The NYC district attorney’s office has subpoenaed Twitter for records of protestor communications relating to Occupy Wall Street.

Once again, people, you cannot trust a centralized service for your communications, because the Authorities can and will exert pressure on the organization which runs the service. It doesn’t matter how “secure” they are or how much fancy encryption they use; they will cave when the cops show up.

This is the Honda frame I bought last week and it is going to be my new motorcycle. I chose this one because its construction is simple and sturdy and has a large engine compartment I can stuff full of batteries.

This article by Gary Shteyngart, a writer for Travel and Leisure, is one of the more evocative descriptions of Seattle I’ve ever read.

Yesterday evening was the kickoff meeting for the Seattle Meshnet project, which aims to set up a free, decentralized, community-operated data network across Seattle. About a dozen people met up at ALTSpace to kick ideas around and see how to get things moving. There was an immediate technical consensus on the idea of using CJDNS and Ubiquiti Nanostations, so the next step is to lay out a map and start putting up antennas.

I’m not sure how involved I will personally be with the hardware end of this project, but I’d like to participate even if I don’t help develop the architecture. This is something that ought to exist. I’m hoping to get ALTSpace on board with it; I think we could get permission from the building owner to set up an antenna pole in our courtyard.

After the Meshnet meeting I walked over to Offspring for another meeting, this one discussing a different sort of web: Kevin’s building a human-sized spiderweb installation for SEAF, using steel cable and custom-machined aluminum clamp nodes. I’m going to help out by developing a lighting system: an array of accelerometer-driven LEDs will make the web respond to movement, with little sparkles like dewdrops.

I didn’t get the prototypes assembled in time to show at the meeting, but it was easy enough to see how the parts would fit together and to test-fit them with Kevin’s sample nodes. It was useful; I’ve got a whole new batch of prototype parts on order from Digikey now.

I went out on another exploratory trip to Eastern Washington yesterday, checking out three more possible event sites. Ava came along this time, and we had a pleasant day poking around the back country. It was interesting, but as with my last trip it was ultimately inconclusive, and I am already planning a third scouting mission.

The first site was on top of a plateau near an OHV park. The road in is surprisingly good, and there are great little “peekaboo” views out over the wide-open valley as you ascend. When you get to the top the crest drops sharply down the other side, with a spread-out vista of flood-scoured channel lands… It’s a nice spot. The place I was looking for is securely locked away behind miles of barbed wire, though; there’s no way to reach it without crossing private land.

The second place is actually inside an OHV park: there are sand dunes next to a creek in a broad, flat valley, and camping is allowed, so I thought it might be suitable. I didn’t stay long, though; there’s a lot of traffic through the area, there’s no privacy, and the local authorities are trying to discourage party-like activities due to a former excess of drunken yahoo revelry.

Third site was really gorgeous and would be a lovely place for a large festival. It’s a large box canyon hidden away along the Columbia River gorge, basalt cliffs all around, totally private, with a nice easy road in. There are broad spreading grass fields, pocket meadows, low rock outcrops – lots of places to set up tents or stages or sculptures or whatever.

The catch is that there’s a locked gate a mile before the end of the road and a sign forbidding unauthorized vehicles. It’s not a park, but it’s apparently under some kind of natural resource management program, and you can’t just drive in. Bummer! I suspect there might be some set of forms one can fill out to gain individual access for some limited period of time, but it seems unlikely that they’d be willing to unlock the gate for a weekend and let dozens or hundreds of cars come in.

If I can’t find a better spot in time, I’ll use the little box canyon I found two weeks ago. It’s small, and open flames would be a significant problem, but it would otherwise be a good place to start. Still, I have two more sites to check out, and one of them even looks like it has a small dry lakebed….

I bought a motorcycle frame today from a guy up in Lake City who does vintage bike restoration. He’s got frames just laying around outside his shop, heaps of parts inside – it was clear he was basically just trying to clean up his shop a bit, so he sold me a 1973 CB750 frame for $25. He threw in a pair of shocks and a swingarm, too, just to get rid of them. Well, okay, I won’t argue with that!

