July 2003 Archives
So Tony has added Trackback to his ClickableCulture portal.
So i was sick for half of last week, which is my excuse for no blog posts. Sorry about that. I've tried to blather on a bit in this post, to make up for it.
So the low-down on Conor is as follows: 17 pounds 3 ounces. 69 centimeters. He is over the hundredth percentile for height, and still in the 97th percentile for weight. This does mean that both Ciara and i were off on our weight guess', tho Ciara was closer. Now the big question is, how tall will Conor be when he stops growing? I'm not very tall, and don't really have any tall genes, tho my grandfather is tall, so i guess it could have skipped two generations. Ciara is taller then me, and her family is taller then mine, but not really giants.
Place your bets now, payoff in, well, 18 years?
Last week was a pretty exciting one for Conor. He preformed his first "roll-over" on Thursday. He is having some difficulties finishing the move, his little arm gets all stuck under his body, and he hasn't figured how to get it out yet. Pretty fun watching him tho - and doing a 90 degree roll is no problem - he just pulls his chubby little legs up and, bingo, over on his side.
The other cool thing he just started to do is really use his hands to grab stuff. I sit him at the kitchen table with baby toys within reach, and he starts to grab and interact with them. He picks them up, smashes them down, throws them on the floor, all kinds of good stuff. Its quite funny as he still dosen't have any kind of fine motor control, so its all pretty jerky, big motions. Oh, and the drool on the counter top - just makes it more lubed up and easier to slide stuff off and onto the floor... funny little monkey!
I got a trackback from the mod pubsub folks today. Their comments have to do with some of their recent work around the pubsub javascript library. Its funny that they should mention pubsub and ChatSpaces together, as the idea for ChatSpaces really stared when i discovered mod pubsub.
Ok, i know this was on slashdot last week, but i just found it and think its way cool - a working gauss gun (lots of photos). I remember in high-school building a much more clumbersom verison of this kind of thing.
In a different vein, these videos of a talk given at ILAW 2003 "covers the entire history of domain names from the beginning of the Internet to the present day". If you ever wondered how domain names worked or came about, or interested in the history of the internet, these are very worth watching. Funny and informative, the talk is subtitled "How the Nerds Were Having A Perfectly Good Time Until The Businesspeople And Lawyers Showed Up And Ruined Everything", these help keep us informed of the history of the net, and help define and show how it got to where it is today. I worry that we are going to loose site of much of this recent computer / internet history, so i really think this kind of thing is worth watching and archiving.
Wow, a very powerful essay at Armed and Dangerous about violence, the nature of "man" and government.
Found this really excellent article all about how to use MoveableType in ways beyond those of a simple blog. The ideas of 'remapping' the fields in MT to have different meanings is great, and i really like some of the ideas around how to use MT as a photo blog. This is something i've been trying to figure out for a while now, as my current solution is not exactly how i'd like it.
One idea this article kicked loose is to somehow use the comments as additional fields for the "Database". I'm not sure how i'd apply this, but it seemed like something that i should remember for the future...
So yesterday, while waiting for the Boy to fall asleep, i worked on what the first experimental release should contain. The server would allow client to connect. Give them the representation of the map and where their avatars are on the map. Allow the clients to move their avatars around the map and to send text messages to all other connected clients. The map will be a simple 2D grid, and small, say 10 by 10, to start.
I've been tring to set small accomplishable goals, in the hopes that something actually gets done, rather then huge lofty ideas that fade off into the recesses of my brain.
Tony, Aj and i were discussing a post Aj recently made, having to do with, in part, LARPing. I thought i'd try to get some of what i said, and have been thinking about, down here.
CiteSeer brings back an interesting array of articles with the term "Distributed Virtual Environments". Lots of good reading! Gods, i could spend all my time reading and none doing - i seem to always end up in this situation. But better to learn about the basic mistakes from others then make them myself!
So, last night, while trying to get to sleep, i had a flash of a great name for the ChatSpaces project - Distributed Virtual Environments! DiVE! Wow, that'd be great, thought i. Well, its such a good idea that its been in use since at least 1993 - The Dive Home Page. The number of hits at Google are huge too. Rats. Back to the drawing board.
Had lunch with Tony where we talked about Epoch, movies and this crazy ChatSpaces idea. He made the cogent points that there are several "must have" items of functionality that this project is going to need, if it is to become popular. Its funny, with almost all my projects i never really think about them "in the wild", like, they are just for me and maybe a few of my friends. I love that Tony generally takes the bigger view. He can make me look at things in a way i would never think of. Very handy having a friend like that. So, the two bits i need to start thinking about now are the buddy list and some kind of "find a server" tool.
The find a server tool is, i think, the easier to do, so i'm going to talk about the harder one first.
