Toynbee Tile in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Stuck in the asphalt on Smithfield Street, where it's been there about as long as I've been alive.
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In the home stretch.
We're in the home stretch. I'm writing this at HacDC while waiting for a build to finish. We're getting ready to freeze the codebase for v0.2a of Project Byzantium, after which time we're not going to change anything until people start using it and the bug reports come in. In other words, we'll have a code freeze until we start working on the next release. We have special give-aways for HOPE Number Nine and a presentation to finish up (start, really).
Anyway, this is a post to say where I'll be and what we're doing. I have two presentations …Read more...
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Happy birthday, Alan.
Alan Mathison Turing, born 23 June 1912, died 7 June 1954.
See you at the end of Time...Read more...
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Prometheus: A flawed but thought provoking horror movie.
Last night, after some juggling of schedules, Lyssa, Laurelindel, and I went to see Prometheus, the long-awaited prequel to the Alien movies which feature the designs of (and inspired by) the artist H.R. Giger. I have to admit, we had some trepidation going in because the Alien movies are some of our favorites (and there were only three, we maintain) and unless it was done right the prequel was destined to suck.
Well....
Prometheus is a deeply flawed movie. The writing is good in some parts, okay in others, but it has a few scenes that should have been …Read more...
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First workable neuromorphic chip design developed at Intel.
A couple of years back scientists at HP figured out how to make memristors viable. Memristors were first conceived of back in the 1970's and are components that remember (for lack of a better term) how much current passed through them for a particular interval of time. They've been compared to neurons in that the more often they fire, the more likely they are to fire in the future. On the other side of the house, scientists have been trying for decades to figure out the principles (and combination of mechanisms) by which organic brains operate. They're not binary devices …
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Insomnia.
I can't sleep tonight. Again.
I'm doing something for a friend. I usually can't fall asleep at a reasonable time on Sunday nights to save my lives, anyway. My body's circadian rhythms have always been programmed for the 1200-0000 shift, anyway, so every weekend my 0000-0630 rhythm gets shot to hell.
While a long (and CPU intensive) job runs on Windbringer I'm going back through my addressbook, looking up old friends. I'm feeling nostalgic tonight. And sad. A lot of people I still call friends I last saw many years ago before Time scattered us to the four winds. That …Read more...
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I can't think of a suitably funny or ironic title for this post.
I've been struggling to come up with a suitable title for this post but I gave up on the effort in favor of writing about what's actually been going on in my life lately. First, the good stuff, and then I'll follow up with everything else.
Last month we launched the new Project Byzantium website. It took us a while to get it together - we tried a couple of CMSes before we found one which struck a good balance between ease of use, usability, and plain old "it does what we need." I wish that it had been a smoother …Read more...
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Notice: Katie Yeager has gone missing.
I'm boosting the signal for Eria Owens Yeager - this is important:
Quoting from her blog:
IMPORTANT.
Katie has run away; she left from school yesterday (Thursday). We believe that she has gone to Williamsburg VA or Richmond VA, to be with a young man named Donovan Bullock. (An earlier attempt to run to him was thwarted on Tuesday of this week.) Police in Silver Spring MD and in Williamsburg have been notified, and there is a national missing persons report for her.
If you can help, please contact the authorities. Katie sometimes goes by the name "Howell." She is around …Read more...
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WARNING: THIS STICKER KILLS DEMONS!
As you may or may not have guessed I'm a fan of science fiction (I'd have to be to take the name of a certain time traveling alien as my own) as well as an afficionado of H.P. Lovecraft's C'thul'hu Mythos. Maybe I'm in dire need of calling the crew together for another tabletop RPG night or maybe I've been under a little too much stess recently but lately I've been on a Laundry Files bender. If you've never heard of Charles Stross he's an excellent author who writes this particular series, in which a halpless hacker named Bob …
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CarolinaCon 8: Not the Cyber-Apocalypse.
"This is our SUV, the Nebuchadnezzar. From it, we hack into the Matrix and broadcast our pirate signal."
That pretty much sums up our trip to CarolinaCon 8, held last weekend at the Hilton Hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina.
CarolinaCon, now in its eighth year, is a small, intimate hacker con founded by people who believe that sharing information with one another is the best way to both learn and advance the state of the art. It's the sort of con where you will see a talk by someone who may have learned about public speaking from watching Jerry Seinfeld's …Read more...