The River of Life

I have released my new virtual reality world, The River of Life.

This is a Hindu influenced world of temples made of design information I found on the web and in some cases, textured from photos. I have tried as best as I can within my limited understanding to honor the Hindu religion of which I am a sincere admirer. Not having been born Hindu, I cannot be Hindu but I can love the light I see in the faces of the devotees. Ekam sat. It centers around the goddess Saraswati because she is the goddess of learning and of music, both the central themes of my life. I am always her student and doubt I shall ever become more, but that is quite enough.

This world was created because of a woman I met many years ago who practiced her faith with deep devotion giving me a painful but very necessary mirror when my world view and my faith were being stripped away and reborn in her luminous eyes.

To Mrs. Singh: This is to repay your kindness to me and and to honor your unfathomable beauty born of your love of God. The light within you both enlightens me and gives me joy to this day and those that follow. Namaste, Alka ji. Shukriya.

I’ve applied several animation and sensor techniques to make this more fun to move around in. There are also poems attached but you’ll have to find them. The rule of thumb is to click on things that move. Over time, I will hide more cookies.

Turn on your speakers or put on your headphones. The world is an experiment in animation and sound to progress toward what I call an “immersive album”. Real-time 3D spatialized sound combined with real time 3D visuals provides unique ways to combine motion and sound sources such that the music mixes depending on settings and one’s location in the world, or the objects one is near. I am just scratching the surface of this new unique art form. For this world, I used samples of Hindu musicians for reasons of theme and because raga-based music is very suitable for this application given its basis in scalar constructions (ragas are scales) over Western-influenced harmonic construction. Think loops if you must, but really, it is a matter of how distance and motion combine to create ambient sound in virtual space just as it does in meatspace. For download bandwidth reasons, these are 22khz mono samples and not very long. Because 3D sound is spatialized, stereo is redundant.

If you want to visit The River of Life, you need a VRML97 conformant browser. I use BS Contact. You can download a Contact browser at http://www.blaxxun.com. I suggest version 6.1 or higher. Since I will later convert this world from VRML97 to X3D format, the new version of the VRML language, you may want the Bit Management beta version of Contact (7.n). Note that it displays an irritating floating logo that will try to take you to their site if you click on it, and is otherwise a nuisance. But free is free.

Once you have the browser, I highly suggest you go to the VRMLWorld site and download River of Life into the lobby function of that chat server. It is great fun to tour one of these worlds with friends in multi-user mode as can be provided by Rick Kimball’s ABNet software. This link will take you there.

http://vrmlworld.net/abnet2/indexc.html?x3durl=http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/rol/riveroflife.wrl

I will register this world there soon and I encourage other VRML builders to do the same so that we can create a true metaverse that is open to both authors and the public without paying rent. I never liked rental property. It builds no equity for the tenant. Besides, the VRMLers invented virtual reality on the web and ought to get a bit more boo for it. The press only notices big investments so Linden Labs gets a lot of press these days, but VRML looks better and it is free to develop. I suggest we pick up the prize.

Some notes for the newbie to VRML:

In Internet Explorer, VRML plug-ins are usually Active-X controls. Because of the EOLAS lawsuit, you will get the annoying security warnings about scripted content. Select the option in the yellow bar to accept the content. It is scripted but it is safe.

This is not a small download when it first starts up due to the heavy texturing and the sound files. So it is good to have broadband but if you are still on dial-up, expect about 10 minutes of downloading. I have not compressed the files yet (I will) so that those who like to poke around the code quickly can. If you take things and use them, please give propers where due. That is the only way any of the VRML artists can afford to share their code to ensure the growth of the art. Otherwise, it’s all going to be binaries.

Because scripts start to run as they download, you may open up in a foggy world or not. The fog will go away when the skies change. The skies are not synced to the time of day. They just change. I am having fun with these and may make them more natural over time, but why bother with virtual reality just to make it more real?

If you are not familiar with VRML, you can get a menu by a right click in the window. This allows you to select viewpoints and to select your navigation mode. In WALK mode (the default for the world) with gravity enabled, you move following the ground. In FLY mode (more fun ) whatever height you are at remains the height until you collide with something; then you will climb to its height and remain there. This mode is good for jumping off tall buildings or hills with a single bound. More people like to fly than don’t. It’s the brachiating monkey blood in our genes.

Viewpoints in VRML worlds can be jumped to using the right click menu or by using the PAGE UP/PAGE DOWN keys on the keyboard. Some viewpoints are animated and you travel with the object to which they are bound. Try clicking on these but if you move away from them while bound to them, you will fall to the ground unless you have set your browser to FLY mode. You will begin to hallucinate that you are being pushed through the Earth where the view is very strange. 

This has been a long haul project. I’ve been working on it on and off for ten years. I’ve received an enormous amount of help in the last few weeks from the VRML community that always pulls together and helps out when a new world is being released. Many many thanks! You are still the best online bunch of crazies and artists on the web. Inside the world, there is a WorldInfo node that gives propers as due. Other artists have been leaving samples up for people to use for a decade now and I’ve incorporated and adapted some of these. That beautiful sun is Paul Hoffman’s work from our IrishSpace project. Chakor and Chakori are Robert St. John’s Dove from his Temple of Love project that was released as a sample with the V-realm Builder editor (sadly no longer available).

To build this world, I used the V-Realm Builder, Professional File Editor and the demo of Internet Space Builder from ParallelGraphics. These are old tools but they do a good job when one knows the language.

I hope you enjoy The River of Life. It is purely art for art’s sake which is fun for fun’s sake. As my mentor in VRML, Paul Hoffman used to tell us, “keep on wrl’ing”.

cheers,

len

The Elves and the Shoemaker

God exults in creation. Give voice to this.

I read that religion is a pernicious practice that is ultimately bad for the mammals. I dispute that. It seems to me that anything that brings them together in hope and joy as fellows is ultimately good where it is not a means to suborn their spirit to some other cause. The small country church is often the center of a community, the place where they come to raise their families, try to set good examples and find in fellowship relief from the torrid political climate of work and economy. I’ve never worked at a job that gave as much cheer or wonder as I find at the church and I am not exactly a devoutly formal worshipper of any faith. I like the company and I like the way they handle themselves in that setting. That’s all I need to know about it.

Last weekend the children performed “The Elves and The Shoemaker” at church. Even small country churches build community halls with stages any civic center would be proud of these days. Where city facilities would be too expensive and sometimes too dangerous given their locations in city centers for keeping and corralling 30+ small ones in full dudgeon, these church centers are better secured, adjacent to the sanctuary and kitchens, so safe. When working with children, safe is a major consideration.

I was asked to write and record the music for the show. Most of the time my music is composed for myself or my band of the moment to perform, so when it is performed, I am inside that performance. It is a different experience to sit anonymously at the back of a theatre and watch others perform my composition or act their roles while it provides the emotional space within which they perform. I quite like it. Children don’t know when something is hard. They only know if it makes them feel good. When the tiny 14 year old soprano was given a piece written in 5/4 time that my professional trained soprano friends gasp at, she just stepped out and did it beautifully. When the ballerinas spun on stage to the short ragtime, they were amazingly funny and precise. As all the smaller children who were the elves tittered through the shoemaker song, “shoes made by elves are REAL NEAT”, I realized this experience is an infinitesimal glimpse of what it must be to be the creator of a universe, to create an emotional space within which others can feel and share their feelings. That joy is inexpressible.

God exults in creation. Give voice to this.

Flipping Out Over YouTube and MySpace?

Considerable press is being devoted to the YouTube purchase. Some press is being devoted to the falling numbers for the last flip-up darling, MySpace. The web developers and their investors are beginning to see that the web did not change the dynamics of the entertainment industry any more than it made business frictionless. Entropy has a way of shaking its finger in the faces of those who accept the proseletyzing pundits pronouncements of the next new thing being somehow bigger better and newer than the last new thing. The dynamics of business are determined not by the distribution channel but by the reasons for the transactions themselves.

1. YouTube provides content of a different quality than MySpace. As long as it can provide that, it can grow. The dynamics of user-generated video and the long tail of talent determine its limits. The long tail will cause stars to emerge and their longevity and productivity will determine the stickiness of YouTube.

2. Teens want to be alone as much as they want to be in company. They are the most fickle audience of all as any musician or actor can tell you. Sites like MySpace may evolve into business sites just as high school get togethers evolve into business oriented cocktail parties. Corporations have more reasons to create and keep conversations going with the same people than teen-agers do.

3. The objective of a site builder is to drive enough traffic to a site to make it worth purchasing for several orders of magnitude of its development value. This is precisely the model of pop music and for exactly the same reasons. Some sites are one-hit wonders that are worth visiting for a summer, and others last for several decades.

What happens? The big dollar buyouts are the blips not the recurring peaks of the purchasing cycle.

The flip costs will be reduced proportionally and will evolve toward the same kind of deals made with bands for points where the initial investments don't go straight to the pockets of the band but to the producers, in this case, the VCs. To make the big dollars site developers will need the kind of legal help that enables them to renegotiate their contracts after they prove the sustainability of the traffic to the site just as music lawyers renegotiate with music labels after the third platinum album. Until then, the developers live on subsistence wages just as the bands do with million selling hit songs and just enough money to get to the next gig.

