Solipsism Gradient

Now some real news. Contrary to my own expectations, I’ll be able to make it to the US this year, after all. But it’ll be to WWDC, Apple’s worldwide developer’s conference, at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, from June 6 to 10.

I’ll actually fly into SFO early on June 2nd and leave on the 13th. So there’ll be time to meet with people, drive a little around the Bay Area, and visit the bookstores. It’s been 5 years since my last visit! So if you’re in SF during that time, feel free to set up a meeting.

Following a suggestion from Dori Smith (thanks Dori!), I’ve made reservations at the Mosser Hotel, where I’ll be splitting the room with HyperJeff, my co-author in a forthcoming ADHOC paper. Buzz Andersen of SciFiHiFi is setting up a Weblogger Dinner on June 6 and I’m attending. It’ll be my birthday too, so there’s a good excuse for partying!

Further details later…

WWDC ADHOC

Posted by taliesin’s log:
taliesin’s log linked to this post

‘Am I in it?’

So Rainer’s French.

Been some time without reporting test results here, so here’s one which surprised me a little:

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything – at least, *you* think so.

I’ve been playing around with the stats available on DreamHost, and the results are interesting.

Fully a quarter of site visitors now come from Google and from VersionTracker.

Over a third of visitors, unsurprisingly, use Safari. The next popular browsers are MSIE (hm), Mozilla derivatives and NetNewsWire, that last one with about 10%. The number of bots is higher than I expected; some bots even download .dmg files, I can’t imagine what for.

The failure reports are the most interesting part. Fully 12% of accesses over this month so far seem to be various forms of attacks, mostly the tired old attacks against phpbb forums using one of the published scripts. A few people try to run one of the awstat scripts (which I don’t use), or some Microsoft-server-specific thing (which I don’t use either). For the last 3 days, about 60% of all requests have been phpbb attacks, like in the peak days in January, when the Santy worm was going around. Don’t these people have anything better to do?

At the same time, this weblog has been hit daily with comment spam, referrer spam and link spam – the latter by people registering with fake web addresses which redirect to some gambling or porn site. I’m not accepting any such users – they’re very easy to spot – and their links would be tagged with “nofollow” anyway. I don’t publish referrer lists, so referrer spam doesn’t work either. If comment spam volume grows, well, I’ll have to install a little modification to have posts wait for moderator approval…

phpbb

Yes, I know, it’s been over two weeks. I’ve been holding back some posts I’ve wanted to make, since they demanded preliminary work I couldn’t do at the time… scanning stuff and processing pictures, and so on. Hopefully next week…

Meanwhile, my proposed paper for the 2005 Advanced Developers Hands On Conference has been accepted. ADHOC (formerly famous as MacHack) will happen July 27-31, 2005, in Dearborn MI (near Detroit). A great conference for Mac developers.

Regarding the paper, the working title is: “Out of the Bottle: Beyond the Genie Effect”.

One Cocoa FAQ is how to do the Genie Effect. Unfortunately, the effect itself is done behind the curtain by the Window Manager. We’ll show how to do it in a few easy steps, which will teach you how to:

1) Overlay a transparent window over the screen and draw into it

2) Use OpenGL in that window to move images around

3) Make it appear that your windows are actually doing cool stuff.

Most important, this is the first paper I’ll be doing with a coauthor: Jeff Biggus, the mild-mannered secret identity of HyperJeff (cue applause!). Jeff will be doing the OpenGL part – something about which I know very little right now – and I’ll be doing the graphic interface part. He’ll also attend the conference to present the paper, as I won’t be able to make it this year.

In other news, RBSplitView 1.0.5 is nearly ready for publication. There’s still one feature request and a couple of bugs to take care of, but I hope to have it ready over the weekend. So watch this space…

ADHOC MacHack Cocoa

Well, the whole April Fools shtick has gone a little stale in recent years. The BBC “spaghetti harvest” episode is now 48 years old and still unsurpassed. But for a science fiction fan, this one is very good:

At exactly 1:07 PM GMT on March 31, 2005, noted science fiction author Charles Stross ceased his existence as a baseline human being and entered an unknowable posthuman condition.

…”Charlie was teetering on the precipice of transhumanism for the whole last year,” said his friend and collaborator Cory Doctorow. “His lifestyle and cerebral/neurological capabilities had been ramped up through intensive ideation and selective smart-drug use to an exquisite pitch just short of the Singularity. When he laid his hands on that sweet, sweet hunk of hardware, it provided the critical mass of complexification necessary to tip him over fully into the Extropian ideal condition.”

Thanks to the Boing Boing folks for the link!

Dan W. wrote:

… or belated April Fools joke?

Spam. It’s deleted. All URLs posted by guests are tagged with “nofollow”, so they don’t count for Google ranking…

Posted by Dan W.:
… or belated April Fools joke?