We managed to find the one place in Washington state where it is freezing cold and damp in the summertime. I think it just touches the current that eventually makes the Bay Area so frigid.

Things I would never do anywhere else: program a robot to dance, hold a sword receiving blasts of purple lighting bolts from a Gauss gun, worship at the Church of Robotron, get a preview of a cool interactive toy Star was working on, help assemble a tower built of pipes to validate one of Miloh’s theories about constructing large structures with struts of uniform length, play foosball on a table that automatically keeps score and lights up when points are scored, attend a bicycle jousting event….

To avoid cross-site scripting, developers are sometimes advised to encode all incoming data into HTML, upon reception. The idea is that as long as it’s encoded into HTML right in your database, if you make a mistake later and dump that data back to the client, the worst thing that can happen is that they see encoded HTML. They won’t get data which contains script tags or other nefarious stuff.

While I see the logic, I find the idea of storing user data in HTML almost offensive.

At the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire, this old Apple //e was showing a simple demo:

10 PRINT "Maker Faire ": GOTO 10

I decided a green-screen Matrix effect would be way cooler, so I busted out some quarter-century old skillz to whip up this demo.

We downloaded an AppleSoft Basic PDF manual onto our phones, but it turned out not be necessary. I remembered about half of what was needed and another guy supplied the other half. Most of AppleSoft Basic is burned into my neurons – I started programming when I was 11.

I put the source code up on Github. I find it hilarious that I’m putting an AppleSoft BASIC program on Github.

Facebook allows programmers to look up a user by their account number (ID), with a very simple URL scheme.

1

https://graph.facebook.com/$id

Usually Facebook IDs aren’t well known so this is not a huge security issue. However, in the early days of Facebook, the ID was a simple auto-incrementing number.

This leads to a hack which fits in a tweet: early Facebook users in order.

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perl -le 'while(++$i){$_=`curl -s https://graph.facebook.com/$i `;print "$i ", $_=~/name":"([^""]+)/}'

I made these with the AutoStitch app on my iPhone, but instead of standing in one place and pivoting, I walked around objects.

I had tried doing something similar a long time ago, back when it was a free program you could download from UBC… but in 2005, AutoStitch’s SIFT algorithm tended to reject photo sets like this. The iPhone version seems to be more forgiving.

I went to Madrid in part because I wanted to see these ongoing protests for myself. Let no one say this was a mob; it was a functioning anarchist community, with distribution of food, security, even cleanup crews.

I don’t believe in every slogan I saw here – but it is wonderful to see people reclaiming a town square as a place to discuss the issues of the day. The main activity was simply reading all the messages plastered on every surface; some radical, some witty, some revolutionary. Everyone from young people to grandmothers was engaged in consuming or producing messages, outside the mass media system.

I never got close enough to photograph my favorite slogan, written in English: "SPAIN IS NOT A BUSINESS. WE ARE NOT SLAVES."

And they love the interwebs. Facebook pages and Twitter hashtags are everywhere, as are references to "rebooting the system", "upgrading the system" and more. If you thought the internet was producing a generation of passive mouse potatoes, it seems not. They instead seem to be learning to expect systems that are more transparent, more flexible, more efficient, and more personal.