Some First Principals:

• It is difficult, and likely impossible to technologically restrict the duplication and redistribution of digital resources. In other-words, digitally accessible resources will never be scarce.
• Creators of content (music, literature, software) should be reimbursed for their work, and there should be business models that support these kinds of pursuits. In other words people should be compensated for the creation of content in a viable and sustainable manner.
• Information probably does want to be free. Creators of information, should want their information to be “free” because the information that has the most power and influence is that which is most accessible.
• The conveyance of physical objects (books, etc.) is a source of concrete value. Physicality is not the only basis for economic exchange, of course, but it’s a good place to start.

Questions and Answers:

• What is the “content problem?"

  I suppose the core of the problem with content these days is that we don’t have a good set of business models that can support the creation of new content in an ongoing sort of way. The industry around content is unstable and in flux: newspapers are hemorrhaging money and it doesn’t seem likely that they’re going to be able to do anything other than (maybe) prolonging the amount of time between now and when they collapse. Some paper companies might surrivive, but the consolidation and “flufification” of a great many newspapers, doesn’t seem to have a great deal of long term potential.

  Same thing with the book publishers. There are some that seem to be doing interesting things. Tor.com seems to be a good example of a step in the right direction. And maybe there will be an ebook platform that makes sense, or maybe we’ll see some sort of revival in niche-booksellers that will revive an interest in book collection.

  But the bottom line seems to be that we need to find some better way to support the creation of content. Because what we have now doesn’t seem to fit the bill. And whats on the horizon, doesn’t seem to be much better.

• Isn’t content a horrible word for this?

  I confess that the word “content” makes me a bit sick from time to time. Not only is it awkward to lump the concerns of musicians, academics, writers, journalists, and perhaps even software developers all in one label. I’m not even sure if the concerns of content producers as a whole, if we can address these folks as a group, are particularly aligned.

  Some academics use the term “knowledge production,” to refer to the core output of their work, and I’m using content in a similarly broad context. Writing/Literature/Music, “Art,” and even thought this might be a tad bit unconventional I think there’s not much that separates the consumption of software and the consumption of essays (for example.)

  There are also a number of different dimensions upon which we can think about content and the future of content: the experience of consumption; the process of generation; and the business models which support the creation and consumption of content.

• Owning Bits? What do you mean?

  I said, a few weeks ago of the whole DRM issue, that I thought “we needed to get away from the whole ‘owning bits’ metaphor for content distribution.” The whole DRM thing that so many of us find so onerous would be mostly become a non issue if we dropped the pretense that when you download a song or a book or a movie that you’re “buying them.” If you’re just watching the bits for a while, who cares what the digital restrictions are? If prices are reasonable for content, who cares if you can only “have” a half dozen books at once? I think it would all work out. But maybe that’s just me.

  The questions that result, however are much more interesting: What does it mean, socially and politically, if we don’t own information? What is reasonable and sustainable pricing? What kinds of distribution schemes make sense?

• Besides the general “fear of copying” that has heretofore plagued the content industry, what new technological challenges might the content industry face in the mid-to-short term future?

  One of the major issues that I think we’re going to have to deal with is the fact that digital information systems are too mutable.

  While this flexibility gives us lots of very powerful information resources, like Wikipedia and the ability to correct flaws in digital versions, it also means that Amazon can remove books from the Kindle at will. Furthermore, it means that creators and publishers can (attempt) to “take back” content if they have second thoughts about it. The mutability issue is obviously a mixed bag, but I think the most useful information and the most free information will have some sort of versioning information.

• What are the business models that will support content in the in the future?

  The one downfall of Project Xanadu is that it pushed forward an idea of “micropayments,” and the idea if we charge a la carte for content and have the per unit cost for content low enough that somehow it’ll all work out. The problem with this, however, is that the psychological border between “free” and “not-free” is much larger than the border between “a few cents” and “a few dollars.” The end result: micropayments keep failing.

  It’s a shame that this idea was the most successful idea to proliferate from Xanadu.

  My current bet is that some sort of subscription model is likely to win out. Pay a few dollars a month, and get access to some reasonable quantity of content. Have different levels of subscription to meet different needs and demands, and I think there’s potential there.

  The other prevailing model is the “rockstar” model, where the content creator goes on a tour and uses honoraria and merchandise sales to offset the cost of content creation. We see this both for authors who tour to support books as well as the musicians for whom I’ve named the model. It works, it focuses the transaction of physical objects.

