People are retarded

Jesus fucking christ! People in this country are fucking retarded! There's a reason why these people believe in creationism, it's because people like the theater owners are shielding these people from the truth. If they weren't shielded from real science maybe they would start thinking for themselves.

The Web is the Computer

There's been talk for a long time that somebody's gonna built a thin client internet access box that's gonna be perfect for most users and people will stop buying PCs and Macs. Every single time a company has come out with one of these boxes they've pretty much sucked. They usually have propriatory operating system, they usually will only run one kind of browser, one kind of email client and they usually have pretty high monthly fees for not getting much. Also, and I think that this is a big factor in their failure: They look like toys. Why would anyone wanting to jump into the great new world of the internet want to start on a toy. It's like a 16 year old wanting his first car to be a scooter.

But, I don't think that these companies are always going to be failing in the future. I'm pretty convinced that somebody will come of with a computer that acts as a thin client to a central server and if they do it right they are gonna make a ton of money and make a lot of people happy.

The vast majority of computer users use a very small subset of its possible applications: 1. Web access (web pages, streaming music, email, maybe rss), 2. Word processing, 3. Speadsheets, 4. Digital photo processing (downloading the photos from the camera, viewing the photos, printing the photos, emailing them to their friends relatives), 5. Tax software. And you know what? None of that needs to be running locally on your computer.

All you would need is a low end modern computer (the Mac Mini would do perfect) and replace the operating system with a version of linux that hides linux from the user. The users doesn't need anything except for a web browser. Nobody should know that it's actually linux that's running the computer. You just see Firefox. There should be a modest hard drive, the 40 gigs on the cheapest Mac Mini is more than enough. You just need enough space to cache your data before it goes to the server and while you're using it.

The expected response would be "Mac OS X Rulez man, why would you get rid of it?". Of course OS X rulez, but it's overkill for a normal user. Why should they have to worry about upgrading their software and (here's the biggy) why should they have to worry about backing up their data? I think that backups (or lack of) are going to cause majors problems for people and they don't even know it. People are switching to digital cameras fast and soon they'll have all of their memories on their hard drive, when it crashes all of that data will be lost. This is something huge that will make people pissed off if huge numbers when they realize what's going on. I think it's going to be talked about in the same way as the Virus/Worm/Spam problem that's going on right now.

Nobody (except me of course) should have to worry about building a networked RAID storage for their house just to store their photos and mp3s. It would cost a lot less money to store them on a central server and access them as needed.

Slashdot just recently ran an post describing Google's possible plans of creating an internet-wide operating system and there were a lot of interesting comments by people who don't seem to get it. For example:

Add on top of that people have routinely rejected thin-clients. Bandwidth and latency are big problems. I expect acess to my files and data with low latency. That means viewing my 8MB digital photos without waiting for part of all of it to come over a wire. I expect it to be available to me all the time.

Google is great, but Google is not above the law of physics. People - just average users - have 20 or 30 or 40 or 80 gb of data on their PCs. No matter how great Google gets, providing this amount of data quickly, securely, with low latency and high-availablity will prove out of reach. Even with Google's highly skilled team of programmers, making a decently response web-mail client, or map tool is a pain in the ass. And it's still below par. Despite how great Gmail is, it's not nearly a rich as Thunderbird or Outlook 2003.

and even better:

The bandwidth just isn't there for video or even industrial photo work. I wouldn't want to run a batch script to modify 5,000 images in the Ajax analog of Photoshop.

Both of these people seem to think that most users use all of the bits from all of their data all of the time. They don't. They listen to one song at a time, which can easily be streamed to them over an broadband connection. They rarely look at the full sized versions of their photos. Of course, they want the rest of the photo to be there if they do decide to zoom in or print, but most of the time they'll either be looking at thumbnails or 1024x768 images which won't be as hard to send over the internet. Just image how awesome it would be to plug your camera into your computer, have it import your photos and then start sending them to a central server where you'll never need to worry about disks crashing. And in response to the last comment, how many people run Photoshop scripts over 5,000 images?

The Large Sketch

I just got back from the paper restorer (restorationist?) and the sketch looks amazing. She said that she finally got it flattened and dried out this last week. She used a new method to flatten it that supposedly worked great. She bought a couple really large sheets of GoreTex and laid them around the drawing, added weights and wet towels. She said that she kept it like this for a day and a half and when she was done she pulled off the GoreTex and it was flat and slightly damp. She showed us the GoreTex and we could see the dirt and grim that came up with it.

She showed us the bottom and it was amazing how she was able to connect all of the pieces. She said that she used Japanese paper and a wheat based glue that can be easily removed if someone else wanted to work on it again in a few hundred years. Her work was really amazing.

