tychoish: tycho garen's notes and essays

Current Projects

2009-11-06T00:00:00-05:00

It’s been a while since I’ve written about what I’m working on, so I wanted to write up a little post on the subject. Just to keep myself honest.

Last time I did this, I tried to promise myself that I’d get a draft the novel I’m working on done by the beginning of November in time for me to not do the NaNoWriMo project–as is my custom. That isn’t going to happen.

I have, however, begun to stub out three files which will form the core of the remainder of the book. I have the very end of the biggest section of chapter eight, and then four more chapters. The plan is to write what feels more like four short stories with four or five adjoining little scenes. I’m not sure that this will seem all that different from the outside when I’m done, but I think this change in plan will make things easier to write.

This project is one that I both adore, and am pretty pleased with (at least at the moment,) but I’m also keenly aware that I need to be done with it, and I need to move on, as it’s been in progress for more than a year, and none of my reasons for not finishing it yet are very good.
I’ve been slowly working on a knitting project. A sweater knit at a fairly fine gauge, and incredibly plain. I’m happy with the project but I’ve pretty much given up entirely on Television watching, and as a result haven’t found a lot of time to do knitting on a regular basis. I knit during a meeting, and for a few moments here and there during a couple of social interludes, but haven’t really gotten into it. It’s going well, and I’ve got about 9 inches done of the body. 7 more till the armhole shaping begins.
I’m continuing to do the contra dance and shape note things. I think the shape note experience has been helpful for the way that I understand and participate in music, and that’s a good thing indeed. I’ve picked up a few new contra dance things, though if a given week is busy, contra dancing tends to be the first thing to disappear. I’m okay with that. I’ve also taken to going for walks in the morning before work, rather than in the evening, which is, I think better for my mind during the day at work, and also for getting work done on projects in the evening.
It seems like there’s always something else in the project of “getting your technology to work the way it ought to,” and as a result it seems like I always have something to hack upon. With my laptop running the right operating system, and doing so pretty well, the list of things to hack on have cleared up significantly. I have a desktop that I’m not using as well as I could. There’s always something else to work on with regards to my writing setup, though that’s mostly abated for the moment. I really need to find some better way to read RSS feeds. I have some hacking to do with regards to websites. There’s always something to work on, I suppose.

Oh, and I’m working a lot, but then that’s how it goes. The work projects are actually pretty fun, and they’re going well, so that’s good. If only there were more hours in the day.

Cheers!

Interview with Angie Marshall

2009-11-05T00:00:00-05:00

Today’s interview is with Angie Marshall. I think introductions here are pretty much uncalled for, so here we go:

Who are you? What do you?

Angie Marshall, Legal Assistant is my paying job, but I am a Farm wife, mother of 3, a knitter, a former quilter and a half-assed gardener. I have multiple knitting projects OTN currently, but most consistently, I knit socks.
Merino or Blue Faced Leicester?

Either is awesome, but I will admit a fondness for Merino.
Lets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what’s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?

I use a palm centro for a phone, but alas, no interwebs connection from that. I like that it keeps my names/addresses/calendar at hand, but I am frustrated that i can’t create I have an iPod touch that 98% of the time I use to listen to inspirational speeches or podcasts or audio books. I have music on it, but… meh. I have Scrabble and Soduko applications on it and I love them. This iPod frustrates me because I cheaped out on it and didn’t get a big enough one so I am constantly juggling what gets put on it. I love my laptop, but wished the battery held more charge.
Favorite book you’ve read in the last year? Runners up?

Hanging my head in shame… the Twilight series. I listen to audiobooks mostly, but I did read those in real book form. I read for entertainment.
Favorite Websites?

Ravelry and Facebook.
What do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?

The election of our current President.
What do you think will be of the next 10?

I look forward to our scientific minds developing a fuel source that doesn’t depend on foreign oil. I hope that we take the lessons learned from this last war and we return to a self-sufficiency mindset so that we never again make the mistake of sending our troups to war over oil. >
One thing that you’re most looking forward to in the next year?

Getting better control of my life, cutting back to a 4 day work week (affirming, affirming), vacation, knitting camp, fresh asparagas morel mushrooms
One thing that you wish you could learn?

Spanish, there is such a need for spanish speakers in all areas of employment. My French from long ago High School, just isn’t much help.
Cats vs. Dogs?

Cats in the house, Dogs outside. Nothing like a warm cat “spot” (or 2 or 4) on a cold morning or a sick day.
Where can we find more about you/your projects?

Knit4Angine; The Grumpy Farmer but I don’t post much; perhaps this interview will goad me into posting a little more often.

Radicalism in Free Software, Open Source

2009-11-04T00:00:00-05:00

The background:

zonker on Selling vs. Shaming
bkuhn on Denouncing vs. Advocating: In Defense of the Occasional Denouncement
Various other conversations on identi.ca over the past few weeks.

In light of this debate I’ve been thinking about the role and manifestations of radicalism in the free software and open source world. I think a lot of people (unfairly, I think in many cases) equate dedication to the “Cause of Free Software,” as the refusal to use anything but free software, and the admonishment of those who do use “unpure” software. To my mind this is both unfair to Free Software as well as the radicals who work on free software projects and advocate for Free Software.

First, lets back up and talk about RMS¹. RMS is often held up as the straw man for “free software radicals.” RMS apparently (and I’d believe it) refuses to use software that isn’t free software. This is seen as being somewhat “monkish,” because doesn’t just involve using GNU/Linux on the desktop, but it also involves things like refusing to use the non-free software written for GNU/Linux, including Adobe’s Flash player, and various drivers. In short using the “free-only” stack of software is a somewhat archaic experience. The moderates say “who wants to use a computer which has been willfully broken because the software’s license is ideologically incompatible,” and the moderates come out looking rational and pragmatic.

Except that, as near as I can tell, while the refusal to use non-free software might be a bit traumatic for a new convert from the proprietary operating system world, for someone like RMS, it’s not a huge personal sacrifice. I don’t think I’m particularly “monkish” about my free software habits, and the only non-free software I use is the adobe flash player, and the non-open-source extensions to Sun’s Virtual Box. I’m pretty sure I don’t even need the binary blob stuff in the kernel. For me–and likely for RMS, and those of our ilk–sticking to the pure “free software” stuff works better and suits the way I enjoy working.²

In short, our ability to use free software exclusively, depends upon our habits and on the ways in which we use and interact with technology.

To my mind, the process by which the pragmatic approach to free software and open source radicalizes people like RMS, is terribly unproductive. While we can see that the moderates come away from this encounter looking more reasonable to the more conventional types in the software world, this is not a productive or useful discussion to entertain.

In any case I think there are a number of dimensions to the free software (and open source world,) that focusing on “how free your software” is distracts us from. Might it not be useful to think of a few other issues. They are, as follows:

Free software is about education, and ensuring that the users of technology can and do understand the implications of the technology that they use.

At least theoretically, one of the leading reasons why having “complete and corresponding source code” is so crucial to free software is that with the source code, users will be able to understand how their technology works.

