I’ve written a few times over the years about Spore, the new life-cycle simulation game by Will Wright (creator of The Sims), with spontaneous/generative music by Brian Eno. The game’s release is now just a couple of months away, and Maxis have released the Spore Creature Creator in advance, so users can get started creating a library of bizarre land, water, and air-borne beings. Luckily for us, the game’s many delays have given Miles just enough time to grow up enough to start appreciating basic concepts of evolution, and to become comfy with a mouse.

Just spent the bulk of a cold grey summer morning playing with the Creature Creator, and my jaw is on the floor. Spore manages so much complexity behind such a simple and intuitive interface. Performance is superb, movement is silky smooth, and the creative possibilities are endless. Working mostly by himself, Miles created HasEverything, Headfeathers, Aquaboogie, and Ezra. This is Ezra:

Yep - in test drive mode, you can build short movies and upload them directly into YouTube, without leaving the game. The resolution here isn’t great, but inside the game, both creatures and settings are stunningly beautiful.

If we’re having this much fun with just the creature editor, I can only imagine what the actual game is going to be like.

So tempting to let everything live in the cloud, to hand over storage and bandwidth requirements to YouTube and Flickr, to use an external wiki service rather than host your own, let Google run your email… but think hard before handing it all over. Before you know it, you’re an indentured servant.

From the recent ignite conference:

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Watched an interesting presentation by Robin Sloan of current.tv today, nice coda to last night’s talk by Chris Walton of the BBC. Both networks have harnessed the power of user-generated content in ways that go way beyond the casual contribution - BBC has an entire bureau (”hub”) of editors tracking, databasing, fact-checking, and processing cell phone photography, comments on beeb stories, email messages, etc., all now a staple of their “normal” news gathering process.

The idea behind current.tv was always to be UGC-focused, but many didn’t think it had legs. It has, it’s profitable, and it’s good. The relationship between their web and TV properties is total symbiosis - the web acts like a catch basin, accepting UGC from all comers and posting most of it. Editors squeeze and condense out the best of that into the content stream that feeds the TV network. Brave new world.

In passing, Sloan showed a mesmerizing web experiment called Twistori that sifts and filters key words from Twitter streams. Sit and watch the world of love/hate/think/believe/feel/wish go by. The public mind on parade. Weird and kind of wonderful (and strangely depressing).

Reader baald pointed me to a discussion at thegearpage, where a user asked whether utilizing someone else’s unsecured WiFi access point was tantamount to theft. Amazingly, this is a not-uncommon perception, and people have even been arrested for availing themselves of publicly accessible WiFi signals (which is insane).

My take: If I’m sitting in my car outside your house and can access your WiFi signal without a password, you are transmitting an open signal into my space. How is that not an invitation to use it? You’re literally bombarding me with with signal and simultaneously telling me I can’t use it?

I’ll go further: Anyone paying for a broadband connection is only using a tiny fraction of it and, IMO, practically has an obligation to share it, in the interest of making life better for everyone. We want to get to a point where wifi flows freely, like water out of public drinking fountains. When you pay for a signal and have tons of it to spare, you can / should help the world approach that nirvana.

That doesn’t mean you should be stupid about it. You should make sure your home network is secure and un-surfable. You should only share the TCP/IP, not LAN access. Big difference.

So:

A) Ideally, everyone with a connection shares that connection — but does so smartly.

B) Yes, one should be able to safely assume that a non-protected hotspot is there as a public service.

While sharing a connection is against the Terms of Service of some ISPs, others think more like their users — British Telecom actually encourages their users to share the love.

Update: Security expert Bruce Schneir also leaves his home Wifi network unsecured, for all the same reasons.

The new J-School server has arrived! Spent half the day developing a migration strategy to transition sites and services for the school off of OS X Server and onto a Linux/cPanel solution more tuned to the security ravages and configuration needs of pure web hosting (if cPanel ran on OS X Server we’d be sticking with it). The next month will be an interesting challenge as we get that project off the ground.

