I wrote a series of posts about setting up my new work computer as a way to avoid blathering on and on about how the movers lost the cushions for my couch, and other assorted minutia that seem to dominate my attention. What these posts didn’t talk about were what I was doing for “tychoish” and related computing.

About a week and some change, before I moved, I packed up my desktop computer and started using my laptop full time. It’s small, portable, and sufficient, if not particularly speedy.

I can do everything with the laptop (a ThinkPad x41t, which is a 2005-vintage 12" tablet) that I can do on any other computer I use, and while I often prefer it because small screen means that it’s really easy to focus intently on writing one thing at a time. This, inversely, means that it doesn’t work very well for research intensive work, where I need to switch between contexts regularly. It’s a fair trade off, and I did OK for weeks.

But then, having been in town for two and a half weeks, I decided it was time to break down and get my personal desktop setup and working. And it’s amazing. The thing, works just as well as it always has (which is pretty good,) and it’s nice to have a computer at home that I can do serious writing on, and the extra screen space is just perfect. I’ve been able to be much more productive and comfortable with my own projects since this began.

There are some things that I need to address with this computer, that have been queuing up. In the spirit of posting my todo lists for the world to see…

• I need to get a new keyboard. My “fancy” “Happy Hacking Lite 2” keyboard is at work, as I’m comfortable with it, I do a lot of writing at work, and I set up that keyboard first (and the current default Mac keyboard sucks.)

  I’m thinking of either, getting another Happy Hacking keyboard, or more likely at this point, getting a das keybaord ultimate because how could I turn down blank keys and variable-pressure mechanical switch keys. And writing is what I do, so totally worth it.

• I need to install Arch on this computer. I feel like cruft is beginning to accumulate here, I’ve never quite been happy with the ubutnu experience, and there are some things that I can’t get to work right (namely mounting of USB-mass storage devices) My concerns are that getting dual monitors setup on this box was a royal pain. But that might have been ubuntu related. I’m not sure.

• My current thought is that I’ll buy a new (small) hard drive (eg. 80 gigs) to run a clean operating system install on (arch) and then use the current drive as storage for the stuff that’s already there (music, video). But I might just get a larger additional drive and do it in reverse. I dunno. The current situation isn’t that bad, and I think that I’ll archify the laptop first.

Annnyway…

Two things on the agenda. First, the third “season” of the BBC science fiction show Torchwood, which I have recently completed. Second, Samuel R. Delany’s novel “Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand,” which I am two-thirds of the way through.

Act One: Torchwood

I’m a huge fan of torchwood. It’s quirky, it’s fun, its easy to connect with the characters, and then there’s the Ianto/Jack relationship, which is handled amazingly throughout the entire story. The show isn’t without its flaws, of course, but it works really well.

So about this third season. It was good. While the fan in me says “I want more stories, and episodes” and “I want more characters to survive,” and “I want to see more of characters that I didn’t get to see very much of,” and “why do they leave so many fucking threads untied,” on the whole, I thought it was very well executed.

I think the mini-series--as this was, undeniably--is likely the future of television. The story telling potential is great, there are marketing reasons why it has merit, and I think from the perspective of the scripted television world, I think there’s a lot of potential for this sort of approach to television.

As for my quibbles with the story itself, I will attempt to not spoil anything, but I will say, that while the sentimentalist in me would have liked to see something different: it worked. Furthermore, I’d almost be tempted to say that “more torchwood” wouldn’t really work, and I don’t know that there’s anyway to write a season four that would capture “what I liked” about torchwood. It isn’t a pretty as the Battlestar Galatica ending this spring, but there’s almost a similar finality. Discuss?

If you’ve not watched torchwood, it is, I think, a worthwhile expenditure of time.

Act Two: Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand

This is an amazing book. The prose is stunning, the world that Delany created is incredibly fascinating, and the story pulls it all together. Amazing. Simply Amazing.

I know what happens (or doesn’t happen) in the end, which but so much of this book revolves around absorbing the ecstatic experience of the characters, that it doesn’t really seem to matter. There’s also, a second book that remains unfinished (though a portion was published in the 90s,) and I don’t expect that to be finished, pretty much ever, though I could be surprised.

There’s so much to say about the book, even with 150 pages left to go, that saying anything seems incomplete. Despite the fact that the main character is human, the world, and “his” world, is so totally alien. There’s this new gendered-pronoun system that the main character (and narrator) uses, where everyone regardless of gender is “she,” unless the speaker is attracted to the referant, at which point they’re “he,” and typically people refer to themselves as “women.” It makes it hard to track things, but it really works.

