Tag Archives: geek

Gaaaah! And geeky fun stuff

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First, the Gaaaah! Updated my Red Hat 9 system to Fedora Core 2 a couple nights ago. It works, buuuuuuut…..

…it won’t start X if I boot from the newest Fedora kernel. It says it can’t locate the mouse–even when I use a generic PS/2 mouse, a USB mouse, and a serial mouse. The mouse is configured right (I’ve run the configuration several times), and the mouse works fine in console mode. It also works fine when I boot using the earlier kernel from the RedHat 9 install. The X error log complains it can’t open /dev/psaux, even though the correct file is in /dev. Anyone know what gives?

And the geeky fun stuff: An archived screen capture of Google’s main search engine page, circa 1960.

Steve, Steve, Steve…

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My word, nothing good ever comes of crossing His Steveness, Mr. Steve “I’m brilliant and charming and charismatic but also kind of psycho” Jobs, does it?

IDG, which hosts MacWorld, moved MacWorld from New York to Boston this year. His Steveness doesn’t like Boston, and threatened to pull Apple out of MacWorld. IDG called his bluff…

…’cept it wasn’t a bluff. Apple pulled out of MacWorld Boston.

And so did almost every other major vendor, once everyone heard that Apple wasn’t going to be there. It was slightly surreal; there were, like, 5 people there. (By way of comparison, MacWorld San Francisco normally fills Moscone Convention Center, and the last MacWorld in Boston, in 1992, completely filled both of Boston’s convention centers.)

Here’s a pic of the exhibit floor:

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You could cover it in ten minutes.

Fortunately, a friend of mine hooked Shelly and I up with free conference passes, else I would have been right pissed about paying money for such a dismal thing.

IDG cried “uncle” and is moving back to New York.

Pity, too–I was hoping Apple would make a formal announcement about the G5 iMac.

Meme madness: The street finds its own uses for things

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So, according to the latest viral meme, I belong to two cliques of size 9:

I am a member of 2 cliques of size 9

Find the largest clique containing:
(Enter your livejournal username here).

This is interesting for its own reasons (there are some common denominators in all the names listed, which I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader to describe), but I think what’s more interesting is how it works, which is described here.

Discovering these two threads of nine users in my friends list required a couple of minutes of activity on a server of unknown capacity and about 6,000 database search steps, and turned up lists of people with several significant things in common with me. Yes, it’s a toy, but it also demonstrates the power of data mining.

Now, let’s suppose the same thing were to be done to, say, social or political networks in government databases. Let us further assume that the government were looking for people with, say, subversive political views. I’m sure you can figure out where this is going…

The software is dumb. It knows nothing about me and it knows nothing about the people on my friends list, yet it teased out a list of people with very unconventional social views, based on nothing more than the fact that like-minded people tend to gravitate toward one another. The software doesn’t have to be smart in order to be able to reveal patterns of social activity that a human observer might not see.

So. Fred is in a government database. Fred is being scrutinized by the government, because he has Dangerous and Unacceptable Ideas–that Iraqshould be left alone, say, or that George W. Bush is a miserable failure. Or perhaps he’s a Communist–who knows?

So. The database plots Fred’s social contacts–who he talks to, who he goes to the movies with, who he has lunch with. The government wants to find a list of other subversives like Fred, but it doesn’t want or can’t afford to spend the manpower to knock on all of Fred’s neighbors’ doors. Well, hey! Who needs that, when all you really need to do is search the database of social contacts?

As a LiveJournal meme, the cliques list is kind of neat. As a proof-of-concept for social database mining, it’s slightly disconcerting.

Thoughts from the convention floor…

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* * * * * M E M O * * * * *

FROM: Homo Sapiens Sapiens

TO: The other members of the animal kingdom

Re: Some changes

As you may or may not have noticed, the primate family has given rise to a new species. We’d like to take advantage of this opportunity to introduce ourselves.

We are small, hairless, and lacking in armor, scales, fangs, claws, or hides. What we do have, however, are big brains , opposing thumbs, tools, and language. Some of you may believe that these don’t count for much. This memo is here to set the record straight.

Over the next seventy thousand years or so, our numbers will explode, and we plan to dominate every climate and every geographical region.

Many of you will be hunted into extinction, either for food or for sport. Many of you will be exterminated as we encroach on your habitat. A few of you will be domesticated, as food animals, beasts of burden, or (if you are cute and fluffy enough) companions. All things considered, domestication is probably your best bet.

Some of you are dozens of times bigger, stronger, and faster than we are. You may think that this gives you an advantage over us. We have a different way of looking at it; we seet it more as “one of you will feed fifty of us for a week.”

Some of you currently inhabit areas that very remote geographically, or seem to have climates inhospitable to a naked ape, or both. We’re more adaptable than you, though. We’ll get there eventually, trust us on this. Again, all things considered, domestication is probably your best bet.

Regards,
Adam

PS: Homo Neandertalis: Yes, we’re aware you also have tools, language, and opposing thumbs, and you’re gifted with a higher cranial capacity than we are. However, we breed faster than you do, we form larger social groups than you do, and we’re more aggressive than you are. Just sayin’.

PPS: Did I mention that we’re really, really, really aggressive?

You have GOT to be kidding!

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With a nod to trinker…

ThinkGeek has a USB-controlled EasyBake oven that fits in a 5.25″ bay on your PC. The included USB control software to bake your cakes from the convenience of your computer.

This is a weird, weird world. Who, exactly is the target market for this gadget?

Google AdWords and Social Commentary

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So I got a letter (real, honest-to-God snail mail letter, the kind that’s printed on sliced dead trees) from Google a couple weeks back. Google, the darling of the dot-com world, sending me physical mail rather than email…but I digress.

The letter invited me to join the Google AdWords program, a system where you put ads on a Web site served by Google’s AdSense system. The idea behind AdWords and AdSense is that they deliver “targeted,” relevant advertising to Web sites, because the ad that’s delivered is based on keywords found in a site. So, for example, go to a Web site about home improvement, and the system sees words like “lumber” and “carpentry” and serves up ads for Lowes and Home Depot.

Funny thing, that. The Google AdSense system also serves up some entirely unwitting social commentary.

You see, advertisers buy keywords based on what they think people associate with those words. So, put Google ads on a page about polyamory, and it sees words like “jealousy” and “polyamory” and serves up ads for divorce lawyers, PIs, and books on how to tell if your husband is cheating. Put Google ads on a page mentioning the word “magazine,” and you’ll see ads for Harlequin romance novels.

I’m not going to make a dime on these ads. I’m leaving them there, though. Social commentary is fun.

The street finds its own uses for things

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The latest weird juxtaposition between technology and society: toothing, the practice of using BlueTooth-enabled cell phones for anonymous sex.

Pretty straightforward, really; you set up your BlueTooth device for automatic discovery, create a new BlueTooth entry, and put your text number in it. Other people in crowded places–trade shows, trains, and so on–search for BlueTooth-enabled devices within range, they find you, you chat, you nip off to the bathroom for some quick, anonymous sex.

Bet Ericsson, IBM, Intel, and the rest of the Bluetooth consortium never saw that one coming…