In the middle of putting the strategy together, the server itself arrived. Along with it, a separate box, very light. Inside that box, two more boxes. And inside those… ye gods! One power cable each. Power cables that don’t require damage protection at all, and that could have been stuffed into a single padded envelope. Better yet, they could have been thrown into the server’s own box - there was plenty of room.

This kind of thing makes my blood boil. Why do so many people/organizations behave as if their actions don’t matter? It’s not just one box. Multiply this kind of apathy by millions and you get… the world as it is. Talked to a Safeway employee last night who was foisting plastic bags on me unrequested. Asked her whether management was talking about banning plastic bags from the store any time soon. Her answer floored me: “No. In fact, we’re not even allowed to ask ‘Paper or plastic.’”

My boss warned me that if I blogged about this, certain perqs would be revoked. This is a test.

Awesome day, as always, with Miles at Maker Faire yesterday. Arrived early and glad we did - heard that by early afternoon the traffic and lines were so bad that people were turning around on the highway and returning home. This was our third year at the show, and somehow things didn’t click as well as they have in the past - didn’t manage to catch any of the scheduled events (giant mousetrap, Eepybird’s Diet Coke and Mentos display, floating R/C battleship war…) And starting to realize there’s a lot of carry-over from year to year, so didn’t get the delight of surprise from a lot of stuff. Crowds larger than ever, and the presence of Disney at a DIY fair kind of gave me the willies (though Miles loved their toy Wall-E bot).

Still, Maker Faire is one of the most inspirational things going - a wonderland of unpackaged, under-funded, can-do creativity. Cyclecide had their full range of human/bike-powered rides and attractions, the giant mousetrap was fully operational. A glass-blowing artist displayed his Prozac-eating chicken, an electronic calliope and a chariot pulled by an Arnold Schwarzenegger bot wandered the grounds, blending in with the Extra Action marching band as Total Annihalation jammed on stage near a 40-ft goddess made of welded steel cable, spewing great balls of flame from her heart chakra. Battlebots battled and hovercraft hummed and dudes roasted pickles near a giant Tesla coil. Steampunk ruled the day, its centerpiece Neverwas Haul alive and well (and until you’ve heard a steam gizmo concerto, your ears ain’t lived). People ground bags of flour from raw wheat with a bicycle, affixed Legos to a Jeep, 4′ cupcakes drove around, kids blasted model rockets 200 yards into the air, a man knitted and drummed at the same time (with the same sticks).

In other words, Maker Faire is Burning Man Lite — and that’s OK. If you can’t take off a week to hang out in the desert, or don’t want to usher your kids into a psychedelic love den, Maker Faire brings much of the same creative juice, with a more scientific bent and none of the drugs. It’s one of those things that makes you feel blessed to live in the Bay Area.

Dylan Tweney: Maker Faire and DIY culture

Wired.com: From Welding to Weddings

Here’s my Flickr Set from the day, which also includes five short videos - using Flickr’s new video upload capability for the first time, with 30fps videos taken with my new PowerShot SD1100s - amazing to see how far the video quality has come in consumer still cams.

Other public Flickr shots tagged makerfaire2008.

Something has happened to PBS favorite “Charlie Rose.” The erudite conversations and sober intellectualism have been replaced by an absurd world where illogic, inane dialogues, and open hostility rule. The one-on-one interview between Charlie and his guest begins as usual but quickly goes awry, so much so that Charlie is warned that, somewhere, a man named “Steve” is “not happy.” Though this seemingly random statement might confuse us, Charlie understands it for what it is — a threat. But who is “Steve” and why is he angry? And why does the mere mention of his name stop Charlie cold? Using appropriated footage from a single episode of “Charlie Rose,” filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. creates something both disturbing and farcical in “‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett.”