The other cool thing, is that there are these two ideologies that are battling each other for domination. The conservative one, called “The Family,” take a very structuralist approach to social organization. In today’s world we might call them “conservative,” but I think that misses the point; in contrast there’s the “Sygn” who take a very radical/post-structuralist approach to social organization, which is useful both as an example, and as it provides a very non-Utopian idea of freedom.

This is amazing stuff, and in a totally different way, it’s a very worthwhile book and experience. Give it a shot if you’re looking for something good.

“I’m giving up blogging because twitter has more energy and satisfies my online media needs these days.” I here yet another person say, as they give up the blog that they’ve been working on sporadically for the last 4 or five years for a twitter account.

I’m certainly not giving up blogging any time soon, but I hear people say these things. Not always so explicitly, and less often now that twitter has become more established, and less of a novelty. Nevertheless I think its high time to take a step back and take an account of “the state of blogging.”

While I think we need to consider the impact of twitter on the current state of blogging, I think the past five years and maybe the past seven or eight years (most of which have been without twitter) have had an even larger impact on the forum.

I’m not sure, exactly, what the state of things are, but the following are the questions I’m asking myself.

• Are blogs simply the default way of publishing serialized/periodical content and updates to websites?
• Blogging, at least in my mind, grew out of online-journal communities, and while there’s a lot of division between “bloggers” and “journalers” there’s a lot of connection. Blogs can be self-referential, and first-person, and they can drift between multiple threads of the author(s) life. What’s the state of blogging/journaling?
• Are blogs things that people grow, develop, and build over a long time, or are blogs commodities that serve a specific purpose attached to some other purpose. In other words, do people say, I want to create a blog, and they have a blog which meanders and continues for years, or have blogs become something that people start on a whim in response to communities or current events, and then discard when the mood passes?
• Do people read blogs? I have a good excuse for being more than a thousand post behind on my feed reader (moving across the country, starting a new job) but I’m pretty sure that blog reading isn’t exactly flourishing. There are some really well read blogs, of course, but I don’t know if people are really reading.

My answers, if not obvious are: yes, strained and under-appreciated, more commodity and ephemeral than they used to be as a result of software development, and readership hasn’t grown with the growth of the web.

And then we introduce twitter.

I’ve always seen twitter as an evolution of the “chat room” of “IRC” and phenomena like that, rather than an evolution of the blog, though it makes sense to think about twitter and related formats as being “microbiology.” At the same time, I think microblogging becomes a viable format because it makes it “OK” for folks to post lots of little ephemeral thoughts, which is hard in conventional blogging, both in terms of time/energy, but also in terms of what the software and social convention will allow.

In order for a blog post--just one--to be “successful,” in today’s world, it needs to be clever and well written, and it needs to hang around for long enough for people to notice it. It might also need to provide a useful analysis in combination with some useful information.

In order for a post to twitter to be successful, it needs to be and timely (so that people see it), it probably needs to include some sort of link, and other people need to “Retweet” it a lot (which has got to be the most annoying thing in the short history of the medium).

I don’t think the “short form” is going to kill the long form, or that that has even begun to happen, but might twitter kill off some of the cruft that that’s built up around commodity blogging? Does twitter reintegrate the journal-form with the more-objective form?

Maybe. We’ll see in a little while.

When I started doing this website thing on the eve of the millennium, the burgening buzzword of the time was “web standards.” All of us in the know were working on learning and then writing to web standards like HTML 4.0 and eventually XHTML 1.0 along with CSS 1 and 2. And we were all hankering for browsers that implemented these standards in a consistent way.

Really all we wanted was for our web pages to look the same no matter who was viewing the page.

This pretty much never happened. Web browsers are pretty good these days, or they at least--in many ways--don’t suck as much as they used to, but they’re all a bit quirky and they all render things a bit differently from each other. And on top of that they’ve got poor architectures, so as programs they’re really bloated, and prone to crashing and the like. I’ve written before about being “against” websites, webapps, and the like and I think my disdain for the “web” grows out of the plan and simple fact that:

the web browser is broken, beyond repair.

So where does this put the cause of web standards in web design? Thoughts and questions:

Do we write to standards which aren’t going to get adopted usefully? Is ad hearing to standards a productive use of time?

Do we write to clients (specific browser implementations) that are broken, but at least assure that content looks “right?”

