A little bit about me

Net Neutrality is really a misnomer; it’s not just about neutrality. Calling Common Carrier requirements for Internet providers “Net Neutrality” is like calling your car gasoline neutral. If Ford or General Motors made an exclusive deal with Exxon-Mobile so that their vehicles only got the rated gas mileage using that brand of gasoline, and all others would produce sub-par results, there would be no question about legislating against that. So why then are the carriers allowed to try to hold content providers hostage over bandwidth and performance? When I purchase Internet access through my ISP, I am buying bandwidth to the net at large, not to the companies that have cooperative agreements with my provider. I expect that the content provider may throttle requests and responses to mitigate issues such as being slashdoted and having unusually large amounts of traffic at an unpredictable moment, but that is in their business model not in the business of the Internet Provider who has so...

This time Google found the hint I was looking for. I use SciTe to edit when I am working on Python projects. But on the brand new machine running Vista it was coughing up the "No module named ..." error. A couple of Google searches later, I actually found this blog that had the answer to editing the Windows path and XPATH variables to find Python. One would think that the Windows installer for Python would have done that already, but apparently not. *sigh* And now back to my regularly scheduled programming projects.

Well, first let me say that I just watched a movie whose characters are all marionettes. That should put the rest into a little more perspective. The theme of Strings is that we are all bound to one another. The metaphor of strings is obvious in the strings that control the actors, but is also carried throughout the story in other more subtle ways. When our hero is exposed to the world outside the city, he sees some of these connections, and has some shown to him. The story itself is a hero saga, with our hero the young price setting forth to avenge his father that he wrongly believes to have been slain by their historical enemies. Of course there is an evil uncle who is furthering this for his own ends, being control of the kingdom, but that is about as trite as the story gets. Our young prince disguises himself and leaves the city with his general alone to seek the rebels who he believes murdered his father, leaving behind his sister in the clutches of the evil uncle and his henc...

learning a new trick is always a difficult proposition. The new trick I am attempting to master this time is the use of dictation with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It actually feels somewhat silly to sit and talk to your computer. Which is doubly so for me given that I was raised reading science fiction. Teaching this old dog new trick of using dictation software instead of typing is going to take a bit more practice than I had expected. I hope that at the end of this process dictation will prove faster than typing and I may yet get a few short stories into electronic ink.

Web Worker Daily was a lovely article on rescuing an unproductive day. I really have to thank them for reminding me to turn the music on. Drowning out the conversations from the cubes around the floor, and the noises of the toys the folks around here use to help adjust attitude when taking support calls is a godsend. Pandora really helps in providing the soundtrack I actually want to listen to. Setting up a channel for 80s bubble-gum pop music, or loud, stompy industrial, is great for fixing a broken day.

Stanislaw Lem is a brilliant author. This is the first book of stories about pilot (or cadet, in the first story) Pirx of the space service. We open with Pirx as a cadet, learning to fly the atomic rocket. This is almost identical to the rockets described by Charles Stross in his current science fiction stories, which is rather telling in terms of the perception of atomic fission as the source of energy for rockets in space. But I digress. Pirx is worried about his performance, and comparing himself to the best and brightest in his class. I know that I did that through highschool and college as well. But when Pirx emerges from the simulator that he thought was a real training flight he finds that his overthinking of things has led him to land while the bright boy crashed his simulator into the moor. Pirx is an everyman of a character who thinks too much, and analyzes too much. He is worried that his name will impact his ability to get a date. "I'm Pirx" doesn...

Charles Stross once again delivers a romping good read. Cramming in a good number of the current trendy terms and concepts from the singularist camp, Accelerando is a fast forward look at what might happen if the computers do take over. Uploading into the net, external mental components, ability to fork yourself into multiple versions, these are the wet dreams of the technorati. The cat as the family curse is a nice subplot, but does seem a bit Deus Ex Machine; the whole story being centered around the machines does tend to lend itself to those sorts of plot devices however. The idea of a robotic cat that is upgradable really is a nice extension of the Aibo and other products currently on the market. The idea put forth of a Matrioshka brain instead of a Dyson Sphere as the final outcome of a solar system that has uploaded itself is very compelling. Given the change from consuming all resources to support the human form, to consuming all resources to support the virtual worlds, ...