Street Cred
Secured Digits
Why worry about people sharing passwords? I/O Software's Puppy combines a new fingerprint reader from Sony with software for Windows NT to create a system with invulnerable login security.
Once you've been fingerprinted, log in with Puppy by simply resting your finger on the coated glass.
The system works well, although it takes a bit of practice to make the scans come out right. A bigger problem came up when I tried to log in over the network: without a fingerprint reader for my laptop, I was locked out. You can set up Puppy to accept either your fingerprint or your password, but that kind of defeats the purpose. A better alternative is to buy a reader for each workstation.
Perhaps the system's best feature is the biometric sensor that differentiates between a live finger and a dead one. Good news for workers in high-security situations who don't want to worry about having their digits chopped off by overzealous computer crackers - or, in this case - hackers.
Simson Garfinkel
Puppy: US$650. I/O Software: +1 (909) 222 7600, fax +1 (909) 222 7601.
A Life Uncoded
Memoirs are all the rage in the book biz; among them, fortunately, is Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents. Ullman comes with her tech bona fides intact (she is, after all, a seasoned software engineer). But she also comes with novel material: the not-meek musings of an aging girl geek.
The "discontents" of the title are programmers: those who navigate between the world as humans understand it and the world as computers understand it, consigned to what Ullman calls "a strange state of disjunction." In that latter world, "human needs must cross the line into code," she writes. "They must pass through this semipermeable membrane where urgency, fear, and hope are filtered out, and only reason travels across."
These disjunctions are at play in Ullman's life and in the central intimacy of her identity as a coder: her closeness to the machine. We see the seduction at the heart of programming: embedded in the hijinks and hieroglyphics are the esoteric mysteries of the human mind.
It's partly Ullman's use of language that conveys the sexy jazz of coding. In this duet with coworker Joel, they stare down a stubborn bug: "We lock eyes. We barely breathe. For a slim moment, we are together in a universe where two human beings can simultaneously understand the statement 'If space is numeric!'" Back-and-forth cuts make the book feel like a fast-clip film. But sometimes this leaves the narrative arc wanting. The work also flags when it veers off into the confessional: sex with Brian, her cocksure lover, for example. I ate up descriptions like "His lovemaking was tantric, algorithmic," but found myself asking, "Why am I reading this?" There is an answer to that question: in Ullman's anxieties about her affair, in her contemplations of her late father's belief in the machinery of capital, and in her sense of "self-made solitude," she is registering the uncertainties of a fortysomething programmer entering the Mid-Life Crisis.
A team of young coders comes to replace her on a job. The blessing-and-curse of technology - obsolescence - shouts to her like the all-caps subject field of an email: FROM ADOLESCENCE TO OBSOLESCENCE - WHAM!
From Britain, with Love
What is it with those perfidious Brits? They're all please and thank you to your face, but the minute you turn your back, and they settle down to write, they turn out to be so ... well, rude. From the boyish lechery of the drugs-and-birds Loaded magazine to the scandal of London's Private Eye, it seems like the best stories in the UK come after the stiff-upper-lip façade drops and writers start getting low-down, mean, and dirty.
Even British geeks have shown their dark side. Every Friday, games programmers, Web monkeys, and Bastard Operators from Hell across the Atlantic snicker their way through Need To Know now, "Britain's most sarcastic tech newsletter." Since its launch in May, it's received raves from the thousand or so subscribers dissatisfied with both the West Coast bias of other Net-based news sources and the plethora of dreary tech supplements that fall unread from Britain's newspapers. Delivered in plain (yet nattily formatted) ASCII via email and written by journalists who've grown frustrated by the strictures of the trade press, this Drudge Report for the UK's digital industries has become required reading for anyone wanting to know the real poop.
That's not to say it's local color only. NTK now has a lot to recommend it to an international audience. For one thing, it's funny. When it aims its sniper fire at the luminaries of Silicon Valley, it's often hilarious. Coverage of the Apple-Microsoft buyout in NTK now ("Capturing the spirit of the classic Apple 1984 advert, Steve Jobs announced that Microsoft was investing US$150 million in Apple, Microsoft had always been Apple's friend, and that Apple was now at war with Eurasia.") was flash-forwarded to the Net's humor mailing lists.