When the previous goals two goals aren’t compatible which wins?

Will HTML 5 and CSS 4 fix these problems, or is it another moving target that browsers won’t adopt for another 10 years, and even then only haphazardly?

Are there other methods of networked content delivery that bypass the browser that might succeed while the browser space (and the content delivered therein) continues to flounder? I’m thinking object/document databases with structured bidirectional, and limited hierarchy (in the system, objects might have internal hierarchy)?

Is the goal/standard of pixel-perfect layout rendering something which the browser is incapable of providing? Might it be the case that CSS is simply too capable of addressing problems which are outside of the ideal scope for defining a consistent style for a page: Let me run with this idea for a moment:

Maybe the problem with XHTML and CSS isn’t that it’s implemented poorly, but rather that we’re trying to use CSS classes and IDs and div tags in an attempt to make pixel-perfect renderings of pages, which is really beyond CSS’s “mission.” What would web standards and the state of the browser look like, if you dropped CSS IDs (eg. #id-name{ }) and made single instance classes (eg. .class-name{}) verboten? Aside from crashing and burning and completely killing off browser-based applications?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the subject.

I think I’ve touched on this question before but with the last technology as infrastructure post it seems like another opportunity to talk about the intersections between this topic--thinking about technology as infrastructure--and about the sort of small scale/cooperative economics that I was writing a lot about a couple of months back.

The question on my mind at the moment is, “What do the business models of technology firms look like, in a software-freedom-loving, non-corporate/cooperative-business way?”

And I’m not sure what the answers to this question are. Not really. I’ve been thinking about business models for the producers of software/technology services during earlier moments.

We have the example of the 70s and 80s when the prevailing technology companies were ATT and IBM. ATT made their money selling phone service, and licensing UNIX. IBM made their money selling mainframes. In the eighties and nineties we had the prevailing Microsoft lead “proprietary software licensing” business models, where consumers paid for the legal write to run code on their computers.

In the nineties and early naughties the successful business models were either from people buying hardware (ie. Sun Microsystems and IBM) or people buying support for operating systems (ie. RedHat). We’ve also seen some more stable business models centered around subscriptions-for-services (this seems to be what all the successful startups are doing), and more of the time honored selling hardware, and there are some support-services based companies that remain successful (eg. RedHat), the support market consolidated a lot recently. And it’s not like the Microsoft-consumer model doesn’t still exist.

So when we look at “infrastructural technology” it sure looks like there are some kinds of businesses that will continue to flourish:

• The people making mainframes/servers and the high level computing systems that provide the infrastructure.
• The people who provide the tools that make low level tools successful and useful to users. (eg. What UbuntuOne provides on top of SSH and rsync; What gmail provides on top of IMAP; What MobileMe provides ontop of WebDAV/CalDAV/IMAP).

These strike me as rather conventional business models, given the history. Does infrastructural computing also:

• further the development of subscription-based businesses?
• create a new kind of challenge in customizing solutions for organizations and groups that translate raw resources into “finished output?” Is this too much like IMAP --> Gmail?
• [other possibilities created by you, here]

I’m trying to approach this by asking myself “what creates value in this market,” rather than “where’s the money.” It strikes me that value exists in making systems “work” in a way that’s customized to the task at hand. It strikes me that value is created when individuals and organizations are able to take ownership of their own data and computing. Gmail is valuable, but running my own IMAP server is more valuable. Running my own IMAP server without the fuss of needing to personally manage the hardware and software of the server is even more valuable.

What else does the hive mind have for us?

Continued from, Technology as Infrastructure, Act Two.

Act Three

All my discussions of “technology as infrastructure” thus far have been fairly high level. Discussions of particular business strategies of major players (eg. google and amazon), discussions approaches to “the cloud,” and so forth. As is my way, however, I’ve noticed that the obvious missing piece of this puzzle is how users--like you and me--are going to use the cloud. How thinking about technology as infrastructure changes the way we interact with our technology, and other related issues.

One of my introductory interludes was a new use-case that I’ve developed for myself: I run my chat clients on a server, and then using GNU screen which is an incredibly powerful, clever, and impossible to describe application. I’ve written about it before, but lets just describe it’s functionality as such:

Screen allows users to begin a persistent (terminal/shell/console) session on one computer, and then “detatch” and continue that session on another machine where the session runs--virtually--indistinguishable from “native sessions.”

