“announces”
74 posts under this tag.
In computing, the second-system syndrome is a form of sophomore slump that describes the tendency to design the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system as an elephantine, feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks WP in his classic The Mythical Man-MonthWP, AM.
Y’know, I remember reading about the syndrome in Brooks’s book with a smug confidence that it would never happen to me. It did. Imagery was by many accounts a pretty cool thing, but then I tried to outdo myself with its successor, Domburi, and, many, many ineffectual months later, I must admit that I’ve only weird sketches and weirder code to show for my time.
Which doesn’t mean that I’ve given up. It means that we need a new strategy. The all-or-nothing, hail-mary, next-big-thing, under-wraps-until-perfect approach was doomed since the beginning. (I really should have known better.) So the new strategy is to get it all out. As rough and soon as possible.
I’m calling it ”Improv’d Daily!” and it is akin to beta-hoodWP—in that it indicates that the website is still under developement—but it carries the all important mantra of radical incrementalism: every single day there will be at least one new, stand-alone, non-trivial improvement for the website. It won’t be earth shattering every day but it shall always be interesting.
I’m starting the meme with this very blog, which is supposed to be my online self and yet still lags far, far behind of what I want from it. (Domburi will be up in a couple of hours. Domburi up.) This very post will be updated daily with each day’s changes starting now and I have several new goodies to kickstart the kaizen:
8/May/07
# Related Posts section added (when viewing an individual post). Posts are related the more tags they have in common and the more rare those tags are.
# List of comments (accessible from the right sidebar, at the bottom of the Recent Comments header)
# New URLs: http://elzr.com/articles/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/TITLE becomes http://elzr.com/posts/TITLE, which is shorter and sweeter. You don’t need to remember a post’s date now and, what’s more, if there’s no post found with that TITLE, Google comes automagically to the rescue.
# Left sidebar redesign: new headshot, shorter description, just email (putting my phone # up there was always a bad idea, that phone-call confirmed it), new format for the archives.
# Collapsed “for:” tags in a post’s tag list. Much clearer. Tags are also now ordered alphabetically.
# Lots of tiny improvements all over. Like the orange bar atop a single post—neat, huh?—or icons for search (a magnifying glass in the searchbox) and for favorites (a star in favorite articles).
9/May/07
# Crappy day: a minor, bureaucratic improvement to the website became a nightmare. Blog crashing on and off. Domburi will have to wait until tomorrow.
10/May/07
# Blog back!
# Section Cache!: the recent list (favorites, posts, comments), the tags list, and the archive are now cached, making the website much, much faster.
# List of all posts (accessible from the left sidebar, below the Archives header)
11/May/07
# Save to Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg, and Stumble Upon when viewing an individual post.
# Tag Cloud!
# js-less Improv’d Daily! Ok, this may not sound like much but it’s important and cool. I use ALA’s CSS Sprites technique.
12-14/May/07
Obsessed Domburi fiddling. Sorry.
15/May/07
# Fixed broken Tag Cloud links (Thanks Aaron!)
16/May/07—20/Jun/07
Big, humongous gap—or vacations—or depression bout. Or all of them together. See chronicle on Domburi’s Improv’d Daily.
21/Jun/07
- Old URLs redirect to URLs to keep with the migration announced May 8. http://elzr.com/articles/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/TITLE now really becomes http://elzr.com/posts/TITLE.>
- Sidebar Redesign: new picture, new welcome copy bared down to its barest Basic EnglishWP essentials, new webapps added to webapp section, new, much better descriptions for most items in the sidebar.
- Daily Improves section in the sidebar for you to keep handy track of my progress—or lack thereof.
- Minor CSS fiddling—like a new, bigger size for small caps type (it could be hard to read at some resolutions and some platforms).
- New 404 page, that is, a new page to aid you when you type in an address that can’t be found. Try it now with http://elzr.com/this-address-is-wrong/. Thanks Aaron!
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New title for homepage. Since the delta thing is already obscure conceit enough, I decided to convert seconds into more humane time units. 8,321,231s delta is now 96 day delta.