Getting the buddy list thing to work in a fully distributed environment has some interesting challenges... i will have to ponder how to accomplish this...
Well, this weekend we, that is, Ciara and I, went to a movie. And the biggest, most important bit about that statement is that we did it without Conor. Grandma came over to babysit on Saturday night, and we sneaked out to a film. It was pretty easy for me, as i have to leave Conor everyday to come to work, but i think it was a bit, not scary, but difficult for Ciara at first. I'm happy to say she got over it. And its a lot easier when the person looking after your child is a member of the family. When it comes time to hire babysitters, i'm sure that first time i'm going to be pretty nervous!
Anyway, in a quick review of the film, i'd say "Excellent! Very grim, verging on too much so, but never passing over the line". Read on for more details - danger, contains spoilers! You have been warned!
So i've got the Python server in working shape. It will accept multiple Remote Client connections on port 42024 and a single Local Server connection from localhost on port 42042. The broadcaster script that i wrote is working great to pass messages from the Remote Clients to the Local Server, and vice-versa.
AJ's got MoveableType up and running on his blog, so you can now sub to his RSS feed, leave comments or trackback on his posts. Fun fun fun.
Ok, so i'm working on this project right? I'm calling it ChatSpace, for now anyway. The idea was to allow everyone that wants to chat to have their own rooms or spaces. These spaces, which would be representations of physical space, could be joined together with other user's spaces. Unlike in some other shared distributed worlds, the idea is that the spaces would be continuous - there would be no loading or pause as you walk from one persons space to the other.
Gods, you'd think i'd be getting a kickback from some of these folks for the amount i talk about their damn product... Though i guess having an audence of 8 doesn't really help get the message out... Anyway, two new articles talking about Scott McCloud and Micropayments - Micropayments -- An Issue of MacroProportions? and Micropayments and Web Comics: Let's Do the Math.
What a great idea - an email alias that stops working after a user settable amount of time. This kind of small, easy and fast tool reminds me of tinyURL, another hugely useful tool.
So, if you are seeing new posts, you are on the new server. If you have any problems emailing me or ciara, please let me know. Thanks!
Well, having worked over the async_core lib in Python, i'm now moving on to figure out unit testing. This is all part of me trying to be more methodical in my programming tasks, and to experiment with agile and XP programming. Ok, i know i can't do real XP with only one person, but some of the ideas i can still work with - specially the "build the test first, then code".
This is all related to a project that i've been working on, so far only in my head, that is finally ready to see some code. It has to do with, surprise surprise, virtual spaces. The ideas that i want to explore in this project are having a distributed space, where everyone is both a client and server. I'm using both Flash and Python to build it right now. Will try to keep posting about this as things happen.
Update: An interesting discussion about Extreme Programming For One.
Just posted a comment at Tony's site about the whole Scott McCloud / Micropayment thing. There was a post at Slashdot about it too. Anyway, waiting to see what Tony has to say...
Further with the BitPass, micropayments, online money stuff, here is a chart with a bunch of companies that use gold as the base medium.
"Precious metal is held in storage corresponding to internet accessible user account balances"I did hookup an account with BitPass, and checked out Scotts new comic. The comic was good, and it didn't take hardly any time to register with BitPass. So far so good, but like all micropayment schemes, this one will only succeed if there is a lot of content out there for users to actually spend money on. I am guardedly hopeful about the possibilities with BitPass and Scott, but ultimately, only time will tell... (how's that for a cliched ending!)
Is here. This is again one of those posts where i'm just posting it so i don't forget about it and can look at it later, but i of course get sidetracked and never look at it ever again.
Say no more
So, today we find out if Vancouver get the 2010 Olympics. 2010, wow, i'm going to be 40 then! Christ. The Boy will be 7. Crazy. Anyway, we should know soon...
Finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix last night. While not my fav of the series so far, it was good, tho it took till around page 300 for me to really get into it. I don't want to give anything away, but it seemed like, for a book that is just under 800 pages, there really wasn't a lot of plot development. A couple of interesting tidbits of info, but it seemed like there should have been more. Or it could just be that after waiting for 3 years and reading it over 3 days, i expected more, 'specially as it was so long. So, in the end, good, but not great.
Scott McCloud has a new comic up "The Right Number". The thing that i'm most interested in is the company that is doing the micropayments for this comic - BitPass. I've not even gone over their FAQ yet, but they offer payments as low as a cent. Its what i was hoping PayPal would be... I'm going to try it out, as i want to read Scott's comic, and will rant more about it later.
Oh, and i watched "The Tansporter" the other night. Now, i did not expect very much, just some half-decent fighting, kung-fu, something... Well, it under-performed. What a total waste of time. Crap.
I forgot to upload this video of Conor this morning. Its a pretty big quicktime, around 10 Megs, so if you have a slow download, it is going to take a while...
