Mobog - Send pictures directly from your camera phone

Take a camera phone, an email address, and hook them up to a www page and you have Mobog. This site allows anyone to send pictures which are posted immediately. This link is not safe for work.

Pictures of Pompei

One of the books I'm reading right now is Pompei: A Novel by Robert Harris. It's shaping up to be one of the better books I've read recently and I'm excited to see how it ends. I've never been to Italy, and although the author's description is very good, I wanted to see what Pompei looks like today. I did a google search and found the following sites:

• A good site with some images of the place and the remains of the people
• Several Pictures here, but no descriptions
• A site with some nice images, again no descriptions
• Lot's of text and a couple of pictures

AFA Poll: Right Back at 'cha

The America Family Association (America's Pro-Family Online Activism Organization) has an online poll asking people their opinion about gay marriage. They list the options as the following:

• I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and "civil unions"
• I favor legalization of homosexual marriage
• I favor a "civil union" with the full benefits of marriage except for the name

As of right now they have the following results:

• I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and "civil unions" 32.82% (234524 votes)
• I favor legalization of homosexual marriage 59.16% (422701 votes)
• I favor a "civil union" with the full benefits of marriage except for the name 8.02% (57331 votes)

They require an email address to vote, so one would think that it would be harder to rig the poll with web robots. It will be interesting to see if they pull the poll because the results don't match up with their mission.

The Sun Newspaper Online - UK's biggest selling newspaper

According to The Sun (UK's biggest selling newspaper) there was a recent UK flight came with a show:

A RANDY couple on a holiday jet were cheered by 250 passengers when they were exposed bonking in the loo. The lovers sneaked into a tiny cubicle during a four-hour flight home from Tenerife. When the cabin crew noticed it had been engaged for more than 15 minutes, a steward went to investigate. After hearing grunts and groans through the door, he decided to unlock it from the outside and revealed the naked couple in mid-romp.

Yes, The Sun is the paper with the naked chicks on page 3.

b e a g l e 2 : news

According to the official beagle2 www site, there has still been no communication from the little lander. It's starting to look like Mars is really a probe eating planet.

a preponderance of evidence : Preventing Image Theft

Over on a preponderance of evidence the author has a nice post about image theft. That is making an image reference on a page to an image that is actually hosted on another page. At first glance one might not think that it's a huge problem until you think about the amount of bandwidth it takes to load that image several times. If the original author has limited bandwidth or has to pay for his web space on a metered scale you can really cause him some trouble by hijacking an image in this way. As the owner of a sizable online image collection, I've dealt with this problem several times. Usually by ignoring it. However, this is another side to this story. If an author puts an all-rights reserved copyright on his www page, I don't feel right just copying his image to my server. I've also had authors ask me to remove their content from my server and just link to it on their server. I've also interacted with authors who feel the same way as the author on a preponderance of evidence. So what is a guy to do? Here is what I generally do. If I find a pic on a site that I would like to include on my site I try the following things:

1. Look for a copyright notice that tells you it's ok to copy the image. Like a Create Commons symbol. If the author has already said it's ok to copy the image then move it to your server and make the link that way, and attribute it correctly by the terms in the copyright statement.
2. If there is no copyright statement or it's all rights reserved, I will link to the image on the author's server, and then send him an email asking for permission to copy the image over to my server. My link also contains an href to the original item or page and a very clear attribution.

So, that's my suggestion. Just treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Keep an eye on your referrer logs, and everyone will be ok. I don't think there is really much need for taking a bunch of technological measures which just make it harder to use the internet as a place to freely exchange ideas.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

It's 10 minutes to Christmas here in the San Francisco Bay. It's been a wonderful year for me full of experiences I wouldn't trade for the world. I hope this holiday season finds you happy and well. I look forward to continuing this forum in 2004, so thanks for reading this year and I hope to see you next. Wishing you the warmest of holiday greetings, Allen Hutchison

Cube House

For your holiday enjoyment, here is a picture of a Cube House that someone built. I don't really know what to say.

Yahoo! News - Strong Quake Hits Central California

Yahoo! News has this report of a very strong earthquake which hit central California just now. Initial estimates are 6.5. You can see the maps from the USGS site here. I was out looking at the site because I thought I felt a very small quake in my building in Palo Alto. Don't know if it was a minor ripple from this one or not.

Boing Boing: Zip-Linq cables: device charging without bricks

Over on Boing Boing, uber-blogger Cory Doctorow is waxing ecstatic about the Zip-Linq gadget charging cables. You may remember that I also wrote about these things last month. I'm just posting now to remind people that these little guys make excellent Christmas gifts for that hard-to-buy-for geek in your life. They are cheap, available at Fry's, and easily fit in a stocking.

NPR : Carols for Christmas Yet to Come

I heard an excellent piece on NPR this morning about the annual VocalEssence Christmas Carol Contest. They played excerpts of two of the winning pieces and they were great.

Dec. 21, 2003 -- For the past six years, the Minneapolis-based choral ensemble VocalEssence, along with the American Composers Forum, have co-sponsored the 'Welcome Christmas Carol Contest.' The event solicits entries from around the country and the winning carols are premiered at the VocalEssence annual holiday concert.

