Burning Man was a crazy and amazing event; words aren’t the best way to relate the experience, but I’ll do my best here.  Also, I was separated from my phone almost as soon as I got there, so I wasn’t able to take any pictures myself, so I’ll link to whatever I can find from searching on Google as I write this.

One person in our camp suggested that we were actually on another planet for the week in reference to the fact that we were completely cut off from the outside world with respect to communication, power, and trash, and the environment was so different than what most of are used to. (The Black Rock desert does not support any form of life during the summer.) There were porta-potties though, and lots of light to collect with the solar panel that someone brought to our camp. I brought 12.5 gallons of water from Reno but only used 8 of them.

Despite the remote and primitive conditions of the desert, I witnessed some of the most amazing and extravagant events and interactive sculpture art installations I’ve ever seen. There were many “mutant vehicles”, as they are called: one was a three story a luxury yacht that had been mounted on wheels and had a staircase extending down to the desert ground so people like myself could hop on and off as it drove around the desert at about 4 miles per hour. Another was a giant steampunk / junkyard-esque metal octopus called “El Pulpo Mecanico” that shot fire from all eight of its tentacles as well as its head. There were dozens more: several neon-lit full-size pirate ships, a soul train, and a three-story playground on wheels complete with a sliding board and a merry-go-round. One of the more elaborate installations was a giant ferris wheel-looking thing, but was actually a human-powered three dimensional persistence of vision illusion of a life-size skeleton rowing a boat. Here is it under construction. Oh, there was also a really big trojan horse (burned on Friday). Every day, a handful of skydivers would descend onto the Playa. On Friday, some did a night-jump and lit their paths with flames; it looked like a group of large comets were burning through the sky. All of these things were performed / sponsored by other people participating in and attending the event just like me.

I was camped with a group of people called “Orphan III”, a group of people that self-assembled on Facebook with no commonality other than that they weren’t already associated with another group of people. Things came together very nicely, and I got there late enough that they had already put the camp together. Someone in our camp named Cosmo brought a three-story scaffolding set in his truck, which made a nice shade structure as well as a lookout perch to see the entire camp as well as a few amazing sunsets (and a sunrise). Another person in our group brought a full-sized hot air balloon. We attempted a launch on Wednesday night. We got as far as inflating the balloon with hot air, but the wind picked up and became too strong for a controlled launch. Helping to put the launch together was still quite an experience, especially as we switched from using the cold fan to blowing flame-heated air into the balloon and letting a curious crowd gather around our flame-illuminated balloon in the middle of the night, far, far away from everything else at the event.

This was the most populated incarnation of Black Rock City yet; according to the census (yes, they take a census of everyone in attendance,) over 55,000 people were present at peak population. Although completely unsustainable, for a week this was a real city, complete with streets, neighborhoods, a post-office, a coffee shop, and even an airport. It feels like utopian community since everyone is in great spirits for the most part, but there is also a shared feeling of “the end is near” which is not limited to the event itself. Money is replaced by a no-strings-attached gift economy. There is no advertising, no dollar-signs, very little social stigma with respect to sex, sexuality, and going around naked (if you are wondering about me and these things the answers are “no”, “no”, and “no”), and no expectations (unless you are with a group of people putting on an event of some sort.) The remote location and lack of any utilities make the whole community completely unsustainable, but it works rather well for a week! Speaking only from my experiences, the whole event was much less debaucherous than what is often portrayed in photographs and documentaries. Walking around the city was in a way just as interesting and distracting, if not more so, than walking around Manhattan at day or night. Many of the camps invite passers-by in for some sort of crazy happening or activity. For example, I came upon one camp that had a central tower with an array of wires stretched down to the ground with glow sticks attached to the wires. At the end of each wire was a sling-shot that you could use to shoot the glow stick up to the tower. If the glow stick hit the top of the tower, a large explosion / flame would shoot out of the top. Another camp had a nice collection of unicycles that you could just pick up and ride around for a while. Many camps had trampolines. I didn’t drink (much) alcohol while I was there, but it was available for free and in large amounts to those that wanted it. Make-shift bars lined most streets, and it was not uncommon to see a stilt bar that catered specifically to people that were walking on stilts (or Powerisers.) One of my favorites was the roller disco camp that had a half-sized plywood roller skating rink with skates in all sizes.

