the life and times of endenizen » Science & Technology

RFID devices (short for radio-frequency identification) have been around for quite a while. Mobil’s Speedpass uses this technology so you can “swipe” your credit information without actually sticking your credit card in strange slots. The U.S. government has said they will require RFID chips to be placed in all new passports by October 2006. This statement has generated plenty of controversy, since the information on the RFID chip will include the personal identification of the passport holder, but that’s a whole ‘nother story that I’m not too excited about at the moment.

What I *am* excited about, is the prospect of implanting a tiny chip into my hand so I can easily authenticate with a multitude of devices. Imagine your car door unlocking just when your hand reaches the handle; imagine logging onto your computer with a wave of your hand; imagine never again having to use the excuse, “I lost my keys.”

Forget biometric scanners or clunky “unlock buttons,” this is ubiquitous computing at its finest.

People around the world (mostly early-adopters of the latest tech gadgets) have tried RFID implants. Some night clubs in Spain have made Tuesday nights “Implant nights” for those who want to recieve their own chips so that the bar can literally keep “tabs” on the person. Others have hacked together their own hardware to open deadbolts or log them into a computer.

If you’d like more information, Amal Graafstra has an implant in each hand and is sort of an expert on the subject. He has a book on RFID coming out next month. The Tagged Forum is a good place to go for more information (or to fulfill all your government conspiracy theory needs). Phidgets sells one of the more popular chips used for implanting.

On the classic cartoon Transformers, none of the robots ever turned into a bicycle because, well, that would have been lame.

Wired 13.11: START

Wired is always a good source for all things interesting and tech-related. After reading a few articles recently posted on their website, I came across one about making robots from old bike parts. By itself, the article didn’t provide too much insight into making actual “robots” but instead works of art that resemble robots and will never actually move. Disappointing as it was, the idea intrigued me as I’ve recently been looking for parts that could be used in robot construction. I even have a few bikes laying around at home that might work well for such a project…

Link – Wikiversity- Your Free University

For the sake of this entry, “Genuine knowledge” will be defined to mean any attainable knowledge that is respected and valid for use in the workforce, further education, or elsewhere. We’re currently in an age where this knowledge is prohibitively expensive. To make sure the knowledge we gain is valid, we must pay people a lot of money to share their 10-30 years of accredited research and study. How do we know that they’re giving us good information? Well, because we trust that the titles after their name were given because they have proven their usefulness in a given area. Mr. Smith could be anyone, a plumber, a student, we don’t know for sure because the title doesn’t convey enough information. Dr. Smith, PhD, however, tells a completely different story. Somebody, somewhere, (hopefully an accredited institution) claims that “Dr. Smith” has proven to have knowledge in some given area. In fact, he has so much knowledge that the institution (that we hope exists) has staked its reputation of producing knowledgeable people into the world on this one man. If he goes on to get a job and it’s discovered that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, that institution will be less respected.

Where does the reputation of an institution come from? Is it something that takes a very long time to build up? Can a new institution sprout up and instantly become well-known and respected if they produce just one class of knowledgeable graduates? What if this happened… soon.

In the future, degrees will be attained without ever leaving home. Everyone will have access to the sum of human knowledge and everyone will be able to contribute to further it. In this flat earth, there are no barriers to learn. In the future, knowledge will be free.

XuQa.com is the latest in a wave of online communities for college-types. Initially, it appears to have many things that other web “portals” are lacking. 5 gigs of space for pictures is certainly impressive. That is, if they can deliver. So far, I haven’t seen any sign of where the money comes from to support this site. It’s certainly not cheap. Everyone loves math though, so let’s do some math…

• 5 gigs of space for each user (assuming 5,000 megs instead of 5,120)
• 100,000 users (less than the actual number)
• 500,000 gigabytes, or 500 terabytes

At the risk of a horrible flaming, let’s just grossly underestimate and assume $3 for every 4gigs. That’s $75,000. Let that fact set in while we move on.

Here’s a brief snippet from the “About XuQa” section:

XuQa.com is the illegitimate child of a few zany ideas, two months of toiling in front of shitty half-assed PC’s, a lack of consensus on a name and lots and lots of bickering.

This isn’t a big deal though. Lots of projects start this way and end up being great. Problem is, it’s currently being supported by 4 students and I don’t see any mention of a way they are paying for the site. (remember, the storage alone would be a *minimum* of $75,000, assuming they actually have the capacity to support that many users, which I’m pretty sure they don’t)

On further inspection, the site wasn’t very thoroughly tested. Not by anyone outside the group anyway. To add someone as a “crush” you only need to pass &cmd=crush to the end of the url when viewing their profile. So, to add the entire database to your crush list, you only need to do a simple loop and load that url in a popup (which I am currently doing – 861 crushes so far).

With that, I think XuQa has some potential, but it would need a lot more support. There’s some things that are interesting and new, and some things that hauntingly remind me of myspace, which I detest. If you’re a programmer yourself, go have some fun and hack what you can before they actually code it correctly.

PS. All in good fun, of course. XuQa Team, if you’re reading this, I commend you on the current system and wish you good luck in the future. I’ll probably get bored and stop hammering your server soon enough…

Waking up this morning kinda sucked. We stayed up till 2:30 and slept till 5:30, which means we got very little actual sleep. I pretended I was at some overseas conference and I was really tired because of the jet lag. As volunteers, Chris and I ran some cable around the floor into the different conference areas and hung around with the presenters. The actual conferences were pretty cool. I went to see Linux-based High Availability Infrastructures, Building an Open Source Company, Apache: mod_rewrite, Hula, and the best one, Deploying Open Source Software in Schools.

Now the presentations are done, the vendors have packed up and the real fun has started. Notacon is supposedly putting on a major party for all of the attendees with free drinks, loud music, and lots of other stuff.

I think I’ll go check it out.