From the fortune file:

Tell me why the stars do shine
Tell me why the ivy twines
Tell me why the sky's so blue
And I will tell you why I love you.
Nuclear fusion makes stars to shine
Phototropism makes ivy twine
Rayleigh Scattering makes sky so blue
Sexual hormones are why I love you.

I received a mailer today informing me that Comcast has just doubled my downstream bandwidth (now capped to 3Mbps/256Kbps) and sure enough, a 60s power cycle later, I’m now getting 450KBps transfers from muffins instead of 240KBps. So, sure they’ve increased prices over the past year so I’m now paying twice as much as I was two years ago, but at least I’m getting more bandwidth.

• social software: automatic relationship clustering
• Machine Learning Meets the User Interface, Dec 12, 2003
• John Platt’s Home Page (MSR)
  

  My research is focused on helping people become more effective and efficient. This research goal has two parts: making
  intelligent user interfaces and building more efficient machine learning
  algorithms to support the interface.

  Int the field of building intelligent user interfaces, I have worked on

  • Improving the resolution of LCDs with ClearType.
  • Making digital music easier to use with audio fingerprinting and AutoDJ.
  • Making personal photographs more browsable with AutoAlbum.
  • Improving document search through text categorization.
  • Enabling Chinese users to quickly enter text with handwriting recognition.

  I have also helped to create improved machine learning algorithms, such as

  • Fast training algorithms, probabilistic outputs, multi-class training, and on-line training for Support Vector Machines.
  • Learning priors for Gaussian Process Regression
  • Best practices for convolutional neural networks.

• Clustering algorithms (an overview)
• CURE: An Efficient Clustering Algorithm for Large Databases (1998)
• Clustering Algorithms (basic basic)
• Automatic Categorizing vs. Good Searching: Which Approach Will Ease Email Overload The Most?”
• CRM114 possible uses/mod
• Outlook Categorizer Add-In: An Experimental Framework for Email Categorization and Management
• List of open source clustering algorithm implementations – including Java, Python, Perl libraries
• dbacl – a digramic Bayesian classifier

Dave Louthan, the guy who killed the first mad cow has a web page.

Let me give you a perfect example of what I’m trying to get across here. Vern’s Moses Lake Meat, the home of the Mad Cow. They have been killing Holsteins there everyday, business as usual. Not a single BSE test done. Shipping those carcasses to the same exact places. The burger is ground up by the same machines by the same people and shipped to the same stores. The only thing that has changed is THEY HAVE NOT TAKEN A SINGLE BSE SAMPLE. NOT ONE. Not at Vern’s, not anywhere. I dare anybody to prove me wrong. GOD I wish somebody would.

You people have got to stop buying beef. You have got to stop feeding that stuff to your kids. If you don’t give them any money I guarantee you they will start testing in short order. Vote with your checkbook. They don’t test now because they don’t need to. Consumption is right where they want it to be.

(NYTimes writeup about Dave Louthan)

I took off a bit early to get back in town to hear Richard Edlund (he’s currently talking about Thomson’s upcoming digital film camera (Viper FilmStream). I’ll be doing some ETECH braindumping tonight/his weekend. I lost about 15 unsaved Omnioutliner files w/ a freak power loss, but I’ve started rewriting what I’ve been processing.

• Cory’s public domained his e-book presentation. It definitely had the slide with the best title of the conference (‘WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS’).

ETECH meta-thoughts:

• It’d be interesting to count notebooks (win/*nix/os x/paper), do breakdowns; there’s much more that could be done w/ this, but a lot are probably pretty invasive, privacy wise
• Conference Tools
  • Traffic Shaping – understandable that bandwidth is limited, but for the love of god, a T1 is more than good enough to guarantee everyone at least 1Kbps of decent QoS
  • Squid proxy – wow, this would really reduce traffic, right?
  • SSH Tunnels – while you have your busybox installed doing traffic shaping, it might be nice to provide stunnels or VPN as a courtesy
  • Password Sniffer/Alert – even w/ providing encryption, there should be sniffing bot that will sniff for unencrypted passwords, and then alert (via private email would probably be the best way, along w/ a blurb on how to use the stunnel; registering MAC address of your machine and your email ddress at registration; public posting would probably not be a good idea)
  • local EtherPEG – would be interesting to project somewhere; also, you can do analytics like tracking traffic per room to figure out which sessions are boring
  • local wiki – probably also a distinction between internal/external authors, possibly even spaces, like an internal notes session
  • local IRC – there should be a separate channel for each room/session. there should also be logged and notlogged rooms; you can be sure the former will have less noise (also, the logbot should probably respont to a per/line !log prepend); there should be a chumpbot. hecklebot or other way of using back/side-channels, maybe. possibly make rooms to track presence, but that’s probably confusing – and there’s a better way:
  • RFID conference pass – a way to track presence, and here’s a way to do it while maintaining privacy. Stick on a random RFID tag at registration (from a single large bowl) at registration. Now, have a kiosk where they can register the tag w/ their preferences (say linking their name/contact info, and then whether they want to make their location known, and in what contexts). Put scanners at the doorways to track ins/outs. collect interesting stats
  • Session whuffie – this may be as simple as a ++/– to a votebot; alternatively a web button on the wiki; one vote per person of course

Not going to blog incessantly from etech, looks like there’s going to be copious coverage, see etech04 wiki.

Some notes:

• Connection is slow. Lots of uncapped users fighting for bandwidth. WonderShaper would definitely be a good thing. Good quote: “it’s only a T1”
• Dav talks about conference scheduling tools – a while back when I was at OSCON I was thinking about what kind of tools would be useful for conferences… along those lines

Wow, so Firefox 0.8 for OS X rocks. Pinstripe is amazing. (more about renaming)

Also, I’m definitely digging both the new icon and the streamlined product homepage. An especially nice touch is that the first download button auto-detects your OS by UA to offer the appropriate d/l in one click.

That being said, there’s still clean-up to do, I noticed a bunch of FB references in popups, etc (OTOH, there are still Phoenix refs, so it may be a while…), and of course there needs to be a new page in the book.

Ok, laundry/packing, one hour nap, then a two hour drive to ETCON.

UCLA Symposium on Design and Computation: Shape Computation [PDF]

Generative grammars provide the necessary theoretical foundation for design studies, as they do language theory. The sceptic may go far along this path but hesitate over the imponderables of design. Granting that formal and functional aspects of design may be subject to grammatical rules, the sceptic may nevertheless wish to claim immunity for the aesthetic dimension. This is the final stand of the spontaneous heart against the scheming mind.

I downloaded Mulberry to take it for a spin. At first the interface complexity really is a shock, but I got used to it pretty quickly. I don’t think I’ll be paying money for it, despite how well it does IMAP. Mail.app isn’t unusably bad in that respect. Some thoughts:

• No support for AppleScript or other alternative scripting language
• keyboard shortcuts don’t seem to be arbitrarily (re)assignable
• Tabs/rest of interface can’t be navigated fully by keyboard (my biggest problem w/ Mail.app)
• No mailbox list filterings (a la Mozilla – or even better, the ability to create complex filters as views), also option to hide deleted/but not expunged messages, etc

Related: the CMU HCII actually did a usability study on improving Mulberry’s interface last year.