Friday, June 27

Todays patient method of redistributing wealth.

Ok so yeh, it's human nature to want to help other humans just as much as it is our nature to be greedy little buttheads. People spend tons of money on "mandetory" things like vehicles, petroleum, computers, school, food, and all the other odds and ends that make up our day to day. So there are starving kids in all corners of the world and guilty messages on the TV saying we should donate to them. Outright donation is great, and it strengthens your internal moral obligations to commit yourself to humanity in all aspects. It's not uncommon that companies or people will take their hard earned money and send a good chunk of it off to a charity of some kind.

There is another aspect to contribution that I'm realizing now.. The patient method. So patient that you may have no idea that you are participating in it until it materializes. You get rich first through being smart, lucky, or handsome. Eventually you encourage yourself, or through the encouragement of others, to contribute to good causes because you are so fortunate. I really like that the Gates family started up the Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation now that they are more than set for life. This is the patient method. Eventually everybody in the world contributes to the hungry, bored, sick, and less fortunate people in the world through consumerism and monopolies. I feel a bit better about life after thinking about this. It's kind of a shame that if your goal is to give to as many people as possible that you'll first have to take from as many as you can first. In exchange for "goods" sure.. but why isn't everybody just giving?

That said, no I don't feel like joining any relief organizations, hungry child networks, etc.. I'm a prick.

Tuesday, June 17

What I plan on doing with my domains.

I've registered an obsene amount of domains in the past two years to hopefully be the new home for commercial entities, ideas, public websites, and organizations that I want to create or at least be part of. I've ended up with the following - for giggles I've also thrown in domains I've had for a looong time. Now A lot of the information below may make you wonder "Why is he sharing all these ideas so publically?" and the answer is because I can't do any of these on my own and the world is as much my audience as it is my cohort.

And now on to the list:

Personal Use:

bogomip.com
: My personal domain I use for all things me. Blogs, email, home network domains, temp domain names, silly projects, etc..

Organizations:

gnuak.org
: GNU/AK - Alaska's GNU Professional Society. My hopes were to create something similar to the local LUG but geared more toward professionals that use GNU software like Linux at the professional level.

alaskadogparks.org: Hoping to build a community of dog owners. Alaska has an awesome ratio of dogs per household but still a very small percentage of people get their dogs the excersize they need. This site was to help with the public information on dog parks, scheduled dog walks in a specific neighborhood or area, help promote dog parks and reduce conflict with other activities sharing space with the parks. Anchorage AK has some amazing dog parks but their boundaries, accessability schedules, and maintainence aren't well known and would benifit from better public knowledge. It would be kinda neat if there were a lost and found on the site as well, dogs tend to knock things out of their owners pockets somehow.

Large public projects:

wheresmybooze.com: At some point I will be creating the fabric to allow vendors and sellers of "adult beverages" the ability to post their wares on tap, in the fridge, on bottle to a friendly GIS aware website. Users will have the ability to create smart searches that seek out new beverages in the area when they are listed, specific beverages when they become available, and allow local and national distributers and creators the ability to perform advanced queries to analyze competition and get feedback from WMB (Wheres My Booze) users. Wouldn't it be sweet to be notified that McGinleys Irish Pub suddenly started selling Ring Of Fire Cizer? You bet your sweet butt it would. Party at McGinleys!

terrabug.com: This project has been in my head for a year now, and it keeps growing. This, as well as WMB, is going to be based around either GeoDjango (GIS extensions for Django) or possibly a simpler approach toward spatial database queries. The main goal is similar, however more community based than http://www.everyblock.com/ which I stumbled into the other week. I'm a bit miffed that they are so awesome and a bit revved up to compete/collaborate/whatever. My goal is to create a geographically aware issue tracker but it has recently taken me in several different directions. I need to find a good complementary set of directions and start putting some code together. I'd like to provide a searchable, indexable, rss'able interface to the following:

  1. Municipal Actions including public notices, inspection reports, geospatial analysis, incedent reports, and information reguarding permits effecting city, state, or federal land.
  2. Issue tracking with routing to the appropriate agency. Like reporting a pothole, attaching recordings of construction noise in a certain area, etc.. Eventually, hopefully, getting feedback or an notice that their issue has been accepted. I'm keeping in mind the ability for multiple parties to sign off on an action approval.
  3. Publicly submitted information on new bike trail proposals, their own gathered information on traffic count in an area, potential speed bump sites, and up to date information on all requests. Public forums discussing individual areas, or even large geographic areas. I can see situations where selecting a lassod or rectangular area and listing all information in all categories, or single categories, at the top of a discussion thread may be useful.
  4. Hopefully this site will be used to break down misinformation by aggregating good information voted on by the community and reporting agencies.
  5. International support would be awesome, talk about a great learning experience for yours truly.
  6. I could go on and on, actually... But I'd like to create something that everybody will enjoy using and allow them awesome amounts of information. I hope it will be educational as well and people of all ages will see how busy we in our cities, help people get their bearings in a new city, and become more eco-concious by reviewing changes to our cities and reading up on environmental impact reports effecting all areas of our world.
openbounty.com: Open source code can be profitable. There are several projects aimed at helping open source programmers get in touch with projects that actually pay them to work on them. Asterisk has a ton of bounties, Ubuntu has them, so does the Linux kernel itself. After talking with Toykeeper a bit about how he would prefer a bounty system to operate I found there was a much larger need for a bounty system that collaborated with current project maintaners, project programmers, and the companies or individuals interested in paying for certain features. They key to this site will be review and approval of code changes by a majority (maintainers can have different voting weights as well) of the original or current project maintainers which will usher changes into "trunk" a bit faster. Bounties can be for anything: Packaging for a specific OS, Documentation for newer features, new functionality or simply reviewing the issueing companies code for QA and helping it get into new project releases. I imagine even maintainers can go after bounties, but they forfeit their vote. The biggest role of openbounty will be working with project maintainers when a bounty for their project is created, getting the company and the project maintainers in agreement on certain very simple terms, and advertising the bounty using a clean interface. Escrow will be interesting on this sort of project...

hashnick.com:
hashid.com: When I first discovered the six-degrees of seperation research going on in the world I imagined an ICQ like hashed identity network (ICQ issued numbers to users instead of their preferred handles) where web and jabber clients could view the world as a bunch of connections to other semi-anonymous beings. You could register a nick and put HN:8903 on your business card as you hand them out. Savvy people would understand this and add you to their list as a direct contact and a buddy list seperated by degrees would begin to form and automatically add itself to your jabber client. I thought it would be interesting. I would have loved to offer GIS queries, shouts grouping whatever degree of seperation you intend it for, etc.. It's just a neat way of viewing the world, albiet not incredibly practical. I like the diagrams it creates. :)

Technical Consulting:

brutetechnology.com:
brutetechnologies.com:
brutetech.com: These domains are set aside for my consulting business. Brute fits well. I'm .. well, I'm a big guy. I scare people off when I enter a room. Children find it fascinating to challenge me and see if they can pick on the big dumb guy. I'm somewhat of a brute too - I'm blunt, large, scary, I have myself one mean glare, and I don't mind a punch to the head when push comes to shove. At the same time I'm smart, verbose, friendly, like the ladies, and I imagine I'm quite an odd scene when I see a kitten I want to cuddle. So the name works, and it makes fun of myself a bit too.

brutemethod.com: This is the software wing of Brute Technologies where I will be publishing software releases, doing issue tracking, hosting software related mailing lists, etc..

madmanguides.com: I will be releasing guides here based on a new documentation system I am developing which will compile documents dynamically by situating chapters and sections based on their prerequisite relationships with other sections. It's probably too complicated for me and won't work well with the english style of writing. But would work well, I hope, for technical documentation.

Zines:

tekkake.com: Yes, haha, it's a play on words that is a bit digusting. The motto is "A refreshing splash of technology news". This has yet to go anywhere, however I imagine just like myself it will be incredibly opinionated. I will be hated by the general populous and my google adsense account will skyrocket. Right?

Potential Candidates for my own consulting company:
This list is a bit awesome, stand back.
  • cerritec.com
  • cerritus.com
  • djinntec.com - I totally dig djinn, but not many people do. Especially Ifrit.
  • fluxtec.com - Sigh, I didn't realize flux also referred to some very gross bodily issues.
  • geekmoto.com - I'm not sure why I regerested this/
  • hackmeco.com - Hackme Co. (haha, like Acme Co., it's funny.)
  • hack-mode.com - To be in the zone, however it points out how detached I am usually.
  • haxortech.com - Yes, it's lame.
  • hexterra.com
  • luckyhex.com
  • luckyhex.org
Other projects that aren't worth mentioning until something real happens with them:
  • hexcache.com
  • hexdigest.com
I hope you enjoyed a good laugh at my expense, if you're interested in any of the domains I'm not using please let me know and I will transfer them to you if you have a Gandi ID.

Wednesday, June 11

So, really, who am I?

This may be incomprehensible drivel. Just a warning.

I need to step outside myself to see who I really am. Whats going on? My thoughts are all twisted and my body is tired, being creative isn't working, and I feel like I am swimming in a sea of indecision. I know what I need to do, but I want to see what will happen if I do nothing. Sometimes that's a good play in poker, right?

