Category Archives: Link of the Day

Twilight Zone meets Planet of the Apes

Twilight Zone, or Planet of the Apes?One of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while is this remake of The Planet of the Apes as a Twilight Zone Episode. An interesting bit of trivia was that Rod Serling was the writer of both. The production notes are actually quite illuminating: the editor read the introductions and closing narrations for every Twilight Zone episode to find one that thematically matched the description of Planet of the Apes. He then trimmed POTA down to thirty minutes and three acts. I think it works very well, and is a testimony to the quality of the original movie. Good stuff.

Change This

Today’s link of the day routes you to ChangeThis, a website with an interesting idea: if you distribute good ideas, people will adopt, adapt and use them to make the world a better place. Ah, optimism. Personally, I often tend toward pessimism, but even though I know it will fail, I’ll try to entertain optimistic ideals for a moment or two. 🙂

The first manifesto they have posted is by venerable Macintosh evangelist Guy Kawasaki, and is excerpted from his upcoming book The Art of the Start. Since I am mired deep within what has beme a rather large organization, I found his mini-chapter The Art of Internal Entrepanuering to be particularly interesting. I suspect I’ll be visiting this website frequently in an attempt to expand my thinking about a wide variety of topics, and to combat my occasionally crippling pessimism.

Talking Boards Patents and Trademarks

Ouija Board PatentFor some reason, I found a reference to an early patent on Ouija boards, and with a bit of digging, came up with this page of Talking Boards Patents and Trademarks. Most of these early patents declare it a game, rather than a legitimate way to contact the dead.

Using pat2pdf, I extracted a few of these patents as PDF files:

Becker, 1880
Patent 233,198
Bond, 1891
Patent 446,054, the first patent to mention the term “Ouija”
Fuld, 1892
Patent 479,266, makers of Ouija boards until the bottom fell out of the market in the 1970s

It appears that patent examiners of the past were every bit as diligent as those we have today.

Things CPU Architects (and others) Need To Think About

Bob Colwell gave an interesting talk at Stanford about his experiences as Chief Architect of Intel’s IA32 processors from 1992-2000. I spent an hour and a half watching the video download, and thought it was an interesting look into where CPU design is going, not going, and what that means for products.

I’m not a huge hardware guy, but the level is pretty straightforward, I had no problem following his presentation.

The points that really struck home were really about complexity. At Pixar, I spent well over a decade working on RenderMan, Pixar’s core renderer that we have used for all our films. Many of the criticisms that Colwell had for later architectures (increasing fragility, difficulty in extension, maintaining backward compatibility, shrinking ability to keep track of all aspects of the design) are common in large software projects as well. When I finally left the RenderMan group, I suspect that I understood about 85% of the renderer really well, which was probably just about as high as anyone, but it was clear that there were many subtle interactions amongst features which led to confusing performance variations. Often trying to tune these variations was like moving piles of sand: you move some sand, but you always leave a little behind and pick up some dirt too.

Colwell ultimately is concerned that that if CPU manufacturers continue to try to play the “more transistors, more die, more speed, more heat” game they’ve been playing, then they will have only a dead end architecture that they can’t sell because nobody wants a processor that dissapates 2KW.

Good stuff.

Stairway to Heaven, Orchestral Variations

For publicity, the University of New South Wales commissioned orchestral variations on the classic Led Zepplin tune, Stairway to Heaven. Each segment is done in the style of a different composer. The Holst’s Mars, Bringer of War was funny enough that it made me laugh. The segments in the style of Bizet and Glenn Miller are quite good as well.

The idea isn’t that new. An Australian TV show once ran a contest asking for submissions for as many variations on Stairway to Heaven as they could. The result was an album with 22 tracks, most of which are deliciously absurd. How do I know about it? My friend Tom Duff has every absurd CD ever stamped.

Enjoy Tom!

Rick Boucher, Guest Blogger on lessig.org

Congressman Rich Boucher is guest blogging on Lawrence Lessig’s blog this week. Congressman Boucher is fairly rare amongst politicians in that he actually seems to understand many of the issues related to intellectual property rights. He is working to amend the DMCA to restore fair use rights to digital media, and is the author of the Digital Media Consumer Rights Act. His opening entry is a request for comments regarding the Induce Act, and the discussions are quite interesting, including postings by Andy Greenberg which I thought were enormously clear and which apparently have struck a chord with Boucher.

I’ll be reading throughout the week.

Eliza Turns Dirty, Changes Name to Jenny18

Normally I steer this website away from overtly sexual topics, but I’ll make an exception here. Jenny18 is a version of the classic Eliza program which has been tailored to imitate a sort of dumb-blond cyber sex slave. It relies on the fact that many people talk like complete idiots online, which means that even simple programs can seem plausible in that social context. Often it’s hard to tell which side of the transcripts are being acted out by the script and which are real humans. It’s amazing how easily people (well, horny geeks anyway) are drawn in by rather trivial programmed responses, and how absurdly moronic they are.

Oh, by the way, you shouldn’t mix up the Eliza mentioned above with this one.

Predicting the Internet’s catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996 (InfoWorld)

Metafilter had a link to Bob Metcalfe’s 1995 article Predicting the Internet’s catastrophic collapse and ghost sites galore in 1996 (InfoWorld). It’s always incredible to look back on historical predictions and see how they panned out.

For those of you who don’t know who Bob Metcalfe is, he is the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com.

Metcalfe predicted a dot.com collapse in 1996, but despite his assertions to the contrary, companies appeared to be able to find greater fools to fund their ideas for a few more years until they were finally exhausted around 2000. Similarly, measurements have proven that web based advertising isn’t particularly effective, and the ridiculous rates for web advertising have mostly collapsed into reasoanble levels. Security is still a huge issue, but is one what we continue to ignore at our peril, hoping that the virus scanners will keep ahead of the virus writers and that we are smart enough to avoid identity theft and scams.

And of course, there is no problem finding pornography on the web.

Brace yourself folks: I think that Metcalfe was merely just ahead of his time.

Programming in Lua

Before I discovered Python, I enjoyed a brief period of experimentation with Lua. I even went so far as to use Lua to add a simple shading language to my old MTV raytracer. You could write Lua functions that would compute the results of certain shading operations. It was pretty slow, but was really quite easy to do.

Now, I’ve discovered there is a nice looking book, Programming in Lua, which you can either buy or read online. I may have to revisit Lua again.