From frost on rooftops out our windows (San Francisco – frost?) to the vivid red maple blooming in front of our home, we continue to appreciate life and beauty!

Kathryn: I am still leading the Feldenkrais program for adults with severe neuro-motor challenges at Bay Area Ability Now and also co-leading a weekly meditation practice group for Tergar International on Sunday mornings, with my colleague Cristian Lotito—something I’ve done weekly since April 2020, and monthly in person before that. The photo shows me with Cristian and Mingyur Rinpoche, Tergar’s Founding Teacher.

I was drawn to the work of Roshi Joan Halifax (photo left) several years ago, and I am delighted to be able to study with her “in person” on zoom. (You can see my small face on the zoom insert above her head.)

Jim/Sky: It’s been mostly-sunny days this week on the ski slopes near Lake Tahoe, and we’re happy that we’re both skiing — at least on the fair-weather days. (Temp 36°F day and 18°F night)

Despite a ski injury last January, Kathryn has continued skiing and loves it — as she has for many years. These photos of us were taken yesterday!

 

Jim/Sky: Kathryn also got to visit with her sister Susan Amber Gordon on the East Coast, despite our lessened eagerness to travel since the start of the pandemic.

 

---

Play It Again

Jim/Sky: In 2022 I started producing my feature-length film Play It Again about “Coming home to music.” I’m personally an extreme example of this. For me the coming back started in 2014, then accelerated to full tilt in 2015-2016 at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where I completed a full-time post-graduate year in Technology and Applied Composition. At that time, I had already been thinking about making a film about the experience, but there just wasn’t time to complete the coursework and do a film at the same time. So in February, 2022 I finally started filming. An intermediate full-length cut of the film is completed now (December, 2022) and with the filming of one more scene in January, we will have it all “in the can.”

When I went back to music in 2015 I said that “software had caught up with us” and was finally enabling a new breed of composer and compositional process — with sampled instruments it had become possible to compose and play back in real time at good quality — a new cyclical compositional process much like software development. Well by 2022 it was obvious that iPhone hardware and software were advanced enough that “filming” could be similarly streamlined and available to far more would-be producers. So I became one of those. The film is almost entirely shot on iPhone with wireless sound recording right into the camera as well. Sign up for more film info!

Play It Again — Coming home to music and how it changed my life; filmed in 2022, and scheduled for release in February, 2023. New audio albums are in the works for Q1:2023 augmenting the existing albums. Amateur Music Network; I’m on the board of directors of this org that promotes “the love of music” including upcoming workshops and a library of video of many past workshops. Joined the board of the Ross McKee Foundation, which promotes piano performance. We had a private showing and panel discussion of The Third Harmony, a film I scored in 2020. CDs of my albums are available now via special order. Just ask me.

My film will be available in February, 2023, and if you visit the Play It Again web site, you can sign up there for email notification.

(The space above is where the intro video should appear. It may be empty if you have opted out of ‘statistics’ cookies. You may play the introductory video on Vimeo)

 

The post 2022 year-end greeting appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The cutout cards are produced by the Unemployed Philosophers’ Guild and they stand up on four legs. There are philosophers, writers, activists, scientists, composers, and many others. The (Unemployed) Philosophers’ Guild sells its cards and other products online. (The online store was broken when I tried it today, but they’re also sold in many stores.) It’s worth a visit to see the promotional videos. Cute.

The post Gandhi Action Figure appeared first on Sky's Blog.

You know, in programming (which I do a lot of), there are often little gotchas that require hours or days to figure out. And once you’ve figured them out, it’s easy to forget them if you immediately move on to the next challenge. Working at the level I do, which often requires typing command-line stuff, I’d never remember this stuff character by character unless I used it every day.

For instance, I was exporting a French blog database today (from MySQL), which has lots of é and ï and ç and ô characters in it. These have always given me trouble, because when you’re migrating a MySQL database from one server to another, and you don’t export and import them properly, they just don’t come through as the proper accented characters.

To do it right I’d have to remember this line:

mysqldump  –user=mylogin -p –opt mydbname -r myfile.sql

Now, given the hundreds of different things I do every day, week after week, how would I remember that one?

