When I packed to come live with my grandmother for an extended stay, I didn’t give a lot of thought to my knitting. I packed some, the usual ongoing projects and whatever yarn was attached to them, and that was about it. I’m at a point in all of my knitting where I’ve made serious progress (but haven’t completed) on a number (2? 3? big projects). My hope, by not packing too much yarn, was that I would be able to make some serious progress on all of my projects without being tempted by the sweater (which is my wont).

So I’ve been knitting a lot of lace: it travels well, the yarn goes a long way, and it can be seriously relaxing. And lace is complex enough to keep the brain satisfied, while still being easy to not wear out the braincells.

But the projects are big, so I’m prone to thinking “why the hell am I doing this,” perhaps a bit more than I should. I don’t wear lace, while I know a few people who like to wear lace, (even among women,) I’ve found that a lot of people don’t particularly like lace.

So the question is: why knit lace? Particularly if you don’t like to wear it.

This isn’t a fully formed thought yet, but I was wondering what the status of discussion and commenting is on the web these days. Clearly microblogging like Twitter and Identi.ca produces a powerful platform for conversations and I think what’s coming with xmpp (innovative interfaces for group chats, etc.) furthers the potential for conversation online. At the same time, I’m wondering what the status of conversations are “older” media like blog comments…

Are people still commenting on blogs? A few of you comment here now and then, and websites like making light have vibrant comments threads (that I don’t have the attention span for or time to read), and the big sites (slashdot, digg, etc.) have active comments as well, but a lot of sites (including those with moderate readership) don’t get many comments, and my sense is that a significant percentage of comments these days are in the “me too” vein, rather than productive themselves (because threads are difficult to read). Here are a few questions:

• Do features (threading? email notification? persistent identities?) make commenting “work better” or flow more productively?
• Are conversations about content moving away from comments into more centralized media like twitter, email lists, and discussion forums?
• Are we more likely to respond to a blog post we read in our own blog, rather than in a comments thread? Has the blogging community reached a saturation point?
• Dose a vibrant community of comment-posers indicate a marker of blog-success, these days? Did it ever? What might replace comments?

I’m pretty convinced that comments are dying, but I’d love to get your feedback. I’m not terribly mournful about this but I’m very interested in thinking about how we (as a community will replace this niche.)

I’m working on laying the seed content for a new wiki that I hope to launch in a few weeks. I want the wiki to be a free text/open source, and I have been giving some thought to the best way to accomplish this. This is, as it turns out, is pretty hard to accomplish: open source software licences are designed (not surprisingly) for software, and while Creative Commons Licences are great, I don’t think they support community authorship in a way that matches with my ideals/gaols.

The brilliance of the GPL (to my mind) is the way that it equalizes the relationship between all contributors (big and small) and between the “authors” and the “users.” While in a lot of open source projects these groups/interests overlap, they don’t sometimes and those cases where those interests might obstruct the freedom of the work, the GPL equalizes it.

There are two mechanisms in the GPL (to my mind) that make this possible: first, the requirement that source code be made available (and reproducible) with any distribution means that you don’t get anything extra because you were/are the original author of the code. The second, is the “viral” or “share alike” provisions where you can trust that anything released under the GPL will stay under the GPL.

While these mechanisms increase freedom and equity in situations where there are a select group of contributors and one legal author¹ the freedoms are most powerful when the boundaries between contributor and author and user are blurred.

This is all very basic stuff in the area of software freedom after all. The truth is that, as near as I understand there aren’t terms that can be used to get a similar effect with non-code projects (exactly.) There are a couple of copy left licenses, issued by Creative Commons and even the Free Software Foundation, but there are problems with both of these strategies. Here are the issues as I see them:

The GNU FDL is designed, primarily for software manuals and documentation in support of free software, and is strategically designed for this kind of text. It, as a result, lacks a certain… grace and elegance for dealing with other kinds of text, particularly when dealing with derivative and physical reproductions of a work.

In contrast, the Creative Commons Licenses² (CC) don’t have a concept of “source,” so that while they provide the same sorts of rights regarding distribution of work (and thereby equalize some of the rights between distributor/user), they don’t facilitate derivative work in the same way that open source licenses do.

I’m mostly worried about the following scenario. Say I release a piece of audio-art in a lossless (high quality; source) format (eg. FLAC/WAV) as well as MP3/OGG file (lower quality; compiled) under a CC license that permits derivative work under a viral/share alike terms. Then you turn around, re-equalize, and mix my audio-art with some other similarly licensed audio, and release it as a derivative work. That’s cool. But the derivative work needed be in the higher quality format, because CC doesn’t have a concept of source. Not having a concept of source doesn’t effect the possibility of derivative works, but it does mean that derivative works are second-class citizens, as it were. CC doesn’t equalize this relationship.

If I’m wrong about this interpretation, I’d love to be corrected, for the record.

For works where there’s a single author, having derivative works as second-class citizens isn’t a bad thing, and I can imagine that it would be seen as a feature in some cases. In cases where a text/work is authored by a community this is a major flaw.

I hear that there’s a project to Simplify the GFDL (or provide a way to use the GPL for documents/texts) that might remedy these problems (haven’t dug through it yet). In the mean time, I’m wondering what folks think on the subject.

My inclination is to just use the GPL with the specification that “source” would be some sort of plain text (ASCII/UTF-8/UTF-16) compatible file. That achieves the goal required, without too much fuss or concocting a new license that would prove incompatible down the road. I think mandating a particular format (markdown/org-mode/xhtml/LaTeX) is a bit too strict, but I’d hate to see a document developed in the open, released as a PDF derivative without making (say) LaTeX sources available.

Though I’ll be the first to acknowledge the irony that for non-software works, the “source” isn’t “human readable source code” but rather “machine readable data source.”

