°2003.04.28.mo | Details Determine Deployment
In February when I wrote about about Non-Novel Patents, I argued that genuine innovators:
... are prevented from using their innovations by those who may have not done anything other than write incomprehensible claims! The phrase "the devil is in the details" definitely holds true for deploying technology; many competing approaches may fail to the one that makes the right pragmatic design choices. But all deployed approaches are susceptible to the unproven and ambiguous patent claim.
This year, we have an excellent, though unfortunate, example of this in action. Graffiti was the Palm Pilot's handwriting mechanism — this product launched our present "palmtop" industry. It's a simple writing system wherein a character corresponds to an intuitive single stroke: a character can be written without lifting the stylus. Unfortunately, Xerox has successfully argued that Graffiti violates its Unistroke patent and now Palm will be abandoning the technology.
Regardless of the merits of the case, this provides an excellent example of how Xerox's clumsy and never adopted alphabet has "innovated" a sound and widely used technology into oblivion.
(This image from Pen Computing shows that the Xerox strokes hardly even correspond to the letters we learn in kindergarten! Graffiti does a better job, and details can determine deployment.)
°2003.04.26.sa | lights and lines in the sky
°2003.04.25.fr | Appreciating All of the Issues
Gregory Huang's article on the Mind Machine Merger was interesting, but also alarming. I appreciate that the focus of the article wasn't on the speculative aspects of what will happen when we successfully integrate electronics with brains. However, Huang did present some motivating scenarios: improving soldier safety, guiding remote robots in hazardous environments, and augmenting human disabilities. Perhaps then, a little consideration should have also be given to the less than rosy means and ends of this, military funded, research?
What happens when the "tiny amounts of electricity [injected] into the brain of a monkey" is larger than intended: seizure, death? When the hippocampus of a brain from a living creature is "temporarily inactivated" exactly when and how is it "activated" again? What of the ethics of remotely piloted robots antiseptically killing their human targets? When I read the article I couldn't help but ask myself these questions. Huang blithely failed to do so and effected a seemingly neutral language in order to escape them. While this research is exciting, it is of course more than that. Even if, on balance, the work is worthwhile, we should not ignore any of its consequences.
°2003.04.16.we | Fun with Reading Lists and XML
I recently improved my horribly disorganized reading list. Previously, my list was strung out over separate memos organized according to genre and whether I had read them or not. The Palm OS has a fixed size memo limit, my genres were haphazard, and I rarely remembered to cut and paste a finished book to its appropriate location. For example, I had two "to read" sci-fi memos, including many books I've since read, and two "already read" sci-fi memos. Yuck.
After discovering Robby Stephenson's bookcase application I manually coerced my book lists into a simple format and then converted that into a bookcase XML file: I now have a handy application for maintaining my reading list on the KDE desktop! I then used Trever Shick's jpilot-db converter to turn the XML into a pilot-db database that I can use on my Palm!
While I'm very happy with these results, much of the bibliographic information is incomplete: it'd be nice to have the publisher, ISBN number, and Amazon URL for each book. I want something like CDDB, an Internet database that permits an MP3 player to automatically correct the metadata associated with poorly labeled MP3s. While I don't think there is such a thing for books, Amazon does offer an API that can be queried for its information associated with a book — including ratings, comments, availability, sales rank, etc. I then tweaked Mark Pilgrim's Python wrapper by adding a searchByPower method method and fixing a tricky bug that prevented a single result from being returned as a list (of cardinality '1').
The next phase is to finish the script that adds additional information to my bookcase XML instance using the searchByPower method of the python API! That shouldn't be too hard, but I wouldn't have gotten this far without the benefits of open source software and responsive developers: cool!
Update 030423: pybook.py is now available, and I've since tweaked amazon.py to bypass the marshalling all together: it now returns the XML directly with 'return_xml=1'. Also, Dave Kuhlman is providing a python interface too.
°2003.04.14.mo | Why Does Phil Geenspun Like Blogging?
In the first half of the 90s Phil Greenspun published a photo-journal, Travel with Samantha, and started photo.net. After nearly 10 years, the photography site continues to be one of the best communities in which people can post their images and solicit feedback. There's discussion groups, neighborly recommendations, and photographic guides. So when I noted his new blog I asked him:
"I'm curious to what degree you consider it different from what you did at photo.net? You already had a mechanism for posting your thoughts (or photos) and seeing folks comments. In what ways do you consider the blog variant novel?"