So my chat programs are running on a server “inside of” a screen session and when I want to talk to someone, I trigger something on my local machine that connects to that screen session, and a second later, the program is up and running just as I left it.

Screen can of course, be used locally (and I do use it in this mode every waking moment of my day) but there’s something fundamentally different about how this specific use case affects the way I think about my connection.

This is just one, and one very geeky, example of what infrastructural computing--the cloud--is all about. We (I) can talk till we’re (I’m) blue in the face, but I think the interesting questions arise not from thinking about how the infrastructure and the software will develop, but rather from thinking about what this means to people on the ground.

At a(n apparently) crucial moment in the development of “the cloud” my personal technological consumption went from “quirky but popular and mainstream” to fiercely independent, hackerish, and free-software-based. As a result, my examples in this area may not be concretely helpful in figuring out the path of things to come.

I guess the best I can do, at the moment is to pose a series of questions, and we’ll discuss the answers, if they seem apparent in comments:

• Does “the cloud” provide more--on any meaningful way--than a backup service? It seems like the key functionality that cloud services provide is hosting for things like email and documents, that is more reliable than saving and managing backups for the ordinary consumer>
• Is there functionality in standards and conventions that are underutilized in desktop computing that infrastructural approaches could take advantage without building proprietary layers on-top of java-script and HTTP?
• Is it more effective to teach casual user advanced computing techniques (ie. using SSH) or to develop solutions that make advanced infrastructural computing easier for casual users (ie. front ends for git, more effective remote-desktop services).
• Is it more effective for connections to “the cloud” to be baked into current applications (more or less the current approach) or to bake connections to the cloud into the operating system (eg. mounting infrastructural resources as file systems)
• Is the browser indeed the prevailing modality, or simply the most convenient tool for network interaction.
• Do we have enough conceptual experience with using technology to collaborate (eg. wikis, source control systems like git, email) to be able to leverage the potential of the cloud, in ways that reduce total workloads rather than increase said workloads?
• Does infrastructural computing grow out of the problem of limited computing power (we might call this “vertical complexity”) or a management problem of computing resources in multiple contexts (eg. work, home, laptop, desktop, cellphone; we might call this “horizontal complexity”) And does this affect the kind of solutions that we are able to think about and use?

Perhaps the last question isn’t quite user-centric, but I think it leads to a lot of interesting solutions about possible technologies. In a lot of ways the most useful “cloud” tool that I use, is Google’s Blackberry sync tool which keeps my calendar and address book synced (perfectly! so much that I don’t even notice) between my computer, the phone, and the web. Git, for me solves the horizontal problem. I’m not sure that there are many “vertical problems,” other than search and data filtering, but it’s going to be interesting to think about.

In any case, I look forward to discussing the answers and implications of these issues with you all, so if you’re feeling shy, don’t, and leave a comment.

Cheers!

Continued from, Technology as Infrastructure, Act One.

Act Two

Cnet’s Matt Assay covering this post by RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady suggests that an “open source cloud” is unlikely because superstructure (hardware/concrete power) matters more than infrastructure (software)--though in IT “infrastructure” means something different, so go read Stephen’s article.

It’s my understanding that, in a manner of speaking, open source has already “won” this game. Though google’s code is proprietary, it runs on a Linux/java-script/python platform. Amazon’s “cloud” (EC2) runs on Xen (the open source virtualization platform) and nearly all of the operating system choices are linux based. (Solaris and Windows, are options).

I guess the question of “what cloud” would seem trite at this point, but I think clarifying “which cloud” is crucial at this point, particularly with regards to openness. There seem to be several:

• Cloud infrastructure. Web servers, hosting, email servers. Traditionally these are things an institution ran their own servers for, these days that same institution might run their servers on some sort of virtualized hardware for which there are many providers.

  How open? Open. There are certainly proprietary virtualization tools (VMware, windows-whatever, etc.), and you can vitalize windows, and I suppose HP-UX and AIX are getting virtualized as well. But Linux-based operating systems are likely virtualized at astonishing rates compared to non-open source OSes. And much of the server infrastructure (sendmail, postfix/exim, Apache, etc.) is open source at some point.

  In point of fact, this cloud is more or less the way it’s always been and is, I’d argue, open-source’s “home turf.”

• Cloud applications: consumer. This would be stuff like Gmail, flickr, wikipedia, twitter, facebok, ubuntuONE, googe docs, google wave, and other “application services” targeted at non-commercial/enterprise consumers and very small groups of people. This cloud consists of entirely software, provided as services and is largely dominated by google, and other big players (Microsoft, yahoo, etc.)

