Stephenson: In the beginning was the command line

In the Beginning was the Command Line is an idiosyncratic essay about interface and operating systems by Neil Stephenson of Cryptonomicon fame. It is almost a memoire and almost a plug for Linux.

I am now reading the second of the The Baroque Cycle series, The Confusion. It con-fuses two story lines that split in Quicksilver, that of Eliza and that of Jack. The prose is sinking into academic prose as Stephenson can’t avoid lecturing his reader about details of the history of culture that he has learned or invented. Eliza remains an unbelievable character who gives hand jobs to cryptographers and, of course, is beautiful. You wonder if Stephenson has met a woman who has interests other than his? I am annoyed by the tendency of science fiction writers to create women characters who are not women, but are admirable men in babe’s bodies. The prose equivalent of Lara Croft – action hero with boobs.

That said, Stephenson plays well with history in this retro scifi book, especially the history of economics and science. It remains to be seen if he can pull all the threads together in the third novel. Is he going to pull off “the ideal history of computing, the internet and commerce”?

PNG and GIF

So we were discussing whether the PNG (pronounced “ping”) graphics format included vectors. I thought it did since Fireworks lets you draw vectors and uses PNG as its native format. Turns out I was wrong. Fireworks extends the PGN format to include chunks for features others than bitmaps. See PNG feature support in Fireworks.
On a related note – PNG (Portable Network Graphics) was developed as a networked graphics format that was unemcumbered by patents the way GIF was until GIF Liberation Day (June 2002) when the patents expired. Now JPG is having problems as Forgent sues over JPG patent.
Continue reading PNG and GIF

HyperGraph: Embedded Site Map

The site for TAPoR at the University of Alberta has an interesting feature – a dynamic site map. In the lower left of every page (if your browser supports it) is a graph of the page you are looking at with the connections to other pages in the site. This worked for me in Safari, but not IE on the Mac. StÈfan Sinclair showed it to me as just one application of visualization. Now… can we turn it into a TAPoRware tool?

Quantum Computing and Information

Jerry McGann has been talking about quantum models of textuality for some time. (See McGann, “Preface to _Radiant Textuality: Literary Studies After the World Wide Web_”, Romanticism and Contemporary Culture, Praxis Series, Romantic Circles.)

In general whenever Jerry is interested in something it is worth thinking about, even when I don’t get it. Here, therefore are some links on quantum computing.

An introduction to Quantum Computing is a short and clear introduction.
Quantum Computation and Quantum Information is the site to a book with that title where you can download/read the first chapter.
Seb’s Open Research blog also has an entry on Quantum computing weblogs (Note: blog now gone). This entry got me going on the subject.
Continue reading Quantum Computing and Information

A9: Amazon Search Engine

Search Technologies” href=”http://a9.com/”>A9.com is a new search engine site from Amazon that lets you search inside books in addition to searching the web. There is supposed to be a feature to allow you to link notes to what you find and you can, if you get an account, keep information about your search history.

Remember when people speculated that Netscape could become your OS? As Google and other (pseudo) portals add features we are returning to the possibility of a network portal OS. My kids use MSN for more and more, I use Google for more and more – at what point do I ditch the “personal” computer for an environment available through any networked device?