Reinventing HTML 2.0

It will be interesting to see if many care about this and who they are if they do. In some ways, this flurry coming from the W3C stalwarts is the reality test of the continuing or discontinuous relevance of the W3C to the evolution of standardized web systems on the Internet.

It is possible that without much fanfare and little notice, the control of web evolution has passed back to the industrialists who quietly sponsored it and insisted on its primacy in major acquisitions. At least in the USA, those institutions passed into the control of MBAs from B-schools whose dominant computer literacy is with spreadsheets.

So the question is, can spreadsheet-augmented intelligence fix the mess made by Tim Berners-Lee et al with the launch of HTML and the Mosaic web browser if Sir Tim and the W3C can't?

This will be fascinating to watch. The mammals are relentlessly innovative in their messmaking and the means they deploy to clean it up or to avoid cleaning it up. In the latter, the well-financed announcement is usually something to the effect that the mess is actually a clever, simple solution and simple is always preferred.

In technology and politics, the best approach is always slow and steady with diplomacy preferred and guns kept unlocked but loaded.

A Faster Horse

In an article on mastering complexity while innovating, Henry Ford is quoted as saying, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse."

In the quote is the dilemma of innovation for companies that use surveys, product planning, consultants hired away from their customer base and like strategies. It is expensive and it doesn't work reliably. Over the years, the best results I've seen come from those who talk to the customers casually. This accomplishes what the article recommends: you get to understand the heart of the customer.

The devil in the stone is getting developers to trust those who do talk to customers and getting those who talk to customers to translate that faithfully. In commission-driven sales environments, that is tough to achieve. In any management suite where numbers and the promise of numbers drive the day to day operations, it is almost impossible.

A colleague who was a field representative to a major American city related that sales efforts for an account with that customer were doomed because over lunch she had heard the decision maker relating to another co-worker that our company wasn't even being considered. We took that information to management who promptly discarded it as gossip because a consultant had assured them that our company was indeed the front runner. With that positive relationship spinning, we went on to spend a very large sum of money and company resources on a bid that we did lose just as our field rep told us we would. Why? No one believes bad news when hope marries propaganda. Numbers are often just that: propaganda from the management suite. See Iraq.

Another problem is incrementalism. After our new General Manager made her reputation for being 'customer-focused', development became saturated with requests for product changes. In the past, development could decline these as non-strategic, meaning they added no value for the majority of the customers. Under the new GM, technology didn't matter. Keeping customers happy so they wouldn't generate bad press did. Once the customers understood that, bad press and liquidated damages became the topic of every conversation and of course, we slipped further behind the broad market requirements and deeper into the technology chasm because we did not have the resources to rapidly educate ourselves and develop new products.

Filtered views and closed doors are barriers to innovation. It is one thing to say we are listening; it is another to actually hear what is said. Understanding requires patience in conversation and that means time. Those who are ‘time-sensitive positive relationship managers’ can open their doors to their employees or their customers, but they will only hear what they think is important, and then they will demand a ‘faster horse’.

To solve problems like these, more conversations need to be had with more of the players most of the time. Companies need new ways to talk to customers often and casually and at every level of the company. Blogging companies know this and they are wining in the market. They understand that there is no such thing as an inward facing and outward facing set of communications. That strategy is the buggy whip of today. In a network-savvy company, ALL communicators face in ALL directions ALL of the time. That they may not use them is apparent, but they have them when they need them.

Blogs are one means but blogs tend to be ‘one guy on a soapbox talking loud and gathering a crowd’. That is fine for topics that require depth, but the hints the lead to understanding the heart of the customer are typically discovered in casual conversations. For that the web offers chatrooms.

Chat rooms have a mixed reputation given the problems of Ally Oxen Come Free chat rooms that are the majority on the web. Corporate chat rooms are a different beastie. They are corporation sponsored and corporation hosted. They can have corporate policies just as corporate bloggers heed, and they produce server logs that can be mined. While this flies a bit in the general wisdom that less control is better, and it usually is, a corporate chat room is not a public web site. With the right technologies, it is also a corporate communications center, a branded face on the corporate conversations, and can be a means to show off products new, old, and emerging.

An innovation for this is to move the corporate chat world into a virtual world using free and relatively simple real-time 3D technology such X3D and ABNet. The advantages are exactly as promised: presence and branded identities for customers, employees and press. As long as the conversations are casual, the encounters unhindered, and the style is entertaining, these corporate 3D rooms can serve as a place of fun, familiarity and business without the bar tab.

It is a cheap experiment to conduct given the available technologies. Given these technologies can be applied to other customer needs, it is also a cheap means to move a company up the learning curve fast before the spreadsheet nazis can send out a memo or tell the customer that this technology is ‘just a toy’. When the Macintosh and the PC were introduced, they were also ‘just a toy’. Virtual worlds like other innovative technologies need time to find their markets, but the potential for them to be a means to understand and find markets is already there.

Why Not X3D on Macintosh?

A colleague says, "… until someone makes a decent player for the Mac, you'll never see all the amazing content created on a Mac in the VRML world. You must realize that most high end content is created on Mac. 90% of high end Hollywood 2D and 3D content is for sure. Besides, even if most of the world owns PCs, pretty much every "creative" I talk to about VRML is on a Mac for their real work and they all wish we had some decent players for Macs.”

Snob. ;-) Let me be my curmudgeonly self...

Really. X3D is not a high end format and VRML wasn’t one when it started. Lots of creatives are on PCs, but more importantly, the vast majority of web customers are, and that is what the web as a marketplace is about: customers. Savvy creatives adapt to the customer base. Hollywood is not that customer base. It is a high end production town with high end developers. If they want to put content on the web, they adapt to the web or they adapt the web. It won’t happen by promoting Macs unless the Mac becomes a TV the way iPods became transistor radios.

I’ve never seen a decent Mac VRML client. That is the point. If Apple owners want them, they need to bug Steve Jobs. He built a closed system and is satisfied with his high-end developers and architecture. If he wants to put 3D on the web, he has to develop a client. If he wants that client to be standard on the web (something Apple isn’t famous for doing in the majority of cases), he steps up to the web standards for 3D or does what he always does: launches yet another closed system, in this case, Safari’s canvas tag. Who gets to see that? Safari users who own Macs. PC owners? Jobs doesn’t care about PC owners.

That’s the problem of the Mac vs The Web. Job doesn’t have to care about Mac content or Mac customers; he owns them both. iTunes is a splendid example of how well that strategy works. It took him all of two years to slam the doors on indie musicians and production and open them up to the middlemen. He managed to reconstruct the BadOlMusicIndustry with lightning speed under his control.

And that is what you want for X3D content and the 3D user community?

Say anything you like. That is how the Apple market shakes out. PC owners just don’t care and never will. They can’t. It would mean giving up their chance at the Big Break to The Man from Cupertino.

If Mac owners want X3D, they can demand it. They are the customers but they have to demand it from the boutique dealers where they buy the rest of their stuff because the guys selling commodity products know full well that Macs ain’t commodity products. And they never will be because that isn’t what Jobs wants to sell or else he would be Bill Gates. Talk to any Mercedes dealer about Fords. Who invented the car and made it the best it could be at the time: Mercedes. Who put the masses on the road? Ford. Who took the market away from them both? GM. Why? Smarter than both at both jobs. Who took it from them? Toyota. For the same reason. Who’ll take it next. Who knows.

Would production quality X3D editors and viewers for the Mac result in high-quality X3D? Heck yes, but it will only happen when the boutique content makers decide they want to sell lower-cost knock-offs at Wal-Mart.

That day may come sooner than some think. The web-based portals are becoming gazillion-channel broadcast networks. YouTube is a fluke the way that HTML was: a low end access point to lots and lots of content but that matters. Over time, people want more and better and new and different and eventually in any flat-market a talent longTail begins to rise up and dominate the landscape. It’s sad for the rest of the talent community when that happens, but competition is a reality of markets. As that point is reached, Hollywood and their evil zombie cousins in New York, Atlanta and Nashville will do as they’ve always done: dominate the management of the talent by paying them lots and lots of money. And then they will all buy Macs.

Web business sustainability evolves toward controlling the sources for resources just as any commodity market differentiated by limited sources does. This is where Radar O’Reilly and Mark Cuban lose it with the ‘real sharing’ riffs. At the point of maximum uncertainty, forces are applied to hold an object in orbit. $$$ is the strong force. Egoboo is the weak force. Guess which one wins as the customer locale expands in reach and scope?

So would it help X3D quality if the professional Mac talent began to work on X3D content at night when they aren’t working for the moguls? Sure. But meanwhile, the web is the land of opportunity for the hobbyist and the visionary and the deeply irrationally persistent junk yard dogs that just won’t lie down or roll over when told to.

Unless given a bit of petting AND a treat. A pretty enough dog always gets both because dogs will be dogs.

3D is today where the video tape market was when the owners of video stores discovered that storing more tapes on low-rent shelves sold more rentals. Who were the losers? Makers of boutique art films. Who were the winners? Pornographers and major releases. The difference is major releases stayed the same, but porn quickly became much better porn.

That is how the long tail actually works: the best get the point and the rest get the tail.

A War Lyric

War is only understood by those who fight one. The rest of us are witnesses.

My Son's Time To Go

Two men stood on the platform
Watching the train pull away
In the diner car their only sons
Waved goodbye that day.