• You seem to like subscription models. What are the implications of a shift toward subscription models in terms of the way people relate to the information (music, writing, etc.) that they consume?

  I’m not sure. I think creating a technological limitation which stores version information in some sort of immutable index. I don’t think publishers will really go for this.

  I think subscription models may also revive (in part) the interest and power of the physical-object-market. In the way that Libraries don’t cannibalize booksales (and may encourage and support the sale of real books,) I think digital content subscriptions could have the same effect on content.

As always I look forward to your thoughts and responses to these questions. See you in comments!

This post is an attempt to ask “what next?” in the world of contemporary application development. I’m disturbed by the conveyance of applications in this format. This is not news to popular readers, but, rather than complain extensively about the state of the contemporary technology, I think it would be more productive to muse on possible improvements and some of the underlying structural concerns in this space

In No Particular Order…

Today, we routinely design and implement user interfaces in HTML and JavaScript these days. I’m not convinced that HTML, or any XML based format is really all that good for conveying well formatted structured text, much less pixel perfect graphic design and application interface.

Lightweight text markups like Markdown, reStructuredText (for all it’s warts), and Textile are human readable, provide structure, and convey text well. Furthermore, it’s very possible to efficiently translate them into very high quality output formats, including XML formats and LaTeX.

One of the driving forces behind the convergence on “web-technologies” is that JavaScrpt/HTML/CSS are all thought to be “cross platform” technologies. It doesn’t matter if you’re running on a Mac, or a PC, or UNIX system, if it has a web browser it’ll run there. The web application movement realizes the “write once run everywhere,” notion that Sun attempted with Java in the 90s (except, that Java never really worked for that.) Except that every browser implements JavaScript/HTML/CSS in a different way which means, that it’s really “write once and tweak it to death so that IE/Firefox/Webkit don’t break.” There are some things (like jQuery; HTML5) that make this better, but the browser market is dirty and browser makers will never be incentivized to comply with the standards.¹

RESTful APIs² are, I think, leading to more desktop applications. Or at least making them more possible. It used to be very much the case that if you wanted web-connected data you had to go to a website. Now, if you want data from the Internet, in most cases it can be gotten in an easy to process formant (i.e. YAML/JSON) and then folded into a desktop application. In addition to “rounded corner power” and “social media,” the biggest impact of “Web 2.0” has been the increasing awareness and interest the API[^quality] in the more general public.

Adobe AIR is a wonderful idea. Even smaller lightweight devices like smartphones and netbooks are so powerful that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have them operate as such “dumb” clients. Conventional web development has developers cobble together server applications that put together content and then chuck it off to the client for rendering. With APIs (see above) it doesn’t make a lot of sense to leave all the heavy lifting on the server. Adobe understood this with AIR, the problem with AIR? It’s wildly proprietary, applications look out of place on every platform, and performance is miserable relative to “real” native applications. Its a great idea, and I’m terribly interested to see what comes next in this space.

I’m grumpy about HTML 5 because I remain unconvinced that web standards are really a viable way of regulating sane design and development practices. It also seems too likely that HTML 5 solves the problems we were having 2 years ago, rather than the problems we’ll have over the next 10 years. Also, I think this world needs a hell of a lot less XML, in any form.

What are your thoughts?

[^qualit]y]:I’m not sure there is any singular aspect of the whole “Web 2.0 thing” that is unequivocally bad or good. I think on the whole web design is better now than it used to be, but “rounded corner power” at this point all looks the same, and it’s really difficult to achieve in a clean technological sort of way. And the web has always been social; so while that’s not new, it’s nice that the web has caught on even if the whole “social networking silo” phenomena is less than desirable. The same thing goes for RESTful APIs: it’s great that data is more accessible, but it sucks that APIs can be so proprietary and I’m not convinced that HTTP is the “right” or “best” protocol for this technology. But these things happen.

I fear I’ve been posting too many posts in the vein of “so here’s what I’m up to folks,” rather than you know writing about things that may be interesting to folks out there in Internet land. Nevertheless, here’s another slightly more technical post.

