YAML (aka YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a human readable format for serializing and storing data. There is even an HTTP transport RPC mechanism (similar to XML-RPC) defined for YAML called OkayRpcProtocol.

I seriously think this is something which could change the Internet drastically 1. I also think it is something the 'powers that be' 2 will be very concerned about if it does gain critical mass.

1 I suspect this change will accellerate the 'Balkinization' of the Internet as users start creating private zones of the like-minded. Among other things of course.

2 'Powers that be' is defined here as meaning anyone that thinks too much freedom is bad for people...

Kathryn Cramer is raising her kids right .

Some friends came down from Bellingham and stopped by last night. The purpose of their trip was to go to a coffee 'cupping' at the home of another friend of theirs (and acquaintance of mine). And then today they are attending the Seattle Coffee Fest. All very Pacific Northwest, don't you know...

This sounded pretty interesting to me, and I haven't been out of the house much lately, so I tagged along to the cupping. I am what you might call a 'coffee connaisseur' in that I really like the stuff, scorn drip coffee makers and can talk knowledgably about coffee varietals and roasts. But I am not a patch on Ulysses who is probably best described as a coffee otaku, (except that he does have a life outside of coffee). So I expected to learn a lot about coffee, but had no idea the extent of education I was about to receive. You see Ulysses (who has worked as a coffee roaster in the past) is now roasting his own coffee at home using a hot-air popcorn popper! Furthermore, he and his wife are looking seriously into starting a small gourmet coffee shop specializing in hand-roasted coffees.

So the pupose of the cupping was to determine which, and what quantity, of several varietals should go into a special espresso blend. There were six coffees from different areas of the world (and a seventh that was decaffienated and wasn't for blending), each with varying degrees of flavor and body. We stood there slurping the brew from spoons and discussing the characteristics of each. Then Ulysses demonstrated the roasting method using my favorite from the varietals (a very nice Kenyan with all the good florals and grapfruityness of typical Kenyan coffees, but less of the characteristic acidic sharpness). Aftwards I was presented with the results to take home.

Fascinating! Anything involving process appeals to my geeky nature, and (like brewing beer) if it also results in an end product I enjoy the appeal increses exponentially. So now I am thinking seriously about digging out my old popcorn popper and buying some green coffee beans. Oh, and I had some of that Kenyan this morning and it is really quite good when made in a french press, although I think in the future I will blend it with a Columbian dark-roast for more body...

The Open Mobile Alliance has been plugging away for several years now, generating documents describing the architecture and standards for wireless applications for small devices (WAP). Thousands of man hours that are mostly going to waste because, well, WAP is dead just as soon as the next generation of cell-phone/PDA hybrids becomes the standard and there is no longer a reason not to use good old TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML (and all those other protocols that require more horsepower than 1998 cellphones could provide and more bandwidth than 1998 cell systems could pump out). Sometime soon, probably less than two years from now, WAP will become yet another footnote in computing history.

In a way that is too bad, but it is an old story. I can't tell you how many projects I know of that did some cool stuff only to disapear forever, victims of 'design rot' where they became obsolete even before they got off the drawing board. Perhaps because someone else (possibly with a worse design) got there first and owned the market. Possibly, like WAP, they fell victim to Moore's Law. Or maybe the problem they intended to solve really wasn't a problem in the first place.

Of course much of WAP is over designed and therefore too complicated to easily implement, so perhaps it deserves to die off. Certainly they could have thought ahead a little and realized they didn't need to re-invent quite so many wheels...

But one cool (and really needed) thing the WAP people did was create a standard for Binary XML known as 'WBXML'. This is something that W3C has been unable to do despite the fact nearly everyone wants it. Of course the WBXML design is a bit over the top (with bizaare things like arbitrary byte-count integers using bit-fields -- that is what happens when data size is your first priority). But the design exists and can be implemented and that is more than anyone else I know of can say.

Interestingly WBXML might actually be something that survives WAP. There is a GPL licensed implementation of WBXML called (appropriately enough) 'libwbxml2'. So if W3C doesn't get off its butt soon and come up with a better design it seems likely people are going to start using WBXML as a stop-gap. Which means WBXML may become a de-facto standard; weird bit-fields and all.

Meaning that one victim of design rot might just have a legacy that causes design rot somewhere else. It could happen!

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!!! Shit, schist, caca, merde!!!

Sorry about the language there, but I am really pissed off right now. Partly at myself, I should have backed everything up before I started. I know that. But mostly I am pissed at Microsoft...

What I am I talking about? I have been doing rolling upgrades on the computers here at home since I got back from Michigan. Taking it slow, just a little at a time. First I built myself a new machine and moved all my stuff over to it. (Quite a cool new machine too, I should post pics.) Then I moved my wife's stuff from an old HP running Win 98 to my previous machine, being as that was quite an upgrade for her. Finally, today, I upgraded her box from Win 98 to Win XP. I had some problems, but I got it done and was setting up the accounts when I discovered something that had me cursing like a sailor up to his neck in bilgewater...

The Win XP upgrade process ate my wife's Outlook Express Data Folder! No shit! Everything!

It works like this: In Win 98 the identities are stored in the Windows directory, with the data files for the programs using an identity stored as subdirectories of the identity folder. In Win XP you have a Win 2000 style 'Directories and Settings' folder that contains a subdirectory for each user, with identities for that user stored under that. And so on and so forth.

