Ideas Posts

  • 04.15.08 Cloudy Identity (Ideas, Social Software, Computers)

    At the root of Cloudy is the means for creating and establishing identity. A lot of peer-to-peer systems treat the peers mostly as interchangeable anonymous nodes, often deliberately so, but Cloudy is a social system. Your Cloudy identity is simply a public key, currently 2048-bit RSA, generated the first time you launch the program. (The matching private key is stored securely in the Mac OS Keychain.) From then on, that public key uniquely identifies you.… MORE

  • 03.27.08 “Sci-Fi Mavens Offer Far Out Homeland Security Advice!” (Ideas, Humor)

    Speaking of Arthur C. Clarke, another of his achievements was to live a long life without making a complete ass of himself. A goal we should all emulate, but one that’s eluded too many other SF writers.

    For example! Take Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who, having ceased putting any mental effort into their writing at least 25 years ago, now have the free time, in their dotage, to advise top government officials on … MORE

  • 03.18.08 The Origin Of The iChat UI (Ideas, Social Software, Me, Computers)

    I had lost this historical document for a long time, but finally found it the other day on an old backup CD. It’s the original 1997 sketch I made of a chat user interface based on speech balloons.
    … MORE

  • 03.07.08 The Beauty Of 99¢ iPhone Apps (Ideas, Computers)

    After digesting yesterday’s iPhone announcements [with fava beans and a nice Chianti] I started thinking about the pricing models made possible by the “Application Store”. In particular,

    How cheap can an iPhone app be?

    I think the answer’s clear. The Application Store will obviously be based on the iTunes store, whose bread-and-butter is a product, the AAC audio file, that sells for … 99¢. Apple’s clearly able to make a profit at that price point, despite credit-card processing fees, bandwidth costs, and comparable payments [Updated. Thanks, Dru!] to the record labels. So I see no reason they wouldn’t allow a developer to price an application that low.

    But why would a developer want to sell an application for a net 70¢?

    Micropayments

    Because at such a low price, with a one-click store a couple of taps away, it becomes an impulse purchase. It’s a form of micropayment, an idea that’s been talked about for years but hasn’t widely taken off due to the practical difficulties of collecting very small payments. The few areas where micropayments (albeit larger than the canonical 1/10¢ originally proposed) have worked include the iTunes store, and the downloadable-game stores for the Xbox and Wii.

    And let’s not forget the most amazing example of what people will pay for if you make it convenient enough: ringtones. The practice of charging suckers $2 for a 30-second snippet of a song they already have, is a multi-billion-dollar industry.
    … MORE

  • 02.19.08 hash musings (Ideas, Computers)

    I’ve been thinking about writing an essay about the beauty & weirdness of cryptographic hash functions. The way any digitized data, however huge, can be named by a short fixed-size binary string. The way there are in theory an infinite number of hash collisions, but in practice zero. I was talking to myself about it, this morning, and two quotes appeared, which I write down here to remember:

    “Hashing is my favorite computer-science concept.”

    and

    “SHA is the … MORE

  • 02.09.08 Make Mine Mercurial (Ideas, Computers)

    Mercurial’s having a contest to design a new logo. I hadn’t been paying attention, but today I was reminded of Mercury’s symbolic connection to alchemy and the occult, and decided to design something incorporating John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, a symbol he designed based on the astrological symbol for Mercury.… MORE

  • 02.06.08 Network Barbie Says “Asynchrony Is Hard!” (Ideas, Languages, Computers)

    …Just like many times before, I’m wishing there were a third way between threads and callback-based asynchrony. I’d like to be able to keep each operation’s flow of control simple, as with threads, but at the same time limit the interactions between operations to keep the overall flow of control from turning into race-condition spaghetti.… MORE

  • 01.27.08 Dear Lazyweb: Certificates in RDF? (Ideas, Social Software, Computers)

    It seems to me that RDF ought to be a good way to represent cryptographic certificates, since it describes arbitrary types of relationships between entities (e.g. FOAF), and allows them to be composed in complex ways. Does anyone know of schemas or libraries for such a thing, or something related?… MORE

  • 12.10.07 The Gnostic argument for agnosticism (Ideas)

    A few weeks ago I had the thought that you could combine Arthur Clarke’s famous Third Law with some of the ideas of Gnosticism, and arrive at a “proof” (which I’m aware is a contradiction in terms) of agnosticism. I’m sure this isn’t entirely original, but it amuses me.… MORE

  • 08.27.07 Holding a Program in One’s Head (Ideas, Me, Computers)

    Paul Graham [who is obnoxiously elitist, but frequently insightful] has a new essay, “Holding a Program in One’s Head“, that is making me feel sad this morning.

    “A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he’s working on. Mathematicians don’t answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will.”

    I know that feeling so well, and I want to be back in that [non-Euclidean] space again.


    … MORE

« EARLIER