One was going to Canada
One to Vietnam
Two fathers sharing wordlessly
Sorrows yet to come.

Two men fought in another war
And served there side by side
Not for flag or apple pie
But to keep each other alive.

Their sons grew up together.
They tried to raise them right.
Now one would go to speak his truth,
And one would go to fight.

No one knew if they'd come back.
Their Momma's cried and prayed.
Goodbyes break the brave and few
When a father has to say:

"Son, just fight the good fight.
Be true to who you are.
Don't try to be a hero.
Your faith can take you far.
Though I've been there and I came back,
I want you to know
How proud I am to be your Dad.
It's my son's time to go."

A soldier returned to an angry world
His cousin was standing in line
Among some far-out people
"Singing songs and carrying signs".

The grunt Marine put out his hand.
The hippie shook his head,
"Man, I don't think I know you."
The soldier wearily said,

"Kiss my ass. I'm not proud
Of all the things I've done,
My country called. I had to go
To a war that couldn't be won.

I only want to see my Mom.
If you'll kindly step aside
I won't call you 'family'.
Remember that I tried.

I went to fight the good fight.
I was true to the cause I served.
I lost my friends in the Mekong,
But I never lost my nerve.
Peace and love and all good things
Have a price, they tell me so.
I paid that price, but I'll be sad
When it's my son's time to go."

Two men stand by the window
Watching a plane pull away
Ferrying their only sons
To a place they wouldn't say.

Thirty years without a word
These men have lived apart,
Now one holds out his palsied hand
To the one with the broken heart.

"Will you come to my house, please;
So, we can kneel and pray?
The Lord will keep our sons alive
And bring them home one day.

Peace and love and all good things
Have a price, but I didn't know
How sad I'd feel to be his Dad
Now its my son's time to go.
How sad it is to be the one.
It's my son's time to go."

len bullard
10/26/1006

Virtual Worlds with ABNet

I've been looking at the products available for real-time 3D chat worlds. While Blaxxun continues to be the commercially licensed leader, other vendors are stepping up to provide communications servers and hosting. Today I am looking at ABNet from Kimball Software. The main man at this company is Rick Kimball. You can click on this blog title to go to the VRMLWorld site and play with some sample worlds in their chat windows. It requires an Active-X control and as usual, thanks to our dear friends at EOLAS (#@#@$), you have to accept the control using IE.

I'm running on a 56k dial-up here (yes, Virginia, some of us still do), and had no problem running these worlds. However, I was the only one in there so this is not a very good test. For those who want a low-cost/no-cost approach to building 3D chat worlds, ABNet is a good place to start and may prove to be a commercial survivor. The site describes the software thusly:

ABNet is a communication framework that happens to let you create 3D multi-user chat worlds. It isn't limited to this application but 3D chat shows its flexibility. The communication framework of ABNet provides an asynchronous low-latency publish and subscribe environment using XML messages.

The communication server of ABNet is written in Java allowing for deployment on any platform running a Java VM. The client side of ABNet uses Javascript on an HTML page to turn a single-user VRML or X3D world into a Multi-user Virtual World environment. 3D Avatars can interact and use shared events to provide a virtual experience much like the old blaxxun community platform. ABNet is the software that powers http://vrmlworld.net

ABNet can be used to build your own chat site that uses very little bandwidth. It is feasible to run a 3D chat site from your personal computer.

The software supports both the Contact 6.1 and MediaMachines browsers.

Some useful URLS:

Forums:
http://vrmlworld.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=118

Setup the Software

http://vrmlworld.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=105

Download the current ABNet 2 ActiveX client from here:
http://kimballsoftware.com/abnet/abnetclient2_002.exe

Download both the client and java server from here:
http://kimballsoftware.com/abnet/abnetserver2_002.exe

XML Knitting and Stitching

At the XML conferences I attended that Lauren Wood organized, there were walls of XML cross-stitching and knitting. I wondered about that until I was sitting here for the first time in a while doing some XML data design work for a new project.

Developing XML data systems is like knitting and stitching: it is only tedious if done for hire. When done for a topic that one has a passion for innately, it becomes a relaxed passion.

I'm not an expert, but I suspect that this relaxed passion is one reason that many knit and stitch to relax and others can relax when they do data design work on documents with content they love. It is satisfying to work with the threads one loves for passionate content.

The real-time memory that captures this for me is Lynne Price at SGML standards meetings knitting her dogs' hair. That was an ultimate expression of making structure from the threads of the universe productively and passionately.

Stuck On Standards?

Stuck on standards?

When it was ISO, it wasn't a standard because it wasn't the W3C. When it is ECMA, it isn't a standard because it came from Microsoft.

The not so deep but ever abiding truth about standards is that either some group of self-selected companies and individuals are or are not making money applying technologies conforming to some standard or specification. The right or wrong of which organization produces the standard was forfeit with the rise of company-organized and pundit supported consortia such as the W3C. When these groups began to pillory existing organizations such as ISO and burgled the standards they had produced shifting both the center of standards activities by nations and the leadership in favor of the individuals so inclined by their own careers and goals, they derailed any chance that the Internet would evolve toward fairly constituted groups in favor of their own.

That set the rules by example and everything that has followed has followed predictably and logically from those examples.

So how does a company, agency or individual choose among the offerings of these more or less equal offerings? By doing what has been working successfully since HTML and its siblings were offered: select by the size of the following. If one is using Microsoft products and the majority of one's peers are using Microsoft, use the Microsoft specifications and standards. If one is using Sun products similarly, choose what Sun supports.

It quit being about fair and balanced for all parties when the XML Working Group and ERB blew off ISO in favor of their own self-selected parties. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree. Any XML can be transformed into any other XML with some degree of loss. That was the promise; this is the outcome.

Sad, but so. Quit whining about it.

How To Beat YouTube

Here's a challenge: build a GUI for a sign event system (code list dispatcher in the scene and in each avatar) selectors that can route the code to any and all objects in the X3D scene.

The problem of X3D in the current technical offerings is the very large gap between authoring intelligent geometry and scripting scenes in it.

Character-building should be be simple variations on code lists of avatar-gestures that are reacted to differently given the avatar's interpreter (event behaviors).

The authoring system tool should enable a high-level character builder that sets emotional ranges coupled to ranges.

The avatar is not a passive reactor. All events/links aren't inbound; the avatar as an actor is seeking events and will navigate towards clusters containing the search terms in Topical Vector Space (the vectors among the terms in the XML metadata create clustered attractors). Where locations in geometric space contain these terms, the avatar navigates toward it or away from it.

The DeepGeeks will note that these are both Hamiltonian coordinate systems subject to the same transformations. In energy terms, the search term clusters act as attractors. Create a search set that returns the demographic desired and it pulls the search engine to the location. The world metadata (searc terms) is pulling the search engine, therefore, the avatar toward it. While this is trivial in terms of search engine ad placement support, it is non-trivial in creating a real=time situation comedy.

That is how you beat YouTube.

Darkstar Works With X3D

As it turns out, X3D can be applied with the DarkStar server kit. Aaron Bergstrom [Aaron.Bergstrom@ndsu.edu]answered on the X3D Public list:

Yes, X3D can be deployed through Darkstar.

Immediate Mode Interactive (www.imilabs.com) is developing an X3D-based game engine called Cosmic. I refer you to the Cosmic Blog page: http://cosmic-game-engine.blogspot.com/

I demo'd IMI's Cosmic Birdie video game based on the Cosmic game engine at the X3D Tech Talk - Siggraph 2006. All the content in Cosmic Birdie was created using RawKee, the X3D exporter for Maya.

IMI demo'd Cosmic Birdie using the Darkstar server in the Sun booth this year's Game Developers Conference.

If you look through the Darkstar documentation you'll notice that Darkstar supports HTTP requests for communication, so theoretically, it's probably possible to use the XMLHttpRequest/Ajax3D techniques outlined by Tony Parisi (http://www.aja3d.org/whitepaper/) to do multi-user environments with Flux and Darkstar.

Of course, licensing is another issue. And they last I heard from the IMI guys, Darkstar is still in the development phase, though supposedly, Sony has some sort of arrangement with Sun to deploy Darkstar as a game server for the PSP. I have no idea about the current status. You may want to check out the following URL: http://www.projectdarkstar.com

The Cosmic Birdie demo is available through the darkstar website.

Aaron

So free-to-develop server software and open source X3D clients using AJAX techniques can now be applied to serious games (think training and scenario generation). There is a nice startup opportunity here or several.

A key thing to remember as Eric Maranne pointed out on the X3D list: don't sell syntax and languages. Sell applications. But the development costs are shifting away from licensing costs to server hardware and personnel. Figure out how to live within your means there, and as the DealNews guys proved, you can start and sustain a company long enough to become profitable even in the face of bad times (which BTW, times are good right now).

Project Darkstar

Wow! THIS is pretty dammed cool. Sun is building a shareable server and tool system for games with five 9s reliability. That is awesome.

When I worked for public safety, we loathed to guarantee five nines for mission critical real time dispatch systems. Five nines is awesome for massive multiplayer games.

