random($foo)

Here’s the abstract:

Representatives of top personal publishing companies talk about the strengths and weakeness of their applications, as well as discuss where this medium is evolving to in future years.

Sounds interesting, right? From these online notes it looks like it marginally did, but after 20 minutes of introductions and another 10 minutes of nearly content-less product pitchy stuff, I left.

(It looks like there was no chair-bashing, so I guess I didn’t miss anything)

I was really looking forward to Alex’s panel, and I’ll have to admit that I was pretty disappointed by how it turned out. It never seemed to get any momentum, was all over the place, and rarely touched upon any of what was implied by the abstract. Kathryn was rockin the SubEthaEdit on this one and has a comprehensive transcript on the notes exchange so you can judge for yourself. Also Ka-Ping Yee (hey, he’s put up a new Usable Security Blog up after SXSW), who I hadn’t met before came off very well (and IMO had the most interesting things to say).

For what it’s worth, here’s a quickie run-down of some things I might have liked discussed:

• Defining trusts at the node, system, and meta-system level (not covering this first was probably what threw the whole panel off)
• Control of personal data propagation through the network, specifically in addressing issues of social context friction/collisions (and their real world implications!)
• Relationship management, particularly interchange, how they map
• Good and bad ways to represent complex relationships – directionality, transitivity, type, explicit/implicitness
• Actual different approaches for trust, application of the sociological/ontological into real-world systems

I’ve actually done a lot of thinking some of these issues (I’ve posted bits in the past), but it might be worth writing in depth sometime in the near future. In the past I’ve been of the opinion that the last thing the web needs is more punditry, but well, maybe not in this case.

Lastly, one thing I mentioned in the IRC channel at the end (did that get logged anywhere?) was that Danah Boyd gave a very interesting talk at ETECH 2004 on trust from a social theory perspective that I found to be quite interesting and an excellent way to get into the right frame of mind on these things.

The “How to Hot-Wire the Creative Process” panel was supposed to be quite good, but unfortunately completely overflowing, so I spent most of the time hanging in the hallway. I swung through the “Blogs and Blockades” session, but the speaker was talking about which blogs he could access through the Great Firewall on China (didn’t we do this exact thing 3 years ago?) so I tried the “Uses and Abuses of History in the Education of Designers” next. I sat down, but after a minute I realized that words were being spoken, but entirely without content. I didn’t stick around.

External Notes:

• Hot-Wiring presentation slides
• SXSW Notes Exchange: How to Hot-Wire the Creative Process
• terry storch @ fellowship church: SxSW: How to Hot-Wire the Creative Process
• SXSW Notes Exchange: Blogs and Blockades: Forging a True Global Internet
• SXSW Notes Exchange: Uses and Abuses of History in the Education of Designers

To preface, keynotes this year are unfortunately incredibly crowded due to the fact that the keynote room is only a double-room, so you need to get in really early just to get a seat/in the room. Boo-urns.

Zeldman’s remarks were an in-jokey, folksy, rambly thing — not an ‘essential’ talk if you missed it, but perhaps a good instroduction for the lots of new faces this year. I miss Billy and Jess too.

• jz’s deck
• photomatt’s mp3 recording
• Will Pate’s notes
• Clickable Culture’s notes

Earlier, I linked to the SXSW4Pod page, which has a 2.6GB torrent of the entire 2005 Showcase. (There were hundreds of seeders when I got on). It’s been sort of dead around here, so what the heck, lets give mod_musicindex a stretch.

Here’s the entire showcase, 756 songs, available for streaming or individual download.

I’ll be flying out for Austin tomorrow morning. See you guys there.

Gamespy just posted an article on the specs for the next Xbox. Note the last line in particular:

CPU – Xenon’s CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache. Alpha 2 developer kits currently have two cores instead of three.

I’ve been sitting on this until it became public knowledge, but when I saw a dev machine last year, it occurred to me that it’d explain why that Microsoft blogger was fired a year and a half ago.

Wow, I’m a dumbass. While closing out tabs this morning, I found an article on Smoothing Time Series that actually explains this stuff in code terms instead of subscripted letters that made my eyes glaze over.

Looking back at the formula at the bottom of John Walker’s Exponentially smoothed moving averages page, it’s pretty clear how trivially easy the code is:

// Exponentially smoothed moving average function
function esma($in) {
  $out[0] = $in[0];
  for($i=1; $i<sizeof($in); $i++) {
    $out[$i] = $out[$i-1] + 0.1 * ($in[$i] - $out[$i-1]);
  }
  return $out;
}

Here’s an output comparing a 20-day simple moving average, a 20-day exponential moving average, and the exponentially smoothed moving average. You can see the latter two are almost identical. The advantage of the exponential averages are that they track from the first point (instead of the simple moving average’s offset). The exponentially smoothed average uses a smoothing constant, so it doesn’t depend on the a size window):

Also, here’s the source.

Before I forget here’s a quick and dirty hack for enabling Apache Authentication in WordPress 1.5 that I whipped up the other week:

# line 20 of wp-login.php

if($_SERVER['REMOTE_USER']) {
  $action = 'login';
}

# line 162 of wp-login.php
if($_SERVER['REMOTE_USER']) {
  $user_login = $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'];
  $user_pass = $user_login;
}

# at the top of wp_login in wp-include/functions.php

if($username == $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER']) {
  
  $login = $wpdb->get_row("SELECT ID, user_login, user_pass 
                           FROM $wpdb->users 
                           WHERE user_login = '$username'");
  if ($login) {
    return true;
  }
}

.htaccess are applied to <File wp-login.php> and to the wp-admin directory

There’s a more “proper” WP 1.5 Authentication Plugin but I couldn’t get it to work and the do_action() callbacks were annoying/impossible to debug. Daniel generously offered to help get it working, but if we use it for what we’re planning to, the above hack should be fine until Apache auth makes it into WP core.

One other note: there’s no ‘scheme’ so http/https is broken on the CSS linking for the admin. That needs to be changed from the WP options.