The only real practical concern is that if the FSF releases a 2.0 of the FDL (or a SFDL) that becomes the a standard for free/open source non-software/text projects then going with the GPL might make that a difficult/bothersome transition on that. So the question, seems to be would providing the option to upgrade to the GNU FDL make sense (eg. this work is licensed under the GPL [with an understanding of what the source is] version 3 or (at your choice) a later version [or a later version of the GFDL]).

Anyway, back to writing.

Long story, short punch line. I was developing a website the other day, and I realized that I had to do some compatibility testing with other browsers. While I have a webkit-based browser lying around for these purposes I had to turn to BroswerShots to see what the site looked like in certain windows only browsers. this lead me on something of a little mystery hunt.

I did some checking on my stats and I found that a majority of the visitors to this site are firefox/mozilla (gecko users) and there’s a sizable minority that uses Webkit browsers (Safari/Chrome/Etc.). That takes care of about 75% percent of you. The remaining portion uses Internet Explorer (IE).

So be it, really, I mean, I’d try Chrome, or Firefox if you can, but the truth is that by now IE 8 (and even 7) render pages more or less the way they should, and I don’t have a big gripe about that (which accounts for 3/4s of all IE useage). There are, however, a quarter of the IE users (so 6% of you,) that are using IE 6. Which actually, can’t seem to render any pages correctly, from what I can tell.

Since I already know what browsers you use the survey then should be:

• Why do you use the browser you use, particularly if its IE or IE 6
• Do you prefer a brwoser that’s fast, but light on features (All WebKit browsers henceforth deployed), or a slower but featured filled browser (Firefox?)
• Are you trying to use your browser less than you currently do (taking work offline,) or more (putting more things into the cloud)?
• What do you think the “next big thing in browsers is?”

I wrote a lot yesterday. I write a lot most days to be honest. Though I’m not often successful at this, my usual plan of attack is to spend a chunk of time in the morning writing on fiction projects, (after some sort of warm up like a blog post or a few email) before I graduate onto other projects. Often this doesn’t work: I have other commitments in the morning, I get sucked into emacs or website hacking, “the best laid plans of mice and men,” as it were.

Yesterday, something similar happened: I got up and had something to do that took up morning, and I tried to do a little bit of writing, but I fell into another project, where I wrote a lot of content, but none of it was fiction. And then, at about 8pm, I said “crap, I need to write fiction.”

So I did. And I yanked out about 500 words (which is about my current daily fiction writing goal,) and then I was done. And I felt good. One of the reasons I’m so intent upon writing fiction despite my utter lack of training, and dubious skill is that in aggregate writing fiction makes me very happy. This example demonstrates--as if we needed more examples--that while it’s important to get in the habit of writing, ritualizing the habit is probably counter productive.

When I finished doing school the last time, I thought, “yes! no more homework,” except that this writing experience (from a procedural point of view) was a lot like homework (“ugg time I should do this”). Surprisingly this isn’t such a bad thing: writing makes me happy, and truth be told I’m pretty good at doing homework.

Anyway. Enjoy your day, and write something if you’re inclined thusly.

I write you from the future! I, as predicted, made the switch over between the wordpress powered version of tychoish.com and the jekyll powered version of my site. I’m quite pleased with this development. Basically it works by taking a repository of posts with all the content from my site and then compiles a website of static pages whenever I trigger an update. Though it hasn’t worked flawlessly, I’m pretty pleased with how this has worked out, and as I clean things up and get to using the system a bit more I’ll write up a post regarding jekyll, but I want to get used to it some more.

The biggest change is that I’m now calling the short form posts, “notes” and the long form posts, “essays” (as usual) and I’ve changed the landing page a bit. In all I think it’s an improvement. I’m not done tinkering around here: I hope this system will make it easier to develop and “curation” lists of related content. If I learned nothing else from this project, it’s that I have a lot hanging around in the archives, and the chronological list of content isn’t a particularly good presentation of this. So new ways of visualizing the content are in store.

Also, if you’re inclined, you can get a copy of the repository that powers this site over on github. I’ll set up local hosting/cloning of the git repository, in a bit.

Anyway, Onward and Upward indeed!

I have a confession. I last week (briefly) considered getting a Nokia N810 so that I could sync and use org-mode when I was away from my computer/laptop. The N800/810 is a small tablet that runs a Debian based operating system, which means it could run emacs, and I could write little clickable scripts that could do all of the syncing and awesomeness that I’ve grown accustomed to.

Then I realized how absurd this is, and cast it aside. My laptop is really mobile, and if I needed it to be lighter or more mobile, I could buy a new battery for it. And it has a full sized keyboard.

This is a sickness right?

I’ve had “write post about writing/read sexuality” on my todo list for too long and I wanted to make the general note before it got too stale. In a lot of way’s this is in response to Nora’s post on magic district and I think something else that I can’t trace down the reference to.

Basically I saw a couple of things where non-normative sexualities (more promiscuous, more casual, more queer) were underplayed or criticized fiction because of concerns (real or other wise) that the non-norm sexuality would be distracting or feel “Ham handed.”

And I sort of gawk. Not because I think that this is incorrect. Writing about queer sexualities in fictional contexts is distracting, and something of a big deal, relative to non-queer sexualities in fiction. I also think it’s a bit distracting in real life, that the discomfort/distracting experience that many people get isn’t the result of ham handed political message insertion into writing, but rather, a fairly reasonable depiction of what it’s like to have your embodied experience politicized, to be (nearly constantly) reminded of the cultural dissonance you have.

Sure, it’s possible to under-represent queer lives in fiction, it’s possible to write queerness inappropriately, or to over-normalize it. But if your readers are distracted, if they’re made uncomfortable, you probably did something right.