tychoish, posts by tag: technology - LiveJournal

I talk to people from time to time about working in cyberspace and successful new media participation. If I were a hipster, I might even say, “I do SEO,” but I’m not, and I don’t, really. The truth is that I don’t have a good, simple, answer to the question, “How do I succeed on-line with social media.” I do have a lot of ideas on the subject, as you might expect (many of which I’ve already written about here before.) The core of my approach revolves around a conviction that word of mouth–like offline–is the most effective way to promote events and products in cyber-space, with the corollary that “meatspace” connections are among the most powerful and valuable “cyberspace” resources.

During college I spent a long time reading and rereading an essay by Samuel R. Delany, called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue about the process of gentrification in Times Square and it’s affect on cross-class/cross-race social/sexual contact. The argument was that environments and geographies that promoted situations were individuals would come into contact (randomly, casually) promoted opportunity, satisfying social interaction, and interesting conversations in a way that “networking” opportunities (conferences, workshops, cocktail parties, etc.) couldn’t. In illustration of this, Delany describes situations from talking about philosophy in the pornographic theatres of the old Time Square to finding a vacuum cleaner repair service in the checkout line of the grocery store. Furthermore, “contact” between people of different classes (as was present in the pornographic theaters of the old time square,) promotes the destabilization of class-based injustices.¹

Contact has been an incredibly powerful and useful concept for me in a number of different contexts, because it provides an method for affecting social change in “every day life” and in creates a notion of “politics” that’s closer to “people interacting” and further from something tied to institutions of power (”government,” etc.,) which suits my disposition. I think, largely the internet is most powerful when it promotes something closer to “contact” and further from something that resembles “networking.” And by powerful, I mean a number of things: most likely to positively affect people’s work, provide meaningful opportunities for commerce and social relationships, to develop unique cultural environments.

While there are opportunities for contact on contemporary social networking websites, they mostly specialize at helping you find people who are actually quite like you, like people you know in real life, people who are interested in the same things you’re interested in, and people who are friends with people you know in real life. That’s not contact, in the sense provided by Delany.²

There is still, I think, contact. I think microblogging (twitter/identi.ca) particularly with “track” features,³ represents (or did) a move away from “networking” to contact. The communities that form around open source projects, promote contact, as they are often interest specific, and contain members with disparate skills and backgrounds. Once upon a time, general population/topic (ie. non-project specific) IRC channels (chat rooms) were an immense source of contact for their users.⁴

I’m not sure what this means. I remain convinced that contact is a useful and important way of looking at social interactions. I also think it says a lot about my interests in open source. I also think that as technologies and memes in cyberspace (eg. blogs, social networking, microblogging) develop in ways that promote “contact,” and eventually become “networking” opportunities not that the latter is bad, but it is an important conceptual shift. It’s also quite likely that we’d be able to see what ideas are going to be the next big thing based on the degree to which they promote contact. There are other implications I’m sure, but I’ll leave those for another time.

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.

knew I said that I’d post coda things now that I’m going to bi-weekly essays, and today would be the first day of the new order and I’ve failed. Alas. Today was spent going glaring at my outline and waiting in doctor’s waiting rooms. I did read a really great article from Kristine Kathryn Rusch about recessions, short fiction, and it was pretty inspiring. Go read, and then read some more. I’ve also had some interesting twitter and identi.ca conversations about git and emacs, which keeps me entertained at least. I’ve also been trying out new RSS readers, as I’d really like something that ran locally. Canto seems to be leading the pack, but I have so many feeds at the moment that switching seems onerous, and I need something that I can sync between multiple machines, so the whole switch process gives me shivers. Maybe tomorrow. In the mean time, I think I’m ready to get back to writing actual fiction (forward progress) in a day or two, if I can get through one or two more blasted sections of this re-outline; which despite the pain, has been really good for my thinking about the book.

If you were wondering, that really is what it’s like to be in my head. And you thought that my writing was scatter brained.

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.

I’m writing you all today from OS X for the first time in months. Also, I’m writing another journal entry in honor of the weekend-like quality that the holiday has, and I’m writing it right before I post it rather than in my usual bi/tri-monthly binge writing style. Very strange.

