Progression and Java

Sorry for the odd errors and general slowness of cubicgarden.com. I have updated Resin java server, been messing with some wiki's and tearing my hair out trying to get blojsom to output xhtml 1.0 strict code. The last one is a issue with the url's which dont have escaped ampersounds in it. Instead there just simply & which drives any validator crazy. The server upgrade should mean better performance generally but the testing wiki's mean i'm running many things at once and might counter balance the positive effect of the upgrade.

I also tried to run the Java SDK in server mode using this tweak Miles sent through a few days ago.

Someone has done some research about JVM performance: http://www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=45250

In a nutshell, you are recommended to run your JVM as the “Server” JVM not the “Client” JVM. The downside is the server JVM takes longer to start, and uses more memory, but in the performance benchmarks, the Java code is faster the C++ code!

I opted for option 2 which means you need to edit java.cfg sp server comes up before client.

   -client KNOWN
   -server KNOWN

You should change them to:
   -server KNOWN
   -client KNOWN

So I did and guess what nothing worked at all. It broke the whole of the server which is scary. I may try again this weekend to be sure…

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What is EBS?

Mark calls it impromptu while David calls it EBS? What ever it is, it seems to allow blogging via xmlrpc and a instant messager client. I'm left wondering if its blojsim sorted out for blojsom 2.x or something alot more. Oh my I never saw your last post Mark, yes would love to do any experiements possible with cocoon and smack if you like. Anyway I hope to know more soon, now I've made my interests public. – by the way how the hell do trackbacks work?

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Xlink experiement

I've tried to get Xlink working, but bigbrother 5 uk overruled my experiments. Will try again tomorrow. Nice guide on xbmp.org.

Also of use – Xlink Kai Instructions, HOW TO GET UP AND RUNNING and Xbmc + Online Gaming Tutorial, in's and outs of KAI3 support in xbmc!

I also had to cut my streampack experiement short. I now at least know how to setup a stream file. Simply a *.strm file with the url on the first line. MMS and HTTP are fully supported, will try ICY and RTSP later.

Ok its the next day, and I've got it all sorted now. Xlink was not working because my account was not registered, so I registered again and bang were in. So heres how I did it.

Register your XTAG username and password at http://www.teamxlink.co.uk. Then download Xlink Kai: Evo VII. Make sure you've added your username and password to the xbmc config file.

< xlink >
 < username >cubicgarden< /username >
 < password >password< /password >
 < /xlink >

(remove spaces around elements!)
Setup Xlink Kai Evo VII with settings like this. Profile = Engine only, Network adapter = Auto detect and lock, Username = your Xtag, Password = your password, Accept UI connections from = Any IP Address, Dont mess with the ports and finally click launch engine (launch UI on the first go try is a good idea too). Then click OK.

Now launch KAI and login. Thats it… You should be good to go. Enjoy and remember to look for the user cubicgarden.

By the way stream pack is working fine, I was watching French TV today at 56kps. I'm going to try adding tons of links myself to uk radio stations and the television streams. Then submit them to stream pack forum

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The State of Wireless London

Harry sent me a link to this study on wirless in greater London. Not read it all the way though but it seems very interesting. More wireless than I actually thought there was. I mean if you look at central London its basicly covered. Its hard to believe that BT openzone has 173 different hotspots while surf n sip the next biggest rival has 91, the cloud has 78 at the moment.

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Forget iTunes music store

Yep forget Apple's itunes release, allofmp3 is where its at.

yes all of mp3 is russian and may not be totally legal in other counties besides russia – but boy oh boy, the ability to pay for how much you actual download rather than per song sounds like a great idea. Specially when you consider downloading music for mobile phones, palmtops and other devices. They support the ipod with AAC Mpeg4 and tons of other formats including WMA, MP3, OGG, Flac and MPC. Check out the online encoding for even more flexability by the way there selection of music isnt bad. I found lots of trance on there but I cant test it against itunes music store because I refuse to download itunes.

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GPL Shareaza

shareaza logo

Shareaza version 2.0 is now available, the biggest and most important change is that it’s now offered under the GPL license. Slashdot covered it a while ago with comments – but I'm only just downloading it now. Will tell you how it goes over time.

