Lost: Summarized in 3 minutes

Not being a fan or follower of lost, I can now relate to it once it comes out on DVD, or iTunes.

Diaspora does NOT have an idea problem.

Alex Wilhelm says that the Diaspora project already has an idea problem. He figures that the reliance on people setting up servers is a fatal flaw, it's need for servers to run on.

Not to say that hosting a personal FriendFeed and attempting to link it to my friends and their own FriendFeeds does not sound like fun, but it would be mind-numbingly tedious for most. The friction to get started is far too high for this project to ever gain real traction.

He goes on to make several variations of this argument. I think he overestimates the complexity and cost of getting servers up and running on the internet. He also underestimates the ability that people have to automate the process.

Depending on how the Diaspora project is done, it might be possible to host it on a regular web hosting site that supports PHP or some other scripting language. It could also probably be wedged into a Google Appspot instance. VMware and or Amazon EC2 could also come into play.

For any given popular web platform, eventually a number of providers of that service arise and will take care of the details for you. I'd imagine that Robert Scoble is already talking to his coworkers at Rackspace about making it happen for Diaspora once they get all the details.

If the guys get it done, I expect to be able to rent an instance for about $5/month, if not less. (10 instances in a family plan for $10/month wouldn't be too much of a stretch). For commercial free social networking, it would be well worth it.

I could also imagine the larger ISPs bundling it in, or making special provisions for it in their traffic management, because local ip traffic costs them far less than packets that traverse the backbones.

I hope that Diaspora and other projects get off the ground. It'll be good to open up the web again.

A Window of Opprotunity

The diaspora from Facebook is beginning. It's now apparent to me that there is a window of opportunity to get the message of Cabsec embedded into whatever replaces it.

Bye Bye Facebook

I've decided to kill my Facebook account. It's too much evil in one spot.

I'll miss it... like I miss all of the stupid things I used to do in my youth, but now know better than to do.

How I gave up on x-ray vision, and ended up taking pretty pictures instead.

I first became interested when they photos showed the magic ability to see through objects, like the fabled x-ray glasses that populated the backs of comic books in the old days. The researchers at Stanford had actually shown the ability to look through things, though not totally opaque, but close enough. I wanted to learn how it was done, and once I read enough, I resolved to do it myself.

I didn't have the budget, nor the staff, nor the gear... I did have a willingness to experiment, willingness to give it a try, just to see what happened. The first results were interesting, but not what I had hoped for. The focus was on the wrong items, and I learned that it was going to be a fairly manual operation to get things to work right. But with time and practice, my technique improved, and I was able to slowly replicate what took hundreds of cameras and and the work of a few graduate students.

Here is my first result... I managed to see through the trees!

Over time, the ability to see through things lost it's attraction, because it was far easier to just look around something, rather than spend hours after the fact, not knowing if it would even pan out. The experimentation continued, however... and I got some interesting results along the way.

I kept discovering new effects, and new ways of looking at things, including time itself. My interests moved and transformed into something else, the ability to create photographs that would showcase a single object in a frame, with that nice soft focus only achievable in practice with a very large and heavy camera that I could never afford, nor successfully carry.

I wrote about my work on my blog, and posted photos on Flickr, and got some attention. It was enough to keep plugging away at it, learning the tradeoffs involved in order to get the creamy soft focus I really wanted.

I'm now at the point where I think I've got the technical part of it all set, and the artistic choices are going to be the main influencer at this point. I've demonstrated and experimented enough... now I just want pretty photos.

If you find yourself impressed with something, be like me... see if you can figure out how to do it within the limitations you have... you might achieve your goal, or you might just invent something interesting and beautiful along the way.