Delta, btw, means something like the divergence (the difference) that has come to pass between two different times, one of which is usually the present—so when I say in this blog’s homepage title that there’s a 96 day delta I mean that I haven’t updated it in 96 days, i.e., me and my digital self have had 96 days to go our own separate ways. This wonderful sense of the word comes from Charles Stross’s Accelerando.
- Unified search into a simple URL, http://elzr.com/search/QUERY, which currently carries a personalized Google search of elzr.com but will eventually change to Domburi. This new unified interface allowed me to finally create a YubNub command for the blog: try elzr (see its man page) at every input box that speaks YubNub.
Some weeks ago water vapor was found on HD209458bWP, an extrasolar planet some 150 light years away. Just yesterday Gliese 581 cWP, E was discovered. With a radius only 50% bigger than that of Earth and within the “habitable zone”WP—”the region surrounding a star where water would be liquid”—of its star, it is the best candidate so far for extraterrestrial life.
The perennial wild card of the discovery of alien life looks ever closer and I’m teetering already—with excitement, with fear, with awe.
Never had the bug bit me before—always thinking crypto-anarchismWP a hangover from the cyberpunky 80s. It isn’t. It’s pure magic. And it may be anarchy’s best hope—ever.
Timothy C. May’s WP long, superb essay, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy (which appears in an essay collectionAM around Vernor Vinge’s True Names novel) has made a wild-eyed believer out of me. Fascinating stuff, this. (May, btw, is a former chief scientist at Intel, confirming my hypothesis that the people at the trenches of the Moore revolution had to be among humanity’s very best.)
Crypto anarchy is the cyber spatial realization of anarcho-capitalism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to consensually make the economic arrangements they wish to make..
[It] ensures that men with guns cannot be brought in to interfere with mutually agreed-upon transactions, the only kind of economics interaction possible in crypto anarchy. Some people will of course scream “Unfair!” and demand government intervention, which is why strong cryptography will probably be opposed by the masses, unless of course, they are wise and take the long view. This may smack of elitism, but I have very little faith in democracy. De Tocqueville warned in 1840 that, roughly translated, “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” We reached that point several decades ago..
To put it bluntly, crypto anarchy basically undermines democracy: it removes behaviors and transactions from the purview of the mob. And once crypto is deeply entwined into the fabric of life and commerce, it will be too late to pull the plug.
Timothy C. May, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy
Never had I been more than casually interested in cryptography. Now my copy of Schneier’s Applied Cryptograpy is on its way. Can’t wait.
.., one of the world’s largest and most influential private-equityWP firms, is planning an IPO of a minority stake, “perhaps 10%.” Appraisals of the company’s total value range “from $20 billion to double that.”
It has some 750 employees.
Talk about leverage.
Maybe the insolent goal is possible after all.
The always-up-to-something Gwyn is organizing the 2nd Fototour tapatio and place and time have been settled. Here’s the official invite.
El sábado, 28 de este mes (Lo siento, Gibraine, Joyfulgirl y R@ypg, será el siguiente, ojalá)
Qué tal a la 1 de la tarde en la Cantina La Cava: Herrera y Cairo #285, Colonia Centro, esquina con Belen. (Está a unas 5 cuadras del panteon)
Esperamos allá media hora pa´que lleguen todos, y después de una chela o tequilita y ¡que comience el tour!...
Si quieren llegar más tarde, contáctame (con este formulario) o por FlickrMail y te mando mi número de celular para que puedan ver dónde estamos.
Traigan sus cámaras y también unos pesos para la entrada al panteon… Nos vemos en la Cava! (Soy el extranjero con el pelo largo, y la chela y la camara en la mesa)
You should come—it’ll be fun (it was last time). If you do, drop a note at this Flickr thread.
A: There are great, quirky restaurants a plenty in Guadalajara!
B: Fex?
A: Nippondo, La Zanahoria, Los Burritos de Moyagua, Las Corajes, La Fuente, Hotel Victoria, Santuario,...!