Two of the reallyDumbMistakes made while I was in that field are worth relating. The first was having two Development VPs in a row stating that real time 3D was of absolutely no interest to the company or to the public safety market. (Actually, the dumbest was a former company president making the absolute statement that XML was only Microsoft FUD and in no way would affect the public safety market, but I digress). The second reallyDumbMistake was a decision made with the formation of an Innovation Team charged with getting new ideas into Development. One of our senior staffers boasted proudly that when the first batch was submitted, they quickly eliminated any that mentioned games.

A few years later, a major and very significant RFP for public safety required the application of the XML 3D standard application language, X3D, in a game simulation environment for massive multiplayer training. Of course, the company had to license code from two developers in France just to get started because a "leader in spatial graphics technology for fusion of real time information" was caught flat footed.

Now Sun (Notice, Sun, not Microsoft that is twaddling along with the public safety industry) can provide THE key component for these serious 'games'.

And so it goes. It will be interesting to see if X3D clients can use the services of Project Darkstar. Given the open source Java implementations of X3D toolkits, I'd be surprised if the answer is no. If so, there is a very neat opportunity for some of the public safety vendors to get a fast leg up on their front running competitors.

Lead By Example

Let's take this out of the comments.

http://news.com.com/Colin+Powell+urges+corporate+philanthropy

General Powell gives a good speech. I watched a video of this speech when he gave it to my last employer's conference in Orlando. Just a few points in response:

1. If the corporation is making the claim and receiving the credit for philanthropy, the donation needs to come off the bottom line: corporate profits. Since stockholders tend to object to that and rebel against executives who are generous in this regard, this doesn't happen often or in quantity.


2. That leaves employee contributions. We are all familiar with the scene where the office geishas send out memos asking us to contribute to some charity in a city where our company wishes to do future business. We've all heard the speech from the guy representing the PAC of a favored local politician and seen that after the employees contribute, that guy gets a very big promotion. We are familiar with the math of large bonuses for executives based on performance numbers built on employee-contributed hours of unpaid overtime while these same executives tell us that the company can only afford a 2% raise for those who shouldered the burden of the miraculous turn around.

So it really comes down to picking someone's pocket in these corporate initiatives unless contributions are matched in kind by all and by percentage of income. Otherwise, the next time the call goes out for these contributions, tell them that you are happy to do your community work, but that you will donate where the branding of the effort does the most good: give at church. Advancing the career of your minister seldom increases his or her income, career potentials, or customer base. It just goes to where it will do the most good with the least claims.

And if your employers subtly or overtly insinuate that contributions and company-brandable effort are required for consideration of leadership potential, do as the subject of the cited article, General Powell, did when faced with such: seek other employment. That is the hallmark of leadership: lead by example.

It's Good To Know. It Feels Like Me.

Being unemployed is scary. Being unable to find work would be a lot scarier. Scary can be good though. I'm out finding gigs to play. So far, so good. It seems my kind of act is back in vogue. There are all of these little coffee shops and new classy joints opening in town, and they are all looking for the soiled smoky voice sound that too many years of screaming over the top of electric guitars produces, except they want it over the top of an acoustic guitar so they can talk.

They're conversing. That's good. It's a sign of the times. I've seen this before. This was the mood when I was 18 and first playing in the bars. There was an unpopular war on then, trust in the government was low, and there was the sense that maybe people should stop watching the news and start talking to each other. Culture is marvelously adaptive. Businesses and art somehow blend into the need for a place to talk, furnish the sounds, the coffee, the magazines and the comfortable chairs. This possibly scares the lunatic right wing fringe. It should. It means common sense is overcoming fear, one coffee at a time.

Here is something personally neat for me. I'll quote it and those of you with some understanding of the Southern music scene can relate:

From: Dbluebird@aol.com [mailto:Dbluebird@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 2:51 PM
To: cbullard@hiwaay.net
Subject: Re: [BlueBirdCafe Calendar Request]

>>Do I need to audition again to be included in the rotation for Sunday Writer's Night?

Len,

Though it's been 10 years since you played on a Sunday Writers Night, you scored well enough not to have to audition again. Just call any Tuesday - Friday from 11 AM - 4 PM to rebook on a Sunday.

-Fran (Bluebird Cafe)

It's good to know. So, May 13, 7:30 CST, back to the Bluebird with three original songs and no chatter. It is the scariest gig in the world for reasons you'd have to be a solo songwriter/singer to understand. And one of the best.

Scary can be good. I may be unemployed, but I'm working, and yanno, it feels like me again and that feels good.

The Mean Drum

Most nightclub music pros can tell you about gigs where the crowd is large, the drinks are flowing, the dancers are frenzied and heat and humidity push them all to a sort of madness. At that point, a band can choose to mellow them down for the trip home, or push the beat harder and louder. I call that pumping the Mean Drum. The drummer snaps as hard on the snare as he can and we play sounds that are as raw and fierce as flesh and electronics can emit.

If we play the Mean Drum, fights break out either on the dance floor or in the parking lot afterwards. Experienced bands don't do it. They've paid the price for it in smashed gear, broken jaws, and occasionally sending a mate or friend to the hospital or the morgue. At the point of that kind of crazyiness, we play ballads, turn down, or end the performance. It's just smart.

In America, for the last eight years, we have been pumping the Mean Drum. Yes we were attacked on 9/11, but it started before that. It's been a dominant beat in American society for years.

If we continue to beat the Mean Drum, mean is all we will see and experience.

Look at the rise in social violence lately. Society resonates like a drum head and all of the other drums in the kit resonate with the snare if it is pounded hard enough. This pushes the edge cases closer to and off the edge.

Then students shoot principals, psychopaths shoot young students, and so on. We saw this same movie towards the end of the Vietnam era as the political rhetoric ratcheted up the 'us OR them' thinking. Accepting it as a norm of modern politics as both Cheney and Clinton suggest we do in the Washington Post article is not only dumb, it is social suicide with the innocents sacrificed first on the altars of egomania and the lust for power.

It is time to quit beating on the mean drum. As we learned from the early years where all we used were email lists, ignore trolls and they go elsewhere. Laughter is still the best medicine. That is why the most important political pundit for today's youth is Jon Stewart. That's a clue.

The More Stuff You Own

The more stuff you own, the more your stuff owns you.

It is the undeniable fact of modern life that we obsess over what we have, where we got it and how big a space we have to control to keep it. We work longer, harder and consume more than we thought we ever could when we were 12 years old and believed a well-read comic book collection was the ultimate expression of our mojo.

Cultures are classified by the stuff they throw away. Ask any archaeologist and they'll tell you their careers are made by digging through ancient garbage dumps. So your fame after this life is defined by the garbage you dispose of. Consider that the next time you and your significant other are arguing about keeping Great Grandma's piano that can no longer be tuned and therefore played. Maybe it is time to memorialize her in the museum of greatness: the local town landfill. At least then you could start on your own memorial by purchasing the spinet the family down the street is keeping in their minivan because they've run out of room in their four bedroom split level with the unattached garage and 3000 square foot basement.

I've read that an American Indian tribe had a custom where members would give away all of their stuff and start over. Today we call that a garage sale and get more money to get more stuff. Garage sales replace malling as one gets older in America. They say the richer we get the more we obsess over quality stuff but corporations have to spend billions every year tearing down malls that are less than ten years old and rebuilding them to keep us coming to shop there. Do you replace your garage in the same location that often? No. You have a garage sale but you rarely sell the garage so it can be hauled away and you definitely never give it away. Somewhere in the function of trading stuff for more stuff, real economics take over.

Except for the uber-wealthy in America. They are the biggest garage sale buyers in all history reflecting a culture that has found it can buy and sell anything except taste and a reasonable government.

If you can get to Christies' next week, you can buy original parts of the Star Trek set (original series) although Paul Allen already owns Captain Kirk's chair. Someday maybe Paul will have the world's highest quality garage sale.

And so it goes.

DealNews! You Rule!

I went to a fun job interview today. To understand why, you have to understand that unlike Silly Valley or Vain Vancouver, I live in one of the hearts of Eisenhower’s military industrial complex. Some interviewers and interviewees wear clothes that at their most liberal would be conservative-gotta-meet-a-client Monday in Silly Valley. Targeted selection questions modeled, scored and integrated into a politically-correct and technically empty script determine rat fir color to confirm that one is the right kind of rat fit to be on a team of rats who have spent more time obtaining degrees than time spent with their spouses or children.

Cheese, please?

Today, I was interviewed by a real web company. woooh... It reminds me of the first West Coast conference I went to after years of East Coast conferences. The differences are profound.

This was not a startup. These middle school buddies started in a garage ten years ago a few doors down from where my much older middle school buddies used to hang in their bedrooms hooking Christmas tree lights to a stereo and listening to the Allman Brothers while swapping the wisdom of the Furry Freak Brothers. These guys hooked up MACs, learned to code, and built web pages. They didn't go for venture capital. They budgeted, invested and published. They found a niche, survived the dot.bomb, stuck to their business plan, implemented LAMP not because it was cool but because it was everywhere they needed to be, and hired an accountant who doubles as an office admin.

They offer you a Diet Coke before they get around to brewing coffee, have machines sitting next to the office door and office furniture stacked against the wall because they need the space to spread out and work, and otherwise, remind me of garage bands that play their axes, sharpen their chops, record their originals and make it happen while having a helluva good time together. They build multi-platform web pages and enable their customers to buy office equipment cheaper and faster. In other words, without a deep sales teams, planning committees who write studies, scads of ads, moribund meetings and polyphonic professional e-mails, they provide a service and make a profit.

