Author: Steven Garrity

Live from the Formosa #2 – Now with Topics!

by Steven Garrity

Live from the Formosa #2

We’ve taken a second shot at our little tech-talk-radio thing we call Live at the Formosa (even though it’s not really live). This time, we’ve taken some advice on recording and should have significantly improved (if still relatively poor) recording quality.

This time, we also armed ourselves with some specific topics which should bring some more coherence to the conversation. That said, we feel it just went on too long (especially my Firefox bit). Next time, we’ll try to keep it under 30 minutes.

Topics this week include:

  • Steven (me) on the Firefox 1.0 Preview Release
  • Dan on the silverorange stuff website
  • Peter on his voice-over-ip/telephony experiments

Listen to Live from the Formosa #2 (download the 11MB MP3 file).

 

Radio Program Recounts September 11 Hijackings

by Steven Garrity

At risk of contributing to the ongoing media noise about “terrorism”, I am intrigued by a 1-hour radio program titled Witness to Terror about the September 11 hijacking government 9/11 Commission.

The program includes recordings of audio transmissions from planes, recordings of air traffic controllers, military transmissions, and eye-witness accounts. It is chilling.

If you’d rather not relive the day of the hijackings, don’t listen to this. If, however, you share my morbid curiosity, this program is fascinating, but also sad and disturbing.

Listen to the 1-hour RealAudio stream.

The commission examined how air traffic controllers, emergency services, and the military dealt with the situation. While, of course, it makes sense to examine how our institutions dealt with the hijackings, it sounds like people did what they could.

 

Bake Your Noodle with Cellular Automata

by Steven Garrity

A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram

A few years ago, Stephan Wolfram published a 1200+ page book boldly called A New Kind of Science. Wolfram had been apparently working on the concepts for about 20 years. He was an early Sun engineer and went on to create Mathematica, a powerful mathematics application.

When the book came out, the reaction was somewhat confused. Here was a known genius, finally releasing the results of his life of his work. There was anticipation that it might have the impact of Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s Special and General Theory of Relativity. However, when it came out, most couldn’t figure out if it was important, because they couldn’t understand it.

Time will tell how significant Wolfram’s work will be, but in the mean time, for those of us with a passing interest in physics, computing, and philosophy, there is a way around reading the encyclopedic work. The web audio site IT Conversations has available for download a talk by Stephen Wolfram at the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series.

The talk isn’t easy to grasp, but he keeps things out of the stratosphere for comprehension by we mere mortals. It would be nice to have video, since he makes reference to some visuals during his talk, but the audio is worthwhile. The talk can be streamed or downloaded in MP3 format from ITConversations.com.

 

Acts of Volition Radio: Session 13

by Steven Garrity

Acts of Volition Radio: Session Thirteen This, the thirtheenth session of Acts of Volition Radio includes several tracks from the Future Soundtrack for America compilation CD I mentioned last week. There are also a couple of other tracks that warmed my heart in recent weeks.

Songs for the future of America (and Canada). Recorded Wednesday, September 8, 2004 by Steven Garrity. Run time: 30min.

Session Thirteen Playlist:

  1. They Might Be Giants – Tippycanoe and Tyler Too
  2. Mike Doughty – Move On
  3. Clem Snide – The Ballad of David Icke
  4. Nada Surf – Your Legs Grow
  5. Joseph Arthur – In the Sun
  6. The Trews – Tired of Waiting

For more, see the previous Acts of Volition Radio sessions.

Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio
Acts of Volition Radio: Session 13
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Live at the Formosa: Experimental Web Talk Radio

by Steven Garrity

Live at the Formosa

Today, Dan James, Peter Rukavina, and I did an experimental web talk radio thing today from our favourite lunch spot, the Formosa Tea House: Live From the Formosa Tea House.

Peter explains the concept well. This first go at it suffered quite a bit from us figuring out what the hell we’re doing – but it is listenable (we seem to have somehow picked up the sub-woofer from the stereo at the tea house).

Now the whole world can join us for lunch!

 

Service Pack 2: Sympathy for Microsoft from a Linux User

by Steven Garrity

Windows XP Flag

Perhaps because I frequent web news outlets with a geeky bent, I’ve seen a lot of negative reaction to Microsoft’s Service Pack 2 update to Windows XP. Much of this criticism is understandable. Microsoft has been pushing the security issue hard, and it will be near impossible for them to live up to their promises.

That said, let’s be fair to Microsoft. They’ve been criticized for a delayed roll-out of SP2 and for a slew of applications that “break” after it is installed. Well, rolling out a major (free) update to the worlds most popular operating system is not easy. The amount of backwards compatibility issues that Microsoft deals with dwarfs that of competing operating systems given their install base. Upgrading the install base of Windows XP is a massive engineering undertaking.

As for some applications “breaking” after SP2 is installed – sure, there may be (and likely) are bugs in SP2. However, much of the “breaking” I’ve heard of is due to new security policies that Microsoft has been criticized for not having in the past. For example, their Firewall is now turned on by default. This will wreak havoc on all kinds of applications (it messed up some online gaming software for me in the past). However, it is a necessary change. Sure, it will cause some annoyances in the short term – but it will make computing safer in the long term.

We can’t criticize Microsoft for shipping an operating system with no firewall turned on by default, then not give them credit when they finally do ship with a firewall on by default.

SP2 probably doesn’t make Windows secure. From my (admitted limited)understanding, there are fundamental architectural decisions that will prevent Windows from ever being as secure as the more network aware alternatives (Linux and Mac OS X). However, SP2 helps – if only a bit.

I now run Linux as my primary operating system. I run Windows XP occasionally, and I updated my XP partition on my laptop to SP2 today. When an application started to load up in the background, XP with SP2 told me about it, and asked me if it was ok for it to run. If I make legitimate software that runs in the background, this will be an annoyance and may make for a slew of calls to my support line. However, it will make it a hell of a lot easier to find all of that spy-ware running on your moms computer.

Bottom line: SP2 will help make home computers a little bit less annoying for our families to use. I think Microsoft deserves at least a bit of credit for that.

 

New Mozilla.org Design is Live!

by Steven Garrity

It’s up! The new design for Mozilla.org by Daniel Burka, myself, and the others here at silverorange, working with the brilliant and patient people at the Mozilla Foundation has just gone live.

Here’s the CVS checkin:

dbaron%dbaron.org – 2004-08-31 14:31
Landing BETA_20040721_BRANCH: new template, homepage, and product page design by Steven Garrity and Daniel Burka from silverorange, and required tools changes by Myk Melez.

Be sure to refresh! Thanks to all involved (especially bart, dbaron, and myk).

Of course, there is still lots to do to improve the site, and we’ll keep working on it – but for now, it feels good to be live.