Contemporary software is considerably more complex than the 70s vintage software that spurred the Free Software movement. Where one might have imagined being able to see, use, and helpfully modified an early version of a program like Emacs, today the source code for Emacs is eighty megabytes, to say nothing of the entire Linux Kernel. I think it’s absurd to suggest that “just looking at the source code” for a program will be educational in and of itself.

Having said that, I think free software can (and does) teach people a great deal about technology and software. People who use free software know more about technology. And it’s not just because people who are given to use free software are more computer literate, but rather using free software teaches people about technology. Arch Linux is a great example of this at a fairly high level, but I think there’s a way that Open Office Firefox plays a similar role for a more general audience.
There are a number of cases around free software where freedom–despite licensing choices–can be ambiguous. In these cases, particularly, it is important to think about the economics of software, not simply the state of the “ownership” of software.

I’m thinking about situations like the “re-licensing” such as that employed by MySQL AB/Sun/Oracle over the MySQL database. In these cases contributors assign copyright to the commercial owner of the software project on the condition that the code also be licensed under the terms of a license like the GPL. This way the owning copy has the ability to sell licenses to the project under terms that would be incompatible with the GPL. This includes adding proprietary features to the open source code that don’t get reincorporated into the mainline.

This “hybrid model” gives the company who owns the copyright a lot of power over the code base, that normal contributors simply don’t have. While this isn’t a tragedy, I think the current lack of certainty over the MySQL project should give people at least some pause before adopting this sort of business model.

While it might have once been possible to “judge a project by the license,” I think the issue of “Software Freedom” is in today’s world so much more complex, and I’m pretty sure that having some sort of economic understanding of the industry is crucial to figuring this out.
The success of free software may not be directly connected to the size of the userbase of free software

One thing that I think Zonker’s argument falls apart around is the idea that free software will only be successful if the entire world is using it. Wrong.

Lets take a project like Awesome. It’s a highly niche window manager for X11 that isn’t part of a Desktop Environment (e.g. GNOME/KDE/XFCE), and you have to know a thing or two about scripting and programing in order to get it to be usable. If there were much more than a thousand users in the world I’d be surprised. This accounts for a minuscule amount of the desktop window management market. Despite this, I think the Awesome project is wildly successful.

So what marks a successful free software project? A product that creates value in the world, by making people’s jobs easier and more efficient. A community that supports the developers and users of the software equally. Size helps for sure, particularly in that it disperses responsibility for the development of a project among a number of capable folks. However, the size of a projects userbase (or developer base) should not be the sole or even the most important quality by which we can judge success.

There are other issues which are important to think about and debate in the free software world. There are also some other instances where the “hard line” is over radicalized by a more moderate element, nevertheless I think this is a good place to stop for today, and I’m interested in getting some feedback from you all before I continue with this idea.

Onward and Upward!

Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project, original author of the GNU GPL (perhaps the most prevalent free software license), as well as the ever popular gcc and emacs.
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Arguably, it’s easier for software developers and hacker types like myself to use “just free software” because hackers tend to make free software to satisfy their needs (the “scratch your own itch” phenomena), and so there’s a lot of free software that supports “working like a hacker,” but less for more mainstream audiences. Indeed one could argue that “mainstream computer using audiences” as a class is largely the product of the “proprietary software and technology industry.”
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Package Mangement and Why Your Platform Needs an App Store

2009-11-03T00:00:00-05:00

When I want to install an application on a computer that I use, I open a terminal and type something to the effect of:

   apt-get install rxvt-unicode

Which is a great little terminal emulator. I recommend it. Assuming I have a live interned connection, and the application I’m installing isn’t too large, a minute later or less I have whatever it is I asked for installed and ready to use (in most cases.)

Indeed this is the major feature of most Linux Distributions: their core technology and enterprise is to take all of the awesome software that’s out there (and there’s a lot of it,) and make it possible to install easily, to figure out what it depends on, and get it to compile safely and run on a whole host of machines. Although this isn’t the kind of thing that most people think when they’re choosing a distribution of Linux, one of the biggest differentiating features between distributions. But I digress.

I’ve written about package management here before, but to summarize:

We use package managers because many programs share dependencies, that we wouldn’t want to install twice or three times, but that we might not want to install by default with every installation of an operating system. Making sure that everything gets installed is important. This, is I think, a fairly unique-to-open-source problem, because in the proprietary system the dependencies are installed by default (as in there are more monolithic development environments, like .NET, Cocoa, and Java¹, and other older non-managed options).
One of the defining characteristics of open source software is the fact that it’s meant to be redistributed. Package management makes it easy to redistribute software, and provides real value for both the users of the operating system and for the upstream developers. Or so I’m lead to believe.

In the end, we’re back at the beginning where, you can install just about anything in the world if you know what the package is named, and the operating system will blithely keep everything up to date and maintained.²

While GNU/Linux systems get flack for not being as useable as proprietary operating systems, I see package management as this huge “killer feature” that open source systems have on top of proprietary system. We’ll never see something like apt-get for Windows not because it’s not good technology, but because it’s impossible to mange every component of the system and all of the software with a single tool.³

And then all these “App Store” things started popping up.

As I’ve thought about it, “App stores,” do the same thing for application delivery on non-GNU/* systems that package management does for open source systems. We’re seeing this sort of thing for various platforms from cell phones like the iPhone/Blackberry/Andriod to Inuit’s QuickBooks and even for more conventional platforms like Java.

Technically it’s a bit less interesting. App stores generally just receive and distribute compiled code,⁴ but from a social and user-centric perspective, the app store experience is really quite similar to the package management experience.

I’m surely not the only one to make this connection, but I’d be interesting to move past this and think about the kinds of technological progress that stem from this. App stores clearly provide value to users by making applications easier to find, and to developers who can spend less time distributing their software. Are there greater advancements to be made here? Is this always going to be platform specific, or might there be some other sort of curatorial mechanism that might add even more value in this space? And of course, how does Free Software persist and survive in this kind of environment?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Let’s not bicker about this, because the argument breaks down here a bit, admittedly, given that Java is now, mostly open. But it wasn’t designed as an open system, and all of these solve the dependency problem by–I think–providing a big “standard runtime,” and statically compiling anything extra into the program’s executable. Or something.
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Package management sometimes breaks things, it’s true, but I’ve never really had a problem that I haven’t been able to recover from in reasonably short order. I mean, things have broken, and I will be the first to admit that my systems are far from pristine, but everything works, and that’s good enough for me.
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While its possible to use more than one package manager at once, and there are cases even on linux where this is common (i.e. CPAN shell, system packages (apt/deb, yum/rpm) and ruby gems, haskell cabal and so forth) it’s not preferable: Sometimes a package will be installed by a language-specific program manager and then the system package manager will install (over it) a newer or older version of the package, which you might not notice, or it might just cause something to act a bit funny on some systems. If you’re lucky, Usually stuff breaks.
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Which means, I think indirectly that we’re seeing a move away from static linking and bundling of frameworks and into a single binary or bundle. This is one of the advancements of OS X, that all applications are delivered in these “bundles” which are just directories that contain everything that an application needs to run. Apple addressed the dependency problem by removing all dependencies. And this works in the contemporary world because if an App had to be a few extra megs to include its dependencies? No big deal. Same with Ram usage.
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Links on Technology, Blogging, and Emacs