Lastly, it's got heart. Despite its pleadings of amorality, NTK now has a suspiciously idealistic slant. It covers the road protests and activities of the European computer underground that print publications have notoriously ignored. You get a sense that the writers of NTK now care about the world they poke fun at - and the fact that its contributors file their stories gratis is a strong hint that they're doing this for love.
I Can't Drive 55
Carmageddon is the dearest and most taboo dream of any gamer sick to death of conventional racing games: it's not whether you win or lose, it's how many innocent bystanders you smear down the sidewalk in the process. From the opening movie to whatever remains of your humanity when you finish, this "racing game for the chemically imbalanced" is a single- and multiplayer automotive killfest with no rules and enough pointless gore to make things interesting.
Complete the track circuit, eliminate all the opposing vehicles by any means available, or automotively slaughter all the pedestrians - it matters not. Participants can blatantly ram and kill other racers, intentionally power-slide bloody swaths through screaming clusters of innocent pedestrians, and get points for high-speed Splatteri and Combo bonuses that inflict as much antipersonnel damage as possible on such tarmac targets as pudgy businessmen, bikini-clad beach bunnies, and - of course - little old ladies crossing the street. The game physics are marvelously ridiculous: competing race cars can survive not only head-on collisions at 190 mph, but also the ensuing three-story tumble though the air.
The various single-player racetracks (with such highlights as Maim Street and Roswell that Ends Well) are bad enough, but when players invoke the multiplayer evil, the very worst is sure to surface - and this is where the game shines. No true network friend will simply beat you to the finish line when it's just as easy to push your helpless, struggling, burning vehicle over the precipice of a handy 500-foot cliff. Carmageddon is the most twisted, psychotic, player-friendly game in the history of PC racing, and those who achieve its Number One racer status are humbly asked to stay off my street.
Safety Essentials
Whether you're cleaning up a pesky sarin gas leak, cutting up a side of beef with a band saw, or spooning slag from your backyard foundry, the Safety Essentials catalog has something for you. Need a self-contained haz-mat suit, Kevlar gloves, or emergency burn kits? How about earplugs or biohazard disposal boxes? Safety Essentials carries them all.
What's impressive about this collection is the breadth of its idea of safety. Yes, it has all the material you'll ever need to clean up that toxic sludge on the loading dock, but the catalog also features back supports for people who do heavy lifting and wrist supports for those who pound keyboards all day.
If you're an industrial fetishist, Safety Essential's swag is pure pornography: hard hats in every color and aluminized coats (safe up to 2,850 degrees Fahrenheit for you barbecuers).
Whether you're preparing for that toxic date with destiny or just want to look like it, this catalog is one-stop shopping for safety freaks and cultural mutants alike.
The Next NC?
While some multinational corporations sing the merits of a cheap, ubiquitous network computer, one has actually released software whose OS and hardware requirements virtually guarantee this kind of network-is-everywhere deployment - it runs on DOS.
Caldera WebSpyder - based on a program originally written by Prague hacker Michael Polak - is a fully functional, graphical Web browser designed for computers running the venerable Disk Operating System, that forgotten OS of the '80s PC. Also available for noncommercial download is Caldera's OpenDOS - a 100 percent compatible, improved DOS.
You have to be patient with the setup. Speed won't be a problem if you get it off the Net, but my copy of OpenDOS came on CD-ROM, and, well, none of the machines I tested had ever seen a CD-ROM drive - so I had to manually create my own disk set on floppies.
The graphics on an old IBM PC with a CGA card suck, and nothing can ever change that. But try WebSpyder in a 386 with only 1 Mbyte of RAM and an SVGA card - a machine still wimpy enough to make running Linux with its graphical X Window System an impossibility - and you've got a winner.