Jerry’s Brain

Jerry Michalski uses a notable tool —theBrain— to hold links to info and organize it for exploration. He may have the most extensive theBrain in the world, having used the software for more than 15 years. He has a quick introduction to his brain on his Rexpedition site. You can also watch Jerry talk about his brain (30-minute video … breaks all attention span rules).

An (External Memory) Podcast

One of my favorite podcasts is Big Picture Science from Team SETI. On January 20th, 2014, they did a nice cast on how human and computer memory is progressing. The Forget to Remember episode is worth listening to.  And this is a podcast you might like to subscribe to!

The post Where’s your external brain? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

You’ve probably never thought about this, but if you are currently using a mouse, take a look at how the mouse is positioned with respect to your screen. Is the mouse pointing straight away from your body, or is it twisted around to point directly at your screen?

I constantly find that I’m unconsciously twisting the mouse to point toward the screen (first illustration), even though this makes no difference whatsoever in how it functions. It doesn’t get smoother—it doesn’t get faster—it doesn’t gain precision. Sweeping it leftward in an arc still moves the cursor to the left across the screen. Pushing it toward the screen still moves the cursor upward.

If you’d like to review where the computer mouse came from, check out Doug Engelbart’s big demo in 1968 — later Doug and his crew demo’d the mouse for me in 1971 or so at SRI. Mice have come a long way since then.

I find that my mouse position is intertwined with my relationship to the screen. I think I subconsciously feel an invisible “beam” coming out of the mouse and hitting the screen to move the cursor. Kind of like a lever, or a laser pointer, or a stick, or I don’t know what. I think I have always just wanted to point at the screen, or touch. But, yes, I think it has to do with my kinesthetic sense of the mouse and the screen as one device, not as a separate object controlling a cursor on a disconnected screen. My friend, David Thornburg, once required to this action as “trying to draw with a brick in your hand.” At the time he was working with Koala Technologies, which had just come out with a Muppet-themed keyboard and touchpad for the Apple II and other personal computers. Yes, this was in 1984! Thirty years ago.

The alternative to being a mouse twister is to keep the mouse pointed straight ahead (second illustration). In this scenario the mouse is out to the side of the computer (I’m mostly right-handed, so it’s over to the right) and not really pointed at the screen. It’s pointed “straight ahead.”

Which of these is your favored configuration?

I will tell one story about the mid-1980s, when mice were very, very new.

On Macintosh systems we frequently heard that our software users, who were truly newbies, of course, to this mouse-based and cursor-based paradigm, were unable to move the cursor left and right properly. When we observed what they were doing, we found they were twirling the mouse around its central vertical axis, which of course caused no left-right motion at all…just turned the little tracking ball on the bottom, or not at all, in unpredictable motions. Once we got them to understand they had to sweep the mouse left and right, they at least understood what was going on, though sometimes they still couldn’t master the motor skills to make this happen.

What we did to straighten them out, was to get them to point the mouse straight ahead, not pointed at the screen. This freed up the little ball under the mouse so it would work properly. (Today’s mice are more generally reflecting light off the surface of a table or pad, not rolling balls around.)

These days, of course, everyone can either use a mouse or has transitioned to some other pointing device anyway. I am convinced that the computer mouse will be solely a historical relic within 10 years.

—

Corollary: When you use a touchpad or tablet, does your hand come straight at the screen from the “bottom” or is it coming in from the side or even the top? Remember that you can’t rest the heel of your hand on a touch screen when you’re touching a spot near the top, so you are forced to keep your hand floating above the screen, or come in from the side, in many cases.

The post As the mouse turns – Are you twisted or are you straight? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Compared to today, 1963 really was the early days. It was pre-Internet. It was pre-Ted Nelson. It was pre-Doug Engelbart. And so forth. And getting a PhD in computer science back then was really an adventure in the unknown. Most of what we regard as Computer Science was unmapped in those days.

So some unaskedfor advice to my readers. When you find yourself saying ”I think I should do X but I really like Y” please pay attention to what your intuition is telling you. Don’t waste your time doing what someone else thinks you should be doing. Above all, be realistic, but give great weight to what your intuition is telling you, because it’s very likely right about it.