2009-11-02T00:00:00-05:00

Emacs starter configuration scripts. I can’t, for the life of me, recall why I went looking for this, but last week I ended up with a whole host of basic configuration files that people have published. I’ve thought about doing this for my own files, but I’ve not had it properly cleaned up and working in a non-embarrassing way in a while. Most of these are on github, which is a phenomena that could tolerate some investigation, but no matter. Here they are, linked to by screen name: ki, elq, jonshea, larrywright, defmacro (har, just got it), jmhodges, technomancy, markhepburn, and al3x. I’d love to collect more of these, so maybe comments or the cyborg wikinstitute.com/wiki/).
Adjunct to that, a few more cool emacs and related links and points: First, paraedit which is a little tool which makes editing lisp easier, as well as an org-mode tip from Nathan Yergler about using org-rembmember with firefox and ubiquity. which might be of interest to some of you. I also have in the file this link about yet another lisp dialect (yald?) called Lysp, but I don’t have much more than that. I, on the other hand will have more to say about this in the coming few weeks.
My friend Chris Fletcher discusses his experience with contemporary blogging services in this post. I’m not sure. Right? I mean blogging is so different today than it was when I got into it. I remember when you handed FTP credentials to blogger so they could publish your blog with their system to your site. Surely people don’t do that anymore. One of the things that I noticed at Podcamp (more on that on another post) that, frankly horrified me a bit, was that there was a whole class of bloggers who wanted to do “this thing,” but they had no interest in running their own website or making that investment of time and energy.

And maybe that’s what blogging has become. In a lot of ways doing a blog is something anyone can do pretty easily, and having a website is no longer a big part of participating in this discourse. While I’m a big fan of independence, and I don’t think the technological burden is that high. “Doing websites,” very much made me the geek I am today, so I’m not sure. Having said that, LiveJournal has never easily fit into a niche: It was blogging before there was blogging. It was social networking before we said that. It was subculture/niche before that became the thing. If I had more time in my life I’d figure out some way to study and capture that history.
For all of you OS X Desktop User Interaction Geeks, there’s this thing that lets you hide unused windows baked into the window manager. I think. I have access to OS X, but I don’t really use it enough to give this a try. GNU Screen and lots (and lots) of Emacs buffers make it possible to keep a lot of irons on the fire without getting distracted.
A good example of a zshrc file if that’s your thing. I think it’s my thing. Alas. I’ll write more about this once I get more used to it and figure some things out. Mostly, I’m finding that one can use it as a pure superset of bash without ill effect.

Updates and Recent Events

2009-10-30T00:00:00-04:00

It’s been a while since I’ve written a status update, but I think I’ve been up to a few things which haven’t managed to work their way onto the site, so I think I’ll collect them all here, in a sort of “state of the tycho” report.

I’ve gotten more into the shape note singing. I went to the New York State Sacred Harp Convention in Cambridge New York and had a blast. I’ve written here before about this, and I don’t know how much I can really add to that. I’m continuing to be impressed by all of the young people who are into Shape Note. A fair number younger than me (though not by much). It’s strange to have acquired another hobby that takes even more time that I don’t really feel like I have; however, it’s a blast, and I feel like it’s a good thing in my life.
I’ve made a number of post collections” for the tychoish site, which provide an overview of posts on a number of subjects that aren’t generated by some sort of tagging system, nor are they comprehensive. Rather, they represent a hand picked collection of topics that I’ve covered in some depth and the posts that best exemplify these subject areas. I expect this list to grow and shift slightly, but for the moment we have:
I hope you find these archives useful. If you have a suggestion for another topic or theme, or additional posts that you think might work well in one of these posts, do feel free to touch base with me about this.
The job. I’ve not written here a great deal about my job or my move in late June across the country. I figure I write a lot about work things most of the day anyway. Having said that, I know at least a couple c-workers (Hi M.G. & S.S.) and other work-related folks read this, so it’s no great secret. Some brief reflection:

It’s going well. My team, such as it is, has sort of found a rhythm that works for us, our project progresses, and even though it always feels like I’ve written to the end of the subject matter at hand, there’s always seems to be something captivating “up next to write about.

And I get to work with and write about free software stuff with a bunch of geeks. I’m learn stuff about writing all the time somehow, and while I think I probably work a bit too much (or so the cats seem to think) it’s going well.
The Cyborg Institute is a project that I need to figure out how to do better. I think having it as a “blog” was the wrong thing to do, an I’m glad I’ve stopped doing that. I started it when I was in a much different place in so many of my projects. It was long before I started the job, I was writing about different things on the tychoish blog, and a million things. Now, things are different, and I need to figure out a better way of doing things. Having said that, things haven’t been completely dead… News forthcoming.
We’re approaching the beginning of November, when I said in a previous post that I wanted to finish the novel I was working on by then. Well that didn’t happen. Not only did it not happen, but I didn’t even manage to finish the blasted scene that I’ve been working on for a while. Having said that, I have made progress (on that scene), and I have a passable plan for finishing the last of the novel. So that’s a good thing.
I gave up the ghost on my somewhat aged “frankenbuntu” (eg. a quirky variant of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty) installation on my laptop, and installed Arch Linux on the laptop. I’ve been remarkably pleased with this. There are quirks, but lord were there quirks on the old installation. I’m happy with the outcome, and I’ve basically switched to using this machine as my primary computer.

Interview with Judy Stein

2009-10-28T00:00:00-04:00

Here’s another interview for the interview series file. Enjoy!

Who are you? What do you?

I’ve had lots of jobs, but at the moment I only have three: running a folk club, host= ing a radio show, and teaching ballad-singing at the Folk School. Two of these are volunteer jobs. I am also a 40/50-hour per week babysitter for my 2-year-old grandson and adult in charge at my house. I have recently acquired a sewing machine and a few art supplies, and got my concertina back from a friend who borrowed it; the projects, they will come.

Ongoing activities for years include folk dancing, especially Border Morris. I have been dancing, I reckon, for roughly 51 years. Singing, roughly 60; collecting songs maybe 53. Reading, since before I started school. (I read history, detective stories, and Kipling, mostly. I will also pick up= anything by Terry Pratchett, and have only been disappointed once there. I like Shakespeare, don’t care for Thomas Hardy or most poetry.)

Things I can do well enough to have made money at, either occasionally or on a regular basis: Drawing and painting. Sewing in a pants factory. General assistance in a doctor’s office. Singing. Belly-dancing. Salesclerk-type selling: candy, pictures and mirrors. Writing. Teaching mentally ill and/or learning disabled children. All these jobs have their ups and downs.