My plan is to build an electric motorcycle around this frame. I picked a CB750 because it has a larger-than-average engine bay with secure frame rails underneath; it should be possible to pack in a lot of heavy batteries without additional reinforcement. I’ll use the Enertrac motor for the rear wheel and pick up a frontend from Bent Bike.

I’m not planning to pursue this with any particular haste. I have a lot of other stuff going on, after all… but I think this will be a fun tinkering project and eventually a nice way to get to work and back. I doubt it will replace my gas-burner, but it may become a weekend machine instead of a daily rider.

In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop: current trends that will eventually turn universities, book stores, general retail stores, offices, and even churches into little more than specialized coffee shops.

ALTSpace probably ought to contain a coffee shop, but so far nobody wants to do the work of running it.

I spent President’s Day roaming around out in eastern Washington looking for possible camping sites. I am looking for a place where a couple hundred people could drive in and build a tent city, then spend a long weekend setting things on fire, running around in elaborate, provocative, or non-existent costumes, making loud noises at all hours of the day and night, dancing til dawn, and otherwise delighting each other with all the products of the artistic imagination without fear of upsetting the neighbors or attracting law-enforcement busybodies. This is a tall order, especially when you center the search space on Seattle and limit its radius to five hours’ drive.

I used to love poking around in the back country, but have fallen out of the habit. It was fun to just cruise around, looking down any road that interested me, getting out and hiking cross country when there was something interesting in the distance. I had specific destinations in mind, to be sure, located on aerial photos and BLM maps, but working out how the map corresponds to the territory is real work, and is definitely part of the fun.

Yesterday’s survey did not reveal a suitable place, but it was informative nonetheless. I was able to scratch one site off my list, determined that I need better maps if I am going to locate another, and unexpectedly came across a place which, while unsuitable for the event described above, is worth remembering in case I want to do something smaller and less pyrotechnically dangerous.

This elegant, wordless how-to series demonstrates a technique for making and using a wax seal. Each step is posed just so. Words would have added nothing.

The only detail left unclear is the nature of the yellow fluid used to coat the stamp before pressing it into the wax. It appears to be some kind of oil. Perhaps any sort of cooking oil will do.

projects under way:
– don’t get fired at work
– recruit more members for altspace so we can get back to break-even
– hem up the dress for Jeanine
– dispose of the leftovers from the electric skateboard project
– continue implementing asynchronous blocks in radian
– investigate possible sites for a big fiery camping trip later in the summer
– lighting system for Kevin’s spiderweb sculpture project

Light Seattle Times article about bicycle greenways. This caught my eye:

“The theory that bikes have a right to the road and should share lane space with cars on main roads … is hazardous in practice,” he said.

I know that “share the road” is supposed to be the hip thing but I just don’t buy it. It’s not a fault-tolerant system.

This extraordinarily well-written article explains the concept of algebraic datatypes in a way that can actually manage to penetrate my largely Greek-symbol-proof brain. Reading it was one of those awesome mind-goes-pop moments where a whole lot of references I’ve been observing for years finally clicked together into something I can actually use.

I have never been any good at doing work for work’s sake.

If the work is interesting, I’ll dig in and think hard and get lots done. I’ll feel good and focus deeply and I might have a hard time stopping to rest. It’s satisfying to work like this – I need some of this in my life in order to feel truly happy. The best times in my career have been the weeks or months when I have had a deep, challenging project where I can sink my brain in fully.

If I have some boring, mindless task to do, like washing the dishes or sweeping the floor or taking out the trash, I’ll put my body on autopilot and let my mind go play. It’s actually pleasant to do some of this kind of work, because my mind is free to do something fun while I am getting something practical accomplished. Some household chores are pleasant while others are almost unbearable, and it’s all a matter of whether I can daydream while I’m doing the work.

But if I’m stuck with a task which is not really interesting, but which nonetheless requires the participation of my brain, the situation becomes very bad indeed. My thoughts skitter all over the place, slipping off target every time I stop for breath. I find myself “coming to” after half an hour’s daydream, cursor still blinking away on some untouched document. Every possible distraction thrusts itself at me, from all corners; I find myself simultaneously trying to think about three or four different projects or ideas, none of which have anything to do with my actual job.