Right now I'm working for two companies at once, 6 days a week total, and it's a bit draining. I made this stupid work arrangement for the same reason I would accept even more work, payback, I expect that my time will free up eventually and my extra effort will be rewarded if I stay true to my goals. By cutting back hours on one job I'm hoping to migrate more hours into a more interesting one. Extra work would be awesome too, if it's interesting. Right now though - I almost want to take a vacation and take my little dog Shila with me to see if getting away from it all will allow me to focus and create the things I dream about. Just like painting, just like writing a book, just like sculpting the lawn I feel I need some solitude - I feel as though I need to get away in order to clear my head and find the few things I want to do that will make me happy. Sure, I could easily see how it looks like I just want to get away from daily responsibilities. I've never been very good at those anyways.

My thoughts lately are fluctuating constantly between my fiance and I, coding projects, politics, psychology, dreams about a more open world, more dreams about things I could do to make it happen, and thinking about how information is, or isn't, important in many different situations. I believe I see how information technology has modified our world and made certain aspects of our lives very lazy. Now of course I'm trying to keep a good perspective on this and entertain thoughts about 'why' we are handling our lives the way we are. Like what is the cause and effect of what we are doing and what are we overcoming? How do we accurately measure the effect? When will we know for sure if our awesome progress, even if it takes several mutations of our ideas over many more generations of our race, will ultimately fail us. At times it makes me upset to think about how basic we still are in spite of what we have achieved. Maybe that's the upwards arrow of progress that I'm just not seeing. Are we are establishing a good, broad, foundation for tomorrow minds. Maybe I'm a bit too narrow scope to see it for all it's worth right now.

Most of my spare moments are spent dreaming up theories on advanced Internet traffic routing, data management, distributed storage and odd network caching techniques. I know I'm not alone in thinking, or dreaming, about any of those either, I've learned that my ponders may sometimes be rare but never unique (and I kind of dig that). The more I look into ideas on data management the more I understand how truly obnoxious DRM (Digital Rights Management) is. DRM isn't just some fancy way for a company to sue you after invading your privacy, DRM also keeps people like me from implementing networks that temporarily store arbitrary data in an attempt to increase overall efficiency for network traffic. It's easy to guess that next generation networks will either be insanely high speed or insanely intellegent compared to our existing infrastructure, and I'm hoping for the later, and the model that DRM subscribes to is the first. Right now Internet2 is hoping to compensate for the amount of unique, protected, non-redistributable media that companies that have to comply to DRM will be pushing out of their servers one request at a time, over and over by implementing a super high speed backbones. You see, the way we designed networks depends on a lot of handshaking over long distance routes that traverse through a ton different networks which rarely ever works as well as it should. Eventually we will hit the physical limit on transmission speed (at least limited for health reasons) and we'll just have to outsmart ourselves and do math we should have done decades ago. I can't help but feel sorry for our future knowing that we will pointlessly lay down millions of miles of cabling containing massive amounts of non-renewable resources simply because we couldn't use what we have set up today intelligently. I hope our global state of mind will change and the progress of information will be distributed in unison over tree-like mixed manycast/unicast networks. It would be wonderful if large static data like images, media, and programs will be easily distributed through cached chunk networks as a standard.

My past is responsible for what I am thinking about now, and it's taken me a while to realize it. Everything I have ever read on the Internet, talked with my friends about, or banged my head up against a wall while trying to figure it all out so long ago is resurfacing and aligning itself into understanding. It's nice to find out I retained more information that I thought, but it sucks that I'm having such a hard time recalling it on my own. I'm beginning blame Mountain Dew and nicotine.

Am i rambling? yes.. THIS IS WHAT IT's LIKE IN MY HEAD LATELY. Incoherent babble that could turn into great things if only I could apply myself and make it all happen. Unfortunately I know exactly why it is what it is up in my stormy thoughts. It's too many thoughts compensation for too many of my weaknesses. That is after all why we create toothbrushes that almost brush your teeth for you, and chime when you haven't used them in a few days. I know I've failed at being a responsible person and completely sucked at setting a good model for my friends, my collegues, and just about any person that's ever spent more than a few minutes around me. I'm talking about *NOT* doing what needs to be done, *NOT* being a more active part in a larger movement that shares your ideas and goals, and definately *NOT* being employed or finding clients that believe in those same goals. I've unknowingly isolated myself away from the type of people I should be a part of by never actively involving myself into societies full of them. Instead I was probably a prick and swore those people would never have anything to do with me because they didn't understand my motives right off the bat, or some equally stupid bullshit. Those people were probably the people that are inexplicably drawn to me reguardless of my nasty mood. If I would have been nicer to them and formed better friendships I would probably be part of the society I want to be in right now.

Thats enough rambling today.