Apparently he takes my philosophy of never answering but always repurposing to the extreme, "Ask the question in my Ask Philip forum at http://philip.greenspun.com and I'll post an answer!" Ok, so I finally found that forum off the home page (not directly linked), recreated the user password, and posted this entry. Hopefully it was worth it and since I made the effort, I might as well create an entry out of it as well!
°2003.04.14.mo | Stone Soup: Can Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth?
When it comes to open and free software, many ask if the process is too chaotic, shouldn't we settle down now, can't we all focus our work on a single project, are too many cooks spoiling the broth?
These are in fact all the same question, and one I'd answer with a story I remember from childhood. When I was in elementary school I recall being fascinated by the story of Stone Soup: an impoverished village is visited by travelers. The villagers fear the newcomers will take their food, of which they have little, but instead the travelers place a stone into a great big kettle of boiling water. Curious villagers ask about this odd dish and the visitors reply, "We're making stone soup, though it would be much better with an onion." Eventually one villager contributes a single onion that was the only thing left in his cupboard, this inspires another to contribute a cabbage, and eventually the famished village sups on a rich potluck.
To ask if too many cooks would spoil the stone soup is to ignore the very nature of the soup. Our software benefits from the cacophony of free ideas. It does seem wasteful when development efforts are doubly spent. And they may very well be. But to expect a marketing driven "command and control" focus is to forget how the software you now use was developed. If you use free software (e.g., Linux, GNU, Apache, Mozilla, etc.) it's very likely the result of a competitive development or fork — wherein a project splits and developers form a new project with their own variant. Folks are presently concerned about Keith Packard's xwin fork of XFree86, but XFree86 itself was a fork. People complain about the competing desktops KDE and Gnome, but perhaps both are stronger for the competition, and they themselves were once new and competed with other windowing systems: should they have been suppressed back then?
I also think of this story when confronted with strong personalities. Many will complain that Richard Stallman, father of the free software movement, is too uncompromising. But if it was not for his forceful articulation of principle, the movement may have never been born. And when those most concerned with promoting the pragmatic utility of free software to the commercial sector started the "open source" fork, we witnessed again both a potential positive and negative effect of our freedom.
Splits over ego and misunderstanding are unfortunate and should be avoided, but they are also a reflection of our fortune. Too much salt can spoil the soup, but it also gives it its flavor.
°2003.04.11.fr | Crip TV
"Crip" is a term used by some of the disabled to refer to themselves. Nora argues that to use a risque label you need to first own your disability, race, sexuality, or whatever. So even mentioning the term causes me some hesitation: I doubt my RSI qualifies. The best I can do is ask, "what's up my round eyes?!" to other hip occidentals.
When the process of self-reclamation becomes so successful so as to be threatened by mainstream co-option, which results in confusion about its authenticity/legitimacy (e.g., white rappers talking "nigger" or "walkies" playing in crip sports), I consider three variables:
- the history of the term, know what it means and meant
- the context, appreciate the issues of legitimacy/authenticity
- the intent, consider if the term is used to exclude or include from a community.
I mention all of this because last night I saw a commercial for a new reality show: crippled people living together and competing for some prize. The commercial turned out to be a spoof/joke which offended me more than the idea of the show itself. If the show was not completely exploitative — all reality shows are in some sense — having more representation sounded like a good idea. It'd give viewers a sense of what the disabled confront every day! It'd be more compelling than watching 21 year olds in Las Vegas screwing their roommates.
Earlier in the day I was reading an article about the disabled in Hollywood and how they have to lobby to even be included as extras in the background. I bet a show produced by PBS or Bravo on this theme would be quite refreshing.
°2003.04.09.we | Odd Expectations
I just received an email wherein the respondent concluded, "(please note i refrained from the usual etiquette of signing my name.)" I'm not yet sure if this is a reciprocal act or something else, but it does remind me of another email in which someone complained that it was rude of me not to "sign" my emails. I do have a signature file that's automatically appended to my emails, though I often don't include it if the person has received it before. In fact, the message headers clearly state who I am and how to respond.
