I tried (and failed) to do this once – this guy is much more organized than me.

CVS homedir

The Economist recomments this book:

Motivation, Agency and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves, Pawns and Queens examines the theory and practice of “quasi-markets” for public services. The book is short, accessible and profound. Drawing on theory, case studies and surveys of the literature, Mr Le Grand argues that the left is missing a trick. Market forces, he says, can often serve its goals better than the methods socialists and social democrats generally favour.

Economist.com | Economics focus

Seems like IPv4 isn’t running out of space as fast as people think. We have anywhere from 15-25 years left at the current rate.

RIPE NCC – Registration Services

ISP Column – July 2003

I haven’t seen a table like this one before. It shows all the 802.11 working groups, their designated letter, and what they are workingon.

    <p><font size="2"><b>Table 1: Current 802.11 Working Groups at the IEEE</b></font>
    <p>
    <table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="1">

<td valign="top" align="left"><font size="2">Adds quality of service features, multimedia support</font></td>

<td valign="top" align="left"><font size="2">g</font></td>
<td valign="top" align="left"><font size="2">Ups data transfer rates on 2.4GHz band to 54 Mbit/s</font></td>

<td valign="top" align="left"><font size="2">Not being used, because it looks confusing</font></td>

<td valign="top" align="left"><font size="2">n</font></td>
<td valign="top" align="left"><font size="2">Not official yet but likely to be the designation of a high-throughput variant of the standard.</font></td>

Unstrung – The world wide source for analysis of the global wireless economy

Another interesting application of Wi-Fi – for your car.

Bluetooth, Wi-fi expected on 25 million vehicles within 5 years

I’m looking into the convergence of voice wireless (cellular) and 802.11, trying to figure out of there are any opportunities out there. Here’s a good introductory article.

RED HERRING | The Business of Technology

This is a pretty dense but interesting article filled with the possibilities of a world-wide sensor web. Last week I got a tour of the Intel research lab in Berkeley and saw some more cool stuff like this. Amazing to wonder what life wil be like in 20-50 years…

GEO World – Sept 2003 – The Smart Sensor Web: A Revolutionary Leap in Earth Observation

I came close to investing in this company. They have good stuff.

Slashdot/NY Times

SJ Mercury News

We took some technology when we traveled around the world, but not like these guys. We had a digital camera, GPS, and Psion 5mx to write our journals on. We updated our site via cybercafes around the world. These guys are on the cutting edge:

Taking Technology to Extremes

When Ben Saunders reached Camp Borneo, 60 miles from the North Pole, he didn’t celebrate. “Instead, Mr. Saunders, 25, sat down at a table, pulled out his palm-size iPaq digital assistant, his pocket-size Global Positioning System locator, his satellite phone and his digital camera and began updating his Web site, www.northpole2003.com.”

“Some technology is used as it comes off the shelf, while some is customized in an endless quest for the best performance at the lightest weight, said Tom Sjogren, a co-owner of Explorersweb, a Manhattan-based company supplying software, hardware and a home on the Internet to Mr. Saunders and others at the world’s last frontiers (www.explorersweb.com).”

Now THIS is cool. I want to visit space!

LiftPort Inc – Chapter 1: A Space Elevator?

I’ve tried BitTorrent a few times, and it seems to work pretty well. The fatal flaw seems to be the place where you initiate the download, because whether the download is licit or illicit, the record companies are coming after you.

Slashdot on BitTorrent

I love Tim Bray. I met him back in 1992, I think, when I was going to SGML conferences and trying to figure out how to balance the coolness of an easy-to-read metadata format with the incredibly arcane syntax and requirements of SGML. He solved my problem a few years later by inventing XML. Now people are pissing all over it, and he strikes back:

Why XML Doesn’t Suck

Let’s look at some of XML’s chief virtues, then I’ll address some of the XML-sucks arguments, in the same spirit that Sammy Sosa addresses a fastball.

I’m looking for a silent PC to add to the home theatre setup in the family room. I’m too lazy to build one myself, but I’ve been looking around. I guess one was just introduced at CeBIT – it looks pretty nice:

PC silence is golden

It uses a new cooling technology to eliminate all fans from the system so it produces no noise at all during normal operation. Only when the CD-ROM drive is used does any sound escape the sleek metal chassis.

The store seems to be here, but doesn’t sell to the USA. Guess I’m still looking.

This has got to be the most amazing conscious language development process in history. Tens of thousands of interested parties, intense feedback and discussion, and a bona fide genius to wrap it all up and give it consistency. Incredible.

Here’s what started it, and here’s the latest.

Well, I broke down and bought Quicktime Pro, followed the directions (linked to below) and fixed the sound sync problem. Now I’m trying to decide if I want to wait for iDVD 3 to arrive to do the chapter markers before burning the 10 DVDs I’m about to burn.

I spent a bunch of time on the labels, too. My color printer is hooked up to my PC, so I tried both CD Stomper and Easy CD Creator 4 label programs, and ended up liking the Easy CD one better. I grabbed a few background images from the web, scanned in some pictures, and had a pretty nice looking label and booklet in a couple of hours. I used the CD Stomper to put the labels on, and they look great.

So, I’m making a nifty DVD for some friends, using iMovie and iDVD, on my iMac. At first things go great. I easily import the DV from my camera. I spend a couple of hours cleaning up the video, adding some fades in and out, and generally making it look nice. Then I export it to iDVD, which takes forever, and crashes every time the iMac decides to go to sleep.

Finally I get it exported, and run iDVD. Turns out the video needs to be under 90 minutes – I’ve got about 92 minutes. Back to iMovie, and painfully cut a few seconds here and there to try to make it fit without ruining the performance. I get it to 89 minutes and 58 seconds, and re-export, leaving it to run overnight.

In iDVD, I discover that the menus and other things actually take up video time, even when turning the video menus and motion off. iDVD tells me my DVD is 90 mins and 1 second – painful! I go back and find a few more seconds to cut, and re-export, yet again. This time it finally works.

I burn a DVD, and pop it into my DVD player in my home entertainment system. Eureka, it works! Only one problem – towards the end, the sound gets way out of sync. Like nearly a full second early, by the end.

After some sleuthing on the web, I find there’s a way to fix this using Quicktime Pro, but I don’t really want to buy more software to fix what seems to me to be a bug in iMovie. However, I also find that I’m using iMovie 2, and there’s a free upgrade to iMovie 3 – maybe that will do it? So, I use the handy-dandy OS X Software Updater to get the new iMovie.

iMovie 3 runs great, and looks great, and even supports chapter markers, so I spend some time putting them in. Then I click Export, and I find that it doesn’t work with iDVD 2 – bummer! I can’t even download iDVD 3, even if I wanted to pay the $49 for it – I have to order the iLife CD, and wait for it to arrive. How frustrating.

Now I’m exporting to iDVD 2 from iMovie 3, having finally found the technical bulletin that tells me what settings to use. And it looks like I’ll still have to buy Quicktime Pro to fix the damn sound sync problem. Isn’t that just a bug in iMovie?

Apple has gotten a lot of things right, and iMovie and iDVD in general are wonderful and easy to use programs. But they’re so close to perfect, that these bugs are incredibly annoying.