I have an editorial about the effect of programmable logic on gizmo design on the front page of today’s New York Times Christmas Circuits section:

PLASTIC created the age of whimsical forms. Suddenly a radio could look like a moo cow. A chair could look like an egg. Toy ray guns could bulge and swoop. The exuberant designers of the golden age of plastic explored all the wacky, nonfunctional, decorative shapes that household objects could take.

Now that same plasticity is coming to microcontrollers, the computer chips that act as brains for the chirping, dancing, listening and seeing devices that line our knickknack shelves and dashboards and fill our pockets. The proliferation of cheap and cheerful programmable chips promises a new age of “whimsical logic,” chips that power devices whose functions are as delightfully impractical as their forms, the sort of thing you find in a stocking but keep on your desk forever.

I’m giving the opening keynote at Apachecon, the conference for users and developers of the Apache open source Web server and related tools. Other keynotes are coming from Sun’s Simon Phipps, XML-inventor Tim Bray, and VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, and there are sessions and tutorials on Xpath, SpamAssassin, Subversion, mod_python and mod_perl, as well as open source business models and tons of other topics.

ApacheCon is in San Diego, and runs from 10-14 December, 2005 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, and there are still several scholarships available for students working with Java.

My talk, “Open Source is not a crime — yet!” is on Monday, December 12 at 9AM. I’ll be talking about US and international legislative threats to copyleft, Free Software, and Creative Commons — hope to see you there!

Update: Wow! This is insane! Giant Robot is selling this shirt design and giving $1 per shirt sold to EFF! Color me stoked!

I am unbelievably flattered that a reader who wishes to remain anonymous made this “Che Doctorow” tee. Wow. He says, “I figure you’re nobody until someone makes a Che shirt out of your face.”

The tenth and final installment of my serialized novel-in-progress went live on Salon just now (previous installments). I’m working hard on the next section of the novel and hope to have it in the can by the new year, though it remains to be seen whether Salon will take up syndicating it, too. I’ve really, really appreciated the warm feedback I’ve gotten from you folks for this over the last two and a half months — it’s really helped me keep focused as I worked on the next section.

In today’s installment, Lester and Andrea reunite, but the New Work economy hits the skids:

Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn’t blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester’s transformation, they’d found out without hearing it from her.

She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence’s crow’s nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd.

Lester accepted her hug warmly but distantly, letting go a fraction of a second before she did. She didn’t let it get to her. He had drawn a crowd now, with Francis’s protege printer-techs in the innermost circle, and he was recounting the story of his transformation. He had them as spellbound as a roomful of ewoks listening to C3PO.

“Shit, why don’t we sell that stuff?” Jason said. He’d taken a real interest in the business end of their 3D printer project.

“Too much competition,” Lester said. “There are already a dozen shops tooling up to make bathtub versions of the therapy here in America. Hundreds more in Eastern Europe. There just won’t be any profit in it by the time we get to market. Getting thin on the cheap’s going to be *easy*. Hell, all it takes to do it is the stuff you’d use for an E lab. You can buy all that in a kit from a catalog.”

Jason nodded, but looked unconvinced.

Andrea took Lester’s return as her cue to write about his transformation. She snapped more pics of him, added some video. He gave her ten minutes’ description of the therapies he’d undergone, and named a price for the therapy that was substantially lower than a couple weeks in a Hollywood fat-farm, and far more effective.

Next week, I’m returning to Vienna to speak at the brilliant a href=”http://roboexotica.org/en/main.htm”>Roboexotica conference, a whimsical technology/art event in which amateur robotocists gather to demonstrate their cocktail-making robots. Real, no-fooling cocktail-making robots! I went a couple years ago and was blown away by the robots on offer, particularly the robot that used a giant inkjet-style “print head” to pour out different measurements, as set in physical logic embodied in switches and solenoids (no microcontroller!).

There are lectures, readings, and films. I’ll be giving talks on Europe’s coming Broadcast Flag and about science fiction, and if this is anything like last time, it’s going to be a hoot.

Until recently, no attempts were made to publically discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebensraum, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics world-wide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Mr. Turing would without a doubt test this out.

Roboexotica will return November 16th through 20th 2005 in the Freiraum of
Museumsquartier Vienna

Here’s my schedule:

Thursday, 11/17, 4PM, Monochrom, Museumsquartier: “Excepts of Schnipsel by Cory Doctorow
read by Magnus Wurzer, with a short introduction by the author in english.”

Friday, 11.18, 6PM, Monochrom, Museumsquartier: Reading and talk on copyright