In the unlikely case that you have the viewer required for the object below you can play with fitting a power law distribution to the population statitics for various cities.

Update: Moved the plugin used below the fold. Sorry I’d forgotten how obnoxious some browsers are about coercing you into install such things.

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I used to ask people working for me about the trend in their FTJF. Of course, everybody does regularly think “FTJ.” It’s the frequency that’s important; well actually the trends in the frequency. Or, maybe the question is what’s the level compared to one’s mode otherwise.

I’ve been in a particularly nice mood recently, and my FTJF is sky rocketing. A pretty clearly indicates I’ll be leaving my current job real soon now.

Weeee. The fun of the new! I wonder, what will tommorrow bring?

This ugly security flaw in the helpviewer of Mac OS X has a fix from Apple, just do a software update.

Update: Fix available from Apple, just do a software update.

There is an ugly vunerablity in Mac OS X. I assume that if you avoid the internet for a day or two Apple will have a patch; but it’s ugly.

The gist is that if the browser visits certain places (which of course a site can trigger with popups, or redirecting) and those places are named in a particular way, then bad things can happen. They can open up the help tool on the Mac. The help tool has a ugly security hole. That hole enables all kinds of bad things.

More tedious explaination…

The Help Viewer can be instructed via a URL to run arbitrary AppleScripts, and hence shell scripts. For example this URL:

       help:runscript=../../Scripts/Info Scripts/Current Date & Time.scpt

Much more malicious examples are trivially constructed.

No patch available.

Work around…
Disable the help: and disk: protocol handlers; by setting them to invoke a more harmless application; for example Chess.

To edit the protocol handler dispatch table you need an additional system preference’s pane; i.e.
“More Internet”. Found here:

     
http://www.monkeyfood.com/software/moreInternet/

More info ...
   http://secunia.com/advisories/11622/
   http://www.jayallen.org/journey/2004/05/mac_os_x_highly_critical_security_flaw
  http://mamamusings.net/archives/2004/05/18/serious_os_x_security_problem.php
   http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/005217.html#005217

It’s still early in the day, so this will probably unfold further.

I came home yesterday to be treated to a rant from my wife about a radio show she’s suffered thru. Apparently these amazingly clueless these dudes were speaking about blogging. Then later that evening I got to listen to a portion of the show while driving in the car; right she was!

Boy did I enjoy her rant! Mostly since I choke down similar rants on a daily basis.

Technology keeps changing the way the world works is such fundimental ways. Each round in this game we play out similar patterns. At first we have no idea what’s happening. But we fool around with the stuff, we try assorted things. After a while there emerges some patterns in the new stuff. Patterns that those playing with it begin to understand. Those playing with it begin to be certain about what the facts are. They have the certainty that comes from experiance, learning from trail and error. This knowledge has the legitimacy of real experiance.

At the same time there is a large crowd of folks who are hanging back. They
watch what’s unfolding. They tell each other a story about what it means. These stories, like all stories observers tell, are framed in the terms of what they understand. Using the vocabulary of their personal experiances. The vocabulary has the legitimacy of the ages compiled into it.

At this point we get a collision. At some point those hanging back begin to announce that they have the phenomenon parsed, diagnosed, and explained. So often they are entirely wrong. All they have done is taken the phenomenon and shaped it so it fits their models. They dismissed the parts that don’t fit; usually heaping a bit of critism on them at the same time. They heightened the parts that do fit.

The voice they speak in is pompus; while the voice of those exploring in the new world is curious, doubtful, and playful.

At that point the folks that know the facts on the ground laugh, snort, and get angry. “Don’t be silly!” “Pompus Fools.” “Dust bin of history!”

The representatives of the old paradigm smile dismissively and say “angry young men.”

It’s really hard to bother to waste breadth on people so clueless. The world has changed and they will come along in due course. So in a inverse of the usual epilog of a blog posting.

Don’t bother to listen to it all.

Go read my wife’s blog instead.

I have no idea why I’m playing with this stuff, but apparently I still am. The little psuedo phone company (Free World Dialing) that I’ve been using gave us phone calls this mother’s day weekend for free.

I had fun chatting with Ted; it sounded pretty good but suffered lots of misc. tiny drop outs. It would probably work better if I had a real microphone. Ian mentions more examples of how all this is not quite there yet.

Back in the good old days phone calls were routed by operators who’s answer the phone and then rearrange cables so that the caller and the callee were connected.

These days a box usually sits in the phone closet at work and does something similar. That’s called a PBX – for “private branch exchange.” There are about a dozen open source projects that will let you run your own PBX on commodity hardware.

I noticed that I could install one of these on one of the FreeBSD boxes in my basement by typing make install in the right directory; so I did.

That was Asterisk. Golly. Configuring this thing is a lot like a combination of writing microcode and snobol. I sense that it’s got the legacy of years and years of craft knowledge beloved by phone engineers. I mostly found it to be a little odd. It does all kinds of cool things; voicemail, conference rooms, etc. etc.

But a couple wasted hours of fooling around and I can call out thru my own PBX and incomming calls can get routed to voice mail. The voice mail is fun, it get’s emailed to me.

This makes me my own pseudo-phone company. Look out VodaFone!

It appears I can arrange to have my little phone system connect to other little phone systems; like the one I used to talk to Ted. Following the directions seemed to work; but my voice mail prompts don’t get thru.