SWUUUUHHH! Take a deeeeeep breath....

It was humbling. I'm not web-ignorant and I certainly have been on the pioneering end of some stuff, but I've never had the moxie these kids have, and that is why they have a successful company interviewing me instead of the other way around. They are completely the opposite of the dour sour greedy little buggers I'd come to know in other circumstances. The guys who interviewed me today were ALMOST apologetic that they were still building their own tools, didn't have ASP.Net, didn't need it and had no intention of buying Ferraris with their first millions if they could buy more gear for their business. They laughed, carried on, swapped stories and all the while asked questions one needs to hear to know this is a serious business but not a religion, a pipe dream or an ego trip.

It was a breath of fresh air.

I may not get the gig but I hope I get to visit with them again. It's good to smell ambition mixed with sweat equity and hard headed practical programming chops instead of meetings drenched in lattes and sarcasm. I've seen a few bands like this web company. They were the ones who made it and kept it and enjoyed it. They take their angsts to the skateboard park rather than the shrink. They succeed the old fashioned way: turn, burn and return.

Hey DealNews! You rule! Thanks for a great morning and the Diet Coke and the cup of coffee!

Feeds and Seeds for Thoth

Tim Bray posts http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/09/21/Atomic

That is worth a read if any of my ex-company colleagues are keeping up with this blog. I suggest you follow his link to that review he cites by a US agency. It is a thorough piece of work and relevant to your product lines.

I promised a blog on targeted selection techniques. A good friend gave me some literature to review and I will post that blog when I finish the review. It's an easy system to game but interesting in what it sets out to achieve.

Getting Credit: Fight for It

Tim Bray writes that WikiPedia is trumping other more authoritative resources. I've noted this myself some time back and have been commenting on the effects of PageRank since it was introduced on XML-Dev and elsewhere. Inbound linking is a popularity contest. It doesn't confer authority. It confers perception. Perception is NOT reality. Reality requires sustainability. Let me give an example.

Kurt Cagle writes a blog on XML and eXist. He uses a comparison. Should he cite others or can one assume the idea, once out in the wild, can be claimed by anyone? Is it plagiarism? (I'm not accusing. Kurt is a friend. This is just an example.)

http://mailman.ic.ac.uk/pipermail/xml-dev/1998-August/005720.html

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/xml-dev/1397752

http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200602/msg00130.html

Those are three of a number of hits in order of idea emergence provided by Google and I suppose, PageRank. What does this mean?

Credit isn't just about 'showing up'. It is about checking sources. This is why PageRanking works and why it doesn't. In the end, you don't have to be 'given' credit; you have to fight for it. I mentioned some yerars ago on XML-Dev that a program that abstracted ideas from various sources and did a thorough comparison against all published resources would yield a different history of the sources of the ideas than are commonly accepted. Given the potentials in our ranked search systems and overreliance on the web, it's time the search vendors developed such a utility. It would answer a real need and might be a competitive discriminator if the definition of 'authoritative' rougly equals 'original'. It doesn't but that's a different discussion.

Credit is sustainability. Sustainability trumps authority.

A Good Week: The Job Hunt

I’ve had a good week. After the separation anxiety passes, a euphoric feeling of freedom emerges from the constraints of the past job, and an enthusiasm for the things to come. This is exciting even when the outcome is not yet known.

I haven’t been job hunting in over twenty years. That process has changed as have most business processes due to the web. Consolidated job sites enable one to submit a resume once to a series of forms then use job jars to search among the various client companies and submit to all of them. In some, you can set up ‘bots to track new listings and send email to inform you in case you want to add these to the jar. The same technology that powers shopping enables us to shop ourselves. This evolves toward a means to continuously shop one’s services to find the highest bidder, I suppose. Pretty neat, really.

At other sites one discovers the practice of web design is still done by inexperienced programmers. The most common mistake I’ve seen is phone number entry fields that need a specific format and error out without informing the user what the correct format is. The best sites enable one to load in the digital resume one has carefully constructed using the templates provided by word processors. Otherwise, it is a cut and paste process.

The web is fast between the hours of 4AM and 6AM. Since you may have the time to nap in the afternoon, getting up early and doing the online work during these hours is a good idea. The house is quieter too and if you are using a dial up line, you aren’t holding the phone hostage during the day when prospective employers call to arrange interviews.

Interviewing techniques have evolved but I’m not too sure if these have improved. There is less emphasis on discovering the job skills and more questions aimed at discovering the fit of the potential employee. Some of this is amateur psychology but it cuts both ways because one learns a lot about the potential employer. They seem to come in groups of three playing good cop/bad cop with one silent observer. It’s worth going on interviews just to practice this game. Nervousness is normal. I do suggest that when you are called for the interview, you get the job posting number and find the web listing. It usually has enough information to start a web search that reveals enough information to prepare answers and questions. Since practically all of the interviews end with an opportunity to ask questions, you should prepare. Where I feel like I’ve not done a good job are the “Do you have questions for us?” and “Here’s a chance for you to tell us why we should hire you.” Most of us don’t think about selling ourselves, aren’t that practiced, probably have developed a distaste for people who do that as a habit, and may feel that it is too easy to scare people. Get over that but this is why it is a good idea to prepare.

Because of the consolidation of software around web services, there are a lot of jobs where the languages and experience are virtually identical. ASP.Net is the big winner here. I’ve seen one listing for ADA and one can easily predict what that job is about. There are still plenty of Java and C++ jobs but in the area where I live, Microsoft rules. If you know a bit about my hometown, there is an emerging and obvious trend there. If you are someone who got stranded in a legacy language (say Foxpro, C, and even C++) it is time to move on with the training, and if the job situation at your current employer is still legacy work, move on from there.

As the insurance ad says, life comes at you fast. Life is not about sitting around; it’s about getting around.

On Innovation

Tim and Nick Carr are having a shootout on innovation.

Tim says: fortunes are made, and industry titans are built, where management isn’t really looking, almost always. The big pieces of innovation come out of garages and low-rent offices in lousy locations, and they’re produced by small groups without much management backing. It can be done at big companies (the business personal computer at IBM, Java at Sun) but then it’s always in an off-the-mainstream skunkworks. Nobody—I repeat, nobody—is smart enough to predict where the next big strategic innovation is going to come from...

Wrong. Planners do this sort of stuff every day.

I don't quarrel with Nick's 'merely competent' argument, but

this bit
is off target:

Nick says: companies should narrow their sights when it comes to innovation: "You need to bring the same kind of discipline to deciding where you innovate as you'd bring to any other kind of management question. You want to make sure that you innovate in those few areas where innovation can really pay off and create a competitive advantage and not innovate in other areas where it won't pay off.

They should narrow where they will invest, not what they should be thinking about.

They both miss the target because what they are really arguing about is not the processes of innovation but who should get credit and who should pay. The first is about face management and the second is about resource management. They are both right from those related but distinct points of view.

Anyone who is really involved in advanced research such as DARPA can tell you that you don't invent strategic change, or buy strategic innovation: you breed it.

That takes time, some loose planning and a number of generations. You will get both crops that do what you required and some happy accidents. Readiness is everything and that is absolutely a Zen-like experience because you have to confront your own prejudices about what is successful and what is utilitarian.

DARPA doesn't want the crops. They want the seeds.

It's A Dog's Life

I've been asked why I quit my job. It's a reasonable question, so here goes.

It's a dog's life. I stuck my neck out for a fence jumping German Shepherd and a French Poodle. The Shepherd rolled over but the Poodle went for my throat. So even if it is expensive and hard on my family, I went home to hang out with my trustworthy Sheltie because otherwise, the Poodle would have lost her dog house and the Shepherd will still be jumping fences.

Dogs will be dogs.

Why The Top of the Long Tail Fails

Tim Bray opines

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/09/11/Nine-Eleven

linking to Bruce and saying what some way out of the top of the long tail curve have been saying for five years: terrorism is mainly a law enforcement problem. I'm glad to see the top of the tail finally gets it, particularly some that were rooting for the US to go stomping into Iraq, guns blazing, while their citizens sat safely at home blogging.

It really doesn't surprise me that the so called top bloggers tend to be the slowest at actually 'getting it' on almost any topic. That is what a inbound-link based system does: it popularizes an idead the same way a media machine does it and it creates the same fisheye lens effect that distorts even as it appears to cover more information. The long tail is a negative power law when it comes to early detection of important emergent effects. The curve is inverted.

Emergent effect comes from the edges of the network, but that means in the beginning, it is a very weak signal and if the effect of the fisheye is to marginalize and distort, it prevents it from being noticed until it moves to the center, to wit, into a top blogger's blog.

So it keeps us from doing the smart thing early because the center is by effect and definition, slow and often mediocre thinking. After so many years of studying information systems and their en masse effect, I repeat what I've said before: the values of one's values are all that is really important because judgement and justice are individual contributions into a system that by its very nature has neither of these as native qualities.

Take a position, take a chance, pick up the prize or the consolation of knowing you are giving it your personal best, and not just following the herd over the cliff.