That old Steve Jobs advice again (see also)

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

///

P.S.: In 2015 I decided to augment my computer science career by studying (music) composition for a year at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. [Read more]

The post Finding your way appeared first on Sky's Blog.

There is no due process and no way someone who is wrongfully blocked can get themselves quickly unblocked.

And were this legislation to pass in the US, it would signal strong support for other countries similarly blocking internationally-hosted content based on their own national laws. (Many do it already, but let’s not set an example.)

Join me in opposing these bills. Notify your US Senators and Representatives.

This site will be participating in the Strike on January 18th, 2012.

The post Stop SOPA/PIPA appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The knee-jerk reaction to a computer attack, if you’re sitting at home, might be to pull the plug on the computer, and although that might make sense in some cases, turning off Internet functionality in the case of a national or regional emergency could effectively shut down emergency services and civil defense operations. If someone shut down the Internet, then those who run the Internet could no longer talk to each other to fix the problems…except by telephone, let’s say, which most likely would also be impacted by a network shutdown. It’s clear that in the US, as well as many other countries, the President (or other leader) has the authority and ability to shut down these communication channels—including all telecommunications— under certain circumstances, but that’s a very blunt instrument.

It would, of course, also shut down commerce and finance for the duration of an emergency, as well as way beyond that. The aftermath could dwarf the current economic downturn.

October’s a fun month. It is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the US, which I discovered before the fact but have seen little publicity about, and I  doubt that it’s causing people to get fewer viruses this month.

How people do odd things in emergencies was demonstrated for me during last week’s California duck-and-cover emergency drill [2. The Great California ShakeOut] when the sirens went off here in San Francisco, and I checked in on the amateur radio net to see what was happening (and to report status, which is what we do when the sirens are tested on Tuesday mornings). Now, of course this wasn’t a real emergency—it was a simulation—so it’s different. But I discovered two things: first, the regular net where amateurs check in during a siren test was in disarray and nobody took on the net control role, indicating that nobody was ready for an unscheduled emergency; and second, on the ACS[3. Amateur Communications Society, the more “official” city-sanctioned emergency radio operators] network, where people were checking in as they were trained to, the major question was “did you receive the SMS and the email indicating the alert?” If there were some kind of civil emergency someone had shut down the Internet, there would have been no alerting of a large portion of the civilian emergency responders.

In case of emergency, you want to be as observant and vigilant as possible… Shutting down any portion of the Internet in the event of an emergency is like deciding to shut your eyes or put on a blindfold in the event something bad happens.

The post In case of emergency, shut eyes and stagger in the dark appeared first on Sky's Blog.

But times are changing rapidly! Even a site with very little human traffic may be suddenly and catastrophically overwhelmed by searchbot traffic.

Sites on small servers frequently are configured in such a way that they can serve perhaps a dozen or two simultaneous visitors[2. Web servers have limited RAM memory, and because of the way popular web server software, like Apache, is usually configured, once the RAM memory is full, they either slow down or stop serving visitors entirely. The condition is sometimes called “wedging” since it’s like trying to drive a wedge into a crack in a log.]. Searchbots (the robotic spiders that crawl the web on behalf of search engines) don’t use a web site the same way humans do. A human site visitor downloads a page, a bunch of photos, some style sheets, and then sits there a few seconds (at least) reading or looking at the page before clicking for more. Web servers like those that I maintain for my clients, are configured so that they can handle this kind of “human paced” load, and we have lots of tricks [3. Like offloading the photos to content management systems.] so human visitors can be served really fast. WordPress sites, for example, require considerable CPU time to create a dynamic page that’s composed of data, photos, plugins and other widgets. So we have the server cache the finished pages, and serve those cached copies rapidly, rather than spending a lot of server CPU time regenerating them for every visitor. A cached page might require only a tiny fraction of a second to serve, compared to the seconds it takes to build the page in the first place.

But searchbots frequently look only at the core page, and not at the photos[3. There are specialized searchbots now that look only at photos or videos.], and then quickly move to the next page they want to investigate. Sometimes a searchbot will request 5 to 10 pages in a single second—human visitors usually are paced at a page every few seconds. When a searchbot explores like this it can rapidly max out a small server. What’s more, human visitors tend to clump or cluster and look at similar things—while searchbots may request pages all over the place completely unconnected to each other. The human visitors, because they’re interested in similar topics, will end up hitting cached pages, while the searchbot, making 30x the normal number of requests per second [4. Say 10 pages per second rather than 1 every 3 seconds for a human], hits pages all over the site, unrelated to each other.

