nextthing.org

At the moment, I’m in a room in a small motel just off the I-5 in Old Town San Diego. It has wireless Internet access, but no pool. Tomorrow, and through this thursday, I’ll be trekking back and forth to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Also, for a few hours on wednesday starting around 9:45 I’ll be manning the Apple booth, fielding whatever questions people ask of people like me at conferences like this.

The drive down, following roughly the same route populated by old Spanish Missions, was awesome, with perfect 72°F weather and green grass all the way down the coast. If you’ve ever considered touring California, this looks like the year to do it.

I’m stuck at home this weekend with my car in the shop. Lacking transportation, and being a programmer, I decided to start hacking on my weblog. Since I plan on posting code here (sporadically), having some way to present it all gussied up with syntax highlighting will come in handy, provided it’s not a big hassle. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year is to start blogging again. With that in mind, I’m revving the site; cleaning up templates, switching over to WordPress, and percolating some topics in the back of my mind.

Slashdot ran a story yesterday on the release of Shareaza v1.7 and the so-called Gnutella2 or “G2” protocol. Details are light on the Shareaza site, but there are more on Gnutella2.com. Adam Fisk of Limewire LLC seems to think G2 is just a marketing gimmick, and that it’s actually just a collection of previously proposed protocols (such as Limewire’s GUESS). Other people have said that the protocols in question were developed independently of GUESS, but are very similar. Regardless, at first glance this looks like a good step in the direction of making Gnutella a more scalable and mature P2P platform. I hope this proves to be the case.

According to InfoWorld, the NSF has given $12 million to five universities (MIT, UC Berkeley, the International Computer Science Institute, New York University, and Rice University) to research distributed hash tables (DHT’s). The project is called Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems (IRIS), and aims to develop “a secure, decentralized Internet infrastructure that is resistant to failure and attack.” The MIT press release can be found here. I suppose I should mention that I spotted the InfoWorld article in the gossip on The Circle, a DHT-based p2p program.

There’s been a lot of talk in the community about how RSS 2.0 is too complicated. I haven’t heard any objections, so I’m going to move ahead with the following changes that will result in RSS 3.0.

Apologies to those of you not familiar with this particular mess.

I should have posted this on the 21st when I saw it, but I’ve been busy. Between the upcoming wedding and building fence all day, there’s not much time for anything else. Anyway, the creators of eDonkey2000 have released a public beta of Overnet, which is a P2P file sharing application using a distributed hash table. This is similar to The Chord Project and The Circle, but like eDonkey it uses MFTP (Multisource File Transfer Protocol). There are some well-documented concerns about the susceptibility of distributed hash tables to attacks, so it’ll be interesting to see how Overnet fares in that regard.

There’s an article on Switzerland’s secret mountain fortresses running on the Toronto Sun website. I’ve never read about anything like these. Well, actually, now that I think about it that’s not entirely true. Festo leases one from the Swiss Air Force, and I read about it in Wired awhile back. But still, I didn’t know they were so big, or that there were so many of them. Speaking of Wired, I was flipping through my old issues to confirm that my memory wasn’t failing me (I couldn’t find the right issue… ended up just using Google) when I came across a page on Eric J. Heller’s Gallery, which solves the mystery of where I came across that site. It’s worth a look. I’ve been considering getting one of the prints for awhile now, but that’ll have to wait until I have a job. While I’m on the topic, this gallery I found while looking for spider goats has some neat images in it too.

Richard is attempting the Uberman’s Sleep Cycle again. Um, what can I say? He’s insane. I did find a few other resources on polyphasic sleeping. Maybe they’ll prove useful. Try not to hurt anyone when the dementia sets in, okay Richard? 😉

Slashdot ran a story yesterday on “Random Walkers“, a method for searching across Gnutella-like (decentralized unstructured) P2P networks. The New Scientist article pointed to by Slashdot is, as usual, a bit out of kilter with reality. Read the rest of this entry »