Ok first up, the interface with the default skin is a little heavy but attractive and neat. Its very comparable to Winamp 5's default interface. A nicer skin is needed soon. Anyway how does it work? Well it picks up my Bit torrents nicely, read them from clipboards or when i click the file in windows. Opera should be able to send the torrent if i set it up correctly. Thank someone, because the bit torrent downloader is actually good and comparable with Torrent storm which I use to use. Downloaded something quite big very quickly last night. Not really logged on to G2 yet, but might do tonight see how it compares to the plain gnutella network.

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Changes to the cubicgarden

I'm making some long awaited changes to the garden this week. You should start to notice more images creaping into my design at long last. If you reading this now, you should see the sky or grass backdrop on the cubicgarden banner. I'm getting rid of all the tables except the one which makes up the calendar for now, so the blog will be run using pure css. Going to sort out the VM templates so they churn out XHTML 1.1 or at least XHTML 1.0 strict.

I have hopefully fixed the comment feeds. RSS 0.92 Comments and RSS 2.0 Comments. Some of the changes to structure may take a little longer, as I'm going to use blojsom alot more and maybe use some kind of Wiki for other sections of my garden. The first to change will be the mixes, which will have a simular blojsom style interface and this my main blog will pull in parts from my bookmarks (already a blog) and the mixes. My feeds is also up for a change and sort out but maybe in about 2 or 3 weeks.

So if you notice something odd, dont worry it could be me just messing with stuff. But be warned, I'm working to the W3c standards, if your browser does not support XHTML + CSS2 then it might be time to change it… I recommend Opera 7.5, Mozilla or Firefox.

I'm also on the search for a good quality wiki which has these features.
Editing with preview (live preview would be a bonus)
Editing input options (the topcat type buttons)
Real categories
Hierarchy view
GPL or BSD licence (opensource)
XHTML and CSS support
Multiuser
Search (jakarta lucene would be cool)
Recently changed
CSS themes
Metadata and Diff support
Bookmarking
Calendar
Snipsnap support (Textism would be ideal too)
Rss output (input would be awesome)
XMLRPC or Soap interface
Blog support
Comments

Choices so far.
XWiki – http://www.xwiki.org | Forrest – http://forrest.apache.org | JSPWiki – http://www.jspwiki.org | SnipSnap – http://snipsnap.org | Confluence – http://www.atlassian.com. Confluence is the best wiki i've ever seen shame its not open source. Snipsnap is cool but the blog and wiki combined together makes things confusing, dumping Blojsom is simply not a option. I find JSPWiki too plain and too simplex for what I want. I'm really warming to Xwiki as the author is pretty honest about it and where it sits in the sea of wikis. Shame its only alpha and I think it requires a SQL database. Useful page highlighting alot of the Java Wikis also very useful and upto date.

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Television will eat its self?

All the television corps are running around trying to build solutions for the future.

New Service by TiVo Will Build Bridges From Internet to the TV
TiVo, the maker of a popular digital video recorder, plans to announce a new set of Internet-based services today that will further blur the line between programming delivered over traditional cable and satellite channels and content from the Internet.

Interesting specially in the light of… BSkyB launches rival to Freeview
For a one-off payment of £150, it will include the BBC's digital services and Sky News as well as other free stations. But unlike Freeview, a satellite dish will be needed to pick up the service.

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Good luck with the Broadcast Treaty at the World Intellectual Property Organization

Wipo globe icon

On Sunday I passed Cory sitting on the grass at notcon04. And wished him good luck at the WIPO, I think the EFF and others are going to need it for all our sakes… If you honestly dont know what I'm talking about please – i beg of you to read this now.

As usual there has been little about an important issue in the mainstream news. Cory Doctorow and others have been raising awareness but few have picked up on it so far. Slashdot also had a posting yesterday which started the usual slashdotting discussion.

The best way I've found to keep intouch with whats going on is through the union for public domains blog on broadcasting. The EFF page is good for a understanding of whats at sake but not whats going on at this moment. No respect to Cory, his post was a little lost in the boingboing information ocean. But it did provide almost the same if not better links than what I got here.

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A common archive

So I had my meeting with paula today a little latter that expected due to some world service work. But we went off to the non-smoking starbucks and ordered frappachinos before talking shop.

Paula explained the project fully and pointed out the several strands of the project. And all I can say is seriously Paula is awesome and the creative archive couldnt be in better hands…

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Airtunes popped

Airpot Express
Get a grip people. Its once again Apple coming in late with a slighly more polished product and once again people will buy it and stroke it wildly till they realise theres a terriable fault or downside.
For those interested Linksys did this ages ago. Not exactly stylish but hey it does the job and does video too. Dlink's more stylish version, hey lets not forget Philips Streamium. Yeah yeah Apple got the link with itunes but seriously who cares when you got a xbms streaming?