My WP-Mass-Upgrade script has saved me countless hours over the past year. Making sure all Birdhouse and J-School WordPress installations are managed via subversion has meant I’ve been able to wrap them all in a single shell script. When new releases emerge, I’m able to upgrade 50+ installs in a few minutes. The most time consuming part remaining was creating new installations when customers needed them. I had the process down to around five minutes, but knew the repetitive steps could be distilled into a script, so recently wrote WP-Create:

Super fast (~30 second) way to install WordPress for clients, via subversion. Yes, users can often self-install via Fantastico or similar programs, but what guarantee do you have that they’ll upgrade as soon as new releases become available? Letting users run old versions of web software is a great way to get hacked. Take control of users’ installations by checking them out via svn (with this script) and managing them with wp-mass-upgrade.

This script performs the following tasks:

• Gather installation info
• Create install dir and check out a copy of WordPress
• Create database, db user, set db privs via external .sql file
• Create WP config file
• Create upload dir and set filesystem permissions
• Generate array line for wp-mass-upgrade.sh

Final setup is done via browser.

Added these tools to the WordPress codex section on managing WordPress via subversion.

Over time, I’ve built up a handful of shell and PHP scripts, written to satisfy various itches with WordPress, Movable Type, QuickTime Streaming Server, hosting performance, etc. I’ve been tossing them into a dorky static site in case they prove useful to anyone else.

I’ve been meaning for a while to drop them into a WordPress installation - a little software library, open for discussion. Finally got around to doing that: scot hacker’s scripts and utils. Not much different from the old site, but now includes commenting, categories, search, RSS, etc. Using the badly named but very clean WP-Candy theme.

One of these days I’ll have to dig up all my old BeOS scripts and utils and give them a permanent home.

A few days ago, I had the, um, pleasure of having to install some lock-programming software on a Windows laptop — a process that should have taken five minutes but instead took upwards of an hour. Endless DLL conflicts, an uninstallation fiasco, an installer caught in a circular loop, literally hundreds of entries being written to the registry… The whole farce would have been hilarious if it hadn’t wasted so much of my time. I run Windows so seldom these days, I forget how bad it can be.

Sounding a lot like the BeOS founders and evangelists from a decade ago, who used to talk about Windows being held together with bailing wire, chewing gum and twine, a pair of Gartner analysts recently came out and said it: Windows is ‘collapsing’ (Computerworld):

Calling the situation “untenable” and describing Windows as “collapsing,” a pair of Gartner analysts yesterday said Microsoft Corp. must make radical changes to its operating system or risk becoming a has-been … Analysts said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts. “For Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable,” said Silver and MacDonald in their prepared presentation, titled “Windows Is Collapsing: How What Comes Next Will Improve.” Among Microsoft’s problems, the pair said, is Windows’ rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it virtually impossible to quickly craft a new version with meaningful changes. That was proved by Vista, they said, when Microsoft — frustrated by lack of progress during the five-year development effort on the new operating — hit the “reset” button and dropped back to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 as the foundation of Vista … “Windows as we know it must be replaced,” they said in their presentation.

It’s one thing for the userbase to talk like this, but analysts like Gartner are serious about what they do, and don’t make heavy-handed proclamations lightly. Something is in the wind, and it smells like carrion. You can only put so much lipstick on a pig.

I’ve fallen out of like with the web’s usual April Fool’s day shenanigans (on account of being an old humorless curmudgeon), but this one hits joyously close to home.

Toward the end of the BeOS era, I was working with the publishers of the Linux Journal to create a sister publication, the BeOS Journal (this is true - not making this up). I was the senior editor, and had commissioned and packaged all of the content. We had the first issue in the bag and had already gone to layout when Be made the formal announcement that it was folding their cards. Of course, the BeOS Journal went down along with it, and issue #1 never saw the light of day.

But today is a great day. Seven years later, the publishers of Linux Journal have finally come to their senses, and have decided to drop Linux coverage in favor of full-time BeOS content. The introductory video speaks for itself.