Apparently if I by a card to stick in the computer in the basement I can hook my little phone system up to the old fashion phone system. But I probably ought to mow the lawn or get that squirrel out of the eves instead.

Here’s a boondoggle!

Install a “soft phone” on your computer. For example this one works on my powerbook (other platforms too) just fine.

Now that can call other soft phones; but life is a little easier if you get a “virtual phone company” You could sign up with these folks; they are popular and they are cheap; actually they are free. Once you sign up, you need to configure the phone. Then you can call 800 numbers in the old fashion phone system; and that’s fun. For example if you dial 411 then you can talk to the TellMe voice recognition help line – so you don’t even need a friend to talk to! If you actually have friends then you will probably need a real headset with a microphone; but you can get pretty far with just headphones and the microphone in that’s built into the powerbook.

This world of voice over the internet is a lot like the early days of the land line phone system. In those days your village phone system might not connect to the rest of the world. Then they would announce that you could now call the next town. Very exciting! You’d have to dial a special access # and then the number in the town you were trying to reach.

You see a mess of that here. The pseudo phone company I suggest above has ways of dialing out to other phone systems. Here’s an example at another one of these virtual phone companies.

You can configure that softphone to use 10 of these semi-phone-companies; just to make things wonderfully confusing.

I’ve tried this stuff about once a year for the last decade. What’s different this time is that is “just worked.” One reason for that is that they have gotten much better at figuring out how to work around the boxes (NAT) that people use to firewall and share thier internet connections. Of course this doesn’t alway work; but it’s better. A second reason is that some of these companies have started selling boxes that let these systems replace the local phone company. That’s made everything more reliable.

The reason I’m facinated by this is that one of the fundimental standards wars on the planet is betwen the traditional telecom industry and the internet. On the one side we have the traditional telecom industry with it’s “we are here to help you” model and on the other we have the “bandwidth!, we sell bandwidth!” model of the internet. Phone over raw bandwidth is really comming together. It’s not quite there yet. Fun for early adopters. For example one site will give you a free dial in number, another a free conference service, another a free voice mail and you can conspire to glue all these together. This is starting to look very disruptive, real soon now, for the landline phone companies. If you look out the window you may be able to see them running, afraid, hopefully, toward the cellular systems.

Call me, I’m in the book :-).

How can one not like a paper with a illustration like this?

This outlines a fun way to build a clever kind of index over a set of documents.
(via David Weinberger)

I was quite affected by this line in an interview with John Seely Brown:

Blogs are powerful when there’s a set of blogs working independently that end up helping you triangulate on the same point. You have different points of view that end up linking to the same mega-idea. If you have three independent rumors that all say the same thing, then that rumor may turn out to have a certain kind of significance. What’s interesting is whether we should read blogs in the same way as we read a newspaper.

Notice, also, that blogs can suddenly reach a critical mass that then forces something out into the open, into public consciousness. You might think of it as an analogy to the subconscious vs. the conscious.

That line triggerd a resorting in my head about the role of link is, what function it performs. I’ve been uncomfortable about the popular model where are currency in a reputation market.

Certianly there is market where valuation is based on counting links. Google, Technorati, etc. etc. have made that perfectly clear. In these markets A linking to B raises B’s valuation, at least for a while. Measuring the value of a site in this manner has the advantage of being easy and the disadvantage that links are a very noisy proxy for value.

Site valuation markets become reputation because we tend to confuse a site with it’s author. Much as the link is a poor by convient tool for site valuation the site is a poor but convient tool for pinning a reputation to it’s author.

My discomfort with model of links as reputation currency has a third leg. Network graphs like these always have power-law nature. Winners in such populations are often the result of processes that have little to do with quality.

So, in the back of my head I’ve been uncomfortable with the model of link as reputaion currency. John’s triggered a different model to condense in my head.

Ideas are attempting to emerge from the soil. Authors are kicking the dirt trying to set them free. The link’s role is as a spade. It doesn’t serve the site, or the author, or the status economy. It serves the desperate struggle of the ideas to escape.

One reason for the confusion about this is the culture’s fetish for assuming that ideas are owned objects. That the if I dig up an idea I get to lay claim to it. That model presumes that ideas are like rare mushrooms hidden in dangerous dark forests. That the search for each of them is a solitary persuit demanding great self sacrific and risk. In this myth discovery is work of heros who leave hearth, home, and family to seek out these treasures. Surely there are such ideas, but there are other kinds.

There are lots of ideas that emerge from the work of collective efforts. Wherever a crowd gathers such ideas will emerge. So if a problem becomes well identified and a crowd gathers to start wailing away at it, over time they will likely pick away at it until a solution emerges. That’s on the demand side – where a problem appears – but it also happens on the supply side when a new tool emerges. So when Moore’s Law and his friends create new opportunities a crowd gathers to seek the solutions that enables.

Such strong-demand/strong-supply situations are often well tackled collectively. In such sitatutions the link between websites acting as way to signal to the crowd the existance of new information, possible new ideas, possible new approaches, possible new problems. New stuff if brought together just might help useful ideas to emerge.

Google was built almost entirely on the noticing that some folks were creating pages of links about a particular topic. If Joe creates a page of links about topic X then he’s revealing that he’s working on X. He is in effect saying “Join me! Bring your tools! Bring your problems! Together maybe we can dig up some ideas!”