The worst of the “bad behavior” however, arises from certain bots (I’ll name them in another article later on) that “anticipate” what their masters might want to see and do a “look-ahead” instead of picking up a single page, they might pick up a page and 5 to 10 related pages, regardless of whether their master wanted those pages. You can think of them building a repository of pages, stemming from the top or home page, that a visitor might want to see, just on the off chance that a visitor will come along wanting that specific page.

Although the spiders are usually there for legitimate purposes, related to fancy and sometimes useful new online services, this kind of spidering can really drag down a server!

The post Are hungry searchbots eating your small web site alive? appeared first on Sky's Blog.

—the U.S. Internet company “will have to bear the consequences” if it follows through on its pledge to stop censoring its Chinese search site. [WSJ article]

Why is it that we in the “West” hear this statement so differently from the Chinese?

—You are free to say anything you want (in China) as long as it’s legal. [Sky paraphrases what they’ve said]

To give you a benchmark, in China it is illegal to have a photo of the Dalai Lama because he is called a subversive (splittist). In Costa Rica it has been illegal to propose changing the constitution. In the US (and many other countries) it is legal to propose changing the constitution, but illegal to attempt to change it by force or violence. In other words, in some countries it’s illegal to even talk about certain kinds of change…and therefore real and full free speech is impossible. There’s always a limit—it’s just quite variable and we have to work to make or keep it reasonable.

The post Google and China – something will happen soon appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The loose end this article, China’s Hacker Army, in Foreign Policy (March 3, 2009) leaves open is that since the Chinese government isn’t really controlling and coordinating the hacking, there’s something else going on that we don’t understand yet. Is someone paying for the spoils the hackers bring back from their quests? Are they doing this for fame, not fortune? Is it perhaps free-enterprise with the goods being sold to the highest bidder?

”There are many actors, some directed by the government and others tolerated by it…”

“But the fact that these hackers’ interests overlap with Chinese policy does not mean they are working on behalf of Beijing, and indeed many of their activities suggest no government interference at all.” … “An unwritten rule holds that freelance hackers are left alone as long as they target foreign sites and companies. Once they go after information inside China, the government cracks down. For a hacker interested in self-preservation, the choice is clear.”

“Ultimately, a loose connection between Beijing intelligence operatives and patriotic hackers is more troubling than a strong one. Governments operate under constraints. Gangs of young men — as the United States has learned the hard way — don’t.”

The post China’s hacker army / today’s wild, wild west appeared first on Sky's Blog.

One of those ways was Project Happiness. Emmanuel’s school became the third “leg” in the triumvirate of founding schools in that project.

In 2007, Emmanuel joined us in India, along with Tibetan exile students and a dozen students from the US who were participating in the project. We traveled to Dharamsala, where the students interviewed the Dalai Lama. This was a paradigm-altering meeting for Emmanuel.

He returned to Nigeria where he founded Creative Minds International Academy, a values-based institution.

Oh—what prompted my writing this article right now is that some of his supporters are returning to Nigeria soon to deliver more computers and other needed supplies. The Voices of Angels Foundation arose from the communications and activities I mentioned above, and are now providing a computer lab provisioned with eGranery. Listen, watch, and then go read up (better yet—make a donation to support this work).

[youtube 3a08OgnTlw4]

The post Values-based education in Nigeria appeared first on Sky's Blog.

How many times a day are you in a meeting where the group sits down at some small table, opens their laptop computers (on the tiny table) and suddenly you are looking across the tops of the displays (walls of displays!) at the other people around the table? (Um, just think coffeeshop for instance, with several people crowded around a small table and the table filled with laptop computers, not coffee cups.) What do you notice about how the eyes are fixated on screens, and the people aren’t looking at each other over the tops of the screens. Is there more time spent looking at screens, or more time spent looking at each other?

When I was a kid sharing legos^[1], or other building blocks, we would sometimes build walls around our respective play-areas, like people building fences around their property. We defended our property by building these walls.

