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Given that The Singularity is Near, I’ve been brushing up on what the singularity is. It seems important to know what I’m talking about when I tell my six year old “You can do that when you transcend your physical being onto a non-biological substrate!”

I of course indulged in reading popular treatments thereof including Accelerando by Charlie Stross (available via Amazon or by download at accelerando.org .

I recently came across this from the Singularity Institute for Artifical Intelligence. The article, entitled ‘Becoming a Seed AI Programmer’ is an entreatment to join forces to create seed AI (defined loosely as ‘Artificial Intelligence designed for self-understanding, self-modification, and recursive self-enhancement’). The article suggests that folks qualified for this task will be a 10,000:1 or 100,000:1 kind of person. In short, the kind of people that neither I nor you know.

For the record, I am removing myself from nominations for the position.

While reading The Singularity is Near (of which at least the first half of the book is quite excellent) I note that Kurzwiel spends a lot of time on the preconditions and approaches to constructing non-biological intelligence systems. What is not yet clear is how these AIs interface with information stores and respond to information queries. I know that I increasingly want system augmentation that allows me to spin a thought off into the ether and have results presented to me when I think about it again.

Who’s working on the pragmatic side of information acquisition? What are the interface strategies? As great as Web 2.0 is, I really want an out-of-band system that is working on my behalf

idisappear.net - the image of an artist - fading, one pixel at a time. 20,000 pixels. 54 years of dying.

longnow thinking compressed into someone’s lifetime

another find in my trip around the generative art world of the net.

(With apologies to Ron Tranquilla for a line that I’ve never forgotten)

I got a nice note from Georgy over at Safe Digressions about my recent post lamenting the lack of poetry in the Podcasting space.

Georgy responds with the creation of Safe Digressions

a new weblog that aims to emphasize and cultivate the connection between poetry and technology

Also included are some links to podcast accessible poetry.

Georgy introduces a term heretofore unknown on the web “Poemcast”.

Well done.

Where is eyeTuner?

What happened to NewsHeap?

The answer in all cases is that my boredom threshold has been exceeded.

Self awareness can be a hugely empowering attribute - if you know it - if you act on it.

A good friend of mine and I were discussing the phenomenon of exploring good ideas. I typically start with an idea, explore similar or complementary ideas and sometimes execute on a prototypical exploration of the idea. The rub is that as the idea crests the wave of discovery, the appeal of the remaining effort quickly vanishes and I’m off onto the next new thing to explore. He is often satisfied by solving the problem within the confines of his mind. I need to explore this approach - less roadkill.

It turns out that even the Chinese Zodiac sign for my birthdate includes this as a key characteristic. What is one to do in the face of the zodiac?

Perhaps changing my default method of expression to Lisp will, as Ian Eslick has found, allow me to converge on a solution before I reach the boredom threshold.

It sounds like a plan.

Meanwhile, eyeTuner source is out there for the downloading.

I don’t have any plans to release a binary. If anyone is interested in moving it forward, let me know.

Podcasting is taking off and Adam Curry continues to categorize newly found content to grab and absorb.

It seems to me that as this continues to extend beyond geeks talking geek-speak (which I could handle endlessly), that areas ripe for podcasting include:

• Poetry - snippets of new slam or classic verse
• Serialized fiction - Can someone blast fragments from Radio Gutenburg?
• CSPANish content

There’s a lot of fertile ground left here.

Also, check out Open Podcast. You can call in or send in an mp3 that gets subsumed into the OpenPodcast rss feed. How long until we have Dear John podcasts?

Having installed Google Desktop Search today, I wonder how long until I can do gmail locally?

It cleverly inserts local search results in a standard google query.

It’s been on my machine less that four hours and I’m finding that searching for that lost email is much natural from my broswer.

The unexpected bonus is that it indexes source code. Broad searches for a class name includes not only code on my machine, but any emails in which its been discussed. Brilliant.

How long until I can get a local gmail cache? The ability to compose gmail messages locally and sync up with the googlesphere?

Who has discovered the magic that integrates local results with a network search? I suspect that they have inserted themselves as an IE Extension and are intercepting queries to google and blending the results after the fact.

Very nice indeed.

What a blast!

I spent several hours on a plane yesterday listening to IT Conversations.

With great audio commentary focused on current technology trends, convienent packaging in AAC/MB4 or MP3 formats and a host of interviews and conference speeches, I’ll be spending a bunch of time here.

Highly recommended.

Recent updates on eyeTuner prompted me to develop the CFSkins library (which someday could be general purpose). For now, I’ve taken good enough and started skinning the eyeTuner app itself.

Time continues to be a bottleneck, but I’ve written up the skin file format, and packaged up a zip with a sample PPC app to display the skins. I have zero graphical talent and am seeking some skinners to get in early on this.

Drop me a note @ jeff dot schilling at gmail dot com or on my manicwave address if you want to take a swing at designing the default skin for eyeTuner.

Meanwhile to all those enquiring about eyeTuner, I’ll promise a beta in the next few weeks.

My teaser screenshots of eyeTuner garnered a lot of interest. A kind soul offered to put together some graphics to soup up the UI. One thing leads to another and I’ve embarked on full skins support for eyeTuner.

I spent some time looking around for a custom control set for the .NET Compact Framework. A few commercial offerings, but nothing approach the richness needed for eyeTuner.

I’m now in the process of writing a skins library for .NETCF applications. It is tailored to the specific needs of eyeTuner. I started by writing a brief specification of the control types and file format for laying out the UI. In addition to supporting buttons, stateful buttons, sliders and text, I’ve added control types to represent the library tree and image boxes (to support album art). The control set works around the notion of panels, so the now playing panel is just a collection of controls as is the main panel. Users will be able to construct screens with the most useful controls assembled on a single panel if desired.

I’ve got the basic Window/Panel/Control hierarchy worked out. Standard Buttons are done. Currently working on the Vertical Slider. The file format is undergoing revision as I flesh this out and the loader evolves with it.

Time is the bottleneck now. With an average of one hour a day to work on this, progress is slower than anyone would like. I suspect that the skins support will be done in a week or three. I’ll reach out and try to get Eric to build the default graphic set while I wire the skins back into eyeTuner.

Given the hypersensitivity of our consumer culture to service, it takes a lot to exceed my expectations.

The following is an example of being blown away by great customer service.

While on vacation last week, I became “interested” in the Casio GW-1100J watch, a G-Shock with radio time setting, analog and digital readouts and a bunch of standard features.

When I went looking for the watch, sold in Japan only, I came across Higuchi-Inc. A few emails abouts Ts&Cs, a couple of googles to check out his rep and the flick of a paypal and my order was placed. Saturday evening at 8:00pm east coast time.

I immediately recieved confirmation that the watch would ship soon. Monday I got a tracking number and at noon today, the package was waiting for me at my office. Essentially, this standard order came all the way from Japan in under sixty hours.

From what I can tell of Higuchi, this is standard operating procedure.

Bravo.