What a lawyer would say: "is conclusively met where the reverse is considered true for all cases known to us at this time" What a programmer would say: ! (that's an exclamation point)...

I haven't blogged in too long a time, which usually means I've got too much to say and too little time. This birthday morning I woke and felt the need to go on record again, so starting today I'll try to blog a little each day, if only with journal posts like this. Yesterday was a big day for everyone looking to Washington DC, but also big for a small group of dedicated Squeak Etoys fans. We officially announced Squeakland Foundation, a non-profit organization that will take over from Viewpoints Research as the guardians of Etoys. I'm the new executive...

I'm reading Fritjof Capra again, returning to my Daoist roots. In college I studied cognitive science in conjunction with mystic philosophy. Our tendency to divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and to experience ourselves as isolated egos in this world is seen as an illusion which comes from our measuring and categorizing mentality. It is called avidya ... and is seen as the state of a disturbed mind which has to be overcome. - Capra Categorizing mentality! And here I just spent two years making a product that explicitly tags everything in life. I can just see...

We had two-way cable before most people (back in 95/96). In 2001, we moved a mere two miles and were kicked back to one-way cable, which means uploads at 56k modem speeds. To a software/web developer, particularly one developing photo software, this is something akin to the sixth level of hell. Every CVS commit in the last four years has been a "let's go to lunch" event. Last week, I saw one of the most wonderful sites in recent memory: Such a small thing to most, but what a difference! I'm two-way at last....

There are moments when technology transcends mere niftiness and reaches high enough to satisfy an age-old human longing, as with the moon landings or first flight. Here's a true eagle cam. Unbelievable. We've been near the bird, but never on the bird....

This morning, I woke up and looked out on a new landscape: What I love about snow is what I love about writing: the clean sheet of paper. There's that sense of fresh perspective, that anything is possible. The best software design starts the same way: without assumptions. Some call this "thinking outside the box." To me, even that phrase is too constrained. My view is that you've gotta think as if the box never existed, or put another way, do "zero mass design". Zero mass design starts without constraint. You begin with the impossible, then scale it back to...

To prep for my upcoming talk with Dan Brickley, father of FOAF, I figured I'd indulge myself in some wild and irreverant conjecture before hunkering down to a more concise and clear FOAF Tangle Yarn. Imagine someone casts a spell, and we all woke up tomorrow without fear of universal IDs. Let's say Dan bought the domain "humanity.org" and established a worldwide FOAF repository. To make this really wacky, let's say someone invented a cheap way to determine a unique hash ID from our personal genetic code. I can see it now: I walk into my local pharmacy, drop a...

Anyone who's made software for any length of time will be familiar with the perennial quandary: how do we uniquely identify human beings. First and last names are no good. Home addresses and phone numbers change all the time. People are reluctant to give out Social Security Numbers. This leaves the most unlikely candidate of all: email addresses. How did we arrive at email addresses as our universal identifer? Nearly every web account uses email addresses. PGP uses email addresses. Even FOAF uses email addresses (hashed or not) as the primary key. Seems odd that the thing about us that...