The Path From 9/11: Respect for the Law

Today we remember the terrible morning of the planes and the towers. We remember where we were and whom we talked with, what was said, what was felt and with wisdom, what has come of all that. Perhaps we watched the misguided "Path to 9/11" last night, or perhaps as I did with my son, we watched the Ted Koppel's Discovery Channel program of a live debate with some of the decision makers and the families of the victims.

At a point in that program, a man who was a co-author of the Patriot Act stepped forward to say that President Bush has wisely used power not granted under US law and when challenged, has demanded that Congress give him such power. The man said that this was right, that the commander-in-chief should always be given such power under such circumstances. The Republicans in the group could be heard saying "Strong! Very strong." I commented to my son that this was the 'Strong Man' argument often heard in such historical crises. I told him that such cries have led to three strong men being granted unprecedented power, in recent memory, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, but also in historical memory, George Washington.

I asked him what the difference among these men was. He said immediately, the first two wanted the power and Washington didn't because he knew it was wrong. I asked him if there were other differences and we talked about that.

We surmised that Washington not only knew it was wrong, he understood that he had the time to work by other means. While Hitler and Mussolini gained that power citing external existential threats just as we hear from the Republican Party today, Washington knew the external threats were an ocean away and in that time, it may as well have been the Moon because though it was possible to be threatened, that threat took enormous resources to make good. Today, that threat can be within our borders in hours, but that does not change the nature of the difference among these men who were granted great power in a time of crisis. The difference though is still the immediate and strongest threat, as the Republicans say, the existential threat.

Washington saw a different existential threat: the threat from within.

Though the British would come back, Washington, as military leader knew it would take time and if during that time, the young nation destroyed itself from within with bickering and competition between the States and the powers of the central government, if the military did not yield to the Congress and the will of the people, if we became a nation of power but not law out of fear of each other, then everything the Revolutionaries had fought for would be lost, and deservedly lost. So Washington used his power to build the nation, to prepare the nation and when the British did return as he knew they would, the leaders of the nation and the nation itself could withstand the losses and repel the invasion. America became a great nation by working within the law thus enabling the law to be the dissolver of fear from without and more importantly, fear from within.

As we approach the midterms, we will be exercising the right passed down from Washington's generation, the right to choose our leaders and not to inherit them or be inherited by them. As we make that choice, look to the men and women who as Washington did, respect and are bound by the law, and are not proclaiming themselves to be the law. For only as we make that choice wisely will be preserve the good that has made of us a great nation respected throughout the world and feared by the enemies of goodness; a nation of laws and not of men.

As one gentleman quoted during the program from deToqueville, "America is great because America is good. When America is no longer good, it will no longer be great."

August Is Brutal

August is a brutal month. In one month, I’ve left a job, my band mate has contracted lung cancer, my former colleague, Rebecca Addams, dies in a plane crash in Kentucky, and I’ve contracted one very nasty cold. It is definitely time to count my blessings and work on a new attitude.

I can’t believe the news about Rebecca. She was a kind, funny, good soul. One of the last projects I worked on was for her. We never know, do we?

Hug your loved ones and remember what the Good Book says: tomorrow is promised to no one.

Universal Web Access

The promise of a New South (as in the United States) has long been bedeviled by the very concentrations of wealth that spawned the term. In short form, the complete takeover of Southern politics by the combined forces of the noveau riche and the evangelical right wing which finds such fertile ground in the native traditional culture stymies progress in providing the very means by which a democratic society is created: exchange of information. While declaring surpluses and tax cuts, the areas of the South that could benefit most immediately from access to the Internet are twenty-five miles from a browser.

Internet access and skills today define literacy. Those left behind in this information revolution cannot succeed in today's job market or even their own culture. To be uninformed is to be dispossessed.

The information revolution that we speak of so powerfully as a transformative force for other countries such as China isn't available to the rural South without investments from State government and far sighted planning. It is achievable but that requires policy and leadership.

I had a chance to chat with Lieutenant Governor Lucy Baxley yesterday. She is the Democratic Party candidate for Governor in a State where all of the money is betting on the Republican candidate. I was very impressed with Mrs Baxley. The initiatives she proposes look to the future of the State of Alabama. While the Republicans are continuing their tired tactics of isms and distortion, Lucy Baxley is providing a clear-minded and bold but practical approach to the challenges we face at the dawn ofthe 21st century.

I was particularly impressed with her eagerness to begin enabling Internet access to the rural residents so that their children wil lbe better prepared for the 21st century economy. If information exchange is the definition of democracy, such an initiative brings both knowledge and democracy to every citizen as a right sustained by good government.

I admired her character and ethics in saying she did not have all the answers for getting this done,but insisting that just as we had to wire the rural South for electricity not that long ago, we had to bring the information highway by starting now and solving the problem one step at a time.

While this a State election probably of not much concern to the web community, I wonder if candidacies such as hers are not golden opportunities for the open source community to advance its own economic model with ideas for how such rural literacy and senior citizen access can be achieved.

What can open source provide to make such a promise achievable and sustainable? What must we do to make it open to all who wish to learn and achieve? Inclusiveness and transparency are the twin horses of open source. Inclusiveness and transparency are the twin goals of the Baxley campaign. Whatever the political pundits say, we who have the brains and the knowledge have left the choices for the future of our communities for too long in the hands of those who believe that proprietary control preserves their wealth even if at the cost of our future. It's good to win in Boston, but American political power is in the South and so is the red state base of ignorance.

While nothing will change that tomorrow, only education has a chance of changing that at all. I would appreciate your insights into the challenges of bringing the Internet into the rural South where driving to a library every day as a means for a child to do their homework isn't a practical answer.

Perhaps the Googles, Red Hats, Suns and IBMs of the world have an answer. Perhaps the Gates Foundation will help as well. Meanwhile, perhaps the collective brain power of the web can help with ideas as to how this can be achieved.

What will it take to create a model for universal access that is realizable, scalable, sustainable and replicable to other parts of the world?

The Point of Uncertainty

A friend sent me this link

http://www.aish.com/movies/PhotoFraud.asp

to a video that purports to expose fraud on the part of Reuters and other national news organizations. Because I have no way to vette these, I leave it to the reader to form their own conclusions. I have opinions about the means.

Manipulation of the media, spinning the message, denying the obvious, affirming the absurd leads one to trust nothing, and believe no one. Maximum ambiguity creates maximum uncertainty and that is the precise goal of demagoguery, because then only a small truth is needed to create an amplified and incendiary effect.

In orbital mechanics there is a phenomenon known as a lagrange point. In a lagrange point, all of the gravitational forces of different bodies in the system are cancelled out. A lagrange point is a location for a parking orbit that enables telecommunications satellites to remain ‘geostationary’ if no extra force acts to move them. Tiny perturbations are cancelled out with tiny forces. On the other hand, it is the point of maximum uncertainty because the tiniest force can be used to push any object in the lagrange point to favor one of the opposing forces. This is the principal for deep space probe navigation known as low energy transport. It is the phenomenon that characterizes commodity products in economics, and the means to sell the unsellable.

It is also the means to create permanent conflict. No rational self-interested people will pursue their own destruction for multiple generations unless subtle and continuous means are applied to shape the patterns by which they observe and react to that end. The push comes from all sides and keeps them in a continuous uncertainty until a tiny force, a tiny moment of momentum pushes them toward one of the local attractors.

Why is it that peace is the least certain position of the opposing forces in the mideast?

The solution will be to put international forces on the ground between the combatants and as a policeman going to a domestic violence call, the probability that both sides will fire on the policeman is quite high. Then ever greater forces will be put into the region with an ever widening conflict, or the international forces will withdraw and the violence will go on locally until all are dead or exhausted. It is reasonable to assume that as long as the US provides armaments to Israel and Syria and Iran provide armaments to Hezbollah or the latest flavor of Arab violence, the killing will continue. At some point, the Iranians or an outside source will provide Arabs with their own nuclear weapons to match the ones already in the Israeli arsenal.

Will they risk what follows? Will they destroy the holy land once and for all?

I don’t know because I can’t conceive of any Heaven worth going to through a garden of nuclear devastation that destroys the holy places of three world religions. What God greets one as a hero if one has destroyed eternal Jerusalem for eternity?

Open Source: The Plan

A comment on the adoption of open source by governments and the military:

That process has been underway for almost 16 years. US DoD and allies have been sponsoring internal development via contractors for many years. One of the first SGML hypertext system code bases was purchased by the US Army at that time and is still managed, maintained and developed by USAMICOM and contractors. The reason was simple: transparency of the code base ensures that features are continuously improved and secured against IP threats or malicious code. Transparency is a survival trait. It occurs naturally in certain kinds of systems in certain kinds of ecosystems, but not all.

Cultivation of ecosystems and low-energy transport models are both models of non-linear systems with common evolutionary control types. A cluster of traits acts similarly to attractor basins with an evolution towards different semantic/functional clusters as energy is applied continuously or discretely. The cycles can be changed by local energy applied at strength (eg, a Hohman transfer) or by applying smaller bursts and using force vectors of multiple basins to amplify the change where the force vectors attract, push, or cancel. Maps across such basins model the evolving orbits of any situation-aware system that self-directs. This is a model for trading on time and energy to direct evolution via intelligent choice.