Just to comment on the experience of the new/old environment, I’m sort of distraught by how uncomfortable it feels I mean OS X is pretty, and it does a better job with the hardware than Ubuntu (more on this later) but I’m just not used to it any more, and even though I really like TextMate… meh.¹

I rang in the new year by wrapping up a scene in the novel that had been nagging at me for several weeks. It’s the longest single “chunk” of writing in the project thus far, and the oddest, but I like it a lot. It represents, I think, a number of developments for me as a writer. First it’s a big plot twist, and it’s action, two things that I’ve felt I’ve not been able to capture correctly thus far. I’m just over the 19k word mark, and the next scene promises to be fun. By my estimates this is about a third of the story, which feels about right in terms of the plot right now.

A lot of people seem to be writing blog posts and journal posts on their review of the past year and their thoughts for the future year. This year has had it’s trials (the ongoing grandparental health issue; the not getting into graduate school take 2; the lack of knitting) and its high points (a new job that I adore, linux and a new academic direction, more writing, still being alive.) And I expect that the new year will have more of both: though certainly I’m working towards more high points and fewer trials.

My resolution last year was to keep a list of books and fiction that I read. I was pretty successful at this, though certainly I haven’t figured out the hack to carve out time for me to read fiction in the sort of concerted way that I feel I need to be reading fiction. But I’ll continue to keep the list, that’s been fun.

This years resolution is more complex, I suppose, and I’m not going to spell it all out here. This year promises to hold a number of big changes: a move, some trips, more awesomeness in the job, some new big project, and so forth. If nothing else, I think my overall approach at the moment is to work on getting closure with old projects before starting with new projects. Seems like a plan. I’m not sure if that’s a resolution though.

In any case, be warm (or cool) and well in the new year and I’ll be back with our regularly scheduled programing very shortly.

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.

I’m not a programmer, really. I mean I’m a huge geek, and I understand some pretty heavy computer-science related problems, but coding isn’t what I do. This is true of a lot of computer users these days, and it wouldn’t be such a big deal if I weren’t such a huge geek about open source software. I suspect that most of the users of open source software these days aren’t that different than me in this respect–though many are programmers, in most cases they probably don’t make active use of the source code of the software they use.¹

This realization probably sounds familiar to some, as I’ve been trying to pull apart the contemporary modifications for open source software. One obvious answer to this question is, “freedom:” that open source software provides its users an non-tangible freedom and power over their interactions with technology. I’ve posted about why I think this is imprecise and while I need to spend time developing this argument further, there’s some merit.

Another possibility is that open source represents a rethinking of intellectual property that is appealing, and that “free software” is an adjunct of a “free culture” movement. While this is an interesting theory and a good story, certainly there are parallels, I’m not sure that it’s the case. I don’t know if free culture movements (like wikipedia and creative commons) and free/open source software grow out of the same kinds of historical moments, or share anything more than inspirations and morphology. More pondering is required.

I’ve always seen Creative Commons as a sort of “legal activism,” to provide mechanisms to push laws to reflect the realities of copyright in digital spaces. Creative Commons isn’t a technological advancement, but rather a formal account for extant practices. That is, consumers of a CC license aren’t able to do anything (except potentially access) with a covered work that they couldn’t do with a conventionally protected work.

The same is not true of nearly all open source software. A free/open source software license makes certain rights available to the users of that software that they’d never have otherwise. Always. Even though we don’t often take advantage of this accessible source code, it strikes me that “intellectual property reform” doesn’t really cover why people are either contributing to open source or using open source. Additionally, there are relatively few–that I’m aware of–Creative Commons projects/works that are themselves collaborative, which presents another contrast between these two modes. While most FOSS projects originate with a single author, all successes create communities. I’m not sure that the same life cycle exists in “free culture” works.

Open source is successful in a way that “closed source/encumbered freeware” has never really been, outside of some moment-to-moment bubbles. I think this point about “community,” and the mode of authorship is a huge part of what makes open source attractive and vibrant moving forward. Not the only reason, of course, but a key contributor. Works with creative commons licenses are “X by Author, released under CC license,” whereas open source projects eventually become “X is GPL’ed,” even if key original authors are well known as Linus is for Linux or Dries is for Drupal.