As for Intellectual stuff: I admire but do not have the temperament for heavy-duty intellectualism: teaching has made my natural instinct for pragmatism even stronger, and too much nitpicky defining and speculation becomes boring to= me fairly quickly. Also there is a heavy-handedness that goes with too muc= h categorizing; I like exceptions to rules.
Jet Packs or Hovercars?

They both sound like fun!
Lets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what’s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?

I am a fairly backward person technology-wise: I’d say things like “the wheel” or maybe “cars” or “dishwashers” here. And I do like my computer. I also like binoculars. And shoes that actual ly fit your feet, that’s technology. Digital cameras have proved convenient but slightly disappointing: they don’t move fast enough. Cellphones are a mixed blessing too: they always need charging, and people expect you to HAVE one.
Favorite song at the moment? Tune? Who are the runners up?

Song, at the moment: Dick Gaughan singing “Fair Flooer of Northumberland” or Louis Killen singing “April Morning.” or Peter Bellamy singing “We Have Fed Our Sea,” or Pete Morton singing “Another Train.”

Tune: “Orange in Bloom/Sherbourne Waltz,” and there are millions of runners-up. I like shapenote hymns when someone else is singing them, but am too much of an anarchist to like following dots myself. Plus I am rather surly about church, and all the praise-the-Lord-ing gets to me sometimes. There is no why; there usually isn’t, with what I like. I could come up with one if I tried, but I am not by na= ture very introspective.
Favorite Website?

Wikipedia, for one. YouTube. Gutenberg Press. Sky and Telescope. Amazon.
What do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?

The ongoing growth of the Internet–a new Wild West. :D
One thing that you’re most looking forward to in the next year?

Reclaiming a few lost skills (see the first question)
One thing that you wish you could learn?

Gardening. Actually, I’m not sure “wish” is the correct word: if I want to know something I can get a fair start on doing it. But I do intend to try my hand at making a proper garden next spring.
Doctor Who v. Red Dwarf?

Dr. Who: mostly because I’ve never seen Red Dwarf but maybe once…
Where can we find more about you/your projects?

The Focal Point; The LiveJournal; Folk School, or by asking me!

The End of Reusable Software

2009-10-27T00:00:00-04:00

I wrote a post for the Cyborg Institute several weeks ago about the idea of “Reusable Software”, and I’ve thought for a while that it deserved a bit more attention. The first time around, I concentrated a lot about the idea of reusable software in the context of the kinds of computing that people like you and me do on a day to day basis. I was trying to think about the way we interact with computers and how this has changed in the last 30 years (or so) and how we might expect for this to change soon.

Well that was the attempt at any rate. I’m not sure how close I got to that.

More recently, I’ve been thinking about the plight of reusable software in the context of “bigger scale” information technology. I’d say this fits into my larger series of technology futurism posts, except that this is very much a work of presentism. So be it.

To back up for a moment I think we can summarize the argument against reusable software, which boils down to a couple of points:

With widely reusable software, most of the people who use computers on a regular basis can pretty much avoid ever having to write software. While it’s probably true most people end up doing a very small amount of programming without realizing it, gone are the days when using a computer meant that you had to know how to program it. While more people can slip into using computers than ever before, the argument is that people aren’t as good at using computers because they don’t know how they work as well.

Arguably this trend is one of the harbingers of the singularity, but that’s an aside.
Widely reusable software is often less good software than the single-use, or single-purpose stuff. When software doesn’t need to be reused, it only needs to do the exact things you need it to do well and can be optimized, tuned, and designed to fit into a single person’s or organization’s work-flow. When developers know that they’re developing a reusable application, they have to take into account possible variances in the environments where it will be deployed, a host of possible supported and unsupported uses. They have to design a feature set for a normalized population, and the end result is simply lower quality software.

So with the above rattling around in my head, I’ve been asking:

Are web applications, which are deployed centrally and often only on one machine (or a small cluster of machines), the beginning of a return to single use applications? Particularly since the specific economic goals of the sponsoring organization/company is often quite tightly coupled with the code itself?
One of the leading reasons that people give for avoiding open source release is embarrassment at the code base. While many would argue that this is avoidance of one sort or another, and it might be, I think it’s probably also true more often than not. I’m interested in thinking about what the impact of the open source movement’s focus on source code has had on the development of single use code versus multi use code in the larger scope.
What do we see people doing with web application frameworks in terms of code reuse? For starters, the frameworks themselves are all about code reuse and bout providing some basic tools to prevent developers from recreating the wheel over and over again. But then, the applications are (within some basic limitations) wildly different from each other and highly un-reusable.

Having said that, Rails/Django/Drupal sites suffer from poor performance in particularly high-volume situations for two reasons: Firstly, it’s possible to strangle yourself in database queries in the attempt to do something that you’d never do if you had to write the queries yourself. Secondly the frameworks are optimized to save developers time, rather than run blindingly fast on very little memory.

I suppose if I had the answers I wouldn’t be writing this here blog, but I think the questions are more interesting anyways, and besides, I bet you all know what I think about this stuff. Do be in touch with your questions and answers.

Onwards and Upwards!

The Tiling Window Manager Story

2009-10-22T00:00:00-04:00

As I said in ”The Odd Cyborg Out,” I’m thinking of giving StumpWM a run. So I did some musing about tiling window managers, because I am who I am. Here goes,

So, like I said, I’ve been tinkering a very little with StumpWM, and I thought some background might be useful. For those of you who aren’t familiar, StumpWM is another tiling window manager, like my old standard Awesome, except Stump is written in Common Lisp, and is descended from different origins from Awesome. Here’s the history as I understand it.

The History of Tiling Window Managers

There was (and is,) this very minimalist tiling window manager called dwm which is written in less than 2000 lines of code, and is only configurable by modifying the original C code and then recompiling. It’s intentionally elitist, and targeted at a very high level of user. While this is ok, particularly given the niche that are likely to want to use tiling window managers, there were a lot of people who wanted very different things from dwm. In a familiar story to those of us who follow free software and open source development: lots of people started maintaining and sharing patch-sets for DWM. These added additional functionality like easier configuration tools, integration with menus, notification libraries, theeing support, API hooks, and the rest is history.

Fast-forwarding a bit, these patch-sets inspired a number of forks, clones, and children projects. DWM was great (so I hear) if you were into it, but I think the consensus is that even if you were geeky/dweeby enough for it, it required a lot of attention and work to get it to be really useable in a day-to-day sort of way. As a result we see things like Awesome, which began life as a fork of DWM with some configuration options, and has grown into it’s own project “in the tradition of dwm.” dwm is also a leading inpsiration for projects like Xmonad, which is a re-implementation of dwm in the Haskell programing language with some added features around extension and configuration options.

This default configuration problem is something of an issue in the tiling window manager space, that I might need to return to in a later post. In any case…

Stump, by contrast has nothing (really) to do with dwm, except that they take a similar sort of approach to the “window management” problem which is to say that window behavior in both are highly structured and efficient. They tiling windows to use the whole screen and focus on a user experience which is highly keyboard driven operation. Stump, like xmonad, is designed to use one language exclusively for both the core program, the configuration, and the extension of the environment.