I’ve mentioned in passing a few times over the past few months that:

• I’ve been interested in shifting to Arch Linux. While I’ve been running Arch in a VM on my work desktop, I have been quite slow to move additional machines over to Arch. It’s not for lack of wanting, but I have a hard time disrupting something that works when it’s already working.
• Also on the software front, I’ve switched to using the Stump Window Manger, and while I’ve talked a bit about this on the blog, I’ve done virtually no reporting of my ongoing progress with this.
• I missed the days when I only had one computer and it went everywhere with me. While I like having all this computing possibility around, I’m moving around enough these days that it doesn’t make sense to be tied down to a desktop. I like sitting on the couch and writing, and I like being able to go off for a weekend and be able to work on the projects that I really need/want to work on. That’s hard when you have a desk and an “office.”

This post provides updates with regards to these subjects.

Moving to Arch Linux and StumpWM

A few weeks ago, I had this massive cascade of software issues. Mostly things were provoked by the switch to Stump. Basically, the issue was that Stump wasn’t embedded in all of the desktop frameworks that are so popular these days, there were a number of system resources that just didn’t work with the new Window Manager.

The thing was that my systems were running a terribly hacked up version of Ubuntu. I was running weird kernels, I’d mostly given up on the display managers, and the systems were just messy. So the problem wasn’t so much with Stump, as it was with the way that Ubuntu packages and manages certain aspects of the system inside of desktop functionality. I’m thinking specifically of the ways that networking and sound are managed by dbus. If that didn’t make sense to you, don’t worry.

Since the chief problem boiled down to “this system is too complex for me to be able to manage,” and it no longer became an effective use of my time to maintain the system as it was… I wiped everything and finally put Arch on the laptop.

And it went on smoothly, and everything worked. Arch is a tinkerers distribution, there’s no doubt about that. Since I did have Arch experience it wasn’t a terribly traumatic experience. It took a little while to figure out how to make Suspend and Resume work (i.e. for the laptop when the lid closes,) and manually managing network connections isn’t incredibly straightforward until you get the hang of it, but it all works now. And I couldn’t be happier

The Experience of StumpWM

This isn’t really a full report, but more a note to say that my brain has really adapted to Stump, and I’m quite happy with the experience. Stump doesn’t in and of itself increase the ways I’m able to be productive, but… I do think that I work more efficiently when using Stump.

There’s still a lot left to be done with regards to the tweaking of stump for me. I need to play some more with the MPD (music player) integration, and there are a number of other contributed Lisp packages that I really want to play with. Also, I finally figured out how the Key Binding Map works when I had gotten my basic keybidning needs taken care of and I haven’t touched it since then. Now I know how I use the system and I’m ready to tweak things again, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

Additional thoughts regarding Stump, from a more “objective” perspective: it is incredibly stable, and while it’s not blindingly lightweight, it lives in 20 megs of ram and that’s about it. I never need to restart the window manager or X anymore, and that’s kind of nice.

So in short, the Stump WM is a great thing and I need to write a bit more about the actual using of it. But first I need to do a little more tinkering. Because I’m like that.

The Consolidation of the Gear and Laptops

What a strange heading. In any case. I gave in and bought a new laptop, last week. I found a great deal on a used Lenovo x200 with great specs, and I thought that it would solve the majority of my issues with my existing technology.

First, it was considerably newer than the laptop I have been using for most of the past year: more RAM, dual core system, bigger and faster hard drive. Second, it had all of the qualities of the old laptop that I adored: it’s a 12" laptop which means very portable without making sacrifices, and it forgoes a trackpad for a “ThinkPad Nipple” for a mouse. Finally (and perhaps most importantly,) the screen resolution is 1200x800 (up from 1024×768) which makes it possible to comfortably tile two windows next to each-other at once. This is the same resolution as my 15" PowerBook G4 (and I think all of the 13 inch MacBooks). It’s a good size, and I was really aching for the increased screen space.

It turns out that all of these concerns were addressed fully with this new system. The screen is perfect, it’s peppy. it’s also nice to return to the modern computing world. I continue to be mightily impressed with the build quality, design, and functionality of IBM/Lenovo hardware.

My computer consolidation isn’t yet complete: my desktop hasn’t yet been backed up and converted to Arch, but it’s getting there. I’m also not quite sure what happens with the old laptop. I’m thinking of keeping it around as a spare, but if anyone has a need for a really awesome ThinkPad x41 they should be in touch.

Onward and Upward!

I mentioned in an earlier post that I thought Barnes and Noble was largely responsible for the ongoing and impending collapse of the publishing industry, and that’s just the sort of thing that I couldn’t leave a lone without a little bit of further pondering.