WebSpyder doesn't like frames and doesn't speak Java (yet). But it does HTML 3.2, and using it for FTP transfers or sending email is a breeze. It is a strange feeling to use an abandoned 386 to see GIF banner ads on the Web, a strange feeling indeed.
Expect to see this app used as an interface on low-end hardware like point-of-sale terminals and inventory systems. By bringing the Web to the world of the secondhand-store PC, Caldera WebSpyder could effectively become everything the fabled network computer hasn't.
America's Edge
Since America's founding, four stages of population movement have marked our society. For more than 100 years, we were a rural country. The Industrial Revolution transformed us into a country of city dwellers, while the rise of the car in the '50s saw the switch to suburban life as people moved beyond the city limits but streamed back each day to work.
Over the last 20 years, a fourth stage of American development has emerged in parallel with the rise of edge cities around the cores of older metropolitan centers. The marked distinction between edge-city and suburban life is that, unlike the typical suburban dweller who's still linked to the city core for their daily bread, edge-city inhabitants rarely visit this core. Their jobs are close by, either within their edge city or one over.
Joel Garreau examines this demographic trend in his excellent work, Edge City, covering territories in New Jersey, Boston, Detroit, Atlanta, Phoenix, Texas, Southern California, the San Francisco Bay area, and Washington, DC. In this 1991 work, Garreau presages the incredible developments in PCs and telecommunications technologies since the start of the '90s and basically lays out a blueprint for how and why today's technocenters sprang out of the ashes of the collapse of the go-go '80s. Edge City is far from a dry tome of charts and figures; it reveals motivations behind the trend, the real estate economics at play, and the important implications of this new frontier on American society.
Two chapters at the end, "The Glossary" and "The Laws," should be read first and are worth the book's price alone. "The Glossary" is a concise compilation of real estate terms, such as FAR (floor-to-area ratio) and CC&Rs (covenants, conditions, and restrictions), while "The Laws" reveals developer rules of thumb, each utterly engaging. Here's a sample: The average distance from the main office of a company in edge city to the CEO's home: 8 miles. Cervero's Law of the value of time wasted in traffic jams: People view the time they spend in a traffic jam as equal, in dollar value, to half of their hourly wage. The maximum desirable commute, throughout human history, regardless of transportation technology: 45 minutes. The three laws of building: 1. Build. 2. Build at the lowest possible cost. 3. If Rule One and Two come into conflict, Rule One takes precedence.
Edge City is a glimpse of the America to come, whether we're ready or not.
Chip Off the Ol' Blocks
Mindscape's new CD-ROM is the first interactive kids game based on the most popular construction toy in the world. Lego's Danish factories have been spitting out zillions of plastic bricks for 65 years now. Inevitably, Lego bricks had to be turned into Lego bytes.
Lego Island's 3-D world has plenty to keep digital Lego-maniacs busy. Visit the beach or go to the racetrack and take your newly built Formula-L for a spin. The Infomaniac warns players about the resident deconstructionist. Don't deliver pizza to him in jail, or he'll unleash apocalyptic chaos on your plastic utopia.
Virtual Legos were made to complement, not replace, Lego products. But Lego Island provides an interesting fantasy in a place that until now existed only in kid's minds.
Bonjour le Cinéma
I've always been impressed by the Lumière brothers film Demolition of a Wall. In the beginning, there stands a piece of a building and a crew of workers. Fifty seconds later, voilà!, the men are standing in a pile of rubble. Made in France in 1895, this old structure now joins Train Arrival in the Station of La Ciotat and 83 other 19th-century shorts to make up The Lumière Brothers' First Films.
Such scenes are baby pictures of the 20th century's dominant medium, and First Films narrator Bertrand (Round Midnight) Tavernier marks these first steps with well-acquainted asides. Throughout this celluloid seance, the camera peeps discreetly into the long-buried casual life of the 19th century.
Today, we've reached a cool understanding with the camera. We know how to act when videotape is rolling, and we have references to anticipate how we will look. The subjects of First Films, however, either fall over themselves with excitement or stare past the lens, unfazed by an encounter with the future. In a way, these are home movies from the good ol' days.