So far, so good. I had forgotten about Win 98 putting data in the Windows folder and didn't think to back up the files there. And honestly, I might not have done so if it had occurred to me -- after all, you would think Microsoft had tested for an upgrade preserving the data files of one of their own applications? Wouldn't you?

Apparently not. In the upgrade process Win XP simply blew away anything in the Windows folder it didn't need. Bye bye hundreds of megabytes of email. Right down the bit bucket.

One saving grace; we gave Anita's old HP to a friend who is always looking for boxes to add to his SETI cluster. I called him up and he hadn't reformatted the drive yet and, yes, the files are still there. He is burning a CD of the files as I type so, hopefully, I will be able to restore the bulk of the lost email and address book. Unfortunately there is a week or so gap that is lost forever, but this is better than nothing.

But damn... Fuck...

All you Linux Geeks can start ranking on me now!

Anita is home and today is feeling well enough to answer email and post to her weblog. Still no word on the biopsy results, but I will take my rays of sunshine where I can get them. And today we have sunshine, after several straight days of rain. Including yesterday, which broke records. For Seattle. For rain in Seattle...

1001 Fonts has easily more than an thousand and one fonts available, well categorized, rated and searchable. The site UI is well-designed (except the front page) and makes it easy to select the fonts you want. Most of the fonts available for download are freeware and the license terms are described for each font.

Useful as hell when you want that special font. But cool to just browse on a rainy day as well...

I just got home after 28 hours at the hospital with Anita. A friend is staying with her for a few hours whilst I catch a quick shower and head back.

The surgery went fine. The oncologist/surgeon performed a full hysterectomy and the tumors were evaluated by a pathologist who determined that they were malignant; however there was no sign of spread. The cancer seemed very localized and the oncologist is currently staging it as a 1b or 1c.

Of course everything depends on the biopsy reports for the lymph nodes and such, but if those turn out negative this means it is very possible Anita might not even require chemotherapy! This news is an incredible relief to me because I did all the appropriate googling and found that five year survival rates for women over forty-five with stage 3 ovarian cancer were considerably less than 50%, and ten year survival rates even worse -- a very frightening prospect and one that has kept me awake at night for several days now.

However survival rates for stage 1 ovarian cancer, even when chemotherapy is required, are much more optimistic. So, all in all, this truly is good news!

Thank you all for your concern and prayers, and an especial thank you to the local friends who are helping us get through this -- especially mentioning Jane and Tammy who sat with me through the long wait for the surgery last night. This whole thing is horrid enough without having to face it alone and your support means a lot to Anita and myself...

This is a hard entry for me. There are some bad things happening for my wife and myself right now; have been for more than a week in fact. I have held off on posting about them because, well, it has been more Anita's problem than my own and she should decide when and how much to say.

Today she said it. In fact she even updated her personal journal (which has fallen by the wayside lately) with a couple of detailed entries. (You will find journal links in her blog entry...)

There isn't much I can add, except that -- as much as all this hurts and scares me -- I know Anita is going through far worse. If you pray, pray for us; it can't hurt. If you don't pray, just send us a virtual hug. We are going to need all the hugs we can get.

Thanks to Dan Sanderson at Brainlog for this link to Stanford University's "How Everyday Things Are Made".

The nice Flash work of the presentation interface is worth seeing all on its own, but I really like the way they cover the manufacturing processes for a whole raft of different everyday things in a clear and straightforward manner; suitable (as they say) for 'kids of all ages'. Check it out!

Zack Lynch thinks businesses will soon realize they can achieve advantage in the marketplace by maximizing the performance of their most essential assets: The minds of their employees.

Towards this end mental health, neurochemicals and other neural technology that maximizes a person's mental output will become more important. This seems obviously true to me, but then I have read Greg Bear's Queen of Angels

Duke University scientists have succeeded in an experiment where monkeys controlled a robot 'third arm' with their own brains. "The core of the new work is the neuronal model created by the researchers. This translates the brain signals from the monkey into movements of the robot arm. It was developed by monitoring normal brain and muscle activity as the monkey moved its own arms."

This is very interesting research, partly because it showed that brains are flexible enough to control an extra limb: "Once the neuronal model had developed an accurate level of prediction the researchers switched the control of the cursor from the joystick to the robotic arm, which in turn was controlled by the monkey's brain signals. At first the monkeys continued moving their own arms whilst carrying out the task, but in time they learned this was no longer necessary and stopped doing so."

This is similar to how I used to move my body when playing UT (despite the fact only my hands were controlling the action), but eventually learned to use only a twitch of my fingers instead of the twitch combined with the movement of my head when I wanted to make a quick look to the left. So, extrapolating from this, I am thinking it is possible to add extra 'senses' as well as 'limbs' to humans using similar neural connections. (Plus quite a bit of training before you can use them.)

What this means is that early computer/human neural connections will be more like 'typing in your head' than like 'just thinking it'. But, just like typing is for me now, eventually it will be as automatic as thinking, although probably a bit slower.

Leaving today for V-Con a medium sized SF convention in Vancouver Canada. Will post next when I can...

Ready to upload your mind into a computer? Perhaps just thinking it might be a cool idea? The Mind Uploading Home Page is dedicated to the possiblity of doing just that.

Via Kathryn Cramer.