The assertion is that Barnes and Nobel, and Borders particularly as they competed for near total domination of the local-book retail market, forced a consolidation of the publishing industry at the very moment when the worst possible thing for publishing was consolidation.

Consolidation allows an operation to make a bunch of money quickly. The mechanics of this are pretty simple, after all. When yo consolidate you can cut all sorts of mundane expenses, from the physical costs of maintaining parallel operations, to hard costs like printing and shipping costs that can benefit from collective organization.

Amazon had a role in the consolidation of sale of books, certainly, but Amazon has always been a distribution and data company, primarily. Their strategy is to find a way to turn a profit on the sale of goods, any goods: they do this by having a complete inventory of everything and levering a lot of data concerning buying habits and browsing habits to make sure people who are shopping find something to buy.

Where Amazon’s limiting factor is connecting people who want to buy things (books) with books they might like to buy, the “traditional” book sellers, are limited by the amount of shelf space they can use to display and promote books. So they edged all of the little booksellers out of business by having huge stores and coffee shops and so forth, and then faced with too many books and not enough shelf space, they used their muscle to push the publishing industry toward increased consolidation and a “blockbuster” business model.

Blockbusters are how the movie industry works. Production companies make a bunch of movies, on the premise that if one or two turn a huge profit, they can afford to make a number of movies that flop or that just break-even. Hence the great power of reliable successes: another John Grisham novel, Return of the Mummy King VI, etc., the “copy-cat” phenomena and the erosion of the independent movie production business.

Book sellers were culpable as well--consolidation is attractive in what are essentially commodity businesses--and selling easily produced paper-based volumes is a commodity business. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but the undeniable market success of Barnes and Nobel is not, given what I can tell from where I’m sitting, a marker of success of the publishing industry as a whole.

And you know, when you’re a book seller, throwing the publishing industry onto the tracks before an oncoming train, to achieve some mildly impressive profits for a decade seems… not incredibly bright. And not the kind of thing that I’m interested in supporting or putting my faith in.

It strikes me that this “consolidation meme” is a common feature of unsustainable and inauthentic economy, and it extends beyond book retail into other failed and failing sectors of the ecomony.

• Banks. Obvious here. The big banks lost track of the micro economics that make the macro economics go, and we got things like sub-prime morgages, because while they make sense from the consolidated-bank perspective they don’t make sense to people. Like, the John Grisham-esque Legal/Drama/Thriller book makes a lot of sense to the booksellers and the publishers, but most people can only really read so many of them before loosing interest.
• Software. Microsoft’s production of windows makes a lot of sense if you’re a big company, but if you use computers in a specialized way, Windows is like an illfitting suit from Target. It works, but it’s uncomfortable and rough around the edges. There is general consensus that “The Microsoft Way” isn’t the best technological solution to the various problem, even among people who use it regularly (developer tools might require a slightly more complex investigation).
• Your Example Here. Leave a note in the comments.

Thoughts?

I have a confession to make. I really want a Kindle. Bad.

No really. I do. The DRM scares me, and I think the books are just the other side of “too expensive,” and because I come from a long line of “book collecting people” I think there are a lot of books that I would want to own in the paper. Furthermore, I have a great laptop for reading books (a small tablet), and I have a very long history of using small form computing devices (think palm pilots and pocket pcs) to read books. And yet, I returned to paper a few years ago, and don’t feel really bad about that.

I’m not going to get a Kindle, at least not yet. I want to see what the Barnes and Nobel “Nook” looks like. I need to upgrade the laptop more, and I think something like the Nokia n900 might end up being a better device in this space and even if it isn’t, I think we’re going to see a lot of development in the “tablet” space in the next year, and it seems premature to buy now. For me.

Given all these caveats, I think its interesting to think about why I want the Kindle so bad. Here are some questions and answers:

So given all these caveats, why do you want a Kindle so bad?

I’ve held one on a number of occasions, and I’ve always been struck with how nice they feel. They’re solid and they’re thin. The text is clear and readable, the page advance buttons fall wonderfully under your thumbs. The experience, at least on these second generation devices, is really quite good.

I’ve rather famously, taken an entire bag of books along with me for a long weekend trip. A weekend where, I ended up reading about two and a half pages. So, the fact that you can take a whole pile of books or more properly the potential for getting the one right book you want, is appealing in a practical way.