And, as I touched on in my last post on the subject I’m kind of enamored with lisp, and it clicks in my head. I don’t think that I “chose wrong” with regards to Awesome, or that I’ve wasted a bunch of time with Awesome. Frankly, I think I’m pretty likely to remain involved with the project, but I think I’m a very different computer user–Cyborg–today than I was back then, and one of the things that I’ve discovered since I started using Awesome has been emacs and Lisp.

My History with Awesome

Lets talk a little bit more about Awesome though. Awesome is the thing that set me along the path to being a full-time GNU/Linux user. I found the tiling window manager paradigm the perfect thing that lets me concentrate on the parts of my projects that are important and not get hung up on the distractions of organizing windows, and all of the “mouse stuff” that took too much of my brain time. I started playing around in a VM on my old Macbook and I found that I just got things accomplished there somehow. And the more I played with things the more I got into it, and the rest is history.

When I finally gave up the mac, however, I realized that my flirtation with vim wasn’t going to cut it, and I sort of fell down the emacs rabbit hole, which makes sense–in retrospect–given my temperament and the kind of work that I do, but none the less here I am. While Awesome is something that I’m comfortable with and that has severed me quite well, there are a number of inspirations for my switch. Some of them have to do with Awesome itself, but most of them have to do with me:

I want to learn Common Lisp. While I know that emacs’ lisp, and Common Lisp aren’t the same there are similarities, and Lua was something that I’ve put up with and avoided a lot while using Awesome. Its not that Lua is hard, quite the opposite, it’s just that I don’t have much use for it in any other context, and while I know enough to make awesome really work for me, my configuration is incredibly boring.

Not that I think Common Lisp is exactly the kind of thing that is going to be incredibly useful to me in my career in the future, but like I said: I like the way Lisp makes me think, and it’s a language that can be used for production-grade types of things, and it’s a standard, it’s not explained from a math-centric¹ perspective, and like I said reading lisp code makes sense to me. Go figure.
There are several of quirks with Awesome which get to me:
- If you change your configuration, you have to restart the window manager. Which wouldn’t be a big problem except…
- When you restart, if you have a window that appears in more than one tag, the window only appears on one tag.
- The commands for awesome are by default pretty “vimmy,” and while my current config has been properly “emacsified,” you have to do a lot of ugliness to get emacs-style chords (e.g. “C-x C-r o a f” or Control-x, Control-R, followed by o, a, and f.) which I kind of like.)
- Because one of my primary environments is running a virtual machine (in Virtual Box) on an OS X host, I’ve run into some problems around using the Command/Windows/Mod4 key, and there’s no really good way to get around this in awesome.

So that’s my beef, along with the change in usage pattern that I talked about last time, which is probably the biggest single factor. I’m not terribly familiar with Stump yet, so I don’t have a lot to offer in terms of thoughts, but I’ve been tinkering in the laptop, and it fits my brain, which is rather nice. I’ll post more as I progress. For now I think I better cut this off.

This is my major problem with haskell. It looks awesome, I sort of understand it when people talk about it, but every “here’s how to use haskell” guide I read is fully of what I think are “simple” math examples, of how it works, but I have a hard time tracking the math in the examples, so I have a hard time grasping the code and programming lessons because the examples are too hard for me. This is the problem of having geeked out on 20th continental philosophy in college and not math/programming, I think.
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Desktop Virtualization and Operating Systems

2009-10-21T00:00:00-04:00

So what’s the answer to all this operating system and hardware driver angst?

I’m going to make the argument that the answer, insofar as there is one is probably virtualization.

But wait, tycho, this virtualization stuff all about servers. Right?

Heretofore, virtualization technology–the stuff that lets us take a single very powerful piece of hardware, and run multiple instances of an operating system that, in most ways “think of themselves” as being an actual physical computer–has been used in the server way, as a way of “consolidating” and utilizing the potential of given hardware. This is largely because hardware has become so powerful that it’s hard to write software that really leverages this effectively, and there are some other benefits that make managing physical servers “virtually” a generally good thing, and there aren’t a lot of people who would be skeptical of this assertion I think.

But on desktops? On servers where users access the computer over a network connection, it makes sense to put a number of “logical machines” on a physical machine. On a desktop machine this doesn’t make a lot of sense, after all, we generally interact with the physicality of the machine; so having multiple, concurrently running, operating systems on your desk (or in your lap!) doesn’t seem to provide a great benefit. I’d suggest the following two possibilities:

Hypervisors (i.e. the technology that talks to the hardware and the operating system instances running on the hardware,) abstract away the driver problem. The hypervisors real job is to talk to the actual hardware, and provide a hardware-like-interface to the “guest operating systems.” Turns out this technology is 80-90% of where it needs to be for desktop usage. This makes the driver problem a little easier to solve.
Application specific operating systems. One of the problems with desktop usability in recent years is that we’ve been building interfaces that have needed to do everything, as people use computers for everything. This makes operating systems and stacks difficult to design and support, and there is all sorts of unforeseen interactions between all of the different things that we do, which doesn’t help things. So desktop virtualization might allow us to develop very slim operating systems that are exceedingly reliable and portable, but also very limited in what they can accomplish. Which is ok, because we could have any number of them on a given computer.

I only need one instance of an operating system on my computer, why do you want me to have more?

See above for a couple of “ways desktop hypervisors may promote the growth of technology.” But there are a number of other features that desktop virtualization would convey to users, but it mostly boils down to “Easier management and backup.”

If the “machine” is running in a container on top of a hypervisor, its relatively easy to move it to a different machine (the worst thing that could happen is the virtual machine would have to be rebooted, and even then, not always.) It’s easy to snapshot known working states. It’s easy to redeploy a base image of an operating system in moments. These are all things that are, when we live “on the metal,” quite difficult at the moment.

For the record, I don’t think anyone is ever really going have more than five (or so) instances running on their machine, but it seems like there’s a lot of room for some useful applications around five machines.

And lets face it, TCP/IPA is the mode of inter-process communication these days, so I don’t think application architectures would likely change all that much.

Won’t desktop hypervisors have the same sorts of problems that “conventional operating systems,” have today. You’re just moving the problem around.

If you’re talking about the drivers problem discussed earlier, then in a manner of speaking, yes. Hypervisors would need to be able to support all kinds of hardware that (in many cases) they don’t already support. The argument for “giving this” to hypervisor developers is that largely, they’re already working very closely with the “metal” (a great deal of hardware today has some support for virtualization baked in,) and hypervisors are in total much simpler projects.

Its true that I’m mostly suggesting that we move things around a bit, and that isn’t something that’s guaranteed to fix a specific problem, but I think there’s some benefit in rearranging our efforts in this space. As it were

Don’t some of the leading hypervisors, like KVM and others, use the parts or all of the Linux Kernel, so wouldn’t this just recreate all of the problems of contemporary Linux anew?