The day we’ve anticipated for so long has finally arrived. I’m thrilled to see the technology world finally sitting up and taking notice of the greatest OS ever developed. Though I unfortunately can no longer promise to be a substantial contributor to the project, I’ll be reading BeOS Journal regularly and cheering from the sidelines. Hup hup!

Also excellent today: ThinkGeek is running a special on the Super Pii Pii Brothers video game for Wii controllers (see video). Now that’s compelling game content!

Thanks Bret Chou.

Quick, what’s the most widely deployed database in the world? MySQL? Oracle? Nope, it’s that puny squirt SQLite - the one you see listed as an option every time you set up a new Rails or Django site. SQLite is not a database server, but a SQL-compatible interface to a single file — perfect for every application that needs a full relational database without the overhead and complexity of a client/server connection. In other words, it’s in your smartphone. It’s on your Mac (driving the indexes in Mail.app, plus the databases behind Aperture and Safari). It’s in Adobe AIR. It’s in FireFox. It’s in Android. It’s in a bunch of giant products and services that will never admit to it.

SQLite is fast. Hella fast. Not great with massive concurrency or transactions, but runs circles around its more popular big brothers in simple SELECT/INSERT statements in moderate-traffic environments. Apparently it can be used to run production web applications if you don’t transactions or permissions (”If your site is small enough to run on a single server, it’ll rock on SQLite.”)

Excellent interview with SQLite’s creator Richard Hipp in this week’s FLOSS. Incredibly humble guy. Talks like his accomplishments ain’t no big thing. But his software changed the world. And instead of making a million bucks off it, he took his name out of the source code and released it into the public domain. Now he makes his living doing customizations for giant corps. Altruism can be good business.

Loose notes from SXSW 2008 panel on Adobe Air, Taking it to the Desktop.

In October 2006, I attended an Adobe focus group for what was then code-named Apollo, which promised to let us easily create desktop software out of HTML + JavaScript + Flash web apps. Fascinating technology, but I had a hard time wrapping my mind around its potential. With software in general moving towards the web, who out there wants to move things the other direction? I thought the biggest market would be on cell phones. Now, 18 months later, Apollo has become AIR and the software has become more polished. But the strategy is still the same, and I’m still at a loss to come up with a compelling business case for the product.

Anyway, this session helped put a few more of the pieces together mentally. Still not convinced it’s going to become a big hit though.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Scalability Boot Camp” with:

Blaine Cook Architect, Twitter Inc
Jakob Heuser Architect, Gaia Interactive
Alan Kasindorf MySQL DBA, SixApart
Sandy Jen Co-founder, Meebo
Kerry Miller Writer, passiveaggressivenotes.com

Good tips from diverse perspectives. Everyone on the panel admitted to having made huge scaling mistakes in the past, and to having learned critical lessons from real-world usage patterns.

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Loose notes from SXSW 2008 session “Data as Art: Musical, Visual Web APIs” with:

Peter Kirn cdm: Create Digital Media
Joy Mountford VP Design Innovation, joymountford.com

Amazing data visualization demos. This field is going to become increasingly important to journalists looking for new and compelling ways to tell stories online that go way beyond shovelware. The tools need to get easier, but they’re getting there. These notes can’t begin to convey how impressive the interfaces we’re starting to see are becoming.
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Back in the BeOS days, I created a public database of tips and how-to information for BeOS users, called the BeOS Tip Server (betips.net). The site had grown to around 700 tips when Be, Inc. finally went under and I went looking for another career. At that time, I handed ownership of the Tip Server over to a still-avid BeOS user, and didn’t think about it much again.

Late last year, I discovered that links to betips.net were dead. I contacted the owner, only to learn that the database and the site templates had been lost in a data disaster. I combed through my backups and archives and couldn’t find any sign of the templates. However, amazingly, I still had a copy of the mysql database. Dug my old x86 laptop out of the closet, booted BeOS for the first time in eons, and found the original site templates tucked away in a buried folder. Eureka! But ewww… all table-based and mid-90s looking… just fugly.