I'm also serioulsy douhting the range on the express? If its anything like the Extreme, it will throw PC's off the network every minute. Great news if your streaming music I would say… The other interesting for me is once again Apple have held off on Video? Why?
Could it be because they want to bring out video related products together in one batch, once they made as much money off audio as possible? Not sure. Could it be because they dont know how to? Hummm, dont think so. Or could Apple have something in the wings which few others have thought about? Sound about right. But lets not forget the standard complient iChatAV, the simple only Mpeg4 in quicktime or the nasty battery life on the ipods…

How AirTunes works.

For those wondering if AirPort Express supports MP3, AAC, or any other specific file formats, the answer is no. AirPort Express supports Apple's Lossless Compression technology — and everything that your iTunes streams across the network to Airport Express is compressed using that technology.

Did anyone else think propitery in that quote?

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NotCon 04

http://www.xcom2002.com/nc04/ – The main website
http://www.symbianwiki.com/ConConUK/ – The Wiki

Ok so I'm at Notcon04, which is taking place at Imperial College's Union house. Its still early and people are starting to come into the grand garden court. I didnt expect to get here so early but transport for london lied about how long it would take to get here. Anyway I've opened up my tablet and attempted to get a wireless signal, and the good news is that I'm on. So I'm hoping batteries depending I can live blog my thoughts on notcon04 as it happens.

Now this might be a little trouble-some because I prefer to use an outliner for my notes but we shall see. I may have to adapt my style for the purpose of live blogging.

Humm isnt that Violet Berlin in the queue? pretty sure it is but didnt realise she was that short? The crowd of people hanging around are quite cool. Your usual 90% white male and about 10% women. As per usual theres not exactly the most diverse group of people in the world but interesting non the less. (Usual ipod wearing london crowds) Bill Thompson, Cory Doctorow, Tom Coats and Nico Macdonald has also turned up and I'm sure theres some other internet celeb's around but honestly I couldnt care less. I have however noticed Ben Metcalfe and a MA student from Ravensbourne.

Ok time to kick off soon, were watching some show called Heatvision and Jack or something? Got that guy from the school of rock?Jack Black or something? Ok on to LifeHacks. For some reason I cant get on irc.freenode.net at all by the way

Lifehacks
Interetsing talk looking at peoples (supergeek) desktops. Got Paul fords, Google geek, Eric thingys, etc. Getting into why we should use command lines more over GUI's? Mainly people use cmds to talk or use another machine from one machine. People still use todo.txt? Wow no complex apps, what a revelation – not…Interesting enoght a guy from xml.com prefers txt to tagging. Incremental search useful feature for todo.txt, works in Vi, Emacs, Mozilla etc…Bleeding into OS to launch apps
People trust notepad programs over large apps.
Now were going into using one more app for everything. Cory likes email, some like excel (are they nuts?) one nutter (dom lancaneter) love postscript.
Ok now were talking about the private blog? Using a blog to talk to themselves, hands up myself. Plod software for mass blog apps. I'm quite happy with my route of using wblogger at the moment. Interesting about private rss feeds. have to question why private?

Now Dan is looking at secret software. Things the geeks have, random sig generators, netscape killers, ssh foo and mail wrang ling.
Syncing apps, people didnt trust isync, activesync, etc. most built around rsync unix standard.
Boilerplates often used through-out the supergeeks. Interesting app on KDE which shows you the files which are using space futher down your tree. Interesting no one writing much cross appliication automation, no geeks writing it. People love webscaping, agree with that… Ah at long last, people like to make it public. Edd Dumbhill has a interesting quote about giving away ideas which i should copy here really.

Other peoples notes on the same talk – NotCon 04 – Life Hacks

Politics OF the net
Against Politics on the net.
Bill's part – Is there a net only politics, is there a internet? The net has no values, the protocals have values not the net. Talks about the progressive internet and how any machine you plug into the net should talk to the others. End to end is very important and we should fight for it not against closed clusters, trusted nets, etc. Not regulate anything is not the answer, the internet relys on standards, regulation and policies. The internet will dispear and we need to fight for something else.

