I have a very liberal attitude to folks borrowing images from my sites. Every day I get a few hundred hits from random sites that have posted an image they found here. Often these appear in bboard and blog postings. After a few days that traffic falls tends to peter out.

Occationally things get out of hand and I have to put up a fence. One side effect is that the image to the right won’t appear in those contexts where folks embed by RSS feed. (That’s an interesting fence design puzzle.)

That happen yesterday and this is the “failure” report from this morning’s stats.

I keep trying to write an essay about out sourcing, resource advantage, and network hubs. I keep failing.

The point I want to make is that while resource advantage is important, feedback and power-laws are more important. Silicon valley is in a positive feed back loop with silicon valley. So while it’s important that india has a huge pool of talent and a significant cost advantage that is only lays the foundation for creating a feedback loop that creates a vibrant industry.

But it seems I keep comming back to one fact. The real important event, at least for my industry, is Korea.

Korea

It is more important to look for places where the positive reenforcement is spinning up. Resource advantages are a diversion. Plenty of smart people in the midwest. Plenty of cost advantages. But nobody really believes that Kansas city is about to threaten Boston of Silicon Valley.

So go read these notes about a talk on Korea given at WTF! Or article on the online gaming industry – when it was written Everquest had 70 thousand players, while one oneline game in Korea has 10 million! This is much more a threat to the competitive advantage of of the US computer industry than China or India.

One more thing. There hasn’t been a breakthru software product for a decade that didn’t depend on the network for it’s vitality.

My old Treo 180g gave up the ghost, so I got a Treo 600; what fun! I’ll probably have to put together one of those “what is on my X” pages as soon as thing settle down. Meanwhile you can look at my input Q of treo junk. I can’t really get NewPen or Graffiti Anywhere to work dependably yet.

This looks like the future of blogging and I think we should all be very afraid.

I see a bunch of folks are once again taking the political blogger quiz; so I’ll point out my essay about a well founded version of a similar idea.

What a nice term this is: Information Radiator. I’ve often very successfully solved some organizational problem by creating just such a device. More than once I’ve improved the quality of a large piece of software by just creating a concise report of current status and placing in someplace were people would notice it. The trick, from my point of view, is less to collect the data than how you manage to present it. The less ink the report uses per item of information the better. The more the report shows change or summary scores the better.

But the best thing about that term “information radiator” is how it so nicely sums up that you want something that’s not to hot not to cold. Something that changes the temperature. Something that draws attention to it’s self; but doesn’t burn.

(via Brian Marick)

These are delightful. Various snow/ice constructions. If you click on the thumbnails you get enlargements; if you click on the gallery you can see all the various entries.

I love this quote.

Part of the problem was how arrogant we were. We believed that we could spend a couple of days watching trained lawyers perform a highly-skilled job, talk briefly to them, and then make their jobs completely obsolete.
– here

It resonates nicely with the fun that Clay’s been is having tearing into the social software dudes; even if I don’t entirely agree with him.

When I young I used to go to parties with lots of artists and theater people. They would ask what I did and upon replying that I wrote software a painful silence would follow. I’d sometimes indulge myself by inserting toward the end of that silence the assertion. “My dream is to put an entire city of people out of work!”

In reality my dream is to create new cities of people. Don’t tell anybody; but a lot of that arrogant social software seems to be doing just that. Who’d a thought, weird huh?

This picture is a tiny bit of a drawing of the beach at Coney Island by Reginald Marsh.

While this picture is a tiny bit of a painting of the beach at Coney Island by Paul Cadmus.

I love art that shows crowds or urban life.

Port knocking is a trick for adding additional security to your machines on the public internet. The idea is that only after a peculiar series of packets appear on your machine’s external interface to you then lower your firewall and begin listening for connections to a given service. For example only after somebody attempts to connect to port a,b, and d do you then start listening for ssh connections.

I don’t get it. Why this is such a great idea? I often configure machines so that certain listeners are only available after something else happens. For example after a certain email is recieved or after a particular http request happens takes place. I often configure a email address that takes signed pgp encrypted messages, decodes them and executes the commands found there in; a glorified batch Q. I’d much rather have the battle tested smtp or httpd server exposed to the outside world than a cool new innovative port knocking demon.

Of course it should be pointed out that all these techniques work best if there is a gloss of challenge response or public/private key usage laid over the mechinisms.

There are some very clever people out there.

There is an odd grain of truth in the punisher’s statement: “This hurts me more than it hurt’s you.”

For example your driving down the street and you make a minor driving error. Another driver gives you the finger. Clearly he has just shown himself to be a jerk; i.e. the cost of the gesture (intended to push you) on his reputation is larger than any value he can possibly hope to capture (i.e. none).

He is making a sacrificing his reputation as a reasonable pleasent guy to help encourage a better regulated traffic system. This kind of behavior is deeply wired in we primates.

“Waal trained capuchin monkeys to take a pebble from them; if the monkeys gave the pebble back, they got a cucumber. Then they ran the same experiment with two monkeys sitting in adjacent cages, where they could see each other. One monkey still got a cucumber, but the other one got a grape