I'm not very fond of signatures. I come from the old school that if you use them, they better be informative and under 5 lines. And I never thought "ciao", "bye bye", or "ta ta for now" is required of any email I send: it's just redundant bits.
I don't even give the issue much thought beyond these rare emails. However, while I'm initially likely to scoff that these are Internet newbies, or think their expectations are archaic, no one is really right or wrong. It just goes to show how expectations over (seemingly) trivial issues can be important. A good lesson for a big world where people stand literally, and figuratively, oceans apart.
°2003.04.07.mo | More on War and Deceit
My essay on Birds of a Feather: War and Deceit prompted a few responses. Angela Glunn mentioned it in her daily wrap-up of war news for USAToday. Dana Blankenhorn recalled, "54-40 or fight. Remember the Maine! The heritage you cite here is older than you mention." Indeed, but I only had so much time, and I wanted to limit the events to those things that folks might recall happening in their lives instead of dusty history. Another respondent wrote that politicians always lie, "Does it mean that war is never justifiable simply because the public reasons have included lies?"
We can not dismiss this issue because all politicians lie. Even if this is a commonplace, it does not mean we must uncritically accept it. First, this would be self defeating. Second, in this case the integrity of the arguments for going to war affect the nature of the debate itself. For example, is the war a last resort, can its weapons discriminate, will the violence be proportional to the injury, is there a legitimate authority, and will the subsequent peace be an improvement? If each of these questions are addressed with deceit can we be confident that the right decision is being made? Shit happens and politicians lie, but I believe our democracy is not only about counting votes, but a civil culture based on the rule of law, transparency, accountability, and furtherance of individuals rights. In what cases would a war predicated on deceit be just? Not many.
°2003.04.07.mo | Lomo Photography
I buy those silly Japanese magazines because I love the design and photography. In Japan, photography is big enough to permit room for what I would call pop photography: mosaics of ordinary, often blurry, and sometimes poorly exposed photos taken and submitted by the readers.
Professional artists, like Richard Billingham or Wolfgang Tillamns, effect the same candor but this isn't just another instance of the elite co-opting and reserving a populist trend for themselves: real people can take real photographs and have them be seen! Outside of Japan, digital cameras will be the tools of this movement, photo-blogs will be the vehicle, and Lomo Photography will provide the manifesto.
Lomo is a cheap though somewhat novel camera from Russia with a contrasty, overly saturated, and vignetted visual signature. In the late 90s it developed a cult following united under the philosophy of extemporaneous photography: always carry it and shoot anything that strikes your fancy. Ever think you should take a photo of your feet propped up on on the lip of the tub as you soak in the suds? Do it! Lomolust gives the following golden rules:
- Take your lomo with you wherever you go.
- Use it all the time, any time. Day or night.
- Lomography does not interfere with your life, it's a part of it.
- Get as close as possible to the objects of your lomographic desire.
- Gon't think.
- Be fast.
- You don't have to know what's going to be captured on your film beforehand.
- You don't have to know what's on the film afterwards either.
- Shoot from the hip.
- Don't worry about rules.
The result are photographs that sometimes render amazing beauty from the daily fabric of our ordinary lives. Of course, many of the photographs taken will suck, but if you use cheap "Lucky" brand Chinese film, no worries! Digital photography further amplifies this approach to photography because snapping a picture doesn't cost a cent. And, if you really want that sense of lomo-nosity, malana-lars has a Gimp plugin that can appropriately rough up your perfectly captured digital image.
°2003.04.07.mo | Self Reflectivity and Group Definition
In a response to Clay Shirky's essay Social Software and the Politics of Groups, I asked if, when he mentioned the different "political structures" of many of the communities out there, has he given any thought to how much of the content within each of those structures is related to self definition? Shirky speak of a "constitution" which presumes the self definition is explicit and agreed to, but I've found this is rarely the case! Instead people spend a lot of time attempting to articulate the group identity. So a meta-characteristic of any group is the degree to which it attempts to define and enforce its sense of self. This is one characteristic of a larger one I call the self-reflectivity trait of a community, which is probably what most of my "blogging about blogging" is about. (One of my maxims of blogging, if you want to be interesting to a wide audience, is to actually dampen the impulse to only focus on writing about blogging.) I haven't done any empirical analysis, which could be quite interesting, but I expect that the blogging community is highly self-reflective — a typically used term is "navel gazing!"
