onfocus

I watched Alphaville last night. It's a French science fiction film from 1965. It was sometimes difficult to follow, but it had some great ideas. The story is set in a future technocracy called Alphaville—which is an authoritarian society run by a computer called Alpha 60. An outlander secret agent visits Alphaville posing as a journalist; constantly snapping pictures with an old-fashioned camera. The logical society has eliminated poetry and music, and imposes the death penalty for any display of emotion. The society is run based on probabilities the computer determines. At one point Alpha 60 decides to invade the outlands because it is highly probable they will someday invade Alphaville. Their "bible" is a dictionary, with words like "conscience" declared illegal and removed permanently. And, as one character says, "They are replaced by new words expressing new ideas."

Like any good science fiction, it has me looking at the present in a different way. It's based on a novel by Paul Eluard called Capital of Pain (or Capital of Sorrow depending on the translation). Eluard is one of my favorite surrealist poets and I'd love to read it, though I can't find the book in English at any online stores.

Update: Here's a site devoted to Alphaville with stills and some dialogue. And here's a transcription of the subtitles.

Has anyone out there seen an OBEX file transfer program for Windows? I found one that's part of an open source Linux project, but nothing for Windows so far. My goal is to transfer files between a laptop and cellphone via the IR port. I have no trouble getting files to the phone, but can't get them going the other direction.

After considerable pressure from the anti-scrolling community, I tried to find a place for the mophos that will allow faster visual browsing. I think the net result is win-win. You can click the title for the archives.

There's a new rectangle on the side of this page above called mophos (short for mobile photos). I put it together because I have a new cellphone that has a camera. The phone can send a photo as an email attachment—so I coded an email-to-moblog gateway. The gateway script works with my mail server and strips any attachments, creates thumbnails of any photos, and adds them to the moblog. It's fun to be able to add a photo to the site from anywhere with about 5 cellphone clicks. As you can see, the camera isn't the highest quality, but I'm hoping I can learn how to take decent pictures with it.

This page will show the last five photos and they'll all be archived here. Maybe I'll put together an RSS file of the latest five that has HTML image tags for each.

If you're looking for a sub-$8 cab that goes well with homemade macaroni & cheese, I recommend Smoking Loon. (We picked some up at Trader Joe's the other day. They always have good inexpensive wine.)

I have a somewhat ethical question related to Trackbacks. But I'll start with an explanation. Several sites allow you to add a Trackback manually if you don't have the feature built into your weblog tool. (eg. BlogFodder, BlogPopuli, LazyWeb.) And there's no authentication or identity management that goes along with these. They're open for anyone and everyone to add a Trackback linking to any post on any site. (It relies on the honor system + moderation + IP Logging [hopefully!] from the site administrators.)

As Trackbacks are used now, there's an extra bit of information that doesn't show up on the page: the implication that it was the author of the remote post that initiated the Trackback. Is it wrong to use one of these open forms to trackback a post that you didn't write?

For example, Mena posted about her panel at SXSW and I'd like to see it under that panel's entry at the SXSW Notes Exchange. And I could add it with the open form. But should I? This example is no big deal, and I don't think Mena would mind too much. But I can think of situations where this would be a problem. I think Trackbacks could be used for all sorts of information aggregation, but the author-implication could restrict its use.

The Alties is in its public voting stage. It's very cool that they're using instant runoff voting. IRV is better than the standard one vote/one choice method of voting, and it's great to see it in action at a fun project like this. [via Derek]

mophos



(From a Sony Ericsson T300.)

Behind the Scenes: Cool 2B Real: Designer: "I know I should feel guilty, but my salary allows me to buy name-brand aluminum furniture." [via Anil] Reading this makes me think someone could pull off a Spinal Tap for the Web generation.

Barbershop was pretty funny without relying on the inherent humor of bodily fluids.

Also, some collaborative filtering for conferences would be nice. It would be interesting to know if there were other people at a conference who happened to attend all of the same panels I did on a certain day. Then it would nice to see which panels those same people were thinking about attending the next day. And then some way to contact them to talk about meeting. Stalking implications aside, I think this would be very cool as long as the users themselves are controlling what information is public.

I'm starting to get excited about SXSW 2003. I've been busy doing some coding for SXSWblog. There's a new photo exchange and notes exchange that's integrated with the site membership. (The notes exchange is also now Trackback-aware, so anyone can post to their weblog and trackback specific conference events.) Working on this has me thinking about other potential conference-related collaborative projects. I'd like to see something along the lines of geourl meets a weblog—tracking geographic locations of attendees through time. Imagine being able to say: I'm here now, I was there, and I'm going there through a web interface. It would be so much easier if everyone had a WiFi-enabled GPS and could "post" spots to their location-blog.