“Screw Tempe, those people are on their own.”

September 3, 2008 – 10:57 pm

John Scazli short-short story about a superhero booking service (what, you think that Wonder Person is going to stop that rampaging mecha without a damage waver?) Also note the shout-out to Scalzi’s fellow Hugo award nominee, the fan writer and Computer History Museum factotum, Chris Garcia.

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The Rich Are Different, part XXIV

August 16, 2008 – 12:24 pm

Bruce Sterling: (((If you think the behavior of people with cloning technology is weird, you should see the behavior of people with oil wells. Or cars. Or machine guns.)))

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Annoyances: “Free” WiFi

August 12, 2008 – 8:00 am

The Denver Airport advertises “free” WiFi. Of course, it is not free. In this case, every HTTP request is intercepted by a router that replaces the response with a frameset which then loads the requested page surrounded by ads sold by the WiFi provider.

This messes any application that uses an embedded browser to deliver UI, like the Second Life Viewer, for instance.

Second Life.jpg

It appears to be easily circumvented. I turned off JavaScript in Firefox and was able to view the BBC News front page without incident.

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Paper blogging the Worldcon

August 11, 2008 – 11:52 pm

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Avram Grumer with EMP-proof blog software.

ETA: Holy Mother of Comets! That wasn’t just a notebook: it was a sketchblog!

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Int’l Legion of Bills

August 11, 2008 – 11:52 pm

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Higgins, Humphries, and Stewart

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Lois Bujold Reads from New Miles Book

August 11, 2008 – 11:51 pm

Too small a room. Lots of fans.

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Fantasies of Political Agency

August 11, 2008 – 11:51 pm

Lois Bujold’s guest of honor speech at Denvention 3 was about genre boundaries, expectations, and her experiments with breaking them:

In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency.

[via Cynthia Gonsalves]

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Flurosphere Triumphant

August 6, 2008 – 4:34 pm

So, had every intention of making it to the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Prometheus Award ceremony. But I was watching the time on my Mac (still on Pacific) instead of my iPhone (mountain,) and missed it. But Fred Moulton passed along a photo of Jo Walton with her award for Ha’penny.

Jo Walton holding her Prometheus Award for her novel Ha\'penny.
Photo Credit: Fred Molton

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Welcome to storm country

August 5, 2008 – 2:41 pm

Arrived in Denver just ahead of a thunderstorm with wind and hail.

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The Early Days of a Better Metaverse

July 31, 2008 – 1:12 am

It’s been nearly a year since I left Apple to come work for Linden Lab, and I haven’t said much about what I’ve been up to.

This quarter, I’ve stepped away from programming to manage the Open Grid Public Beta program: the first step towards breaking out of the walled garden of virtual worlds.

In this stage, identity is what’s portable. Participants sign in to what we’re calling an Agent Domain on Second Life’s preview grid (aditi.) Then they can log into regions supporting the Open Grid Protocol. Some of those regions are hosted by Linden Lab, the bulk of them are externally hosted, running a special version of the OpenSim virtual world toolkit.

You’ll show up as a default avatar, without a prim or pixel of clothing to your name, because managing inventory, permissions, and the copyright issues surrounding them are out of scope for this part of the program. But you can jump between virtual worlds.

My coworker Periapse Linden coined a wonderful term for the participants, they are gridnauts, a word evoking the romance of the space program.

If you’re interested in the project, read the Second Life wiki page to learn more. If you want to know more about what’s behind all this, Tish Shute has a background piece on the program at Ugotrade (thanks, Tish, by the way, for letting me have the last word, so to speak.)

In an email to the Lab, I paraphrased Alasdair Gray, and called this the early days of a better metaverse. There’s a lot of work to do. It will be fun and not so easy, and I believe that virtual worlds are the place to be right now if you’re looking for interesting technology and governance challenges.

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Adorable Mutant Freaks

July 24, 2008 – 9:57 pm

My friend Lea adopted a little white kitten, which she named Zero. She also illustrated a couple of issues of Transmetropolitan, so the photoshopped image of said kitten should not be a surprise.

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AtomPub Test

July 22, 2008 – 9:59 pm

Trying APP support in the new version of MarsEdit.

ETA: MarsEdit does not send the tags to WordPress when it POSTs an entry.

ETA2: content is sent as escaped HTML:

<content mode="escaped" type="text/html" xml:space="preserve"><![CDATA[<p>Trying APP support in the new version of MarsEdit.</p>
<p><strong>ETA:</strong> MarsEdit does not send the tags to WordPress when it POSTs an entry.</p>]]></content>

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iPhone Client

July 22, 2008 – 12:29 am

The WordPress client for iPhone just went live. I’m trying it now.

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Blue and Gold

July 21, 2008 – 11:21 pm

blueAndGold.jpg

Walking home from the office, I passed by the parish church, and saw the cross was glowing against the darkening sky in the late twilight, so I pulled out my Canon G9 and started shooting. There’s a little post work in iPhoto to crop and color correct.

No, I didn’t have a Paul-knocked-off-his-donkey experience, I just liked the image. I remain a grumpy agnostic with a camera.

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iPhone Screen Caps

July 13, 2008 – 11:23 am

I learned from Dave Rogers that the iPhone 2.0 software will take screen shots! Press the home and sleep buttons, the screen flashes for feedback, and a PNG image will be dropped off in your recent photos folder.

Kottke's Discovery Rule Playlist

The free Remote.app from Apple is nice, but I can’t convince my coworkers to let me run their iTunes remotely.

whump.com running the iPhone Viewport Meta

And now I have a visual explanation of what the iPhone Viewport Meta plugin does.

I found that you may need to add a thin border, via CSS, for contrast against a white background.

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