°2003.04.04.fr | Zinesters Take the Glossies: Index, Evil Sisters, and Punk Rock Nothing
Nora brought over the magazine Index to show me this odd bit of pubic coif in a Gucci advert, rather amusing! I thought to myself, "a typically clever, vapidly exploitative fashion advert in another hipster magazine." But as I perused the magazine, I couldn't contain my exclamations of "no way!" In the table of contents I noted that Amber Gayle had an article ... I thought, "what, what, what what?!" (As Kyle's mother, from South Park, is fond of saying.) The author of one of my favorite zines, My Evil Twin Sister, is writing for this mag? Then I noted her (evil twin) sister, Stacy Wakefield, is the designer for the magazine! That made perfect sense but only heightened my incredulity. As I paged through the magazine I was surprised by the quality of the content: the articles and interviews are interesting! It even included an interview with infamous network cracker Kevin Mitnick. And the biggest surprise came as I concluded my reading.
The back of the magazine had an article about New Mouth from the Dirty South's zine subscription service, providing a "best of" compendium of great zines for $10. Jamie and Abram made their mark in the zine world by selling Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing from "the back of their car" and that's how I met them a few years ago in Cambridge. They were hawking their "book" in Harvard Square before heading off to another town the next day. I use the term "book" in quotations because I remember them resisting the label "zine" by insisting that their publication had an ISBN and all — I laughed to myself, zinesters putting on airs!
But when zinesters infiltrate a glossy, the results can be pretty darn cool.
°2003.04.03.th | Libraries are Patriotic
Amidst the depressing fury about what is — and is not — patriotic, I know one thing for sure: libraries are the most sublime institution of civil governance. Last night I sat in the Cambridge public library reading periodicals, looked for a book my mom recommended, and perused the new science fiction and graphic novels. The varied types of folks, the earnest librarians, the quiet ... libraries let me feel at peace.
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." -Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President
°2003.04.02.we | Where is Heather Now?
Before this latest war with Iraq, before the U.S. toppled the Taliban and before they destroyed the Buddhist monumements, before I knew what a burka was, and before September 11th, I lost a friend to the Middle East. However, whenever I hear story about that region, I can't help wonder where she is and what she is thinking.
°2003.04.01.tu | Ineffabilis Deus
As you might note from the previous entry, I'm a sucker for arguments such as how many angels might enjoy dancing on the head of a pin. Theology is often the recreation of atheists, and I've long been intrigued by the question of whether Jesus sinned. The answer, not surprisingly, depends on your brand of Christianity. But as always, my own abandoned tradition of Catholicism provides the most entertaining tension: how could Jesus be without sin, but also be of man and faced with temptation? Did Jesus sin, was he tempted, or was he "preserved from sin but not concupiscence." And does Jesus' Virgin Birth necessitate Mary's Immaculate Conception, and given that we are now recursing along ancestors to avoid original sin, how is the break made between Mary and her own mother? One can, and some have, spend a lifetime chasing the loose ends of these arguments.
°2003.04.01.tu | What would Jesus Do?
In a time when our President invokes God in speeches about his "crusade" the question of "What would Jesus do?" seems appropriate. And while the question "Who would Jesus bomb?" appears to be more cynical than serious, it too seems fair when I recall that our President named Jesus as his favorite political philosopher.
I can't imagine Jesus would drive a SUV, nor bomb people, and if this reflection causes folks to pause, all the better. However, I can't help but be confused about the substantive theology behind the question. Jesus' philosophy was eschatological: pertaining to the final days. Jesus wouldn't drop bombs nor worry about SUVs, he was asking his disciples to abandon their families to get ready for the end that was imminent, "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled." (Matthew 24:34)
While I'm sympathetic to those who pose these questions, substantive discussion seems as silly as those that argue that a very old contemporary of Jesus must still live today — otherwise why hasn't "all been fulfilled" — and as meritless as the argument that Isreal must be supported because it represents a manifestation of the coming apoclypse. However, unfortunately, this is representative of the level of discourse that does, and always has, driven popular debates.
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