I’ll confess that I’m a huge fan of the Xen hypervisor which takes a much more “thin” approach to the hypervisor problem, because I’m worried about this very problem. And I think Xen is more parsimonious. KVM might be able to offer some slight edge in some contexts in the next few years, like the ability to more intelligently operate inside of the guest operating system, but that’s a ways down the road and subject to the same problems that Linux has today.

So there you have it. Thoughts?

podcamp philly

2009-10-20T00:00:00-04:00

So I went to this “Podcamp” in Philadelphia a few weeks ago. I’m a huge fan of getting together with geeks outside of the Internet (in real life!) to talk about the technology, communities, and practices (let alone skills and ticks). Indeed meeting people in the real world, is often a great way to advance and promote whatever it is you’re doing on the Internet, but beyond I often find the experience of having “really geeky” conversations with people in real life to be rather refreshing. So much of the geeky things we (I?) do are pretty solitary tasks, and it’s fun to have space and time with other people who get it.

On this premise I went to this podcamp thing. I went to a BarCamp last year that I enjoyed a great deal but I was somewhat intimidated by the flock of staff members from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (ok, so there were only two. or three. In a small room. Oh, and a guy who signed the Agile Manifesto. Right.) And while it was great, and I learned a ton of stuff… I’m a writer, and an a critic, and not exactly a programmer, and while I write about programmers and technology a lot I think it might be useful–sometimes–to have separate conversations.

Right? That sounds reasonable.

So here’s the thing about Podcamp. Well the things:

New media isn’t anymore. Sure its still a useful distinction given that the “old media” (e.g. book publishing, magazines, newspapers, network television, and radio) are still around. Indeed they remain an incredibly relevant component of the “media ecosystem” both globally but also online. Having said that “new media” like social media, podcasts, and the like have been around for 4-5 years at this point, and it’s mostly mainstream now: old media like NPR consistently tops the iTunes podcast charts, CNN is on twitter. and so forth. And lets not even get started about blogging.
On the frontier of any new media, anyone who is stubborn enough and the first person to stake out a claim to a niche has a pretty good chance of finding success. Four years later or more, success is something that’s much more difficult to parse or assure.
The Search engine marketing thing, hasn’t, as I would have hoped, died in a fiery and epic death. This shit is all over the place, and everyone seems to be talking about pay-per-click advertising and not the fact that what really matters is word-of-mouth. I’m so incredibly frustrated by all the crap that gets generated both in sport of “SEO” and in service of it as well.

I can tell when you write articles that are designed to get voted up on reddit and digg, and I throw up in my mouth a little when I see them.

I got through a day of that, and I couldn’t cope with any more.
Everyone was talking about how to promote a venture, and how to do marketing in ”this brave new world we’re in,” but no one was really talking about how to develop and make something online that works. The marketing thing takes works and there are a couple of non-obvious aspects of the marketing effort, but it’s not rocket science. Sometimes, figuring out what is likely to work online and how to present things in an effective way is by far the largest challenge.
I’m not sure that hybrid-un/conferences work. And I’m pretty sure that the space didn’t work. Unconferneces are great: they let you get what you want out of a meeting, like the Internet they help deconstruct the boundaries between presenter and audience. Here’s what didn’t work for me with the format at this podcamp:
- The talks were all in these rooms, and the door was at the front of the room. So unless you sat by the door, you had to walk between the speaker to get in and out of the room in the middle of the talk. Which you’re supposed to be able to do. Awkward.
- The opening session was entirely self-congratulatory, and a general waste of time. Better, I think to have let presenters in the morning sessions talk for a few seconds about their session. There weren’t that many sessions.
- I’m not wed to the idea that people have to determine the programing on the spot in the morning of a camp, and sometimes preparation is a good thing, but if you’re going to have multiple parallel “tracks” there should be some sort of thematic unity for a given track, and some organization around that.Randomized conference schedules don’t provide attendees value.
In an effort to provide hyper-accessible content for people, there were a number of topics that I’d consider to be “hot” like, free network services, content curration, microformats and semantic web stuff, the real time web, and so on and so forth. Instead there was a lot of “get a facebook account and sign up for google analytics.”

So yeah. I hear there’s a BarCamp in philly in november. We’ll see how I’m faring, but it might be cool to talk with people about Sygn at that.

Operating Systems and the Driver Issue

2009-10-19T00:00:00-04:00

I made a quip the other day about the UNIX Epoch problem (unix time stamps, are measured in seconds since Jan 1, 1970, and displayed in a 10 digit number. Sometime in 2038, there will need to be 11 digits, and there’s no really good way to fix that.) Someone responded “whatever, we won’t be using UNIX in thirty years!”

Famous last words.

People were saying this about UNIX itself years ago. Indeed before Linux had even begun to be a “thing,” Bell Labs had moved on to “Plan 9” which was to be the successor to UNIX. It wasn’t. Unix came back. Hell, in the late eighties and early nineties we even thought that the “monolithic kernel” as a model of operating system design was dead, and here we are. Funny that.

While it’s probably the case that we’re not going to be using the same technology in thirty years that we are today (i.e. UNIX and GNU/Linux,) it’s probably also true that UNIX as we’ve come to know it, is not going to disappear given UNIX’s stubborn history in this space. More interesting, I think, is to contemplate the ways that UNIX and Linux will resonate in the future. This post is an exploration of one of these possibilities.

I suppose my title has forced me to tip my hand slightly, but lets ignore that for a moment, and instead present the leading problem with personal computing technology today: hardware drivers.

“Operating System geeks,” of which we all know one or two, love to discuss the various merits of Windows/OS X/Linux “such and such works better than everything else,” “such and such is more stable than this,” “suck and such feels bloated compared to that,” and so on and so forth. The truth is that if we take a step back, we can see that the core problem for all of these operating systems is pretty simple: it’s the drivers, stupid.

Lets take Desktop Linux as an example. I’d argue that there are two large barriers to it’s widespread adoption. First it’s not immediately familiar to people who are used to using Windows. This is pretty easily addressed with some training, and I think Microsoft’s willingness to change their interface in the last few years (i.e. the Office “Ribbon,” and so forth,) is a great testimony to the adaptability of the user base. The second, and slightly more thorny issue is about hardware drivers: which are the part of any operating system that allow the software to talk to hardware like video, sound, and networking (including, of course, wireless) adapters. The Kernel has gotten much better in this regard in the past few years (probably by adding support for devices without requiring their drivers be open source), but the leading cause of an “install just not working,” is almost always something related to the drivers.

“Linux People,” avoid this problem by buying hardware that they know is well supported. In my world that means, “Intel everything particularly if you want wireless to work, and Nvidia graphics if you need something peppy, which I never really do,” but I know people who take other approaches.

In a weird way this “geek’s approach to linux” is pretty much the same way that Apple responds to the driver problem in OS X. By constraining their Operating System to run only on a very limited selection of hardware, they’re able to make sure that the drivers work. Try and add a third party wireless card to OS X. It’s not pretty.