Cory is on form! Putting a slash dot through bills ideas. The net is free because we fighted for it to be free. Netrual networks is more important than marketshare or interests. Freenet allows chinese people to speak. Freenet works because it allows End to end, peer to peer. No such thing as lawful or non lawful packets. Tim burners lee made the web so he could share end to end. Plug for WIPO just like at my copyright vs lectures. DRM always breaks end to end, because there not open – Drm relys on law because if you give the key and the secret they you have everything to break it.

Will from iSocity. Micro-politics and how they become very hiarchy based even though they fight for self-organising. A lot of users choice not to look at how they are creating the gated communities of the internet.

Chinese people get around firewalls by typing in the ip address of the site they want to get to. Chinese kids are not bothered by it. DRM doesnt work because it only takes about 10% to make it usable, just like how 8% of people made polltax totally unworkable, because the cost of collecting the tax was too much.

Other peoples notes on the same talk – NotCon 04 – Politics Of the Internet

Bristol Wireless
Bringing the hackers and the artist together, have become a community coop. Open network over disallowing people from accessing the network, has worked for 2-3 years without serious disruption. The legal aspects of wireless? Picopeering = meshnetworking servalance? Network commons a place where the small networks can collabrate together.

After lunch…

Copyright
I missed most of Brewster Kahle, but its good to hear the BBC (through Paula, who i'm meeting Tuesday). Now I grabbed a chair in the panel. Cory is strong again, Rob Hamadi is boring and oh my goodness what is he doing on the panel? Cory points out that the publishers association have the clott to change the governments mind on how to do takedowns but why dont they question takedowns all togther? Dan moves the talk on to WIPO and the EUCD.

Other peoples notes on the same talk – Notcon 04 – Universal access to human knowledge – Brewster Kahle
Other peoples notes on the same talk – NotCon 04 – Copyright part 2

Freenet and Peer2Peer
Freenet was inspired by emergance. Ian finds it very fault tolerant and robust. Everyone should be able to send and recieve annoyminsly. It must be completly decentralised. Cites the six degrees study as it didnt need to go through a central authority to get to its end point. Freenet works on local information from its nodes.
Interesting enough Ian points out that Freenet has almost never been done before unlike the linux project which aims to make an open operating system. So they never had a model to work from. Freenet actual died for a while because 3rd party software would make too many requests. So they introduced a certain amount of live to the nodes. certain amount of limited, memory, bandwidth, etc = a low balancing method (break limiting). The node should use 100% of its least amount of resources and not more than its maximum resources limit. If more requests come through the node will simply wait a specified time. Yeah yeah its all about maths forumlas…

Other peoples notes on the same talk – NotCon 04 Freenet – Ian Clarke

Theres a common theme running through Notcon04, the serious lack of questions from the crowd. I mean in the freenet talk, there were 2 questions in the middle and only 1 at the end! Maybe next time I should just wait for someone to set up a live stream and listen from my home? Theres also been a serious lack of power generally for laptop users which seriously seems to be about 20% of people here. I'm one of the lucky ones sharing power with someone else and a wireless node through one plug. Reminds me next time to bring a cheap as chips Ikea 3 ways. Saying that the wireless has been pretty consistent, with free2air ssid on the top floor and notcon ssid on the ground floor. Anyway on with the second part of peer2peer…

Why do we need annoymus peer2peer networks? because we have realised were not actually annoymus on the internet since napster. Hey isnt annoyminty a given right in this country? Mantis works different from freenet, people know what being shared – sounds interesting. They believe in clients/servers and peers unlike the freenet emerging system. Mantis based on MUTE – http://mute-net.sourceforge.net. Problems with Mute, avi files are large and peers are selfish. Mantis is all three hats at once, you share with 5 people all the time. It sounds more like 6 degrees than emergance – Now thats interesting, new take on p2p. Every node is a leaf of a tree and they dont actually know how big the tree is or what another branch are doing. When nodes find each other for large download they use a back stream, where the server spoofs its IP and just sends the file. What happens when isp dont allowed spoofed traffic, well it starts with Stupidly spoofed addresses then tries more legitmit addresses till it gives up. If Isp's use real filters then Matis will die but it will stop DOS attacks, worms and virus which usually spoof ip addresses anyway. Disadvantage, Matis is open to the man in the middle attack because the client doesnt know the real address of the server. Matis should be out this summer…

P2PQ – sharing your knowledge online and maybe selling it? Its a client server knowledge management system. To ask a question you only need to use a webpage and ask your question. The server sends the question onwards to a pool of randomly choosen person. They dont have a category list, the list just grows depending on the questions asked. The answers are then displayed like a google search page. You make money by reverse SMS billing, humm interesting but what happens when you got google in your hand? However can work by people offering there services. So for example user asks for a lift to airport, people respond with a cost amount to take the person to the airport. Akin – infor@p2pq.net needs developers to take it to 1.0.

