I haven’t decided whether to implement it since Google is rather slower at crawling content than I am at creating it, but it would certainly make me feel like a big man to have the power of Google’s search algorithm at work for my lil’ ol’ blog. However, I’m really not crazy about the ads on the side. I’ve made it my mission to never show ads on my site so I’m not really sure this service will be worth the smudging of my morals.
Google has yet to crawl my newly added blog archives so search is pretty useless right now, but feel free to give it a try below to get a feel for what it will look like: (search “blog” to get a result)

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Demodulated Googled

But that stuff is boring anyway, right? I’ll enthusiastically talk about my experience at Googleplex, which was indeed a very fascinating and surreal place!Pulling into the campus in a taxi, I knew something cool was in store when I saw Google-coloured pylons directing traffic past a young, casual security guard sitting on a Google-emblazoned lounge chair. He nonchalantly waved us past and we pulled up to building 40. I was early so I took a little stroll around, noting the odd architecture of the structures surrounding a huge grassy courtyard featured with some benches and a good-sized beach volleyball pit. A glance around the corner revealed a large outdoor eating area with over a hundred tables, some of which were quite large with many chairs surrounding. Many walls and columns had printed signs advertising lectures and workshops on odd topics such as proper nutrition, spirituality and computing, and attaining better job satisfaction. Powered and motorless scooters were parked neatly every several feet along the walkways with no sign-out sheets in sight. A yellow brick road would probably have helped me string these fantastical pipe-dreams into the realization that this was an actual workplace and I was present there.

Despite the huge signs and directional markers it took me a little while to find the entrance to building 40 as I was rather overwhelmed by the attractive landscaping and beautiful weather. When I found the front door I was greeted by a very friendly receptionist who invited (more than instructed) me to use the terminal in front of her to fill out a guest registration web form. I typed in my pertinents, signed a digital pad, and a pass printed on a label which I affixed to my business-casual shirt which, in context, was feeling pretty business-formal compared to everyone else I saw.

I was still a little flustered by my humbling surroundings so it didn’t really register when the receptionist welcomed me to take a bottled beverage from the nearby fridge. A bit dazed, I waddled over, gave what must have been a bit of a pleadingly befuddled look, and asked “may I?” With her smiley consent I spent nearly 60 seconds surveying brand after brand of water, no-sugar-added juice frappes, milk and shakes, and iced teas and coffees. I grabbed one and took one of the more normal looking plush seats next to a slightly intimidating electric massage chair.

Before long the other guests and I were guided up some stairs and through a few halls to our meeting room. The polish of the exterior layout didn’t quite continue indoors. In true Google style the building felt a little beta, with walls streaked with rubbery skidmarks and thick CAT5e bundles spindled about exposed ceiling beams like blue and grey genetic helices. Further signs (like those pointing to massage therapist and doctor services) and wonders (like free arcade and pinball machines) clouded my senses moreso until our short guided tour ended at the Vienna meeting room.

The meeting room, where I’d spend most of the next 4 days in training, was well equipped but unspectacular. Adorning the plain white walls were whiteboards, a pair of expensive-looking projectors aimed at retractable screens, and a duet of oddly shaped clear plastic speakers. Each attendee’s place was set with IBM and Mac laptop power plugs, a CAT5 network cable, and an exceptionally comfortable chair coloured in one of the Google logo’s hues. It didn’t take long for us to learn that the projector was a bit shakey and the power was a little unstable. Despite the lack of windows I felt comfortable, if understimulated, in the Vienna room.

My rumbling tummy beckoned Google to challenge it with the finest feasts it could muster. At the end of the day, my tummy would eat those words even more heartily than the sumptuous unending banquet offered to the metropolis of proud logo-wearing citizens of this corporate cruise ship.

The food. Holy crap. Oh my goodness. The food. Gracious. The food. Good golly.

Curried calamari with pine nuts, jasmine rice, and naan. Sweet and sour pork with sticky rice, garlic bok choy, and sweet tofu and vegetable stir-fry. Four cheese and mushroom calzones, mini goat cheese pizzas, and whole wheat pasta with vegan tomato cream sauce. Burgers and hot dogs. A grill-your-own-sandwich station. Two salad bars. Two dessert bars. Bottled and on-tap beverages everywhere. This is a FRACTION of what was served at any ONE meal.

But a feast for the tongue and eyes isn’t enough to satiate Google. I must have clicked an “I’m feeling lucky!” button somewhere because one afternoon our lunch was accompanied by the prepubescent warblings of Good Charlotte who was taxied in from San Jose where they were playing later that night. They performed 3 quick songs, but a free lunch was still too high an admission price for such a cacophonous foray into teeniebopperism so I literally retreated indoors after 2.

