Fantastic talk on what really motivates us.

Memristors will change everything.

In an HTML5 slide format.

It’s urban sprawl in hard drive city. One too many power adapters necessitated tearing it all down.

I  had this taped on my cube for years back in the day.

working on parametric video. Got a demo any day now… any day now.

I started programming at age 11, so the legend goes, on a Ti 99/4A. I bought one of those on eBay recently, and there it is, sitting on a shelf in my office. I haven’t powered it on, and I doubt I will.   When I started I learned programming with the Beginner’s Basic book that came with it. I wrote my programs down on paper, and typed them in again when I wanted to run them. Until I got a tape drive – super awesome. Later I got an Apple ][e clone when I lived overseas in Jakarta. Then a //GS, etc.

How many data formats, how many programming languages and storage technologies has my work spanned since I started? I have long thought that finite digital data would be easily preserved. Copied. converted. emulated. But not really. It’s the quantity, it’s the media, it’s long gone apps and obscure file formats.

Work I did at Destiny – a massive amount of coding – I have in its entirety but it no longer works because I’m missing a key proprietary library that we had on the Sparc/Solaris in the 90s. I could code around that, or try to dig it up somewhere, but it’s probably not just that library. I’d surely turn up a whole host of incompatibilities between the setup we used back then and anything I could find now.

It’s all so fragile!

The problem with tags is the same problem with search. I could tag this post “stuff-that-sucks”, and another post. And then, to find posts or other things marked “stuff-that-sucks” we get a list of database search results based upon the text of the desired tag name. But… I don’t want search results. I hate searching. I like finding.

While it doesn’t seem all that different on the surface, the reverse way of doing this I like much better. “stuff-that-sucks” should be an independent entity within this system, and things like posts that are considered to related to the idea of “stuff-that-sucks” are linked to the stuff-that-sucks object. stuff-that-sucks is now embodied by an object in the system and within it is a set of references to these other objects.

Doing this allows several things to happen: first, there is less reliance on search: the data is already there. Second, there is no misspelling confusion. Third, and most interestingly, objects have a chance to specify in more detail their relationship to this notion. How much does it suck, for instance? oh, lots. Lots.

Wired: 7 cables (excluding hub)

Wireless: 6 cables

Power, network, 4 daisy-chained FireWire hard drives, external monitor, USB mouse, USB hub, audio.

One of my external hard drives is about to die. It’s about eight years old. All of a sudden it made a high pitched whining screeching sound and I got the beachball of death in OS X for a minute or so. I recently set up a RAID 1 array of two 500G drives just for this reason, but it’s a good reminder of the unreliability of this media, and the first thing I thought of is that I have to get to those 50 mini DV tapes I have sitting in a drawer. They do not, apparently, have a long shelf life.