Is this just about the hardware, or is there more?

I think the Kindle is the ideal distribution mechanism for periodical literature. The codex is likely to be of enduring importance for quite while, but I’m almost certain that the magazine and newspaper isn’t. While blogs are great, don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a need for publications that are in-between the “book” and the “blog,” and I think the Kindle is a great space for those kinds of texts. Practically, I’d like to read more content of that sort, and if I had a kindle, I suspect that I’d get a lot of use out of it.

The instant distribution model is a huge plus, and I really like to read. Cory Doctorow says something to the effect of “Ebook readers will fail, because a ‘good’ ebook reader would need to remove distractions and malfunction possibilities as effectively as paper, and devices that ‘only’ read books, won’t sell very well next to devices which also check your email and play games.” And I think that’s probably a true observation, but it looks like the Kindle does single-function pretty well. I think the next year, or so, will be really interesting as we see more tablets in the market.

You’re obviously not going to get one today, so what would make you change your mind?

The DRM and the price of the books. The DRM really needs no additional condemnation. I think 10 dollars is a bit steep for books, particularly because it’s so flat rate, and while it’s cheaper than the hardcover (and that’s good,) it’s also more than a paperback in most cases. And at least in a paperback you have something on your shelf. And the DRM really adds insult to injury. If they distributed the files in plain text/html and some weirdass XML format that would be one thing, but they give you a blob that is certain to be next to useless in a year or two. If books were 3 bucks, or 5 bucks, or even 6 or 7 bucks--even if the device was 300--or there was some sort of subscription service, I wouldn’t mind the DRM, but as it is… the DRM makes the economics difficult for me to compute.

If the DRM is such an issue why have you gotten this far?

A lot of times in the paper-book world you buy a book. Read a hundred pages (or maybe twenty?), and then are so disgusted by the book that you can’t bare to read any more, and you set it aside. And often times a trip to the bookstore (particularly in advance of a trip) means buying a number of books, when only some of these books will be of worth (to you) to justify their expense.

These situations are less likely to happen with a Kindle. There are significant samples, and you carry the bookstore around with you. I suspect the chances are that you only really need to “buy” the books that you read, which might end up being significantly cheaper in the long run.

The Kindle is a physical manifestation of a shift away from the physicality of information, but it’s only really a symptom and not a leading cause this shift, right? If you accept this, if you accept that most information and knowledge only exists as bits and photons, then all of the rituals that we build around books (collections, libraries, shelves) are less important.

What about the *Nook*?

The nook is a more impressive platform. For sure, it fails the Doctorow test of (potentially) being too interesting for tasks that aren’t reading books.

I think I probably have some more writing to do on this subject, but, in general I think Amazon is a better and smarter company than Barnes and Nobel, and if the name of the game in ebook readers is “vendor lock-in” then I trust Amazon a bit more. In a lot of ways, I hold B&N responsible for the ongoing/impending collapse of the publishing industry.¹

In any case, mostly, at the moment I just want to wait and see before I make any sort of decision on the subject.

Thoughts?

• Who are you? What do you?

  I’m a 19 year old Perl hacker slash college student. I’m a Computer Science major at SUNYIT in Utica. To be truthful, I’m not a very good student; I spent my study hours teaching myself Perl and UNIX.

  As for my personal life, I live one boat ride away from Manhattan, so when I do have time home it’s pretty hectic. Being upstate for college is so … quaint, compared to living in the big city.

  I’m not really working on any large projects, but I am in the midst of working on a very lightweight an elegant blog software; the goal is to have one page (index.pl), one RSS feed (feed.rss) and one template file (template.html), and combine them all into a fully-functional blog. Then hopefully after that project is done I’ll have the time to run my Sysadmin blog -- I plan on publicising a lot of the random hacks I make at work. For example, I just spent the last two days working on a daemon that uses Net::DBus to automatically log a user out when a preset idle time is reached.

• Smaller Computers, More Powerful Computers, or Cheaper Computers?

  Smaller, generally. I like saving money, and I love netbooks. As I always say, the speed of the computer is up to the knowledge of the user installing the software on it. My EeePC 901 running Debian GNU/Linux runs as fast as most “modern” computers running Windows Vista.

• 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 love the freedom of expression technology brings. Being universal, it’s hard to apply country-wide laws to internet use which opens up a whole new realm of free speech for those who previously haven’t had it. But PERSONALLY, I just enjoy tinkering, learning and achieving goals. Nothing feels as good as finally finishing that program you’ve been working on for the last week.