The brothers one-upped Thomas Edison and lived to tell about it. They built their own camera, invented the projector, and created films with dramatic compositions and intriguing action. Comparing this reality with recent two-hour-plus fantasies The Lost World and ID4, it seems we are now living not in a world of shorter attention spans, but of perpetual escapism. I wonder if that's what Auguste and Louis Lumière were picturing.
Marvelously Tooned
Say you're the average alternative comics fan: frantic to get your hands on the latest Eightball or Acme Novelty Library, lap up irony like it's ambrosia, and hate all the codpiece-centric Batman sequels. Chances are you'd no sooner buy Marvel Comics than read Juggs on a school bus. But here's the comic world's dirty little secret: the majority of fans and cartoonists started their obsession at the corner pharmacy, reveling in thinly plotted exploits of tights-wearing superheroes.
That's the beauty of Coober Skeber, an anthology that stars only Marvel characters (some highly obscure) in a completely unauthorized set of adventures. The stories and artwork range from stilted to stunning, but the sort of exuberance that comes from a brief dip back into adolescent obsession runs throughout.
Dr. Strange endures existential angst in an alternate plane reminiscent of a Wassily Kandinsky painting. Peter Parker suffers the tortures of the damned in high school, at the hands of the popular, preppy Fantastic Four teens. Moon Boy loses his ally Devil Dinosaur to a missile and becomes a clock-punching wage slave. Spiderwoman experiences a pheromone problem that recalls Patrick Suskind's Perfume. There's even a facsimile of the obligatory Twinkies ad adorning every back cover of those pharmacy finds; this one stars the now-forgotten Mole Man. For the reader, this is an odd experience, like feeling another person's nostalgia for something you, too, once loved. Nonetheless, it's great to see the Silver Surfer teamed up with the Man-Thing in one of those endless combinations that so delighted Marvel writers.
To most small comics publishers, the mere thought of a lawsuit by juggernaut Marvel Comics inspires insomnia and heavy drinking. But Boston comics maven Tom Devlin is virtually demanding a copyright-infringement suit by publishing Coober Skeber. The cover puckishly reads "Marvel Benefit Issue," while the credits page requests, "Please send all cease-and-desist orders and summons to Highwater Books." So buy one now, before Marvel's legal eagles put the kibosh on the comic in a cartoon version of that infamous Negativland-U2 flap of a few years back.
Tracks of My Mind
I wrote my thesis with background music playing over my computer. As a result, when I reread certain sections, I still hear a subliminal soundtrack. One sad paragraph reminds me of Elvis Costello's "Alison"; other parts make me uneasy because I don't know the names of the songs they evoke.
Why not? Because software CD players list all tracks as "Track 1," "Track 2," et cetera.
Now there's a cool hack that solves the problem. The combination of the Internet-based CDDB and the Notify CD freeware player lets you do it free and do it today.
When you insert a disc, Notify CD checks your Windows 95 database for track information. If none exists, the program blits out onto the Internet and checks the 57,000 titles in the CDDB. Once found, it simply drags the information back to your PC, and you're done. Instant playlist - no muss, no fuss.
Sonic Chemistry
Enthusiasts of vinyl are no doubt used to a familiar refrain from CD consumers: they still make those? Not only is vinyl production still a booming subculture, but these days, it seems, everyone is a disc jockey.
San Francisco-based writer and Om Records disciple Christopher Kelly has presented a loving tribute to the turntablist in Deep Concentration, an audio CD/CD-ROM double disc set. Once you stop snickering over the irony of learning to DJ via your home computer, the beatbox program on the CD-ROM portion of Deep Concentration might just unleash the wild sonic chemist within. Click the mouse to manipulate vocals, bass lines, and scratches from a large bank of provided samples.
Significantly frustrated by your lack of DJ prowess? Turn to the audio CD to see just how it's done. Thrill to improbable combinations borne out of a deep understanding of connections across different styles. All proof positive that the DJ is more than a breathing jukebox.
