7. There are tons of options though so that has not been a problem for me in San Francisco. It seems like a great win-win-win compromise for the restaurants, drivers and customers, although I would love for a journalist to investigate and report on the actual outcomes.

Would a robust Free Food network be better than Club Feast? Perhaps? CF optimizes a somewhat different problem, but perhaps that could be layered into FF as well? Is there additional value CF could bring that benefits from its centralization? Not really sure. Some things I am sure about are that both of these are better than the dominant centralized apps, and that Free Food really needs to change its name, and the paltry amount of tests in `libfood` is scary 😂.

 

An Ode to Roblox as a Gathering Place

I haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox, even though both of my kids have spent significant amounts of their time and my money there, but this essay about how it compares to those places where teenagers hang out and create their own space away from the rest of the world really resonates. It makes me want to give it a try again.

Some choice excerpts:

On his first experience in Roblox:

In one of the very first games we played together (a work-in-progress safari game, the link to which I have since lost), V became a zebra, and I was a lioness. We ran around a broad plain populated by other animals, trees in the distance, low clouds overhead, and the buzzing of insects on a 2-minute loop. The chat was full of messages from prey to prey, predator to predator. V was almost immediately killed by a cheetah who then got in the chat to say, “Overyone come to pr,” “theres meat.” Summoned, I did so, and as I ate the still-living digital body of my friend in the company of a stranger in the shape of a wild dog, I thought, “Oh. This is special.”

On the game creation tools:

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Roblox Studio is the Toolbox. Other game engines have assets stores, but none of them feel like this: a rollicking, copyright-fucked, messy, virus-filled, unsortable pile of labor and of love.

On the long tail of forgotten worlds (games) waiting to be stumbled upon:

But the things I am making in Roblox are not what are unique or compelling about Roblox, and the same could be said for most of the big games that populate the platform’s front page. Instead, what is so special here are the millions of bizarre little worlds, all networked together and waiting (mostly empty, sometimes for over a decade) to be dropped into and explored with friends.

On the "brutal" monetization situation:

As a developer, you can monetize your own games in a variety of ways, from the above-board (tip jars! cosmetics!) to the scammy. Developers earn 70% of Robux spent in their games, which is a pretty standard cut for an app store/developer split. However, getting USD back out of Robux is a different story. The payout exchange rate drops to $0.0035 USD per 1 Robux, meaning the takeaway in real world currency is roughly 24.5% of any in-game commerce—a brutally extractive exchange rate.

Fighting Date Rape With Nail Polish

Now that Bill Cosby got an early release from prison, my friend Paul brought my attention to the company Undercover Colors that developed a clear nail polish that allows you to check a drink for drugs by dipping a fingernail into the drink. The nail polish changes colors if drugs are encountered.

Brilliant! And love that it was founded by NC State students (didn't to school there, but did participate in their rugby club as a townie).

 

It looks like the product has evolved slightly to a more typical strip test kit though. I supposed the manufacturing costs proved too high? Hopefully they are still working on the more subtle version.

Post Pandemic Predictions

I started compiling this list before George Floyd was murdered, and its triteness bothers me now so I'm just going to post it and move on.

In no particular order:

• Masks largely stay culturally accepted in flu and allergy seasons from now on in the USA, but will always carry a political connotation so some groups will never wear them and mock those that do, but like punk rockers have always mocked people in suits.
• 15 years from now, a common trope will be determining how old some young adult is by what basic K-12 subject they seemed to have completely missed. "How old is Alexandra? Well she can never remember what a gerund is, she must be 27-28."
• It'll be seen as the inflection point for polyamory going mainstream when the released masses just can't get enough of each other 😂.
• 2021: long hair on dudes is back in fashion.
• The artist live stream phenomenon is too beloved to simply disappear, but outdoor live music venues are going to see a boom. There might even be a combination of the two.