Although I’ve had accounts on a good number of them, I just can’t keep them properly updated and maintained anymore. Thus, I’ve decided to start “pruning my network,” so to speak. As such, I’ve cancelled my accounts on Orkut and Friendster. I haven’t even touched my Orkut account in about 2 years, except to occasionally accept friend requests from the hordes of (often quite attractive) Brazillian women who seem to try and befriend everyone on Orkut. And I hadn’t logged into Friendster for so long that I couldn’t remember my password. I also plan on canceling my Myspace account soon, but I’d like to notify a few friends on there before I suddenly disappear.

From now on, I plan on maintaining a much smaller collection of social sites:

• Flickr for my photo collections
• Facebook for general friend-networking
• LinkedIn for career networking
• Twitter for random comments

If you want to network with me, you’re best to find me on one of those four in the future.

Update: I’ve notified those people in my MySpace that weren’t already on Facebook and I’ve canceled my account.

Tilt/shift lenses let you change the focal plane of your camera by shifting your lens up/down/left/right or by tilting it in any direction. [1] In this manner you can do lots of interesting stuff to change the field of view and where the “focal point” is on an image. They’re used a lot in things like fashion and landscape photography to do things like selectively bring into focus a particular part of a photo. Check out the example fashion photo at the bottom of [2]. For landscape and in particular photos taken at a high angle of city scenes, they have the cool side-effect of allowing you to create pictures that look like macro photos of highly detailed models, since you can shrink the field of view to a narrow plane of the photo a lot like a macro lens does. But I just fake it using a gradient mask and a lens blur in photoshop. [1] http://www.dennisonbertram.com/hackmaster/2005/02/tilt-shift-pc-lens.htm [2] http://www.photo.net/equipment/canon/tilt-shift

The whole tilt-shift miniature meme probably started with a post to Boing Boing with some awesome shots from a photographer who used a real tilt-shift lens to constrain his depth-of-field to make photos look like ultra-detailed models. And then, as memes go, it took on a life of its own and spawned more Boing Boing posts, Flickr groups, Photoshop “hacks”, and so-on.

Ah, the joys of the intarweb…

I thought I’d take a minute to plug my friend’s new startup, a project that I think has a lot of potential and that could be very cool if it takes off.

Fundable.org. Its a very neat idea. Say, for instance, that you’ve got a project you’d like to undertake which requires buy-in from a large number of individuals. Something like having a web designer create a good looking webpage for an open-source project or bringing a decent band to a musical vacuum like Pittsburgh.

Fundable allows you to create a “group action” that people can contribute money towards. Say it’ll take $1000 to get The Long Winters to make a stop in Pittsburgh during their next tour:

1. Create a group action with a goal of getting them to play here in Pittsburgh.
2. Allow the advance purchase of 100 tickets to the show for $10 apiece.
3. If the group action gets 100 people to contribute, the $1000 is “turned on” and the group leader can then withdraw the money and set up the show.
4. If the action doesn’t get enough contributors, everybody’s money gets refunded.

Its a neat concept and I think it could be great for setting up “bounties” for open-source projects or for starting advertising campaigns for non-profit groups.

So go check them out and let me know what you think.

So I got my name in the New York Times, in glorious 8-point type. Can I say I’m famous now?

I just finished Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Great book. Highly recommended.

From its website:

The Internet revolution has come. Some say it has gone. What was responsible for its birth? Who is responsible for its demise? In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig explains how the Internet revolution has produced a counterrevolution of devastating power and effect. The explosion of innovation we have seen in the environment of the Internet was not conjured from some new, previously unimagined technological magic; instead, it came from an ideal as old as the nation. Creativity flourished there because the Internet protected an innovation commons. The Internet’s very design built a neutral platform upon which the widest range of creators could experiment. The legal architecture surrounding it protected this free space so that culture and information - the ideas of our era - could flow freely and inspire an unprecedented breadth of expression. But this structural design is changing - both legally and technically. This shift will destroy the opportunities for creativity and innovation that the Internet originally engendered. The cultural dinosaurs of our recent past are moving to quickly remake cyberspace so that they can better protect their interests against the future. Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to “tame” the Internet, transforming it from an open forum for ideas into nothing more than cable television on speed. Innovation, once again, will be directed from the top down, increasingly controlled by owners of the networks, holders of the largest patent portfolios, and, most invidiously, hoarders of copyrights. The choice Lawrence Lessig presents is not between progress and the status quo. It is between progress and a new Dark Ages, in which our capacity to create is confined by an architecture of control and a society more perfectly monitored and filtered than any before in history. Important avenues of thought and free expression will increasingly be closed off. The door to a future of ideas is being shut just as technology makes an extraordinary future possible. With an uncanny blend of knowledge, insight, and eloquence, Lawrence Lessig has written a profoundly important guide to the care and feeding of innovation in a connected world. Whether it proves to be a road map or an elegy is up to us.

I’m supposed to write an “External Viewpoint Report” (read: Book Report) on it for one of my classes, and I’ll probably post it here if anyone is looking for a good summary of the book.

It’ll be Creative Commons licensed, of course.

I found a few good ones:

• 1997 - Posting to a Laser class mailing list (Google cache) - an archive of a mailing list I used to be on.
• 1998 - floach.pimpin.net - a WayBackMachine snapshot of a Windows “shell replacement” news site I was a co-maintainer of for a few years.

I only wish I could remember the URL’s of my old webpages so I could look them up.

Instead of doing the tourist thing with the girls, a few of us snuck off to Defcon 12, the annual (and controversial) computer security convention. Some of the highlights included:

• Vendor ads via 802.11b
• The Shmoo Group’s Sniper Yagi and WiFi Bug
• BlueSnarfing and BlueBugging
• Dan Kaminsky doing shots during his TCP/IP Black Ops talk (and unveiling Voice over DNS)

Amazingly, both my laptop and I survived the whole affair. I connected to the warzone that is the Defcon network without being cracked or landing on the Wall of Sheep. However, I did get portscanned at least 4 times and somebody even attempted to crack me via Bluetooth. I’d like to thank SSH and iptables for keeping me safely encrypted and happily firewalled.

I’ve got a whole bunch of notes I took down in a wiki while I was at the convention. I’ll get them up as soon as possible.

Yes… it is in fact YASNP (Yet-Another-Social-Networking-Project). But this one has an interesting twist that might make it pretty cool… it’s location aware.

So the theory is that when you hit the coffee shop with your PowerBook (or ThinkPad), you can let the network know where you are and it will alert you to possible new friends in your vicinity. You can then learn more about them or send them messages. You can also use the service from your mobile phone using SMS or a WAP browser (the phone interface is very simple, I was impressed).

Right now the service only covers NYC and San Francisco, but James said he’d be adding San Jose to the list within a week or so.

Update: Be sure to check out my profile, and if you for some reason want an invite (instead of signing up on your own), leave a comment.

However, according to overstated.net:

Just received an inside tip that the recently famous Hot Abercrombie Chick is really a male college student capitalizing on cute pictures of his girlfriend (previously unbeknownst to her) in a rush of “beggars” trackbacks. In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious that he is quite the player. Over the course of the last couple of months, “Mr. Abercrombie” has played every text-book trick for raising his popularity on the blogosphere.

Hah! I knew it. She was too good to be true. And nobody that hot sits in front of a computer doing nothing but commenting (often tastefully and correctly) on other peoples blogs.

And some people seem to be trying to fight back…

Update: Aw, what the hell. I’ll join the blogdex slam campaign against her: Comment Spamming Bitch Riding High On Blogdex!

As an experiment, I’ll be forwarding all my mail there and be using it as my primary email client. I’ll blog about my experience for those people that haven’t been lucky enough to get an account. Note the new “GMail” category on the right.

So far, it looks very cool.