bengt-erik norum

how long until we're selling these in target?

i've been looking for a good off-camera external flash for awhile. steve man (wearcam.org) raves about the metz flashes.

price is a bit steep for me, but if warren can convince me to get a nikon d70, it might be worth it.

i just ran across hackingnetflix. it makes my hacks look trendy. one of the articles in there states that national penetration is at 1.8%. nicole and i had debated/wagered on this number a year or so back. neither of us would have thought it would be even close to this successful.

here's proof that drugs and shockwave flash don't mix. note the titles of some of these ("gangascope"). the author has kindly inluded source. it's too bad i have no desire to learn flash.

the domain name (phong.com) makes me want to grab a newer pov-ray and play with all the features added since i knew it. radiosity wasn't implemented in the 'stable' release when i used it.

gizmodo points out that the new portable media center edition have shown up on amazon for pre-order.

my worst fear incarnate -- Web E-Mail: The New Hard Disk (Jeremy Zawodny's blog)

i previously posted the bay-area terrestrial radio stations i listen to. it's worth mentioning kexp and kuoi. they're both good streaming alternatives to the poor fm reception i get in my office.

here's some concrete evidence that my worst fear may already have come to light.

combine this with an indexing system and par and you've got a pretty robust mechanism for duplicating xdrive's basic functionality.

i'm still more intrigued by peer-to-peer backup systems. examples i've found are:

pStore, an mit paper
dibs, a python-based package using a custom erasure correcting implementation
dbs, an abstract at ucalgary
exercising dhash with distributed backup[.ppt], another mit thing built on chord
secure distributed document storage through peer-to-peer technology [.pdf], an ibm zurich effort
dbackup, a jini-based project that doesn't even appear to be in the planning phases

and while they may not meet the definition of peer-to-peer, these are projects i've been watching:
oceanstore, oceanstore is to storage as now.cs is to computing
koh-i-noor, check the ppt slides -- they were going to solve "the hotmail problem"

i started an index of filesystems, awhile back. afs, bfs, cfs, dfs, etc..

while looking for other peer-to-peer backup/storage systems, today, i ran into this. there's a reference to bfs in there. it is described as:

This project is aimed at developing algorithms and implementation techniques to build practical Byzantine-fault-tolerant systems, that is, systems that work correctly even when some components are faulty and exhibit arbitrary behavior. We believe that these systems will be increasingly important in the future because malicious attacks and software errors are increasingly common and can cause faulty nodes to exhibit arbitrary behavior.