I left right after the man burned on Saturday night, and was regretful that I couldn’t stay to see the temple burn on Sunday night, but plane tickets were outrageously expensive for flying out of Reno on Monday so I left a day early. I got a ride to and from the event from a guy that lives in Reno. We stopped at his friend’s property in a town called Gerlach and took a dip in the 105°F hot springs that he had in his front yard. Having not showered for the entire week and with dry cracked skin due to the extreme climate of the desert, this was the most refreshing bath I’ve ever had. The rest of the trip back to Manhattan was rather uneventful. Thanks Enid for asking how it went, I was debating on wether or not to do a write-up :)

I’m sure I missed much of what the event had to offer, but so did everyone else; it is simply too big for one person take in over the course of a week.

On the heels of last week’s post of my implementation of Tonobeb for the web, I bring you another board game blast from my past: back in 2001, I wrote a simple minimax AI in Haskell for a board game called Octi for Kids, a simplified version of Don Green‘s OCTI board game.

I finally had some time this morning to recompile the Haskell code into a binary that runs on my webhost, so now you can play against it while it thinks:

• three moves in advance
• four moves in advance
• five moves in advance

Inspection of the url in the links above will reveal how to arbitrarily increase the look-ahead level.

The code is available here on github.

If someone else loads this page at the same time as you, you will be matched with them automatically. Alternatively, you can challenge a friend by e-mail.

I just open sourced Web Tonobeb on github; I probably won’t have much time to turn it into something that Yahoo games would want to acquire, but you might! Clone away!

This is a proof of concept of portable browser-based distributed computing. (It even runs on iPhone.) The web server will ask your browser to render a specific square on the complex plane onto a canvas. Your browser will then submit the rendered square by turning the canvas into a data URL and posting it to the server’s cache. At the same time, your browser is requesting that the server send out render requests for all squares necessary to make up your current view of the complex plane. These requests may be rendered by your browser, or they may be rendered by another user’s browser that currently has the page running. Load it up on two or three computers at the same time and you’ll notice a significant increase when rendering parts of the fractal. The server caches the tiles, so browse to an obscure part of the fractal to make sure that the system is actually sending requests to the swarm. You can see the last square that your browser rendered just below the large square.

This technique can be used for a specific type of problem where the information that describes the problem and the result is significantly lighter-weight than the computation required to solve it. Specifically, this would also work well for a web-based ray-tracer.

This idea was partially inspired by Resig’s Test Swarm service that distributes front-end toolkit testing to any user that hits the site with their browser.

Here it is in 1440 x 900:

The original 1971 version is available on Brad Templeton’s website.

[update] After googling around a bit, I found this page. It offers a MySpace theme ready to copy and paste. Guess what the background image is? Guess whose server is being used to host that background image? Chances are that there are quite a few MySpace pages that are linking directly to this image, which would explain the steady hit-rate for this image that I’ve noticed over the past few months. I’m seriously thinking about telling my server to redirect requests from MySpace to something that’s not quite so G-rated :)

I just opted out of Bank of America’s “courtesy” overdraft protection “service”. Every time I open an account, I always ask if I can do this, but they never let me. After reading this article, I decided to give it another try. After some intentional confusion from the phone rep, I found out that the overdraft service is actually known as the “overdraft matrix“. So, call your bank and ask to opt out of the overdraft matrix. They just might be able to hook you up! Attached to this post is a partial audio recording of the last 8 minutes of the conversation as proof that it can be done.

So, here are four things that I’m looking forward to, or concerned about that are in the internet’s immediate future:

full standards compliance across web browsers

Web standards are becoming stronger. The latest versions of all the major web browsers support HTML 5 to some extent, and are all relatively standards compliant. The popularity of older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer put application development into a dark age that spanned almost a decade. Internet Explorer was not standards compliant, so it made it very difficult make web applications that worked the same way on other browsers like Firefox and Safari.

The web is more standards-compliant than it ever has been, and as people and IT departments get around to upgrade their browsers, innovation on the web will flourish in ways that we have not yet seen. This is a very good thing.

Saturation of IPv4 will force rapid adoption of IPv6

The article references difficulties that some developers experience with getting applications to talk to each other across internal company networks. The inevitable coming of IP6 will make this less of an issue. IP is the addressing system used on the internet that identifies each machine on the network. All internet-connected machines use IP version 4 (IPv4), but we are approaching a point where the number of machines connected to the internet will be greater than the number of addresses that IPv4 can uniquely identify. Wikipedia says that all IPv4 addresses will be used up some time in 2010.