Although the hosting systems (eg, operating systems) could not be secured, reasonable assurance could be provided that this would not be a threat source and in any case, the host systems would not open fast enough to scale, so the persistence of the monopoly systems of the time provided the stable base. The opening effect in these would take a longer cycle but would eventually evolve toward the same attractors that create commodity lagrange points.

Once the switching costs (cost of basin change) begin to orbit closer to markets where commoditization creates lagrange points (minimal switching costs), transparency emerges naturally as the monopolies face the linearly increasing costs of loss leader research. As the logistic curve narrows, so does the available talent. Ideas and costs are inversely proportional. Monopolistic basins begin to lose force in commoditized markets unless they control distribution. The Internet by its very design and therefore, cultivar traits, would enable smaller systems (think messages) to become very difficult to control with respect to impeding distribution. as long as the necessary ideas are available (the flaw of abundance economics, btw).

Like life, the contest is not fair but everyone gets to enter.

If you know your hypermedia history, you know that military applications were the earliest sponsorship source and particularly with regard to markup applications. While there were more public projects such as the Oxford Dictionary work, these were small by comparison. Modern hypermedia emerges for the most part from the deep pockets of the military-industrial complex guided by the deft hand of DARPA, ONR, USAF and US Army research investments.

The Web got the touchdown but the drive down the field was government work.

And that's the problem. Government work is expensive, slow and requires too much planning, management and incentive to be cost effective except in the incubation stages of technologies. Scale achieves simplification and reduction in costs while improving economic conditions. In the beginning of a technology while it holds a defensive/offensive advantage, it is kept close to the emergent economy. When it must scale, it must go commercial.

At the point the Internet was taken out of military logistics stockpiles and made available for commercial exploitation, its function as a command, control and communications was understood to be ineffective in that form. To become effective, it needed to be world wide, integrated, interoperable, and responsive to OSSINT technologies. As the satellite systems had shown, transparency is a key element of peaceful or offensive diplomacy. The technologies for warfare of the late 20th century had become so complex and decisive that only transparency provided a chance of avoiding the inevitable mistake or madness that leads to their application.

There is no perfect solution to technologies evolving faster than the understanding of their application. Technology evolves on a short cycle relative to the evolution of the understanding of strategic deployment and political will. In metaphor, there is a new car every year, but there hasn't been a new model of the user for 6000 years. Like the car, the fastest understanding emerges when the types of application increase (scope is a diverse population) and the reach scales exponentially. That is the basin behavior of commercial systems: it trades on functions for survival. This is a growth strategy; it increases the population but is not necessarily a fitness trait. With function comes complexity and this can weaken sustainability by narrowing choice. Every feature added perturbs the orbit with respect to the distribution.

In commercial systems, the competitive advantage required for survival is holding close control over resources for resources, not the implementations, but the ideas. This leads to IP and to incentives to retain and manage productive talented staffs. This is capitalism. It works as a means to create scaling effects because it evolves competitive traits for creating markets and acquiring market share. The feedback of reward for value is the engine of commercial scale at every level. It has disadvantages because securing competitive advantage reduces transparency required for scaling systems with diverse populations. To offset this disadvantage where it occurs, it is necessary to use the emergent budgets to stimulate cultivar that do exhibit the desirable trait and breed these with suppliers from the wild that have the necessary survival traits.

As hoped, the release of the Internet for public use has achieved that in the emergence of open source systems: a development and business model that mirrors the original goals of Internet communications, survivable communications systems where the locus of control can shift axiomatically if any part of the system is damaged or destroyed emerged to ensure the replication of that system at a rate that ensures an evolutionary stable strategy for sustainability. Open source emerges from an ESS with survivability as its goal. This resonates on the other emergent basin: the user populations.

Transparency across populations invites understanding but it cannot guarantee it. The understanding that diversity is the key to surviving and growing must be as well scaled and reached. Our tools cannot do this for us, but if these systems are as Doug Englebart described them, a means to augment human intellect, they are our tool to apply for growth or destruction. Choose wisely. Fitness is not what is most elite. The elite cultivar does not scale because it does not survive. A surviving system combines the weak traits from the edges of the network continuously. This is why simpler less complex products often evolve by means that are healthier for the ecosystem itself. It is responsive, agile, and adept.

Open source: at this point in history, it is not only logical to do this, it's the plan.

Hard Things

Some things are hard. When the time comes to make the really hard decisions, one has to admit one is never free of the bias that is mammal, human, individual, and alone. These are the decisions that build, bind, activate and destroy. And they are lonely to make.

Two bits of wisdom, one bitter, one sweet:

o When the rules aren't the same for everyone, there are no rules. There is only fear. Fear kills the mind. When the mind is gone, one is animal. To overcome the animal, overcome fear.

o When one loves one does the right thing to the last thing, and if that does not succeed, one leaves for one has failed, but there is no shame for lovc.

I Need A Job

The title says it. I need a job.

Can travel but cannot relocate. Please reply to cbullard@hiwaay.net

My coding skills are rusty but my knowledge of XML, X3D/VRML, are excellent. I am a skilled analyst and writer. I have spent the last 10 years doing business development work in the public safety industry for the Intergraph Corporation.

Is Sustainability More Important Than Authority?

In a network of reputation management systems, one assumes that authority is the dominant metric for choosing a service. Yet over time, there is a tendancy for all services to reach a rough equilibrium in terms of information goodness (validatible and high correctness scores). It is akin to the problem of picking a news cast in any media. If all reputations for correctness are roughly equal, likability plays a strong role in reputation management.

But if mashups are the brave new application world, then the dominant metric is sustainability of the service over some lifecycle of use by similar and different applications. The tendancy of the system to evolve orbits around deep attractors (as in deep pockets) has not changed, thus the naïve but rough long tail economics continues unabated.

Note that while XML is agnostic to these dimensions of the hyperspaces of web information domains, it becomes doubly difficult for any specific-domain language to emerge unless it has high scores for sustainability. I suspect that this is a contributor to the failures of domain specific browsers that include all semantics in a strongly-coupled package of components. Their niche is self-limiting and not ESS-immune given the infecting nature of the loosely-coupled confabulations that attack from the edges of the information ecology. This explains why many weak semantics and apparently flawed strategies for creating applications can thrive in the face of better constructed and well-funded projects initially. If the locals have a rapid replacement rate, they cannot be unhosted.

Intelligence doesn't scale. Yet as a service, if it is tightly focused and sustainable, it cannot be unhosted until commoditized. At that point, its orbit crosses Lagrange points where small perturbations can drive the connection to other systems.

Savvy systems defend resources for resources until they become loss leaders.

Metta

"I metta man? What man? The man with the power? What power? Hoodoo! Hoodoo? You do? Do what? Metta man! What man? The man with the power!"

The world writhes in agony tonight. Some for the images they see. Some for being those images. One may look in the mirror to find the fault, or one may ask of the receiver that which makes them happy without fault. However we choose, the agony is of our making, so we make a hell for ourselves. Still, hell is a place we make for our torment and if we wish to be peaceful, we must begin the path away from hell.

Here are helpful means to navigate a path out of hell:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/buddharakkhita/wheel365.html

Note well: all the qualities of metta are the qualities of inbound links because they can only be validated by the receiver. To receive, others must care; to give, one is not other.

At The Point Of Value

Tim Bray says:

"But Simon’s right, too, that a lot of money is swirling around; and in particular he’s right that the money happens when the software goes into production."

At the point of value: the software market is replicating the evolution of the music market at the advent of cheap home recording. Prior to that, distribution in the form of fixed media (paper and vinyl), was controlled from point of creative act to point of sale. Once replication or copying technology is in the hands of the purchaser, control by distribution morphs in to control of release value.

The cost is the cost of innovation. In community efforts, this cost is inexpensive by comparison to closed efforts. Open source is still a loss-leader but that is insignificant to the cost of a closed system loss-leader.

The cost of content is less for the complexity of the product, but in an ad based revenue system, quality still requires professional work. The cost of content falls but the competitive edge is best tools. For content, the competition has not changed; the scale of production required has. More can do but it is a market based on small differentiation of the same styles with a slow evolution from cross-breeding styles and saving serendipity. Small teams can do mighty works, but cool counts.

A software market like the music market thrives on Hits. The problem for the very large companies is they need too many to feed the kids and don't really get a subscription model: it requires a high rate of change to get more from less. The closer the software is to the core of the platform, the lower the rate of change. A subscription model is still an expensive subscription. To make this work, the tools built on top must diversify and become smaller and more adaptible. In music, VST improved the lot of all of the follow-on producers of plugins.

Unless the core is common.

So far, the software market won't step up to this except in the domain of open source. Sun makes too much core and not enough plugins. It carries too much community overhead and not enough follow on software.

Planet Quest Website: Brilliant!

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab's PlanetQuest website is brilliant. This is a stunning proof of the power of X3D as an educational format that is beautifully surreal presenting complex information compactly. The techniques applied are ingenious but easy to use and comprehend. This is the professional level of multimedia web content production that X3D needs.

The Wirefusion production approach to integrating text, 2D and 3D is straightforward. They build one dominant object and explain it in the style of a product presentation. Each topic is presented in a mode perfectly suited to it so navigating it is childishly simple and enrapturing.