The physical wall of flipped-up computer screens creates an artificial and dysfunctional social distance among and between members of the group.

The tabletPC and the “pad” could substantially change that dynamic! Much as if you were using a pencil and yellow pad, lying down out of your sightline on the surface of the table, the digital pad sits unobtrusively on the table, where you can look down when you need to, and take notes, and otherwise look up at the meeting participants and the whiteboard or screen.

The social distance created by a laptop with its flipped-up display has allowed you to check email and do other “secret” things stealthily and out of sight of the other meeting participants. The pad won’t allow that to the same degree! If you’re typing email, or doodling, or watching movies on your pad, everyone can see what you’re doing. (That’s why people put their blackberries and iPhones on their laps during meetings—so you can’t see what they’re working on. The pad will make that more difficult.)

I try, as much as possible, to use my iPhone in meetings rather than breaking out the Macbook—I find that it is less disruptive of the social interaction. And I look forward to the first meeting I’m in where the majority of people have tablets or pads instead of clamshell laptop computers!

I encourage people to be online and connected during most business meetings. And my only rule about electronic devices during meetings is they must be on the table in plain sight. You can check email if you want to, but I want to understand that this is what you’re doing so we can mutually adjust the meeting to be of more immediate interest to everyone! The pad will provide a greater degree of transparency in terms of letting meeting participants know what you’re doing.

The post The pad will blow away the clamshell appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Over the last few years, it’s included one of the more dramatic or memorable photos I’ve taken during the year.

This year’s photo is of the Palais des Thermes de Cluny, visible from the rue St. Michel in Paris, in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne, where Kathryn and I had a chance to spend a week this summer. (She had been a Fulbright scholar at the Sorbonne in Paris after graduation from college.) Read more about this photo and the Palais des Thermes in my blog article. I spent two weeks in Paris this year, on two different occasions. The second was with the Traveling Geeks just a couple of weeks ago.

My photo (in the greeting) was taken by Olivier Ezratty in Paris in December, 2009. Olivier was one of our Paris Traveling Geeks, and our guide to the Paris Metro on a number of occasions.

This end-of-year time is a bit more relaxed than the rest of the year, since so many people take time off during one or the other of the weeks around Christmas and New Year’s, though this year there’s been a lot of client activity. And I have two new ventures (both based on technologies developed over the last few years here at Red7) that are launching in January. So I know there are new vistas ahead this year for me, and here’s hoping that you do indeed have new windows and new vistas open for you in the upcoming year!

(Click to view the photo greeting at full size.)

The post 2009 Greetings- May the upcoming year open new vistas for you! appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The photo is of the Palais des Thermes de Cluny, (a Roman tepidarium and frigidarium) originally Roman baths, whose ruins are visible from the Rue St. Michel in the Latin Quarter of Paris. These baths were contained in perhaps the oldest brick building in Paris, built in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE and restored by Napoleon III.

I really fell in love with the contrast of the modern multi-pane glass and how it reflects the back of the brick arches that I’m shooting through. Almost 2400 years of history represented in this photo.

Stepping back from the close-up you can see how the modern window is framed within an ancient arch.

Bricks in Paris blog describes the Palais des Thermes May 5, 2009

Another nice photo and short description {in French}

The site is integrated with the Hôtel de Cluny and the Musée de Cluny (Musée National du Moyen Âge — National Museum of the Middle Ages)

In case you don’t know… BCE

Google Street-View (go to 24 rue St. Michel, Paris, France)

The post Lighten up appeared first on Sky's Blog.

To our surprise, we learned earlier this year that the Adobe Reader processes JavaScript that can be embedded in its PDF documents. Once again, here in December 2009, another vulnerability allows JavaScript can be exploited to turn a PDF into a malicious piece o’ stuff.

The fault won’t be fixed until mid-January 2010. Big companies have long turnaround on fixing software. Yes, they have to test to be sure everything still works after they make a fix – but meanwhile we can’t safely open PDF documents unless we have JavaScript turned off.

The attack vector is to send a poisoned PDF file to intended target individuals, purporting to be “From: a friend” and hoping that they’ll open the attached PDF thinking that it’s safe. Wrong again. You won’t be caught by this, will you?

More on this attack on DarkReading.com.

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