Security was hardcore at Googleplex. All eyes were on us even while we were led like cattle through hallways on the way to lunch. I swear the security guards were more lax than the engineers who leered at us and sometimes “asked” us if they could help direct us somewhere, elsewhere, away. Signs near security doors stressed “no piggybacking”, insisting employees use their badges to traverse all checkpoints. We guests, if we left the group to go outside for lunch, had to take the roundabout route via the front desk (and past my beloved beverage fridge) just to get back to the cafe that was otherwise one door away. No photographs of the premises were permitted, though quizzically there was a photography crew with a semi- (maybe quarterly-) attractive female model sprawling over the reception area chairs one morning.

Google is a fantasyland for engineers. I’d love to work there but I don’t know how much work I’d actually do! I really wonder whether all this spending on accommodations and luxuries per-employee really pays off in productivity. I kind of hope so! That way I can persuade my bosses to implement what I call the “curry and rockband strategy”.

I’ll speak of my other Excellent Adventures in California soon!

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

The sum of a hundred zeroes

So, for fun, I’m using an archaic old web browser, LINKS, to post this blog entry. LINKS is a text-based web browser designed for simple console computers that cannot display graphics, but it’s pretty fun to use on modern computers all the same. You’ll never know the joys of fast web browsing until you check out this browser.

LINKS is an advanced successor to LYNX, the other white meat of text-based web browsers. While also a great program, LYNX lacks support for some neccessary web evils such as JavaScript, frames, and cookies.

Considering the widespread implementation of broadband internet, I’m rather impressed at how many web pages support text-only browsing. For instance, you know those ALT tags – the tooltip descriptions that appear when you hover the mouse over an image? Text browsing is the reason they’re there, and they do the job nicely. Hyperlinks and web forms are no match for this mighty browser, but don’t expect fancy frills to translate. I can understand the ommission of rich text formatting while posting a blog entry in text mode, but I’m a little disappointed that I’m unable to edit my post in html or upload images.

Anyway, give LINKS a try and see the web as it was in its infancy. http://links.sourceforge.net

p.s., I can’t play it yet so it doesn’t really matter, but why the heck is Half Life 2: Episode One still listed as “Preload complete; unreleased” on Steam!? It’s supposed to be released today!! If it’s not playable by the time I get home from work I’ll have a fit!

Screenshot of blogger.com in LINKS (image uploaded with Firefox after the original post)

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Back to the future

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Happy Star Wars day!

1. You remember your favourite IP address. (24.66.99.66)
2. You remember the phone number of your favourite dialup BBS. (xxx-253-5558 – Edge of Eternity BBS, Toronto, circa 1994)
3. You know which modem is faster – 9600 baud Hayes or 9600 baud courier.
4. You know what D&D character you would be IRL. (Chaotic Good Elf Bard Mage)
5. You feel the impulse to “save your game” after accomplishing something IRL. (like Ai – “F5!”)
6. You use the term IRL IRL.
7. You have a folder of Windows desktop screenshots.
8. You hear a “ding” somewhere and you look down to see who’s PMing you. (a la Guild Wars)
9. You size up everyday objects and consider how big your katamari needs to be.
10. You’ve met internet friends for the first time and were asked to match faces to aliases.
11. You continued to call those people by their alias to their faces.
12. You say “SYN” and your friend says “ACK”.
13. You think video games are superior to real life in every way but in load times.
14. You occasionally get the Tetris or Kirby’s Dream Land themes stuck in your head.
15. You want to smash others with your car after playing Need for Speed.
16. You nitpick minute technical inaccuracies in a movie with space monsters.
17. You trade an ISA sound card for an Atari-style serial joystick at a 2600 swap meet.
18. You go camping for the weekend and come home with second hand CDs and videos.
19. You tell people to RTFM without doing so yourself.
20. j00 5p311 f4573r 1n numb3r5 7h4n y0ur fr13nd5 d0 1n l3773r5.

G33ky Gr4ph1c5

Self-scanned image of The 7th Guest, Disc 2 (with 45-minutes of Redbook audio)

Self-scanned image of a real life Infocom text adventure

Sierpinski triangles

Graphical bandwidth monitor showing a CD burn of a network resource

Screenshot of my Windows properties when I installed my Athlon 64 (note the Wargames reference in the registered name)

MSDOS Winamp skin

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

D0n’7 ph34r 7h3 phr34k3r

A mischevious someone used some sort of remote communication device to reprogram electronic signs on several Toronto-area GO Transit trains to display the repeating message “Stephen Harper eats babies.”

Harper doesn’t eat babies: GO Transit

Amusingly, the “Right Honourable” Stephen Harper is unofficially featured in the new Ghost Recon game – as a cadaver. The premise has the Canadian prime minister assassinated at a summit meeting with the American and Mexican presidents. (a recently occuring real-world event) The Ottawa Citizen quotes an Ubisoft senior co-ordinator, asking Canadians not to be offended (we’ll try our darndest), saying. “Basically, for the game, the Canadian guy was the only one that we could actually sacrifice in the story.”

Prime target: Canadian PM assassinated in video game

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Harper vs Hackers

You can check out your uptime with this handy dandy little batch file:

@echo off
c:\windows\system32\systeminfo | find “Up Time”
pause

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Windows XP rules

How the word “fact” got into my blog (or any blog) is beyond me!