Once I have sunk into this state, embarrassment and fear of failure generally keep me stuck there until the impending doom of an approaching deadline spurs me into frantic action. Then my adrenaline pumps, my mind zeroes in, and off I go at full speed, sometimes getting many days’ worth of work done in one hard push. It really isn’t any fun, though, since I am just covering for work I should have already done, and the best I can hope for at the end is “whew, nobody noticed”.

It’s all speculation now, since I don’t seem to be able to change this set of traits just by wishing I could work differently, but I do wonder to what degree this is nature and to what degree nurture. If I had gone through a more normal school environment as a kid, would I have had to learn how to deal with busy-work? Might I now be able to punch the clock and turn the crank and do the work I’m supposed to do when I’m supposed to do it? Or would I have been built the same way, and just had a worse education as a result? Being taught at home definitely played to my strengths, even with all the late-night cram sessions the day before a project deadline.

Ava and I went to Home Depot yesterday and got some half-inch by five-inch molding offcuts. We’re going to assemble a three-layer window insert that includes a cat door. The Beast, aka The Animal, aka Petapod, aka Oedipuss (and more, longer, sillier names), has responded to the arrival of sunshine by insisting, firmly, early in the morning, that he be allowed out to play. I have responded to his rhythmic, ceaseless meowling and prancing about at the foot of the bed with flicks of water, savage kicks through the bed-blankets, grumbles, and summary eviction from the sleeping quarters, but the strength of his craving for the outdoors exceeds all reason, and I’m tired of being woken up at five or six in the morning. Very well, then, the creature gets his own entrance.

Since Oedipuss comes conveniently equipped with his own RFID tag, my plan is to stick a 134KHz reader on the door and use it to control a solenoid rigged as a deadbolt. It’s a very small door, and it would be difficult for someone with nefarious intentions to fit more than an arm through it, but we’d still prefer to leave it locked. If the system works, the reader will simply retract the solenoid when the cat comes in range, and with luck the cat will never notice the “locked” state.

I spent yesterday afternoon helping out with a work party at ALTSpace. We got started around noon and tackled a long list of “wouldn’t it be nice if” projects. It was five hours of nonstop welding, cutting, drilling, screwing, pounding, and hauling, and it felt great.

After watching Ava use Thunderbird on her new netbook, I realised there was no reason I had to keep using the web interface when I wanted to read mail on mine. I have an ancient POP3-era habit of only setting up an email client on one machine at a time, but thanks to the wonder that is IMAP there’s no reason to keep that up. Messages will show up in as many places as I care to read them and all devices stay synchronised.

I’m not so happy with the default Thunderbird layout on this Eee pc screen, though. The fonts are clearly designed for a much larger screen, and they take up much more space than is necessary. There’s no preference setting that allows you to change the font size, but I found a curiously obscure CSS hack that makes it work. If you create a file named userChrome.css inside your Thunderbird profile directory, you can override all the factory style settings, whether they have options in the preferences box or not. Point size 9 works really well on this 1024×600 screen.

EnerTrac has a motorcycle hub motor for sale which looks like just about the easiest way to get an electric bike rolling. (I mentioned this a couple of years back, when it was still a prototype.) It’s hard to make a straight-up comparison, but it appears to be a fair bit more expensive than an equivalent non-hub motor. I guess that makes sense as it likely involves more custom engineering – they have to lace a wheel up around it, after all.

Looks like most people are running these motors at around 100 volts, and getting speeds up to about 75 mph. Not bad! I’ve been thinking about setting a 72 volt system, so my top speed would be more like 55 mph. There’s nothing “wow” about that but it would be plenty for a city commuter.

While I could probably get a more powerful non-hub motor, I’m tempted to go this route because it would make the project simpler – no more custom motor mount to design and fabricate, and no more chain and sprockets to spec and install (or maintain). I don’t really want to engineer the drivetrain anyway; I’d rather focus on the electrical components.