This is important. I’m not sure yet how, but that’s what makes this whole ‘blog thing interesting. There are other arguments too, but this is a start.

Thoughts?

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.

I hear that some of you are celebrating today. If that’s the case, good holiday to you, dear readers. If that’s not the case, I hope you’re not too befuddled by this very strange Thursday we seem to be having.

I guess in some respects I’m celebrating. Though I often leave, the fact that no one else is working changes the way the day feels. And I’m writing today’s blog post/letter this morning after having a nice fish-brunch (it’s a family ritual/jewish thing) with the family. We’re going to go get food at an Indian buffet that’s near by. I’m looking forward to it. But other than that it’ll probably be a normal day. I’ll be writing, and maybe doing some work. But for now I’m just going to write a letter to you all.

Lets see, there have been a lot of little projects that have taken up a lot of my time and brain power. I’ll outline them to show what I’ve been working on and to see if anyone has suggestions:

• I’ve been working on switching to a different terminal emulator (urxvt from gnome-terminal) and I have yet to get the colors right, which is a barrier. A terminal with hard to read colors is totally useful. Also, I haven’t quite figured out how to get copying and pasting from other apps to uxrvt to work, but I figure I can just read the documentation again, and that should be apparent. The reason for doing this? Gnome-terminal, though easy to configure, is pretty heavy weight, when there’s no real reason for that. If I were running one or two instances, that’d be fine, but I need to have at least 4 instances (mail, irc, IM, actual terminal things) and sometimes that grows to even larger numbers. So lightweightness is desirable.

• I’m starting to switch to using jabber/XMPP for all of my IM needs. The good news is that this attempt works way better than my previous attempts. The AIM transport (which seems to be the de facto IM standard in my network) works like a charm most of the time. I’m not deleting pidgin for emergencies, but I’m pleased. The client that I’m using, mcabber works quite well. I’m having two odd problems. First, I find that I’m having trouble adding Google Gtalk users to my roster. It seems like it might be a DNS glitch with dreamhost, but I can’t get it nailed out. Secondly, I seem to have done something so that I can only connect to my account using mcabber, which isn’t a problem in the short term, but it could be annoying/deal breaking in the long term. At some point I’ll probably switch to running my own XMPP server (when I move off of dreamhost) but in the mean time it would be nice to have this fixed.

• I’m thinking of switching away from Wordpress to a blogging platform called Jekyll. This tool would conform more to my workflow (easier posting), it would be fun to have a blogging platform that I could conceptually hack on myself. While I’ve been using Wordpress in its current iteration for three or four years, I’ve used a lot of different CMSs to power the TealArt/tychoish website. Greymatter (back in the day), b2 (the predecessor for wordpress), and a custom CMS that a friend wrote in 2001-2002. And I’ve toyed with Drupal and Moveable Type, of course. While the current setup works–I think it’s not entirely ideal. I’ll need to blog about this a bit more before. And the conversion process promises to be somewhat complex. There’s always something interesting going on.

• I’m thinking of using bootcamp and installing Linux on my macbook, and going back to using that hardware more full time. It’s good hardware, I already have it, and it might be fun to use another installation opportunity to play with Arch Linux (though I’ll probably wimp out and install ubuntu again). What I’ve discovered, I think, is that while I have a lot of respect for and history with Macs and OS X, a linux/awesome platform is–at the moment the system that I feel most comfortable “living in,” and most productive working in.

Anyway, I’ll get back to my day, and enjoy yours too. Remember today means, 10.5 months without Christmas Music in public. That’s something I think we can all celebrate.

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.

Ok, so I haven’t done a journal upate in a long time, and I think it’s high time that I posted an update about my projects and stuff. It’s my blog after all.

I’ve been working a lot, which is a good thing. Also I think some pretty cool things are happening with my job. While work can be stressful by virtue of shear volume, I’m pretty excited about how things are going. I’m also getting better at managing the “working for a virtual company,” thing: it’s taken me a while to figure out the right way to manage things so that it doesn’t feel like I’m working constantly, or conversely feel like I’m never getting anything done. I don’t know that I have the answer, but I’ve started to figure out ways of both working, and making progress on projects that are important to me. Evidence of this: I’ve gotten knitting and writing done recently.