Even though I have almost no interest in BeOS these days, I was once proud of the site, both for the content it had amassed and for the method I had used to serve it (TrackerBase).

Couldn’t stand the thought of the whole thing being lost to history, so decided to resurrect the site. Took a fair bit of grunt work to clean up the data and get the tables into shape as a WordPress back-end, but the work is finally done, I’ve got control of the domain again, and intend to leave the site up for posterity. There’s a standing offer for any current BeOS/Haiku users to help clean up old content and start adding new.

BeOS has an open source descendant called Haiku. I’ve never run Haiku, but expect that most of the content on the site will apply for that OS as well. I’m also interested in having new Haiku-specific content added to the repository.

Happy endings.

Robert Scoble came up with the idea to make a list of obsolete skills - things we used to be good at but no longer need to be, including:

• Dialing a rotary phone
• Putting a needle on a vinyl record
• Shorthand
• Using a slide rule
• Optimizing 640K-worth of memory
• Refilling a fountain pen
• Operating a dictaphone
• Using the eraser ribbon on a typewriter

A wiki sprung up to flesh out the list, and there are now hundreds listed (I added “Cleaning ball bearings in skateboard wheels without losing them”).

David Pogue at the New York Times, quoting from his surprise encounter with a rare non-clueless Best Buy employee:

Q: Is there a lot of consumer confusion about HDTV?

A: Oh, man, you have no idea. People come in here absolutely clueless. Or furious, because they bought an HDTV set, got it home, and discovered that the picture doesn’t look anything like it did here in the store. Because they don’t realize they need a high-def *signal* to feed that set. For example, they need to replace their cable boxes with digital ones, or put a high-def antenna on the roof.

I admit that we fell into something like this trap when going HD a few months ago. We knew we would need to feed it HD signal for best results, but weren’t prepared for how much worse traditional signal would look. But apparently not everyone notices. Or who notice but don’t care:

[D.P. adds: According to a study by the Leichtman Research Group, 50 percent of HDTV owners aren’t actually watching any high-def shows on them... but 25 percent of them *think* they are.]

Yikes.

Science time, boys and girls.

Now, all we need is a worldwide power source strong enough to cool road surfaces to negative bajillion degrees and we’ve got free transportation!

18 months ago, I bought an Infrant ReadyNAS to store MP3s and our home backups. It’s been all peaches, and we’ve been using SuperDuper for backup against it with no issues.

When Leopard came out, thought we’d switch to Time Machine for backup… only to discover that Time Machine doesn’t support backups to network shares — unless those shares are on Mac (HFS+) volumes. The ReadyNAS does do AFP, but the ReadyNAS itself is Linux-based, and its internal filesystem is ext-something.

This sucks. Without simple, any-OS network backups, you’re forced to attach a physical disk to each machine you want to back up — unless you’ve got OS X Server running somewhere in the house (and thus have some networked HFS+ volumes to back up to).

Found a hack on the Infrant forums to force Time Machine to see a ReadyNAS share as a supported volume:

sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences \
TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

It works! Time Machine has been backing up to a partition on the ReadyNAS for a few weeks now. But I haven’t had occassion to try and restore from it yet, and don’t completely trust it. Apple’s introduction of Time Capsule seems like the perfect answer, and is dirt cheap for what you get (remember it doubles as an AirPort base station and print server).

But I resent that it’s required. Daring Fireball has essentially the same gripe. I already have an excellent networked storage unit. I shouldn’t have to buy Apple hardware to accomplish this. Apple needs to step forward and support TM backups to any network volume. Time Machine shouldn’t be a gateway drug sucking you into the Apple Store.

Of course, no law prevents me from continuing to use SuperDuper. But TM feels so good…