The Electro-Harmonix 2880 “super multi-track looper” is the first device I’ve seen that looks like it could replace my ridiculously awesome but long-out-of-production Electrix Repeater. It doesn’t appear to have the ability to store multiple loops at once, but I never really use that feature during live sets anyway. The console form factor is really nice and would allow me to set up a much thinner, lighter performance rig, since it wouldn’t have to accomodate rackmounted gear.

There’s a titled CB750 frame on Craigslist for $100 right now. There are other frames at similar prices, but the CB750 has a nice square engine compartment that would work well for holding batteries. I’m seriously tempted to buy it and start building an electric motorcycle around it, like, now. I imagine it’d take 3-6 months or so to get it running, but that seems well worth it if I end up with a bike I can ride to work every day.

The Brutus electric motorcycle is a stylish beast of a machine. It has a manual transmission, an odd choice for an electric bike, and they claim a 100 mile range. They’re pricing it up in Harley territory, though; it’s estimated to cost about $35,000.

The Lito Sora has a similar shape but more of a high-tech style; they use a CVT and claim 300km range. The design is a little too widgety for my taste, overall, but I really like that taillight. They have not shipped yet and are not advertising a price.

Zero comes at it from a more off-road background with their Zero S, which is clunkier in style but actually exists here and now; for $14k you get a bike with ~100 mile range and an 88 mph top speed.

Brammo seems to be stuck in development hell; their web site has been offering pre-orders for the Enertia Plus and Empulse models for over a year, but they are out of stock of everything but the older Enertia, in green. If the Empulse ever ships it will be a nice, fast, 100 mph sportbike costing about $14k.

Gallery of electric motorcycle conversions from EVAlbum – hundreds of examples, based on practically every different kind of motorcycle. Each one includes a description of the battery, motor, and controller technology used, with some stats about range and speed.

This conversion is almost built from scratch: Jeff Patterson’s “ShocKing” is a 72-volt with a clean, classic chopper style. I like the way it features the batteries and makes them look good, instead of wedging them awkwardly into a motor’s shape or hiding them behind fairings.

GUM: a better UI for Git.

The UI can be confusing and inconsistent for newbies. In fact, even after three years of using git, there are commands I still find confusing (do I want git revert or git reset… and does it need –hard, HARD, –cached, HEAD, –, or something else?).

An interface should never be a by-product of the implementation of the system. This is where the Git UI goes wrong.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on Radian lately. Today’s project was adding support for rational numbers, which means it can deal with fractions now and not just whole numbers. I expect I will put out another binary release this weekend.

The dress for Jeanine is coming along slowly; I’ve been pecking at it in small bursts. I finished up the lining today and sewed it on to the body material along the neck line. I made a mistake I’ll have to go back and correct but it’s a simple thing. I doubt there’s more than an evening’s work left to finish the project.

Today I went over to West Seattle and picked up an industrial serger for ALTSpace. It’s made by some no-name Chinese factory, but it was priced to move – some guy who was the non-sewing half of a small fashion business ended up with all the gear, and after it took up space in his garage for a year he just wanted it gone. I tried it out and it works well; it’s very, very fast.

Ava just got an Acer Aspire One, the 522 model. We installed Ubuntu 11.10, which is very pretty and which has an install procedure about as easy as it could possibly be. The machine worked fine for about a day, then started locking up, seemingly at random. Oh no!

Ava eventually noticed that the lock-up happened when the machine connected to the network. After poking at it for several hours and going through a handful of reinstalls, I found this page which explains the problem and offers a simple fix:

In fact, every time you try to connect to a wireless network, your netbook may freeze, the only option being a hard reset !

It seems that this bug comes from a conflict between the ethernet and the wireless adapter.

But the good news is that there is a very simple tip to avoid this bug : you need to setup a specific boot order, where the network boot is used first. With this setup, the ethernet adapter will be configured in a way that there won’t be any conflict with the wifi adpater at the time of wireless network connexion.

Ah, what a relief. The fix works perfectly.

Surprising, unexpected victory for “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures”: the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the cops do, in fact, need a warrant before they can just stick a GPS logger on your car.