I’ve been working on an academic project–some of the conceptual “thinking” work for this has appeared on the blog in the past few months. I’m laying the groundwork for an application to history/anthropology/library school to study free software/open source development mythologies and communities. The project will wrap up in the next couple of weeks, and then I’m going to spend a couple of months preparing and launching a website/wiki on the subject and initiating correspondences with a few key people in the field. I haven’t totally ruled out applying for a couple Ph.D. programs in Fall 09/Winter 10 to begin in Fall ‘10 as a trial run, but I’m thinking waiting another year is more likely. By then, I think I’ll be ready.

I’ve been doing some knitting. Small stuff, socks and hats and stuff, just because I need something with that kind of pace. Also, while I’ve never been a big yarn buyer, my off an on break from knitting hasn’t entirely put and end to my yarn buying. Also I might have bought a skein of Noro Silk Garden sock yarn that I really want to make into a neck cowl/covering/tube. There will probably some enterlac involved as well. I’ll get back to sweaters soon. But I’m not in a rush.

My technological purchases acquisitions over the past few months (the new laptop, the linux desktop, the fancy cellphone) are continuing to serve me quite well. I miss the amazing battery life and sleep/wake features of the macbook (which my father has taken as his own), I have to say that I think I work much better on the linux machines. I can focus more easily, because there’s less operational overhead (fancy graphics etc.) even the older hardware really keeps up with what I want to do. I’ve thought about selling/trading the macbook away for something like a dell m1330 (or cash to buy another thinkpad)–for the father, as a way of ameliorating my losses. But other than that I’m pretty pleased with the way my stable of technology has improved the way I work.

In a similar vein, my switch to emacs from vim (and TextMate on the Mac) continues to do well. I’m doing much of my writing in emacs, though there are things that I do in other editors. I edit email vim, because that makes sense, and it works well, though I imagine that I’d switch to emacs for that at some point in the future. There are some things where I’ll confess to really liking Gedit’s tabbed interface (mostly for instances where I need to copy and paste a lot of content from an editor into a web browser. The right tool for the right job, and all that. I’ve never thought of myself as a multi-editor kind of guy–and emacs doesn’t seem to provoke this kind of response–but it’s not a bad thing.

I’m not sure how much holiday-related time off I’m going to take this week. Being neither Christian, nor a particularly observant Jew, I don’t expect that I’ll make any formal blog vacation. At the same time, I’m well aware that with a great number of you all in blog land on “holiday schedule,” it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to slavishly stick to my blog schedule. Also, I need a bit of a break for Critical Futures, to recharge and reevaluate so that I can make the best of the new year over there. So, stay tuned and have a good holiday.

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.

So, after all my talk the other week about netbooks and such things, I broke down and got a new computer. Which wasn’t exactly needful, but it’s quite nice, and I think it’ll feature rather heavily in m posts this week. Sorry if this is too far afield for some. I hope suspect that it’ll make sense in the end.

Rather than wait until one of the other computers in the house died, (which would call forth my macbook in as part of the obsolescence cycle), I got a used ThinkPad x41 tablet on ebay (from a local vendor). This is probably about 3 years old, but in it’s day it was a damn nice computer and although it’s a bit puny in many regards its former glory shines through. It has a gig of ram, the construction is sturdy, and it has a lot of the features that are common place now like bluetooth and an SD card slot. So it’s good hardware.

And it’s tiny. There’s something about a 12 inch laptop that’s just the right size. You can fit two standard withds of text next to each other on the screen, the keyboard is fullsized without sacraficing very much, and just like a netbook, any hit in performance is compensated for by the fact that your tasks are likely to be pretty minimal.

One thing that I realized while I was away a couple weeks ago, was that there’s something really good about the Awesome Window Manager and the way that it tends to focus my attention and keep me from checking LiveJournal constantly. Which I’m very prone to doing when I’m using the Mac. So it made some sense to me to work on having a laptop that I could be more productive on. And it helps that this model has some other features that I think are nifty. Like it doesn’t have a touch pad (opting for the “nipple” button between the ‘g’ and ‘h’ keys) and it’s a Tablet, which makes it ideal for reading things

One thing that I had been really worried about before hand was the ease of getting linux onto this system. Laptops are fineky, or they can be and on a laptop, if the hardware you have isn’t supported, there’s not a lot of recourse. And it would kind of suck to have a laptop with a video card that was unsupported, or a wireless card, say. Thankfully, I was able to crib off of someone else in this case, as I knew that Emperor Linux had sold this computer in the past with linux preinstalled and they were able to get all the hardware to work. So I figured I was fairly safe.