My only nit here is the sound is noisy. Streaming sound is still the biggest quality gap in the X3D. Multitrack sound streams that enable the spatial capabilities of real-time 3D such as proximity based mixing and soundFollowers aren't here. On the other hand, this sound is a vast improvement over what we had to use ten years ago so I am still blown away. Personally, loops bore me unless other sound nodes are used with them, for example, an option to have the text entries read by a human voice (not a synth). It only takes a little work to record the voices. I understand the bandwidth vs click through problems, but as a musician/actor, you can blame a guy for wanting. :-)

With only that nit, I recommend this site to anyone, but particularly to X3D authors and site designers as a to-be-studied example of doing it right.

Anywhere I'm Not

Some say love is when two people want to be together and do what they must to make that happen. That's the good stuff but not the only stuff. Sometimes love is when you desperately want to be with someone but you know that it has zero chance of working out. Desperation becomes frustration. You will hurt them and by bitter experience, you know you can't stop this from happening. It is a terrible dark thing to know about oneself, a cold confrontation with the uglyness that desire becomes, a disease of the blood and then the soul.

So you take any measures to be sure that she is somewhere you're not, and pray for the Faerie Queen to release you from the tree.

X3D: Real Time Contexts As Emergent Event Sets

Real time contexts are event sets. Events are strictly ordered given a simple locale but may overlap given multiple locales so event order is not the only signature. When identifying a situation semantic in an emerging phase, event order is very important but so is proximity of multiple instances of event types. Say you have a system of sensors, you may be tracking the order that these send alerts to determine time and speed of some object. You may be monitoring multiple sensor clusters and correlating these values in a higher dimensional space.

To identify an emergent event and dispatch on warning (roughly analogous to launch on warning), you have to be able to assign force values to the events because the emergence of a situation may be presaged by weak signals in combination with strong signals. Proximity is a scalar for weak-to-strong events.

Proximity is one of the signals that you monitor given a locale ontology to make a threat assessment. In an intelligence assessment, you may have multiple intelligence types and fusing these into actionable information where the responder assets are limited is the key to effective dispatch. Otherwise, all you are doing is running to false alarms although false alarms are also a key piece of information. Eventually, all of these signals coalesce and are assigned a value from a code list.

The tricky bit here is learning to get all of this information from multiple XML streams emanating from different information source types (think HUMINT, OSSINT, SIGINT, etc). If the control is emergent, then it may just be an Xlink type, at least, that is one way to do it. Metadata can be emergent information, in fact, likely is.

To Find Peace

I have everything I ever wanted. If that is not the same as what I deserve, then that is good because I am sure there are many punishments for those who get ALL they deserve. I pursued justice as I see it, not as I have been told to see it. I pursued pleasure as I could afford it, not merely as I have desired it. In this combination, I have done my duty. Is that not the way of the temple?

Such wonderful things I have seen and known. Is it not enough to drink from the river, to bathe in the river, to watch it fill the ocean? What good comes from trying to hold it or claim it as one's own? None. Knowing this and accepting it is a way to peace. In peace, one may eventually know enlightenment and there is no higher good than that for a human.

Om shanti. Hari om.

The Second Best Revenge

They say that success is the best revenge. It is no doubt true, but if it is not to be personal success, then the second best revenge is to help one who has wronged you attain their most precious desire where that is something they are not prepared to have or do.

The State of Denial

Here in the heart of the Red states, there is only one word for the right wing noveau riche Republicans that make up the majority:

Denial.

Last month we had a Statewide election with an anti-gay marriage ammendment on it. Keep in mind, same sex marriage is already illegal in Alabama so this ammendment was as redundant as G.W. Bush's left ear. Why was it on the ballot? I think it was the usual politics of distraction, but it was also a way to rally the faithful. How did it do?

It passed with an 89% approval. Yep, nine out of ten voters approved the measure.

These same people are holding rallies to show their support for G.W.s war record and still trying to keep the Dixie Chicks off the local radio.

On the other hand, the free rangers are getting louder. I was on jury duty last week sitting in the holding pen (the venire room) when the announcement of G.W.'s grandstand visit to Iraq came on CNN. A lady in front of me guffawed and the man in front of her called her unpatriotic. Can you say, screwed up? The man, in this case. The woman, it turned out, was a soldier fresh from Afghanistan and she chewed a hole in that man that he couldn't cover with his flag. According to her the troops' morale doesn't improve when politicians come for their photo ops using Amercian soldiers as props. She said it makes them angry because of everything they have to do to protect them and it takes them away from their jobs of keeping each other alive.

He moved to another chair. I thanked her for going.

Still, the denial brigade is far from done and desperation in the face of the inevitable collapse of their worldview which at this point I can only describe as willfully dumb and naively evil, they will become mean. I've seen this movie before. The same people who believed in Nixon waited for a chance to resurrect their egos and their ideologies. These people will too. Stupid people aren't smart enough to admit a mistake in their worldview, and too worldly to give it up for others.

If the nation continues to elect this crew, we may deserve them. There are no excuses left and the State of Denial is full of immigrants from the rest of the red states. I don't see any Statesmen on the horizon except Colin Powell, and he is too smart to want their jobs.

X3D And Ontological Space

X3D and Ontological Space

In an X3D world, the emergent engine is the proximity sensor
because it is a scalar identity of a location and locations
organize the semantic tensor: the objects and methods of the
spaces and the objects they contain.

The location organizes the ontology of the space. The distance
organizes the relationships and force per related set. The
distance is scalar by position and velocity. These values in
a mapped space self-organize by the force per related set as
afforded by the norms of the tensor set, or situation semantic:
a spatio/temporally identified norm.

In an X3D world, events find you.

Growing Up Buttermilk

I grew up in a neighborhood that became a black neighborhood as the 60s social experiment known as Model Cities tore down the ramshackle downtown and moved the blacks that lived there into the better poorer neighborhoods to the north of the city. Slowly but surely, we became the minority living in a minority neighborhood. Some fanciful Hollywood movies attempt to portray the American South during this period, but most concentrate on portrayals of the black side of that experience and many miss the real experience of both sides. It was tough at times but seldom as violent or strained as the movies make it out to be. It was the slow begruding acceptance of each other and the coming to lose our fears and our anger. It was sometimes very funny.

Blacks have a word for a white kid growing up in a black neighborhood: Buttermilk. I grew up Buttermilk. No regrets. I don't think that will be understood by some historical plumbers, but I don't care much. It was a time of stories. Here is one.

While I was in college, my younger brother decided to engage in a horticulture experiment by putting marijuana seeds in my Mother’s wooden flower pot on the front porch of our house. My father made the flower pot for my Mom. Night after night I would come home from class and see it growing there, large and healthy by dint of my Mother’s talented but naïve skills. In such a neighborhood, that shade of green does not go unnoticed but it did go unmolested as my Dad was not someone to trifle with. One night, I decided it was just too risky so at 2AM, I picked up the flower pot and took it into the backyard.

When I came home the next afternoon from class, my Mother greeted me at the door and asked if I knew where her flower was. I hemmed and hawed and finally confessed that it was in the backyard. She asked me why and I told her. She immediately collapsed on the couch in a fit of hysterical laughter. This was not the expected reaction so when she calmed down, I asked why she wasn’t mad. She said she should be but that at that moment my Dad was walking up and down the street asking the neighbors if they knew who had stolen her ‘pot’. I imagine the conversations when he left were quite interesting.

Geishas

Every business has them. The titles vary but the job is the same: they are the donut-dollies of business. They are detailed to ensure that meetings go smoothly, shows are well organized, or lunch with the boss has the right kinds of food depending on who the boss is lunching with. They know who the power players are and who to keep out of the executive suite. Sometimes they are highly paid but most of the times they aren’t. They are overbooked, over promised, underappreciated and if not smart or too young, under something or someone. They are always pretty and ambitious and think that this job that let’s them network at the highest levels of a company ensures them a bright future.

The future?

Geishas are seldom promoted into real management positions of authority even if they are delegated to roles that give them resources to command. The reasons are simple. The geisha by practice is a hostess. Politely handling situations and people is their primary skill set as far as business is concerned. Those years spent in business classes getting advanced degrees don’t mean anything. Like the person skilled in English and editing, those rare gifts outweigh their training and background ensuring they stay in the service industry of business management. In all the time I’ve spent in business, I’ve never seen a geisha promoted to management. That which makes them skilled as hostesses or the perception of their skills cripples them as managers. The aggressive ruthless cunning that must be displayed by the so-called ‘high potential’ candidate is hidden beneath the politeness and allure. Worse, too often, like the donut-dollies in the military, they become the property of the officers.

The good news is a smart geisha learns much from the upper management class about business, and makes friends with their subordinates. If they are really strong, they start their own business and by their own hand become the power player they believe they can be. Yet all too often they remain geishas, and in a job that values their allure, their career begins to wane in their late thirties as age takes away their power. They fight it in the gym, with diets, with makeup, with dresses ten years too young, or with the thousand indignities that accompany submission, but unless they have created a new source of power, they lose.

The aging geisha is the saddest of the sad in a world of values that only knows winners or losers. On the other hand, in a world that prizes the sharp wife, Mom or companion who’s eyes see all, appreciate the gifts of knowledge and fidelity, they can be quite powerful. As in all arts, and the geisha is an artist, the best loss is the loss of desperation that comes when the mirror is not the model. The world is.

Practice and maturity can produce the most sublime works.