Byte-Sized Stories
Just how new technologies will impact future patterns of reading and writing stories is anyone's guess, but Janet H. Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace offers a dazzling range of tantalizing speculations from an author equally at home with Shakespeare and radical hypertext experiments.
Murray, who teaches interactive fiction at MIT, has written a lively overview of the prospects digital media offers new forms of storytelling. She surveys the styles found in computer games, MUDs, and hypertexts. No revelations here, though I like her ability to draw from her literary background, offering plentiful examples of hypertexts published over the centuries, from the Jewish Talmudic commentaries on the Bible to Borges.
Then she tackles the deeper of the book's two themes. Her observations about what forms cyberbards might use make a wish list beyond anything we've seen thus far - a technology that balances interactivity and directed plot. As Murray writes, "It remains to be seen whether we can capture the illusion of the incalculability of life with the emotional calculus of the computer." The holodeck of the title suggests that vista, referring to a Star Trek technology in which holographic simulations permit emotional participation in alternative worlds.
The author's daydreaming intelligently touches upon the possibility of creating software that can offer writers the "capacity for specifying story motifs as accurately as music notation." She envisions future storytellers with the capacity to dip into the world's well of tales with the ease and grace that musicians can currently digitally sample rhythmic patterns.
Those in search of practical approaches toward creative storytelling might find Murray's book annoyingly abstract, but this is a powerful text for anyone willing to "dream along" with the author.
A story Murray tells about her son brings this point home compellingly. Her son and his dad are playing this improvised board game with ever-changing, ever more elaborate rules. Father asks son, after two hours of playing this boundless game, when will it end, and the boy replies: "This game will never end." If that is your kind of game, or story, this book is for you.
Mind Games
The new Psi Explorer CD-ROM grabs you by the neurons and squeezes until you "ooh" and "aah" your way into an unexpectedly pleasurable learning experience that defies science as we know it.
Psi is the scientist's word for all things paranormal - ESP, poltergeists, psychokinesis, precognition. Although this subject has been tackled before, Psi Explorer is far and away the best of this genre, for two reasons.
First, the extraordinarily comprehensive rendition of nearly everything that scientists know about psi is presented with breathtaking graphics, animations, and sound. Second, Psi Explorer is truly interactive. Using a pseudorandom number generator, you not only get psi tests that use the standard Zener cards, but you also get an intense game called The Gate.
Unless my crystal ball is completely cracked, this CD-ROM will be a big winner; and I have ways of knowing that you'll enjoy it as much as I have.
README On the bookshelves of the digerati
Mary Furlong,
of SeniorNet fame, is the founder and CEO of Third Age Media (www.thirdage.com/), a company for growing old - wired style.
Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company and Career, by Andrew Grove.
"According to Grove, businesses need to maximize strategic inflection points. For instance, every 7 seconds someone is turning 50, every 4 seconds a new Web site goes up. Third Age takes advantage of these two trends."
Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, by Jerry Kaplan.
"Kaplan does a wonderful job of capturing the sense of adventure that a start-up involves. The pace is fast and the stakes are high. He understands that energy, that mind absorption that a start-up is all about."
The Spirit of Community, by Amitai Etzioni.
"I am particularly interested in how people create communities, because the goal of Third Age is to create this great, good place. Etzioni recognizes that connecting with other people is a basic human need. He writes of the loss of traditional community and the key elements that make a community. How are the values defined? What is the social contract?"
BRUCE STERLING,
the Shakespeare of cyberpunk, wrote Holy Fire and too many other science fiction books to list here.
Huey Long's Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship 1928-1940, by Harnett T. Kane.
"This is what happens when Southern-fried good-old-boy American corruption gets up on its hind legs and bays at the moon."
Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America 1914-1917, by Jules Witcover.
"Idiotic but fiercely determined terrorist spooks wander across America randomly blowing up ships and ammo factories. Take a lesson, Smilin' Tim McVeigh."
Whole Earth Review, Issue 90.
"Skinnier, a little grayer maybe, but the mag reads exactly as it has for the past 23 years! It's the greatest countercultural periodical in the history of humankind. Give them your money. Donate your blood, if you have to."