What I didn’t expect is for the instalation to go so well. I downloaded a utility that would make an install-stick (as this machine doesn’t have an optical drive) on my desktop, and that took some time, but but the instaliation itself maybe took half an hour. And then it just worked. There was a lot of messing around to be done, tweaking to Awesome for the smaller screen, and it took me some time to get all my data downloaded and setup, but not particularly long. And now it all works. Just like that.

It’s not perfect: the battery only has about 90 minutes on it at best, I can’t get the tablet to work when the screen’s upside down in tablet mode, there’s an accelerometor that should reorient the screen, but that might just take some elbow greese. The biggest problem, frankly, was remapping the keyboard so that it was both comfortable for tycho useage (ie. getting rid of the Caps_Lock key and making it another Control Key) and making the keyboard suitable for awesome (ie. taking the normal control keys and making them “mod4″ or “Windows” keys for all the custom keybindings). That’ll also take a litle bit of work to get right, as a few things appear to be wonky. Who knows.

Anyway, what I really need is a suitable sticker to cover up the IBM logos. Which, unlike an Apple logo, isn’t the kind of thing that one might show off with pride. Suggestions?

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.

In lieu of an actual essay on this quasi-holiday, I have a funny exchange from earlier in the week. Continue to have a good holiday, and I’ll see you on Monday.

tycho: so I was thinking about getting an old(er) ThinkPad x41 tablet and linuxifying it, so I’d have a linux portable and we’d have another computer around here because most of the computers in the house are older and the last time an old computer went south, there was major familial strife.

chris: ah which is the x41

tycho: [passes a link]

chris: you really do obsess over some of the strangest hardware. It’s kinda slow and old.

tycho: it runs emacs and stuff, it should do fine.

chris: trufax. I forget little you demand of your computers. Why would you want a tablet though?

tycho: reading stuff.

chris: I just don’t see the point of sacrificing performance for a nebulously useful tablet functionality.

tycho: Well, why are you looking at net books constantly?

chris: reading stuff.

[silence]

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.

One of the best things that happened to me during college was that I discovered and got involved in the Women’s and Gender Studies program at my school. Though I went to college very interested in gender and sexuality stuff I’m not sure that I ever really intended to come out of the experience with a second major in Women’s Studies, but I did, and I think it was a really great thing.

Making sense of that experience, since graduation has been more difficult, as I’m probably not directly going to go work “in the field” (if there is even a thing there,) and I find my academic interests¹ taking me elsewhere.

The thing that the bright eyed 18-year old tycho found so intriguing about women’s studies is that on the first (or second) day of the first class, the professor handed us a packet of readings photo-copied from her books. And the readings weren’t just “clever parsing of the literature in a forum even undergraduates could handle,” but the key (or parts of the key) documents themselves. From the beginning I felt like a participant in a larger discussion, which is something that I didn’t get from my other classes.

While in the end I learned that participating in these discourses is something that you sort of have to fight your way into, I also came to the conclusion that I didn’t much want to be involved in a field that didn’t value thought and participation of its students. And so I dove into Women’s Studies and I don’t regret it for an instant.

While I don’t tend to buy into the software-is-freedom argument,² I think there is something very freeing about open source in the same way that I found Women’s Studies so academically freeing. The invitation to participate in the software development progress that open source represents is really powerful and even if you’re not a programer in the traditional sense, the invitation to participate in a serious discussion about the shape of the tools that we use is pretty powerful.

At least I think so.

Onward and Upward!

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.

There is a major segment of the open source/free software movement that believes that open source is important because having non-proprietary software is a key to individual liberation and freedom.