Windows is probably the largest victim to the driver problem: they have to support every piece of consumer hardware and their hands are more or less tied. The famous Blue Screen of Death? Driver errors. System bloat (really for all operating systems) tends to be about device drivers. Random lockups? Drivers. Could Microsoft build better solutions for these driver problems, or push equipment manufacturers to use hardware that had “good drivers,” probably; but as much as it pains me, I don’t really think that it would make a whole lot of business sense for them to do that, at the moment.

The Odd Cyborg Out

2009-10-15T00:00:00-04:00

I said to my office mate this week, ”I’m switching to zsh,” and I believe he said something to the effect of “oh dear, what’s next.”

I should back up. I’m something of an odd duck when it comes to the way I use computers. I’m a geek, even in the context of my coworkers who are (also) huge geeks. I’m the only one who uses emacs. We’re an OS X shop (for the desktop, at least) but I run Arch Linux inside of a virtual machine. Because I’m like that. And now, I’m switching away from the by-now unix standard “bash” shell to “zsh.” I’m a bit weird. I’m ok with this.

So zsh. Why should you care? Well…

I’m not expert, having only really used it for a few days but there are a few things that have won me over:

It’s mostly backwards compatible with bash. So, except for the stuff that configured my prompt, I was able to copy over my old .bashrc file pretty much as is. There’s been no real “brain adjustment” from all my old bash habits.
It’s faster. You know, this is the kind of thing taht you don’t believe, “my terminal is faster than your terminal” is kinda lame because bash is pretty peppy compared to GUI stuff. I mean what, bash is a 300-400 kb, how slow can it be? The answer is, zsh just feels faster. This seems to be a quasi universal experience.
It does tab-completion within commands. This is seriously amazing, because while command completion and path completion is awesome in bash, you still have to remember all of the sub-commands. This is particularly rough for big commands like ”git” and ”apt-get” or ”apt-cache”. Very awesome.

Getting up the courage to switch and to rewrite my prompt was something that took a little bit of doing, but now I’m happy, and I strongly recommend it. If you like me live in the terminal, or have thought about using the command line more, give zsh a try, it’s good stuff.

The other thing, almost certain to provoke an “Oh dear” reaction on the part of my geeky friends is the fact that I’m strongly considering switching from the Awesome Window Manager to the Stump Window Manager, or more practically StumpWM or just Stump. Here’s some background on my adventures with tiling window managers:

When I started using Awesome every thing I did with the computer lived in it’s own little window. I was coming from the mac, so I lived with ten or fifteen open TextMate windows, a like number of open tabs in my terminal emulator, and a browser with a gazillion open tabs. I thought that this was sort of “the way I worked,” and so I replicated this kind of workflow in Awesome.

And here’s the thing. Awesome is great for managing a huge number of windows. With 9 workspaces/tags (or more!) it was possible to keep twenty or thirty windows afloat… a few browsers, a few chat windows, a dozen terminals, a few emacs frames, and the like all happening at once. And the window manager made it possible for me to only have to look at 2 or three windows at a time.

Then I progressed. With emacs’ server/daemon mode, I only have one instance of emacs and 20 or so buffers, and in an extreme moment I sometimes have as many as 4 frames open at once, but more often I just have 2 or three (org-mode, writing, and a spare for something.) And terminals? I’ve taken to using screen which multiplexes an untabbed terminal, so I typically have a single screen session with 8 screen-windows, and I keep a couple of instances of that open at once for different contexts, so lets say another three windows. I have a remote screen session for IM and chat now that I connect to, and a single web browser.

Frankly, it’s sort of gotten to the point where I don’t really need to manage very many windows, and I probably never use more than 4-5 tags/workspaces. My needs for a window manager changed, and one of the core problems that problem that Awesome solves, is one that I’ve solved by using multiplexed applications. And that leads me to Stump.

I see that I probably need to spend a little more time talking about this tiling window manager stuff again. Stay tuned!

Breaking up with the Web

2009-10-15T00:00:00-04:00

I really don’t want to use the web anymore. This should come as no great surprise to most of you, but I think it’s worth pondering a bit, particularly because like all “breaking ups,” it’s a bit difficult. To recap, the reasons for the break up:

The software we use to browse the web is awkward and difficult to use efficiently. I’m talking here about things like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. While “webkit” generation browsers are better than everything that’s come before (even if their lack of comparability with the Firefox Platform makes them useable,) every browser I’ve interacted with is a huge program that just feels unwieldy.
There are two many distractions in the browser. I’ve managed to find ways to assimilate and interact with nearly all of the information that comes at me in the course of a day or a week in a sane, balanced, and efficient way. Except for the browser. Where I find myself refreshing Facebook or twitter endlessly. I don’t even like facebook and the twitter website all that much.
The web is too sensitive to the availability of data connectivity. While I have an Internet connection nearly all of the time that I’m in front of a connection, I don’t really like to rely on this to do my work. I don’t want to use applications that rely on connectivity, and I hate situations where I have a few moments to do something, and I have a computer with me, and I get started and then I have to check a fact, or read a little bit about on wikipedia, and I can’t because I don’t have a connection.
I don’t like that the presentation layer of the web provides so much flexibility to make websites so unreadable and difficult to comprehend. Web browsers interfaces like emacs-w3m improve this somewhat, but even that is somewhat lacking. This isn’t a problem with software, but rather it’s a problem with designers, design, and the “way the web works.”

So to end on a somewhat positive note. Here’s what I think we really need in the next generation of digitally connected applications.

Some sort of very smart predictive caching software that would run locally. We have the hard-drive space in contemporary machines that we could dedicate–as much as 100 gigabytes to a cache of network data and never really feel a space crunch. In some cases even more. I think most people’s digital music collections tend to top out in the 75-100 gig range, and “small” desktop hard drives have at least 500 gigs. Nothing else–well videos–takes up space. This would make the offline web a much more realistic proposition, it would speed things up and we could work on ways of only sending diffs between the cache and the servers, and it would rock.
Databases need to mostly move off of the server and onto local boxes. Extension of point above. Content doesn’t change that much, local machines are now fast and smart enough to really be able to handle this. This is in HTML5, but having said that, I worry a bit. Because I’m me.
We can import a lot of the “intelligence” of computing onto clients. There’s moves toward this already, with Adobe AIR and it’s competitors, but this seems to be all about adding “bling” to the web experience, and use the cross-platform nature of web technologies, even the proprietary ones like Flash, to reinvent desktop application development. I think we can go even further with this. Lets think about the next generation of desktop RSS clients. Offline wiki/wikipedia software.

I’m not trying to buck the “software in the 21st century is social and connected” trend that we’re in the middle of, but rather seriously rethink the interface and work-flow paradigms of the web.
I hope that the next generation of web-document standards (of which I think sygn is an example) will focus on structure and organization and a much more limited set of “features” (less is more) that will let content creators make content more useful rather than better looking.

Take design out of the content, and put all of the display logic (aside from headings and meta-data) on the client. Don’t like how a site displays? Use a different client. And so forth.

Anyone with me?

Interview with Scott Farquhar

2009-10-13T00:00:00-04:00

Today’s installment in the interview series is Scott Farquhar. Rather than spend a long time blathering about it, let me just get on with it. Shall we?