John Warwicker
is a founder of Tomato, a London-based brat pack of designers, musicians, and filmmakers making a cultural imprint in the commercial sphere.
Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, by Lucy R. Lippard.
"Lippard looks at modern constructs - the modern art museum, for example - as navigational realms through which language and intent are communicated. Where is the edge of the idea? And what is our relationship with the edge? Engineers must ask the same questions of virtual worlds. Do networks and Web sites have sculptural significance?"
Real Time: A Catalogue of Ideas and Information, by John Brockman and Ed Rosenfeld.
"Similar to the Whole Earth Catalog, Real Time is a compendium of ideas about the world, many of which are condensed into diagrams like chemical formulas: very simple, concise, yet deeply complex and relative. The condensation of experience or the translation of the physical into the cerebral world is one of the reasons I make marks on paper. I believe this peculiar impulse to annotate our experiences drives modern technology, as well."
Steve Baxter ()baxcam@aol.com) is a Seattle-based CBS video journalist and CNN software reviewer.
Colin Berry ()colin@wired.com) is Wired's music editor and a freelance writer. He served as consultant editor for the 1998 Time Out San Francisco Guide.
Ian Christe composes music for modern dance as himself, digital death metal as Dark Noerd, and Donkey Kong-inspired drum and bass as DJ Bazillion.
Simson Garfinkel ()simsong@mit.edu) is HotWired's technology columnist.
Jordan Gruber ()jordan@well.com), former managing editor of Gnosis, writes about forensic electronic evidence and is an aspiring enlightenment broker.
Phil Gyford ()phil@gyford.com) is quite tall and looks like a nice kinda fella.
Constance Hale ()connie@wired.com) loves books so much she wrote one: Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age.
Chris Hudak ()gametheory@aol.com) is a technology columnist, game critic, and recent judge for Robot Wars in San Francisco. He has seen The Color of Money 14 times.
Richard Kadrey ()kadrey@well.com) is the author of the Covert Culture Sourcebook and two novels: Metrophage and Kamikaze L'Amour. He has no qualifications for anything he does.
Paul Kedrosky ()pkedrosky@ashley.business.uwo.ca) is a freelance writer and truant PhD student who hopes his thesis advisor doesn't subscribe to Wired.
Andrew Lentz is a freelance writer who just moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Whew.
Mitch Myers ()comeback@mcs.com) is a psychologist and a freelance writer. He lives in Chicago and Manhattan and spends a lot of time on the phone.
Stacy Osbaum ()osbaum@aol.com) is a Europhile living in Los Angeles who contributes to The Face, Urb, LA Weekly, Request, Option, Magnet, and Axcess.
Tamara Palmer ()trance@netcom.com) is senior editor of Urb and contributes to i-D, The Face, Request, and others. She recently fell victim to the cruel ritual of finding housing in San Francisco.
j. poet ()poebeat@earthlink.net) writes about international pop and ethnic music for a variety of national and international publications, including Pulse! and RhythmMusic.
Alan E. Rapp ()rappa@sfgate.com) is a book publicist and pad Thai aficionado. He sincerely believes that you have his best interests at heart.
Rich Santalesa is former editor-in-chief of Windows User magazine. Currently, he's the editor of PDA & Wireless World and Ask Dr. John.
Dan Sicko ()urbfutur@mindspring.com) is a contributing editor for Urb, fledgling copywriter, webzine publisher, and Boston terrier wrangler.
Marc Spiegler makes enemies for a living in Chicago, then retreats to the Amazon.
Michael Stutz ()stutz@dsl.org) is a writer. His first novel, Sunclipse, has been released as freeware.
Dean Suzuki, PhD ()dsuzuki@sfsu.edu), teaches music at San Francisco State University. He is also a programmer at KPFA in Berkeley, California.
Norman Weinstein ()nweinste@micron.net) is a poet and critic who writes about the arts and technology for The Christian Science Monitor, MIT's Technology Review, and The Boston Phoenix.