While this “camp” has done a lot for the open source movement, and in some respects they’re right: an educated user can deal with his own bugs, tweak the code, and verify that the software is secure. Also free software makes it possible for everyone, not just the very wealthy, from using very powerful tools. Money is still an issue around hardware, but free software helps. These features of free software are indeed powerful and likely make the undertaking worthwhile in its own right. So I don’t want to dismiss the political importance of this idea or faction but I’d like to offer another theory of why open source is so powerful and important.

The marker of a successful proprietary piece of software and a successful open source program are completely different.

Proprietary software is successful if people¹ buy it. And when people buy anything really, for the most part they do a cost-benefit analysis, usually between features and cost. Does this do what I need it to? Will I have to buy something else to finish the task at hand? In this environment the most successful programs will be the best programs that do the most for the least amount of money.

So I guess I’m being an armchair economist in this, but I think that it makes a lot of sense for both developers and purchasers to keep the overall number of discrete programs down. Why develop and support (and buy on the other end) an address book program, a mail reading program, a mail composing program, a calendar program, a task manager when you could just get Outlook? Hell, why buy business/office software a la carte when you can get it as a suite?

Open source doesn’t need to operate like that,² especially historically a good piece of open source software did one thing well. There are a lot of reasons for this. Unix works best when everything is a modular widget widgets, but getting a bunch of hackers to agree on how to accomplish more than one thing is sufficiently non-trivial to have had a great impact on the methods of the movement. Perhaps most importantly, there’s no need for any single piece of software to do everything because open source software doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

And this is the strength of the model. You could never market on or sell application on a large that did one thing really well, but if you asked it to do something else related, the developer would say “not my problem.”

The classic example is mutt, and email client that just reads email, while recently (after much “not my job” protesting,) mutt has added support for connecting to the servers that send and receive email, it historically hasn’t and I suspect most users still don’t use these features. Imagine if Outlook said “nope, sending email is someone else’s problem, I’m just a mail reader.” Mutt succeeds because it’s really good at reading email, but also because there are a lot of really great tools for doing other email related tasks. Fetchmail is a great and reliable program, but it only downloads email, and for sending email I’ve never had a problem with MSMTP, but I think there are a number of popular mail-sending options.

So you get that open source makes a more widget or ecosystem based computing environment viable and stable, but are still wondering why this is a good thing? Because it sounds that this kind of open source just makes things more complex? Right. Here’s why I think the ecosystem is the way to go:

• It’s easier to build programs that only do one thing. A program either is really good at downloading your email or it isn’t, and it’s pretty easy to tell if that’s the case. More complex programs, can’t be as reliable as consistent.
• This system is more responsive to technological development. If there’s a new revolution in email downloading, it’s easy enough to take fetchmail out of the picture and put some other widget in place that works better. Non-modular systems put you at the whim of someone else.
• Your data is (more likely) to be accessible and open. The real reason that open source hackers are interested in open standards and formats is, if we rely on an ecosystem of widgets our data has to be readable by all of the different widgets. The only way to ensure that this is the case is to use open and standard data formats. This is good for the user and good for the programer as a creative constraint.
• This model more closely reflects the way we actually think. Our minds are made up of a bunch of smaller abilities. The ability to recognize written words, the ability to parse those words for sounds and meaning, the ability to take what we read and relate it to things that we’ve seen and read in other contexts. In both the software and cognition the really cool things happen with novel collections of different ideas and tools.

But wait you say, OpenOffice and Ubuntu Linux aren’t widgets and they have very high feature counts. This is very true, and to be honest projects like GNOME/KDE and open office mystify me because they fail so amazingly, they’re too disjointed to really compete with desktop environments from proprietary makers and try to do too many things to really work ideally on their own.³

In the case of Ubuntu–like all linux distributions–the “product,” is a specific and tailored collection of widgets. And this is a pretty good open source business model: take a bunch of tools, customize them, make sure they install and work together, and then package them as some sort of suite. While I think that this software ecosystem thing is pretty cool, it’s not easy to get started with, and unless users really know what they’re doing it requires more than a bit of fidgeting. Distributions solve this problem and make a space for individuals and groups to monetize this “free” software. Which is of course good for (almost) everyone involved.

Anyway, I’ve been going on for way too long. I’m not–by a long shot–done thinking (and writing) about these issues, so expect a continuation of this soon.

Onward and Upward!

Originally published at tychoish. You can comment here or there.