The drawing looks so much better when you can see the whole image.

We also talked about different techniques she could use to make it look better. I don't care about it looking perfect but I wanted the unnatural looking tape marks removed. She also said that she'd clean up a few of the white marks that distract us. Overall it's going to still look very old, but that's perfectly fine since it is very old.

We found a framer downtown that is used to working with large pieces like this and we've scheduled them to work on it next week. Hopefully, by the end of the month we'll have this amazing drawing hanging on our dining room wall.

Here are the pictures I took of it today. Some of the pictures are really dark, I did that intentionally to get possible information that wasn't showing up in the normal pictures. I'm pretty sure that when I photoshop them those are going to look the best. If you want any larger versions of the photos (for wallpaper or whatever) just let me know and I'll hook you up.

The Dynamic Web

Yesterday I realized that my HTML skillz are seriously outdated. Someone at work produced a much better interface to a tool that my team has been writing and showed me that I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to the display layer of web applications. I'm used to working in the guts of the program and my rudimentary HTML comes from 1995 when I created my first webpage (with no blinking text I promise). Even the singular word 'HTML' is completely outdated. Now, you at least have to include CSS and Javascript. And that's just to make a normal webpage. So, I'm going to force myself to acquire new design skillz. I'm going to learn CSS and how Javascript fits into everything. I found that I can go here to see what's possible with CSS, here to find a good tutorial, and here to learn about how to represent lists in CSS.

Of course, CSS is important for making a beautiful webpage but I want to make dynamic applications similar to Gmail and Google Maps. So I searched a little more and read a little bit about XmlHttpRequest which is the client-side library that runs a lot of the dynamic web applications. Ajax is another name for how this all fits together.

After a little more searching I stumbled upon an essay that completely misses the point of the dynamic web. I'm not even sure who the author is, the essay format looks like Paul Graham but it isn't clear that he's the author since it's not on his normal site. I shouldn't even waste my time writing about it but it's so amazingly retarded that I have to. Especially since there seems to be a bigger language war brewing than has happened in a while. The gist of the essay is that you need to use Javascript to make dynamic webpages and Javascript is ugly because it requires so many curly braces and Google is screwing up because it's forcing its developers to write in Javascript. The most amazing paragraph must be read in full:

Viaweb did not rely on client-side Javascript, fancy cascading style sheets, or dynamic content generation.[4] Yet it was effective enough that Yahoo! bought it for $49.6 million. $49.6 million will buy a lot of time for reflecting on the things that really matter, such as why Google Maps and GMail represent one step in the road to intellectual and cultural bankruptcy for Google.

He's basically saying that ViaWeb is a better web app than Google Maps or Gmail because Yahoo paid $49.6 million for it. Wow, what completely insane logic. That's so completely retarded logic that I think maybe this might just be a joke. But I can't really be sure since there are people out there making outrageous claims about why their language is really the One True Language™.

Although the more I think about the more I realize that this must be a joke. He's making fun of Paul Graham's outrageous claims by going a little further. Damn, I hate it when I get pulled into stuff like this. I guess I just don't have a good bullshit-detector, I should have read more carefully. I should have detected it in the first paragraph when he says that Google Maps shows that Google is losing the innovative edge. It's actually a really funny essay the second time I read it. The last time I got pulled in was from this essay about the Mac Mini. It took me only a couple paragraphs to realize that it was a joke, but I was so pissed off at him by then. The Building a Linux Desktop for Grandma essay on that site is also really funny. You should read the rest of the essays too.

Augusto Bartolucci

My great grandfather Augusto Bartolucci was an artist in Buenos Aires. I'm pretty sure that most of his work is hung up in my family's houses in Italy and Argentina so I don't think that too many other people know of him. Although in 1990 there was a book about him published in Italy.

I happen to have three of his works: a small painting, a small sketch, and a very large sketch. The large sketch is very large: about 6 ft by 4 ft and it's in pretty bad condition. I'm pretty sure that it had been sitting in a shed in Bolivia for the last 50 years. The humidity and bugs there couldn't have been great for it. I took it to a framing place and they took one look at it and refused to unroll it. They instead gave me the name of a paper conservator. I was actually relieved when they did that, I wasn't sure what I should have done anyways. I was just happy that I had the chance to save this work.

So I took it took it the paper conservator. She recently sent me these pictures of it unrolled (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) which I think are the first pictures of it since my mom first saw it in the early 70s.

I seem to have an odd fascination with conservation. I worry about saving information for the future, I worry about my digital photos, I worry about checking code into source control as soon as I can. Last night I saw a recent Nova about saving the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights and I knew exactly how those conservators felt.