The IPv4 problem is the equivalent of a neighborhood policy stating that house numbers can only have three digits, and there is demand for over 1000 houses to be in the neighborhood. This creates a supply vs. demand situation, so the price of IPv4 addresses will increase as more and more of them are needed as the internet grows.

The address space problem has been mitigated to some extent by using a technique called NAT (we use it at the Old Homestead). NAT (Network Address Translation) allows a sub-network of machines to communicate with the internet using a single public IP address. While it mitigates the IPv4 address shortage problem, NAT makes it a bit more difficult to establish point-to-point communication between two computers that are each behind a NAT gateway. So, instead of making software that works like this: (computer A) <--> (computer B), you have software that works like this: (computer A) <--> (service provider) <--> (computer B). NAT is the reason behind a significant number of providers of internet services; it allows them to act as, and in some cases charge for being an intermediary between you and whoever you are trying to connect to. Services like Vonage, GoToMyPC, WebEx, and Skype come to mind as I’m writing this.

To summarize, the limits of IPv4 have made it expensive to uniquely identify computers on the internet, and have fostered a genre of companies that act as an unnecessary middle-man to many online services to solve this problem.

IPv6 solves the address space problem completely; IPv6 allows for enough addresses to uniquely identify every atom in the universe. In an ideal scenario, ISPs would offer an unlimited number of IPv6 addresses to their customers, allowing them to address their machines from anywhere without the need of a third party. The middle-man companies would have to change their business model or go out of business, and a new type of peer-to-peer software would blossom and bring about all sorts of new innovative applications to the internet. There are security implications that go along with this new model of communication, so we end up with the classic toss-up of availability vs. security, but that’s a choice that I would like to have.

We may also see new hardware applications that leverage the increased network availability that IPv6 brings for things that are currently considered too trivial for network connectivity. For example, controllable light switches that can report that they are left on, and temperature sensors that can tell you if you need to start your A/C or heater before you come home.

Two more things and I’m done:

Cloud services

Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all offer cloud services that promise nearly unlimited scaling and reliability for hosted web applications. This is great, but it also leads to centralization of policy between only a few companies, which may end up stifling innovation if the company that owns the cloud decides to prohibit services that compete against the ones that they already offer. This has not proved to be a problem yet, but this issue parallels the net neutrality debate and controversies around Apple’s iPhone app store to some extent.

Open APIs

Many services, big and small, eBay, Google, UPS, and FaceBook, just to name a few, are “opening up” their platform using standards like SOAP, REST, or plain XML. This means that they are releasing formal specifications that tell people like myself how to write software that interacts with their service and extend it in ways that the company hasn’t yet anticipated. In an interesting twist on the idea of using standards to open platforms, the RSSCloud project proposes using RSS in an innovative way to replace centralized messaging services like twitter and Facebook.

Premailer is a nifty ruby script that turns most of the css from external stylesheets and style blocks into inline css on each element. This is useful if you want to be sure that HTML e-mails will remain mostly in-tact in the viewer’s mail client.

It’s a great script, but the interface could be better… and by better, I mean invisible. … so I bought the domain inlinecss.com and made it work with premailer and your URLs. No interface required; just add .inlinecss.com after the TLD in the URL of the page that you want to inline, and the site will mirror the inlined version of your page.

For example, to inline google.com, turn http://google.com/ into http://google.com.inlinecss.com/

Thomas Hallock
471 Malcolm X Blvd
Apartment 2N
New York, NY 10037

link to Google Map

I’l depart Austin at 1:05PM CT on 8-June and arrive at JFK Airport at 5:57PM ET – JetBlue flight 1062

Don’t worry, I’m not disappearing from Austin completely; I plan to be in Austin every three months for maintenance / inspection of The Sellery, which will continue to operate despite my physical absence.

In preparation for the move-out date, I will be getting rid of one significant thing per day. Today, I cleaned out my kitchen shelves and will be getting rid of most of my cookware and serving dishes. Make me an offer because they are going to Goodwill by the end of Friday.

So, blog, I am making a commitment to you right now that each day, I will make a post about at least one of my significant possessions (over $50 in value) that I am going to get rid of by the end of the day. If I don’t get any offers, I’m going to take it to Goodwill, or to consign on eBay through The Sellery, depending on how much I think it’s worth.

To keep score, this is what I plan to keep after I get rid of everything else:

• bicycle
• bike lock
• laptop
• laptop power supply
• 7 changes of clothes
• 2 pairs of footwear (leather shoes and sandals)
• toothbrush
• inflatable bed
• sheets
• plastic water bottle
• phone and charging cable
• digital camera and charger