Click on the link to hear both winning pieces streamed from the NPR site.

New Server...

If you can read this, it means that you are on the new server. I've moved to a new server for all of my domains. Gone are the days of DSL drudgery, now we have a 10Mbit connection to the net, and things are very speedy. Take a look at the photo album, if you would like to see just how fast the new server is.

Kinship Chart: How are you related?

C.U.D.D.L.E. that's right (Cousins United to Defeat Discriminating Laws through Education) have a really cool kinship chart on their site. Have you ever wondered what made a cousin once removed? Take a look at the chart to find out. As for C.U.D.D.L.E. they seem to be advocating to allow cousins to marry.

A new record...

At 5:20 (local CA time) I got my first piece of Saddam Hussein is captured spam. This for the Iraq most wanted playing card deck with his picture crossed out.

BW Online | December 15, 2003 | Beyond Wi-Fi: A New Wireless Age

This business week article does a very good job of explaining the state of wireless spectrum today.

On the clear morning of June 10, Mark McHenry climbed onto the rooftop of a seven-floor office building near Washington's busy Dupont Circle. Lugging an unwieldy 10-foot antenna and a gray metal box, he and another engineer set up an experiment to measure the actual usage of airwaves above the Nation's Capital during peak business hours. They were out to debunk a popular myth: With the explosion of wireless devices, the air is nearly saturated with zinging TV, radio, cell-phone, and BlackBerry signals, right? Not to mention satellite and air-traffic-control signals, police dispatches, and mushrooming Wi-Fi networks. And yet, the duo found that even in a heavily trafficked part of the airwaves above the District of Columbia, only 19% to 40% of the spectrum was occupied at any moment during an eight-hour period.

PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

In this New York Times Magazine article the author discusses the rising popularity of Microsoft's PowerPoint, and how it can lead to disastrous conclusions.

In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program. NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted.

I've run into this problem myself on several occasions. I once worked at a company where nothing was official unless there was a powerpoint presentation for it. Furthermore, no one would read a paper no matter how succinct, instead everyone demanded a slide deck to present the information. Generally it did not matter how complex the material was, or how much more appropriate it would be to present it in the form of a paper, if it was it powerpoint, it didn't exist.

CommsDesign - The technology of the year

In this article Craig J. Mathias of EE Times calls MIMO the technology of the year. He also specifically mentions Airgo.

I predict the 802.11n WLAN standard will include MIMO as a key component. Granted, 802.11n is at least 18 months away, but there's just no other practical way to push the performance envelope at this point. In fact, Airgo Networks is now shipping MIMO-based WLAN products with 108-Mbit/second single-channel throughput. And this is a relatively simple implementation. Installation in a notebook would allow even more antennas, resulting in even more throughput. And, of course, one can trade off throughput for more range or greater reliability.

Yahoo! News - Saddam Captured Hiding in Hole Near Tikrit

US Forcecs captures Saddam Hussein this morning. Here is the Reuters story on Yahoo

Grubby and bearded, the fugitive (news - Y! TV) 66-year-old dictator was dug out by troops from a cramped hiding pit during a raid on a farm in Ad-Dawr village late Saturday, the jubilant U.S. commander in Iraq Ricardo Sanchez said Sunday.

Older Palms Won't Get Wi-Fi

According to this article on Wi-Fi Planet that SDIO WiFi card from Sandisk will have palm drivers but only of OS 5 devices.

According to an e-mail from a company spokesman, it will provide Palm drivers in the first quarter of 2004, but only for Palm OS 5.X. SanDisk will not offer Wi-Fi support to makers of units running Palm OS 4.1 or earlier at all. ... The SanDisk SD Connect Wi-Fi Card is based on silicon from SyChip, namely its WLAN 6060. While SyChip's Web site still says it will support Palm OS 4 and higher, SanDisk says SyChip's Palm OS 5.x drivers are still in the very early alpha testing stage. With the recent split by Palm into two companies (palmOne for hardware and PalmSource for software), SyChip has to enter a new legal agreement with PalmSource before it can go forward with future driver development.

John Kerry's Desperate Hours -- RollingStone

This RollingStone.com article has a very interesting interview with Democratic Preseidential Candidate John Kerry. I think he would be doing better in the race now if he had been this blunt early on.

Did you feel you were blindsided by Dean's success? Well, not blindsided. I mean, when I voted for the war, I voted for what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to go off to the left and say, 'I'm against everything'? Sure. Did I expect George Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did.

Iceland Worldwide - Northern Lights

Iceland Worldwide has some amazing pictures of the Northern Lists. I've always wanted to see the northern lights, but have never had the opportunity to get far enough north. The pics on this page are wonderful, I particularly liked the crisp detail in the snow and ground below the lights. It looks to me like these are long exposure shots, and it takes an incredible amount of patience to produce images like these, not to mention freezing your ass off. Thanks to my Mom for sending me this link.

I'm Back...

Some of you have been wondering why this space hasn't been updated in so long. Well, it's because I was out of town on a vacation. I'm back now, and I've posted some pictures from the trip. Take a look and enjoy.