It seems that half the programs I try and install under Windows want to have a "daemon" process with them, which is to say a portion of the program that is always running and which gets a little task-tray icon from which it can be controlled. Usually they want to also be run at boot time. In Windows parlance this is called a service.
I learned today that there is an exhibit about my father in the famous creation museum near Cincinnati. This museum is a multi-million dollar project set up by creationists as a pro-bible "natural history" museum that shows dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, and how the flood carved the Grand Canyon and much more. It's all completely bullocks and a number of satirical articles about it have been written, including the account by SF writer John Scalzi.
I'm scanning my documents on an ADF document scanner now, and it's largely pretty impressive, but I'm surprised at some things the system won't do.
Double page feeding is the bane of document scanning. To prevent it, many scanners offer methods of double feed detection, including ultrasonic detection of double thickness and detection when one page is suddenly longer than all the others (because it's really two.)
PCs can go into standby mode (just enough power to preserve the RAM and do wake-on-lan) and into hibernate mode (where they write out the RAM to disk, shut down entirely and restore from disk later) as well as fully shut down.
I've been ranting of late about the dangers inherent in "Data Portability" which I would like to rename as BEPSI to avoid the motherhood word "portability" for something that really has a strong dark side as well as its light side.
But it's also important to come up with an alternative. I think the best alternative may lie in what I would call a "data deposit box" (formerly "data hosting.") It's a layered system, with a data layer and an application layer on top. Instead of copying the data to the applications, bring the applications to the data.
A data deposit box approach has your personal data stored on a server chosen by you. That server's duty is not to exploit your data, but rather to protect it. That's what you're paying for. Legally, you "own" it, either directly, or in the same sense as you have legal rights when renting an apartment -- or a safety deposit box.
Your data box's job is to perform actions on your data. Rather than giving copies of your data out to a thousand companies (the Facebook and Data Portability approach) you host the data and perform actions on it, programmed by those companies who are developing useful social applications.
As such, you don't join a site like Facebook or LinkedIn. Rather, companies like those build applications and application containers which can run on your data. They don't get the data, rather they write code that works with the data and runs in a protected sandbox on your data host -- and then displays the results directly to you.
To take a simple example, imagine a social application wishes to send a message to all your friends who live within 100 miles of you. Using permission tokens provided by you, it is able to connect to your data host and ask it to create that subset of your friend network, and then e-mail a message to that subset. It never sees the friend network at all.
Been getting a bunch of calls from reporters this weekend. Our good friend spam turns 30 in a couple of days, and a few years ago I did some research and became an authority on the history of the term and the phenomenon. Since everybody else is doing it, I though I should point to my various articles on the history of spam, as well as some updates I just wrote for the 30th.
I've spoken about the Web 2.0 movement that is now calling itself "data portability." Now there are web sites, and format specifications and plans are underway to make it possible to quickly export the personal data you put on one social networking site to another. While that sounds like a good thing -- we like interoperability, and cooperation, and low barriers to entry on new players -- I sometimes seem like a lone voice warning about some of the negative consequences of this.
Ok, this would be a cool application for iPhones, Pocket PC and the like -- a dialer which presents an old style rotary phone dial, and you have to put your finger in it and spin it around the center, and then it slowly twists back and plays the sound of a dial returning. A bit like how you control an iPod, but slower.
Completely useless, other than for having fun and explaining to kids why we call it "dialing" a phone.
With sadness I must report the passing of William C. Tate, my stepfather, on Thursday. Bill and my mother met and fell in love when I was a young teenager. He was a neighbour, and I had met him, and even stayed over at his house with his son before they would meet, which is a bit unusual. He was kind and generous and supported her and our family for many decades. While he died from cancer, it came upon him quite suddenly and he was fortunately strong until near the end.
Ok, admit it, who likes blogging in to a vacuum. You want to know how many people are actually reading your blog.
I have created a simple Perl script that scans your blog's log file and attempts to calculate how many people read the blog and the RSS feeds.
You can download the feed reader script. I release it under GPL2.
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