Home

Words of the now

To the great ones

Remember always Hambo Keygen Studios, Hotline, Suprnova. You have served me well.

Reflections on Geocities

Back in the late nineties, Geocities was all the rage. I had a website set up there, and I maintained it with exacting fervor. At the time, hosting was rare, and free hosting rarer. The concept of user-created sites was still novel, and everybody was clamoring to show off their craptacular HTML. People ate it up at the time because it allowed them to create something of their own, to own a little piece of web property and do with it as they pleased. Geocities even went so far as to give everyone addresses, in neighborhoods, grouped by their topic. I was in Silicon Valley, address 4001.

But then something happened. The same thing that always happens; competitors moved in. Up spring Fortune City, and a dozen others, that all offered free web hosting. And some even did it without ads, like Freedom2Surf. However, it wasn't the diffusion of personal home pages that ultimately killed them off. It was that people finally realized how poor and limited their services actually were. For a nominal annual fee, you could buy webspace unencumbered by ads, with scripting and database support, and probably shell access with it. The only thing Geocities did was wrap that up in a dumbed down interface. The kinds of people that were serious about hosting webpages moved on to professional services or taught themselves how to serve up their own content. Those that didn't, well, their pages are on Geocities, languishing with the other bottom 5% of the web, and complacent in their ignorance. Thus, in the end, Geocities became known not for enabling a generation (in Internet terms, about 3 years) of people to make websites, but instead for hosting some of the worst websites on the Internet.

Now, today, in the late 2000's, Facebook is all the rage. Just like Geocities, it sprang from humble beginnings, and grew in a few short years to become wildly popular, as well as attracting dozens of competing social network sites like Myspace and LinkedIn. The content? Increasingly and equally uninspiring. The question then, is if Facebook is a Geocities a decade later. Personally, I have mixed feelings. Facebook truly does provide services that would be difficult to integrate by oneself using what was already available. Facebook is more than a veneer of interface upon some fundamental technology. It has become not just a community, but a central artery off of which dozens of specialized features and capabilities have spawned. There isn't a simple HTTP server that performs essentially the same duties. And for that, I am annoyed. I am annoyed that the conduit through which interaction and information is shared is so... inconvenient. It is inconvenient that I must send and receive messages through their messaging system, instead of through email where I may have a searchable personal record of the conversation. It is annoying that I must always log in, and be bothered by friend and application requests, that I may be judged by the trivialities I choose to share about myself, and that my refusal to use it makes me look like a Luddite. It also bothers me that ultimately, Facebook is nothing more than some fancy scripts interfacing to a database, albeit a very nicely packaged set of scripts.

But will Facebook fade away, as Geocities did? Or will it become cemented in the culture of the Internet like eBay and Amazon? I would like it to go away, but I don't sense that possibility being very probable. Facebook seems to genuinely serve a purpose that nothing else can match (not at the moment, and not so simply). Its popularity might wane as people outgrow it. People (like me) outgrew Geocities, because they no longer needed the service or found something better. LinkedIn appears to be the more grown up version of Facebook, to which many are flocking. But it remains to be seen if the future of social networking is a permanent Internet establishment or if it is just a fad.

Dupes I

It never ceases to amaze me just how much published literature out there is not-new, or at least quite obvious from well established principles. Maybe it's a good idea to publish it to make it more known, but it still seems like a waste of journal space. Take for instance, Ward and Pendry's "Refraction and geometry in Maxwell's equations", as well as all the latest literature on optical invisibility cloaks. The basic idea is that conformal mapping can be used to remap space around objects, and more generally, conformal metric transformations preserve the form of Maxwell's equations. Now, this idea is more of a logical consequence of the fact that Maxwell's equations can be written in tensorial form using the Faraday 2-form and current 3-form, etc., which has been known for something like half a century now. Since these are tensors, then by definition, a change of coordinates preserves the equations. The fundamentally new aspect that is being brought to light now is that people are now suddenly starting to realize that this is possible and exploiting it. After all, the study of conformal mapping is quite mature, so we should see yet more articles on this topic. This is generally good news to me, since the interesting problems are now essentially finding useful metric perturbations (read: non-Euclidean), which I'm curious about.

Updates

Writings will continue here shortly, after much of the rest of the site is updated. Currently, a significant portion of the content here is stale, and quite frankly, embarassing. The move to using SWL instead of strictly hand coding these pages should reduce the amount of determination required to update the site.

Site updates

• 2008-04-11 - Reworked site to resize properly. Pages compiled with SWL.
• 2008-01-11 - Redesigned code page. Now with pictures!
• 2007-08-12 - Revamped organization of front page.
• 2007-08-12 - Updated to work in IE using magical scripts.
• 2007-08-11 - Updated several pages and added Pure CSS hierarchical lists code page. Updated résumé to reflect graduation.
• 2007-05-19 - Added Ditch Day circuits on hardware page.
• 2007-04-03 - Updated schedule, '52 page
• 2007-02-02 - Added research page.
• 2007-01-05 - Updated front page. Added a whole pile of links on the right. Added brain tickler solutions under Writings.
• 2005-12-13 - Updated KoenigSaver.
• 2006-02-09 - Updated EE 53 site.
• 2005-12-13 - Uploaded KoenigSaver.
• 2005-12-13 - Updated the vlib snapshot.
• 2005-12-04 - Added fractal page on the interests page. Go look at the pretty pictures.
• 2005-12-03 - Updated interests page with a lot of information. Set graph to be hidden by default to make IE not render so badly. Added 5x page.

Schedule

	Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
9 AM
			EE 343 Advanced Optoelectronic Devices Section 1 Instructor: Miller,David A.B School of Education 128		EE 343 Advanced Optoelectronic Devices Section 1 Instructor: Miller,David A.B School of Education 128
10 AM		EE 340 Advanced Topics in Optics and Quantum Optics Section 1 Instructor: Vuckovic,Jelena Bldg 200 34		EE 340 Advanced Topics in Optics and Quantum Optics Section 1 Instructor: Vuckovic, Jelena Bldg 200 34		EE 340 Advanced Topics in Optics and Quantum Optics Section 1 Instructor: Vuckovic, Jelena Bldg 200 34
11 AM		EE 232 Laser Dynamics Section 1 Instructor: Fan, Shanhui HerrinHBio T185		EE 232 Laser Dynamics Section 1 Instructor: Fan, Shanhui HerrinHBio T185		EE 232 Laser Dynamics Section 1 Instructor: Fan, Shanhui Packard 106
12 PM
1 PM					EE 234 Photonics Laboratory Section 1 Instructor: Hesselink,Lambertus Packard 066
						EE 234 Photonics Laboratory Section 1 Instructor: Hesselink,Lambertus Hewlett 103
2 PM
3 PM			EE 343 Advanced Optoelectronic Devices Section 1 Instructor: Rebecca Schaevitz Packard 104
4 PM						Meeting Group Meeting Shanhui Fan Ginzton 299
		OSA Seminar OSA Seminar Shanhui Fan Ginzton 200
5 PM
				EE 340 Advanced Topics in Optics and Quantum Optics Section 1 Instructor: Kelley Rivoire Ginzton 31
6 PM