This is pretty far out in “well, duh” territory, but after a couple decades watching law enforcement agencies get everything they ask for in the name of various imaginary wars on various imaginary bogeymen, it’s awfully satisfying to see them take a rebuff for once.

I’ve been hearing references to the Parisian tunnel explorers for years, but this Wired profile covers them in some nice depth. They sound like a great bunch; I love their decentralized, do-it-yourself style. Too bad Seattle is too young a city to have anything like the tunnel system they get to explore, and America too phobic about imaginary terrorists hiding under the bed to take the legal risk.

Machining a PCB using a CNC mill – cleaner and faster than photoresist and chemical etching.

Strange to think that string-copying functions are still a subject of active debate in 2012, but here’s a clearly-written, well-thought-out survey of the current options and a proposed solution to their various buffer-overrun risks and performance constraints:

This is a look at the various means in C to copy strings, and their safety and performance implications. What is surprising is that all of the available implementations, even the venerable *BSD strl functions have serious issues.

To preface, I am only going to cover null-terminated strings, because that is what the libc runtime, which is the foundation that every language ultimately reaches down to in the end, is built around.

I will also cover a new proposed alternative to address the problems I’ve mentioned at the end of this article.

Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill “until there is wider agreement on a solution.” His statement is full of exactly the sort of self-serving nonsense you’d expect from a career politician who is trying to make a graceful exit without admitting that he made a mistake, but this battle is clearly over.

This infographic shows the overnight change in congressional supporters vs opponents of SOPA/PIPA. The effect of the blackout was a net shift of 85 votes to the side of the angels, which is now ahead by 36 votes.

The MPAA will keep on trying, of course, and we need to keep up the pressure. Here is the letter I sent to senator Maria Cantwell.

Senator Cantwell –

Thanks for your opposition to PIPA. As our world becomes more technology-driven, speech increasingly occurs through the Internet. The architecture of the Internet must be protected from the short-sighted meddling of big media corporations if our First Amendment rights of free speech are to remain meaningful.

I urge you to keep on resisting the MPAA’s attempts to abuse the democratic process. Rather than adapt to the new world of electronic distribution, they are trying to strongarm the US government into protecting their old-fashioned business models, and they will undoubtedly keep on trying regardless of the cost to our fundamental freedoms. Please stand firm and continue to protect our rights of free speech!

your constituent, and fellow Real Networks alum –
Mars Saxman

And here’s the similar note I sent to representative Jim McDermott, who appears to be leaning toward the anti-SOPA side but hasn’t come out strongly against it:

Congressman McDermott –

I’m glad to hear that you are not inclined to support SOPA. While violation of copyright licensing terms may well be a concern for those businesses which still depend on obsolete pre-digital content distribution models, this relatively minor regulatory issue in no way justifies the vast, chilling censorship regime SOPA would create across the public Internet.

As our world becomes more technology-driven, more of our speech occurs through the Internet. The architecture of the Internet must be protected from the short-sighted meddling of big media corporations if our First Amendment rights of free speech are to remain meaningful.

I urge you to vote against SOPA, and to resist its successors as well – it seems likely that SOPA will fail, but I’m sure that the MPAA will try again. Please keep on looking past their short-sighted profit-seeking motives and protect our fundamental freedoms of speech.

Thank you, from one of your constituents.

Mars Saxman

It’s neat watching almost every site I visit regularly either shut down or at least put up some special censorship-related graphics to promote the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests. Even Google has gotten in on the act – I’d hoped they wouldn’t wuss out, and watching them put some muscle into the debate makes me feel like I chose the right place to work.

I miss the old days, when the politicians had no idea what to do with us and pretty much let us alone. I can think of nothing positive that legislature has ever accomplished for the Internet. I’m sad that we have to stoop to their level, and dirty ourselves by dealing with their corrupt process, just to maintain our ability to do what we do; but this is the world we’re stuck with, and as revolutionary as the Internet is we can’t entirely escape the fact that our wires run through their dirt.

I’m going to make the best of a bad deal, and do my part to protest the nightmare that is SOPA/PIPA. If we make enough noise, perhaps we can scare them enough that they’ll think twice before accepting those MPAA bribes next time.

Join me?