Darker Bit torrent – http://aesop.doc.ic.ac.uk
Bittorrent at the moment is too loud, shouts out and says I use bittorrent. Performance modelling = boring but kinda of interesting in a geeky way.
Darker ways – Redirection, Steganorgraphy, Publish, publish, publish
A bit like how in contact the movie the sound wave has pictures and maps inside of the orginal signal – very cool!
How can they stop us? Taking bandwidth away and taking the boxes away through laws. A darker bit torrent inst a huge advance but fun.
http://logicwand.com/darktorrent – http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/pepa – http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/pasta2004

Gmail search and content discovery – Simulating p2p with gmail.
content discovery – looking at content by consensus, do you agree with content? Historical facts usually has consensus but looking for the best trance song may not.
search – can we take an overview of searching, like the google page rank? soundratings.com worked on freenet and injected a file fill with metadata back into freenet. Most people dont like to rate content but the people who do are usually blogger types. If you get bloggers to submit ratings meta into gmail you could search on that? Yes i'm lost too! need to get the page and read it again. Will email Soundrater@yahoo.com and ask for the web address. Ah I think I know what he's getting at. He's more interested in a system which searchs for people not the content. As you will trust your searches with that person more.

Tansparent socity the book comes up in the questioning. Is there really conflict between privicy and freedom of information. Akin makes the point that the triangle is unbalanced because we can only make our feelings felt once every 4 years. While the government can make its feeling felt about what we do when ever they like.
Ahh good question Paula, the nodes are starting to built up a database of rep and respect for certain other nodes, the nodes wear hats. We need to beable to throw away our hats and dis-connect ourselves from the rep. Its kind of like losing your ebay account, but its linked up to the 160 char string in freenet. You own the ID not the ID owning you…

Shame I missed Politics on the net- NotCon04 Politics ON the net

Looking back
Pictures from notcon04 by the way
I have to say I really enjoyed the day, the wireless was pretty good even with a lot of people using there laptops. The search for power to charge laptops was a bit of a bugger but not all bad. If I had my scooter, I would have brough my 15 meters extention cable and a couple of ikea 3 ways. Maybe next time I will bring it for sure, I know lot of laptop users would have said thanks if I did. Just interesting enough a lot of the mac users! But saying that there were tons of PC users more than mac users at least.
Other things, I wish there was a way to have been at most of the sessions. Putting two great sessions back to back was frustrating, I actually kept running up and down stairs trying to get into each one. And when you got downstairs the serious lack of chairs made it feel very uncomfitable. I would have said most of the session downstairs should have took place upstairs where there was lots of room. But god couldnt someone have straighten the white sheet behind the speakers? I mean at least put some bricks or something on the sheet so it was at least plauseable as a screen? I missed the closing spech because I was in the bar talking to the guys from the peer 2 peer session, but I felt there needed to be somekind of chillout or sligtly clubby? music after the event so people could sit and talk about the day. Oh that reminds me the gaps between sessions were pretty small. I mean 30mins for lunch? I ran down to south kesington station and ran back to make the bristol wireless and wireless in general sessions. Besides all that it was great and much better run that other events I have been to before. I felt quite at home just tapping someone on the back and asking them a question. Man I even went to dinner (wagamma's?) with a group of people I only met 2 hrs before. Wicked stuff, cant wait for the next one, and maybe this time I will do a talk myself…

Respect to all the NTK.net crew for making it happen, see you in November?

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More calendaring

I tried to install PHPiCalendar today, but I took one look at it the Tarball and thought forget this. I'm not installing PHP on top of a perfectly fine Java server or run Apache side by side with IIS (webdav) and Resin (everything else). Then I saw dot net cal which is a dot net written ical server. Its not open or GNUed, but it is legally free to groups of less than 10 and to non-profit/educational sectors which isnt bad. I've been spending sometime on there developers blog which highlights some clever thinking and actually decent thoughts on the process of calendaring. On the way I also found these things. iCalendar .net parser, now if someone could write one as a cocoon generator. I'm also interesting in changing ical's ics to xcals so I can actually run some decent xsl transforming on it. I could do it on the ics files but trust me it would be awarked.