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Demodulated demodulated

Video games are particularly easy for technology neophytes to identify with because they are an art form that mirrors reality. They are often the gateway to high-tech living because they help put a human face on the CPU. Is one an addict when they spend as much or more time in simulated worlds (“cyberspace”) as in the physical world (“meatspace”)? Does a Windows desktop have deeper roots in reality than a Pac Man maze?

Ever since playing Police Quest 1 in 4-colour CGA on my old 4.33mhz 8086 I’ve been fascinated with the concept of the simulation of reality. Whether it’s represented by a static series of screens as in Police Quest, a 3D city whose citizens displays dynamic behaviour as in Grand Theft Auto, or a world whose population and ecosystem are based on the actions of the player as in Civilization, computers have allowed us to represent our world in a variety of ways never before possible. Conversely, they have enabled us to perform real world tasks in unforeseen new dimensions.

There are distinct differences between the real world (“meatspace”) and simulated representations (“cyberspace”), of course. In video games we can choose not to save our progress. We can pause the game and come back with the virtual universe and its denizens none the wiser. We can even shut the thing right off, bringing about a sort of instantaneous virtual apocalypse. In the real world, however, we play for keeps. Principles such as entropy dictate that a broken glass is broken forever. For these reasons and more, the variability of cyberspace grants us unique advantages.

Despite their schism, the gap between cyberspace and meatspace is rapidly being bridged. Fax has enabled us to quickly send copies of documents over telephone wires. Graphical computer operating systems help us to multitask (multithread, technically) by making many projects instantly accessible in overlapping “windows”. Instant messages allow us to communicate person-to-person in one of these windows – we can hide the window and do something else quickly without the other participant even knowing. These new abilities could not be done without computers and technology, and our methodologies, and subsequently we ourselves, are evolving.

One of the biggest advancements in communications technology, and coincidentally (or not) one of the clearest examples of resulting human evolution, is the advancement from switched dedicated networks to packet-switched networks.

The public switched telephone network represents perhaps the most successful, most empowering, most reliable and simple-to-use revolutions of human interaction in the history of mankind. A person dials numbers on a telephone, a network is automatically arranged dedicating a solid link (part physical, part logical) with another telephone, and the remote device audibly signals the completion of the network. This link exists as long as both telephones are engaged, even if no one is speaking. This phenomenally powerful concept represents an old way of operating as a human being.

One might associate a switched network with the hunter – a reliable and direct means of ensuring one task is done by dedicating focus.

Packet-switched networks break data into chunks which are transmitted in any order, only to be rearranged at the other end. The link between ends is purely logical, as two consecutive packets may travel entirely different logical and geographical routes to deliver their payload. This concept is representative of multitasking, alt-tabbing, talking on cell phones while driving, telecommuting, picture-in-picture, and countless other ways of splitting our time as successful human beings rather than dedicating it.

One might equate the packet-switched network with the gatherer – a way of thinking where we set out to accomplish a specific goal by plucking useful tidbits from the world around us.

So whats’ the bottom line? We’re transitioning from “hunters” to “gatherers”? Our “male” civilization is “evolving” into a “female” one? “Whole” is becoming “broken”? “Reliability” is giving way to “multitasking”?

It’s interesting to see the rapid evolution of the Internet, like a culture in a Petri dish, contrasted with the slow evolution of the Earth. We live on a planet with legally defined territories that, unless by exception, are not crossed. Countries operate like cells that interoperate by swapping payloads via clouds through protective membranes. The Internet, however, is like a single city with a great mass transit system, a bus stop in every room of every house, and no fares. Goods are sometimes split and reassembled and are delivered in whatever way is most cost-effective.

The underlying principles and physics of these universes are so dissimilar that it seems impossible to meld them in any useful way. In some ways, it is indeed truly impossible. This presents a crux, a split, a fence, a choice. Do we straddle the fence or pick a side?

Entropy itself is challenged by cyberspace thanks to services like The Wayback Machine by Archive.org. In meatspace, something done is done in an instant and is forever condemned to the past. Not so in cyberspace. The Wayback Machine, for example, is an automatic archive service that takes snapshots of internet content and makes them available to the public for posterity. In cyberspace, a broken glass leaves behind not only shards, but an entire legacy of before and after, action, consequence, related occurrences, suggested causes, precedent, theories, instant replays, reverse angles, and more.

A moment in meatspace is over. A moment in cyberspace is catalogued.

An event in meatspace is unidirectional. An event in cyberspace is a temporal web.

Entropy in meatspace is the end. Entropy in cyberspace is a big bang.

Again I ask, where is the line drawn between dependence and acceptance? Embracing and abusing?

I suppose caterpillars look down (metaphorically) on butterflies. How can you possibly eat enough leaves when you spend so much time flying?

For more insight on these and other concepts, check out the World of Ends by Doc Searls and David Weinberger.

This article was written by Brian at demodulated Original post:

Technology addiction