  How open? Not very. This space looks very much like the desktop computing world looked in the mid-90s. Very proprietary, very closed, the alternatives are pretty primitive, and have a hard time doing anything but throwing rocks at the feet of the giant (google.)

• Cloud applications: enterprise. This would be things like SalesForce (a software-as-a-service CRM tool.) and other SaaS application. I suppose google-apps-for-domains falls under this category, as does pretty much anything that uses the term SaaS.

  How open? Not very. SaaS is basically Proprietary Software: The Next Generation as the business model is based on the exclusivity of rights over the source code. At the same time, in most sectors there are viable open source projects that are competing with the proprietary options: SugarCRM, Horde, Squirrel Mail, etc.

• Cloud services: enterprise. This is what act one covered or eluded to, but generally this covers things like PBX systems, all the stuff that runs corporate intranets, groupware applications (some of which are open source), collaboration tools, internal issue tracking systems, shared storage systems.

  How open? Reasonably open. Certainly there’s a lot of variance here, but for the most part, but Asterisk for PBX-stuff, there are a number of open source groupware applications. Jira/perforce/bitkeeper aren’t open source, but Trac/SVN/git are. The samba project kills in this area and is a drop in replacement for Microsoft’s file-sharing systems.

The relationship, between open source and “the cloud,” thus, depends a lot on what you’re talking about. I guess this means there needs to be an “act three,” to cover specific user strategies. Because, regardless of which cloud you use, your freedom has more to do with practice than it does with some inherent capability of the software stack.

Act One

This post is inspired by three converging observations:

1. Matt posted a comment to a previous post: that read:

“Cloud” computing. Seriously. Do we really want to give up that much control over our computing? In the dystopian future celebrated by many tech bloggers, computers will be locked down appliances, and we will rely on big companies to deliver services to us.

2. A number of podcasts that I listened to while I drove to New Jersey produced/hosted/etc. by Michael Cote for RedMonk that discussed current events and trends in “Enterprise-grade Information Technology,” which is a world, that I’m only beginning to scratch the surface of.

3. Because my Internet connection at home is somewhat spotty, and because it makes sense have an always on (and mobile) connection to IRC for work, I’ve started running my chat clients (mcabber and irssi) inside of a gnu screen session on my server.

My specific responses:

1. Matt’s right, from a certain perspective. There’s a lot of buzz-word-heavy, venture capital driven, consumer targeted “cloud computing tools” which seem to be all about getting people to use web-based “applications,” and give up autonomy in exchange for data that may be more available to us because it’s stored on someones network.

Really, however, I think this isn’t so much a problem with “networked computing,” as it is with both existing business models for information technology, and an example of the worst kind of cloud computing. And I’m using Matt’s statement as a bit of a straw man, as a lot of the things that I’m including under the general heading of “cloud computing,” aren’t really what Matt’s talking about above.

At the same time I think there is the cloud that Matt refers to: the Google/Microsoft/Startup/Ubuntu One/etc. cloud, and then there’s all the rest of distributed/networked/infrastructural computing which isn’t new or sexy, but I think is really the same as the rest of the cloud.

2. The “enterprise” world thinks about computers in a much different way than I ever do. Sometimes this is frustrating: the tendrils of proprietary software are strongest here, and enterprise folks care way too much about Java. In other aspects it’s really fascinating, because technology becomes an infrastructural resource, rather than a concrete tool which accomplishes a specific task.

Enterprise hardware and software exists to provide large corporate institutions the tools to manage large amounts of data/projects/data/communications/etc.

This is, I think on some level, the real cloud. This “technology-as-infrastructure” thing.

3. In an elaboration of the above, I outsourced a chunk of my computing to “the cloud.” I could run those applications locally, and I haven’t given up that possibility, but one needs a network connection to use a chat client, so the realm of possibilities where I would want to connect to a chat server, but wouldn’t be able to connect to my server, is next to impossible (particularly because some of the chat servers run on my hardware.).

I guess the point I’m driving at is: maybe this “cloud thing” isn’t about functionality, or websites, or software, or business models, but rather about the evolution of our computing needs from providing a set of tools and localized resources to providing infrastructure.

And that the shift isn’t so much about the technology: in point of fact running a terminal application in a screen session over SSH isn’t a cutting edge technology by any means, but rather about how we use the technology to support what it is we do.

Or am I totally off my rocker here?