Who are you? What do you?

Who are any of us, really? Right now I don’t seem to be doing much but working at my old house and getting it ready to rent. But what I hope to go back to doing after I’m done is the main project of my Royalty Free Music podcast. The break away has been good in some ways. Once I get enough music to produce a commercial CD, I will probably lay that project aside and move on to the next shiny object.
Jet Packs or Hovercars?

As exciting and thrilling as the Jet Pack might be, I think I’d have to go with the Hovercar so I could carry more stuff with me.
Lets talk about technology: What kind of technology do you use, and what’s the coolest thing that technology enables for you? What about your technology do you find frustrating?

I think I have to hold up my digital orchestra package as the niftiest piece of technology that I have in my personal arsenal. It essentially let’s me have access to creating music with actual sampled orchestral instruments. If I want to write something for 5 violas, timpani, bass trombone, and english horn, I can… and relatively quickly have an accurate idea of what it will sound like without having to look for and pay those 8 musicians and get them all together to record. The frustrating aspect is that the music created is grounded in equal temperament, so it’s got that flat, slightly out-of-tune sound that just doesn’t sound quite right. Perhaps it is a good frustration, since it’s clear that no matter how good technology will get, live musicians (and by extension into other areas of technology… people in general) just can’t be replaced.
Favorite Star Trek Series?

The original series. As neat and slick as the newer stuff has been, there’s just something about the original.
The single scariest thing about the future?

At the risk of sounding like a complete bastard… It seems like it’s mostly the stupid (rude/inconsiderate/narrow-minded) people who are breeding. soapbox Humans are overpopulating this planet, with an ever increasing percentage of the overall population also contributing less and less. I honestly feel like my lifetime will see the beginnings of major strains on more basic resources like water and food, much less the fossil fuels more people are worried about right now. /soapbox
Favorite Website?

Working with the idea of “favorite” being some nifty thing to share with other people (like favorite ice cream, etc.) then I’ll have to pick NetFlix. I may visit other sites more often right now, but this is one I think other folks should check out, even though I think most people have probably already heard about it.
What do you think was the most important event of the last 15 years?

In a world context, I’ll have to say what I will call “The Rise of the Internet”… Sure, one can trace origins back as early as the 60s even, but it really was about 15 years ago that it started to become what it is today. In a personal context, it was buying a home… ‘cause it started to make me feel like I’d finally grown up.
One thing that you wish you could learn?

I’ve always wanted to learn how to tap dance. Perhaps, one day…
Cats vs. Dogs

I do like dogs, and live with one. But I am really very much a cat person. They suit my personality much better.
Where can we find more about you/your projects?
Oh, and I am “composerscott” on facebook, livejournal, and twitter.

My Phone is Smarter Than Your's

2009-10-12T00:00:00-04:00

I got a Blackberry last December. I blogged about it then, but I haven’t really talked much about it. There’s been a bunch of hubbub recently about the iPhone finally getting Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) support, and this has spurned some thought on my part about smartphones and mobile technology, and all that jazz. It’s a big space in the technology world, and most of the time I just ignore all of it, because I don’t much care about it. I’m a “big computing,” kind of guy, and I don’t much like the whole “talking on the phone thing,” but this doesn’t–you’re surely not surprised to learn–mean that I don’t have opinions on the subject.

Despite my disdain for telephones, I really like the whole Blackberry thing. The physical keyboard means I’m way faster at typing up messages and notes than I would be otherwise, and that’s incredibly useful. Blackberries aren’t, “sexy” as smartphones go, and frankly the software is sort of insane with regards to how it all works, but in comparison to how other phones work, I’m pretty happy with the way things are. Here are the Pros:

I like that I can run applications in the background on the Blackberry. Being able to get alerts when emails come in. Being able to leave a message that I’m writing, and go respond to another message, or make a call, or get an instant message or twiddle with Google maps, is really great.
I enjoy that the phone is messaging centric. Furthermore, I really like that all messaging: Blackberry Messaging (IM), GoogleTalk (jabber), SMS Texting, and email all appear in one great queue. There’s one big list of things, to check and that’s it. The key to making this work is good filtering, but that’s another point.
I really enjoy the ecosystem of applications available for the phone. Blackberries like many smartphones (including the Android platform, after a fashion) use the J2ME (java) platform, which means and the platform is rather established. Sure the sexy things that people do with iPhones aren’t there for my phone, and there are applications that I wish I had (better SSH, a text editor, some sort of file synching ability,) but the apps I have all work well, are stable, and integrate well with the system (ie. the messaging thing.)
There are host of little things that are great. The charging cradle is an awesome thing. The fact that it’s “smart” enough to alter its behavior based on if it’s in the case or not in the case, so that if it’s on your belt it does something different than if it’s laying on your desk. It also has a “bedside” mode which I think is similarly brilliant. Not a huge feature, but exceedingly useful.
So Google does this thing with their Sync Tools where your contacts from Gmail end up on your phone, and the sync is pretty seamless. No more futzing around with adding people by hand, no more worrying about backing up your database. I’m not thrilled about this reliance on Google, but it just works, and that is an intensely good thing. I do kind of wish that more things on the phone were like this.

What I don’t like?

The twitter apps don’t integrate well into the messaging, and I can’t think of a sane way to use twitter with my phone.
There is no real XMPP/Jabber application aside from Google Talk that I’ve found to be useable. (Though I’d love to be proven wrong.) It would be nice to be able to connect to my general use XMPP account under a different resource and go from there.
I think, as an interaction modality the trackball is a horrible idea, and I think something more joystick-like would be a much more useful and quick. Even, perhaps something that used the keyboard more effectively. As it is, all navigation and system operation uses the trackball, and that’s kind of annoying. It’s done as well as it could, but I think it could be better.
Email filtering is non-intuitive and difficult. Possible, certainly, but difficult. I’d like an interface to be able to exclude and block various senders on the phone itself.
Configuration options are Byzantine and difficult to navigate. There are so many options particularly around the various noises that the phone will make that I’ve not bothered to really modify any of them. I might load up the beginning of “Thick as A Brick” for my ring tone (and part two for the alarm clock?), but for the most part there are too many chirps and chatters that the damn thing does, that it’s hard to really modify it in any real way. It makes it interesting to be in close proximity to other Blackberry users for any length of time, because those noises get embedded in your consciousness.
The Blackberry is pretty unfriendly to Free Software stuff, which is a shame, partly because of the whole lack of freedom issue, but almost more because everything else I do with technology uses free software stuff, that it’s annoying that my existing stuff doesn’t work right on the phone.

Would I get another Blackberry? Probably. Though the lack of a good SSH client is a bother, and I’d like something that did a bit better with things like PDF/electronic-text reading, but all in all I’m pretty happy.

The interesting thing is that at this point I can’t fathom going back to some sort of “non-smartphone:” this just seems, to me, to be “the way a phone should work.” That’s a pretty strong endorsement, I’d say.

Onward and Upward!