I also found windates which is a Windows based ical client in the same vain as Apples iCal. Also found some really nice information about iCalendars under the Mozilla community. I saw the url http://javangelist.snipsnap.org/space/iCalendar – and got a little excited but then read it and realised it was of little use to me. However what on earth is this http://www.scheduleworld.com/index.html? I'm impressed and configuring outlook 2003 to send icals might be one way of keeping my ipaq in sync with my icals?

A java iCalendar parser? Humm will need to try this out for sure… Interesting project using cocoon and icals. Also seen a lot of links going to towards Jetspeed? Which I may try out today sometime as its only a war file. Also saw theres a proposed extention to the webdav standard just for icals, maybe this is what the difference is between webdav server and a ical server? At long last someone doing something about syncing icals directly with the pocketpc database. Linux only I think

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Two thumbs up from the greenwich mean tribe

eastern standard time book cover

Finished the ebook earlier this week and thought it was a very good read, had some genuine clever and thought-out ideas. Ending was a little rushed for my tastes but pretty much from 2 your hooked and wont stop till you hit the last hour. One of my favourate parts from the book. Ant talks in group therapy about life as he sees it…

“It’s like this,” I said. “It used to be that the way you chose your friends was by finding the most like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who lived near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden days, back before, you know, printing and radio and such. Chances were that you’d grow up so immersed in the local doctrine that you’d never even think to question it. If you were a genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of thinking, and if you could pull it off, you’d either gather up a bunch of people who liked your new idea or you’d go somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a little colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though, people who didn’t get along with their neighbors just moped around until they died.”

“Fast-forward to the age of email. Slowly but surely, we begin to mediate almost all of our communication over networks. Why walk down the hallway to ask a coworker a question, when you can just send email? You don’t need to interrupt them, and you can keep going on your own projects, and if you forget the answer, you can just open the message again and look at the response. There’re all kinds of ways to interact with our friends over the network: we can play hallucinogenic games, chat, send pictures, code, music, funny articles, metric fuckloads of porn… The interaction is high-quality! Sure, you gain three pounds every year you spend behind the desk instead of walking down the hall to ask your buddy where he wants to go for lunch, but that’s a small price to pay.

“So you’re a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you’re sixteen years old and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of media on your desktop. All the good stuff—everything that tickles you—comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They’re making cool art, music, clothes. You read their mailing lists and you can tell that they’re exactly the kind of people who’d really appreciate you for who you are. In the old days, you’d pack your bags and hitchhike across the country and move to your community. But you’re sixteen, and that’s a pretty scary step.

“Why move? These kids live online. At lunch, before school, and all night, they’re comming in, talking trash, sending around photos, chatting. Online, you can be a peer. You can hop into these discussions, play the games, chord with one hand while chatting up some hottie a couple thousand miles away.

“Only you can’t. You can’t, because they chat at seven AM while they’re getting ready for school. They chat at five PM, while they’re working on their homework. Their late nights end at three AM. But those are their local times, not yours. If you get up at seven, they’re already at school, ’cause it’s ten there.

“So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you can chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine, ’cause that’s when they go to bed. Used to be that it was stock brokers and journos and factory workers who did that kind of thing, but now it’s anyone who doesn’t fit in. The geniuses and lunatics to whom the local doctrine tastes wrong. They choose their peers based on similarity, not geography, and they keep themselves awake at the same time as them. But you need to make some nod to localness, too—gotta be at work with everyone else, gotta get to the bank when it’s open, gotta buy your groceries. You end up hardly sleeping at all, you end up sneaking naps in the middle of the day, or after dinner, trying to reconcile biological imperatives with cultural ones. Needless to say, that alienates you even further from the folks at home, and drives you more and more into the arms of your online peers of choice.

“So you get the Tribes. People all over the world who are really secret agents for some other time zone, some other way of looking at the world, some other zeitgeist. Unlike other tribes, you can change allegiance by doing nothing more that resetting your alarm clock. Like any tribe, they are primarily loyal to each other, and anyone outside of the tribe is only mostly human. That may sound extreme, but this is what it comes down to.

Oh quick note, Cory put the book out under a Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial 1.0 licence. So unfortually no one can alter the work, which is a shame – as there some parts I would love to mess with…

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