#Tech

ruling the root

I read Salon’s review of Ruling the Root about the root dns servers for .com and so forth. It sounds pretty pessimistic and predicts that intellectual property and law enforcement have taken over the assignment of .com, etc names for their own nefarious purposes.

If it really becomes a problem I don’t see why people won’t just setup alternative root name servers. All my friends and I would use them to get around on the Internet and communicate with each other, and fallback to the ICANN TLDs as needed.

Just installed OS X 10.1

Just installed OS X 10.1 on my Cube and it is sweet. Everything is a great deal faster. It has the new version of IE for OS X which is monumentally faster. The application menus are actually usable now and display immediately when clicked on. Also I now have DVD playback and this is the best playback I’ve had on any platform. I’m writing this as War Wagon is playing in a window. I’ve never had such clean and fluid DVD playback in a window under OS 9 or Windows 9x, especially while I use other applications. The finder windows pop open and they’ve made the column view even more usable. At the bottom of each column is a thumb that you can use to resize them, why just yesterday I was lamenting the fact that I couldn’t widen them easily and now I can!

One thing we postulated about

One thing we postulated about a lot at my old job was communities. The connections people make with other people is a dynamo that never stops running. It’s not without its flaws though. Steven Johnson, a founder of FEED Magazine, has a new book out. It’s called Emergence. It’s about self-organizing systems and how they scale. It borrows from a number of different scientific disciplines to describe how communities work in the online world. An excerpt is available that focuses primarily on Slashdot’s moderation system. This looks like a good book.

Experimental feature added

Experimental feature added

One of the nice things about having a blog that nobody visits is that I can add CPU sucking tools and the light traffic won’t hurt it. I’ve added a new sidebar box called mail waiting. It logs into my IMAP server and checks the Pending folder in my mailbox and gets a list of messages. The Pending folder contains messages that I need to respond to. Don’t go sending me email just to see your name pop up in the list, I manually go through my mailbox and put messages into that Pending folder. I could have it list my whole Inbox but that wouldn’t really serve any purpose.