The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up”— fex, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
With markets becoming saturated and mobile operators’ revenue-growth slowing—there are already 112 mobile devices for every 100 Austrians, fex—providing information about travel patterns could be a lucrative opportunity for telecoms firms.
The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England fex, the inferior races of animals are still.
Think of the arms races that go on between one or two animals living the same environment. Fex the race between the Amazonian manatee and a particular type of reed that it eats. The more of the reed the manatee eats, the more the reed develops silica in its cells to attack the teeth of the manatee and the more silica in the reed, the more manatee’s teeth get bigger and stronger.
It may only be that my grandfather’s agony has me seeing everything with long-now eyes but these days I’m increasingly aware that I should take precautions in case I die.
I don’t want to die. I don’t shake my head and look away at death, I stand up in defiance. But the fact is our lives are still too fragile and faced with the possibility I would rather think things through.
Which is why I’ve written this short will. I shall edit and refine it as long as I’m living (with the latest version the official one, of course) and so I thought I should start now.
I name Chemie, my sister, as my executor
If I die, I
wish a 1-night wake with
Yann Tiersen’s discography as background soundtrack
no prayers or religious services of any kind
Eliezer Yudkowsky’s letter
read in English & Spanish at the wake
printed and given to everyone at departure
to be buried
wish my grave be marked by a white granite slab embedded on the ground (recumbent desk style)
on the slab, I wish this text (and nothing else) engraved verbatim:
eliazar parra cardenas
“I was so happy!”
elzr.com
wish for a pink Primavera tree seed to be planted behind my headstone so that one day its shadow may cover it
wish to donate all my organs
wish to donate all my books to the ITESM Campus Guadalajara’s library, except those that friends or family want to keep
wish anything I’ve written, coded, designed, or in any other way produced, to be released to the public domain
wish to give Jane (my desktop computer) to Chemie and Wu (my macbook) to Chefi
wish any other material possession of mine to be donated to charity, except those that friends or family want to keep
wish elzr.com be kept online, fully-enabled, forever
wish this to be posted as soon as possible
title: I was so happy!
body: I died.
salmon-of-doubt-ly, I wish that my entire harddrive be made available online (through elzr.com) to anyone for free, as technology permits (they’re 500gb after all)
particularly my “life-inside-one-big-text-file” text file and MyDocuments folder
wish that my gmail account be made available online (through elzr.com) to anyone for free
correspondents, however, may ask for any of their emails to be concealed and that wish shall be respected, as long as they live
If I were to fall into a likely irreversible comma, I
wish to be kept alive as long as it’s economically possible
wish to undergo any recovery treatment as soon as it has more than a 1% chance of success
wish that all the above death provisions be carried out, except of course the burying part and the organ donating one
Last Updated: 2007-02-15
It has taken me some three years to realize it but when I did it was obvious. The crazy sleep schedule I’ve been riding since I dropped out of college is more than the pale-hacker tropism for long quiet nights. It’s more than manic-depression, which for a time I was sure of having. It’s more than youthful immaturity, which I’m sure of having.
I remember the first nights out from college, and some before, I would curl up on my bed, scared as I’ve ever been—fingers curled, fetal, with hamsters in my head and a stomach full of nothing, churning away anyway. Scared of what you say? Oh, the usual I guess, scared of failure, of success, of not being up to the challenge, of blowing it all away in search of some silly dream. Mostly, though, scared of this fear I knew not inside of me.
Those nights stopped without my realizing but I now know what happened to them: I tired them away. I would work (or idle) my way to exhaustion, till there was nothing left for me to do but tumble down. Sleeping was sure easier than facing my fears, and since everything could wait, what was the harm of sleeping on it? Again and again.
Never would’ve thought designing calendars was this fun. (PokeCalendario, btw, is a great turn of phrase by James P. Wack)
I’m happy and I’m grateful (and I’m sushied) at my 22.
My gift to you this year is an idea. A great one. Look around and you’ll find it.
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