  What I find frustrating is the amount of outdated documentation you run into. The reason I spent so long on my Net::DBus script is because the docs I was using were outdated. Thankfully buu on #perl pointed me to Net::DBus::Dumper, and I figured everything out myself.

• Favorite Linux/UNIX Command (whatever, as long as it fits on one line.)?

  vi, of course :]

  Or if you mean a singular shell command, it’s probably between perl, sed and awk. Those three programs have saved me countless hours of file editing.

• The single scariest thing about the future?

  Google SkyNet(tm)

• Favorite Website?

  Hmm … Considering I don’t browse the web too much, I’d have to go with http://latfh.com/. The laughs never stop coming.

• What do you think is going to be the most important event of the next 10 years?

  This one’s hard to say. I think it can be one of three things;

  1. The development of high-functioning AI
  2. Using computers to replace non-functioning human senses (eyesight, smell, etc)
  3. Apple publicly announcing that their computers are overpriced

• One thing that you wish you could learn?

  French. For some reason I can’t seem to wrap my brain around spoken language.

• Emacs vs. Vi

  vi, of course :]

  I mean, don’t get me wrong; Emacs is a great operating system, but it’s lacking a good text editor.

• Where can we find more about you/your projects?

  Currently I don’t have a site setup, but when I do it will be at any of these locations:

  • http://web.cs.sunyit.edu/~pobegam/
  • http://fuzzydev.org/
  • http://fuzzydev.org/~pobega

  Or you can just follow me on Identica, @pobega

In “Radicalism in Free Software, Open Source” I contemplated the discourse of and around radicalism in and about Free Software and Open Source software. I think this post is a loose sequel to that post, and I want to use it to think about the role.

I suppose the ongoing merger of Sun Microsystems and Oracle, particularly with regards to the MySQL database engine weights heavy on many of our minds.

There are a number of companies, fairly large companies, who have taken a fairly significant leadership role in open source and free software. Red Hat. Sun Microsystems. IBM. Nov ell. And so forth. While I’m certainly not arguing against the adoption of open source methodologies in the enterprise/corporate space, I don’t think that we can totally ignore the impact that these companies have on the open source community.

A lot of people--mistakenly, I think--fear that Free Software works against commercialism¹ in the software industry. People wonder: “How can we make money off of software if we give it away for free?"² Now it is true that free software (and its adherents) prefer business that look different from proprietary software businesses. They’re smaller, more sustainable, and tend to focus on much more custom deployments for specific users and groups. This is in stark contrast to the “general releases” for large audiences, that a lot of proprietary audiences strive for.

In any case, there is a whole nexus of issues related to free software projects and their communities that are affected by the commercial interests and “powers” that sponsor, support, and have instigated some of the largest free software projects around. The key issues and questions include:

• How do new software projects of consequence begin in an era when most projects of any notable size have significant corporate backing?
• What happens to communities when the corporations that sponsor free software are sold or change directions?
• Do people contribute to free software outside of their jobs? Particularly for big “enterprise” applications like Nagios or Jboss?
• Is the “hobbyist hacker” a relevant and/or useful arch-type? Can we intuit which projects attract hobbyists and which projects survive because businesses sponsor their development, rather than because hobbyists contribute energy to them. For example: desktop stuff, niche window managers, games, etc. are more likely to be the province of hobbyists and we might expect stuff like hardware drivers, application frameworks, and database engines might be the kind of thing where development is mostly sponsored by corporations.
• Is free software (or, Open Source may be the more apropos terminology at the moment) just the contemporary form of industry group cooperation? Is open source how we standardize our nuts and bolts in the 21st century?
• How does “not invented here syndrome” play out in light of the genesis of open source?
• In a similar vein, how do free software projects get started in today’s world. Can someone say “I want to do this thing” and people will follow? Do you need a business and some initial capital to get started? Must the niche be clear and undeveloped?
• I’m sort of surprised that there haven’t been any Lucid-style forks of free software projects since, well, Lucid Emacs. While I’m not exactly arguing that the Lucid Emacs Fork was a good thing, it’s surprising that similar sorts of splits don’t happen any more.

That’s the train of thought. I’d be more than happy to start to hash out any of these ideas with you. Onward and Upward!

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!