It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

I was working at about midnight the other night when I heard my little VPN app scream that it'd lost connection.. I noticed that I couldn't get out to my favorite site and checked my DSL modem.... the status light was off. So the next morning I got up and saw it was still off. I called the DSL provider, we went through the standard power off/on stuff and the regular checklist and the guy in India said he'd overnight a new modem (it still hasn't gotten here..). A little while later I remembered something from my CCNA 1 class - check "layer 1" first.

So I swapped out the line between the modem and the wall jack. The lights came back on. I took that phone line and tested it with a phone and it was bad... heh. Always check layer 1 first.

There was a scene from Minority Report that showed a UI that allowed a person to explore photos and videos of a particular space and time in a fluid way. After watching the scene a few times I think it will be a powerful tool when it becomes reality. I can imagine the day when powerful home computers can stitch together photos and video scenes of a particular place and combine them with other images found via the Net. It should be some fun indeed.

So I stumbled upon Photosynth from Microsoft Live Labs (You can download Photosynth now btw. . ) and also noticed today that the GeoTagger was slashdotted. GeoTagger looks like a super cool little gadget. If you haven't checked it out.. it mounts on the hot shoe of a camera and records:
- Latitude and Longitude
- Magnetic compass direction
- Time and date
Stick the GeoTagger on your camera and you can call the photos up later in a UI that associates the photo with time and space. If there aren't already cameras out there that record all of this data then they'll be coming soon I'm sure. And if you have a GPS receiver you can just use a software solution (there are a few out there like this command line one) to mash a GPS track with your photos without having to buy an extra gadget.

I'm not entirely sure the software behind photosynth is really necessary? I dunno.. but from what was said in the video it seemed like it can process the photos and place them into a virtual 3D space based on the lines and features in the photos.. therefore stitching together panoramas from multiple photos that are possibly from different people and taken at different times. It could be fun, or could be an over the top gizmo that people don't really need to use. It'll be fun to find out.

As for the UI.. take a look at the Photosynth video and then ponder that Geotagging of photos to particular places has been going on for quite a while via Flickr and Google Earth. The existing UIs aren't anywhere near what is shown in the photosynth video, but maybe such an elaborate UI isn't needed? Maybe we're better off with a less interactive 2D interface (yeah, I was ear deep in VRML years ago too) and maybe not. If we're expected to interface with a 3D geotagged photo browser via something more advanced than a mouse then I hope it isn't a "pointscreen" like this guy is using, but I'd be just fine with the "multi touch" screen that Jeff Han showed at TED.

And the tiny little Luddite in me stops and wonders about the wisdom in putting millions (tens of millions? hundreds of...) of photos in one place all tagged with time, date, location, etc. and building a repository of visual information for the day that the ultra powerful AI technology gains access to the Net. Oh, forget about waiting for some AI to use this data, what happens when CNN gets ahold of it. w00t!

This just cracks me up.. 

“Microsoft has been paying the large domain resellers to move their “parked” sites to IIS on Microsoft Server. Moving the parked customers of a single large reseller, GoDaddy.com, caused a shift of 4.5 Million domain names, or 5% of total server share from Apache to Microsoft IIS in the Netcraft report. This is an “appearance” change only, because the sites involved have no content. But managers believe figures like those in the Netcraft report, and act on them. It’s time for the Free Software / Open Source community to fight back.”

So if you have a parked domain name and want it parked on a non-Microsoft server then head on over to http://opensourceparking.com/ and find out how to park it on their servers.