So I, um, bought a computer last Friday.

People who followed the lead up to the purchase of my current computer--which took six months, or a year depending on who you ask--will be surprised that this happened so quickly.

For a while now I’ve wanted to have a computer that would be able to always be on so that I could download big files when I needed to without needing to fuss with making sure that my laptop could be on all night, or similar such concerns. I wanted to have a computer that I could add cheap drives to as needed. I want to be able to have a computer connected to a couple of IRC channels without needing to worry about my computer dropping on and off-line constantly (which is a politeness that I worry about.)

The thing is that it never seemed feasible. Macs are expensive computers, and this wasn’t a premium sort of use case. For many years of my life I was really mobile and having a desktop computer never made much sense. Now that this new job has started to settle down, and as I’ve gotten more into linux, it’s becoming more and more clear that having a desktop computer with lots of screen space is going to be really valuable to me in this next stage anyway, and the truth is that I spend a good deal of my computing time (with my laptop) at my desk, so a desktop made a lot of sense.

And with this growing interest in open source technology/community/history it makes a lot of sense to gather some greater familiarity with the environment. So between the new usage profile, the fact that the hardware isn’t nearly as expensive in practice, and the fact that having a linux box would be a good ethnographic experience, I just hunkered down and bought it, after only a few weeks of dithering on the subject. I even splurged and got a second monitor so that I could run dual monitors, even so it cost less than the souped up MiniMac (which is sans monitor). I’m psyched.

While I’ll spare you the unboxing photos, I think its highly likely that I’ll be writing about my experiences with this new computer as I settle in. Stay tuned…

I remember once in high school (lets call this 2003/04) I bought an 8.5x11 paper calendar. This was after the age of PDAs (indeed I think I had a PDA at that point), and damned if it wasn’t the best calendaring experience I’d ever had. I kept track of things, I knew what was going on beyond the obvious, it was pretty good.

Other than that, I’ve not really (until now) used a calendar in my day to day work. I have a good memory, and pretty simple commitments, so it’s never been a big deal, and most calendaring tools kind of suck. Actually, really suck.

Now mostly, I could care less, except I have this job now, and the scheduling is really complex. I have meetings with clients, I have intra-office meetings, there are things I have to schedule with other people. It’s intense. So I’ve been trying to figure out what to use, how to connect with other calendars, and generally how to make it all work. I’ll tell you what my uneasy solution has been, but I’d love to hear what you use.

Chandler

The Chandler Project is a really pretty darn interesting open source program. It’s written all in python, it’s designed for collaboration and uses all the open standards. It has a really interesting and useful tagging system. It has a feature-loaded (and not annoying!) web interface that compliments the desktop experience.

And despite this it’s kludgey. It’s not peppy, it uses it’s own paradigm, and like all multi-platform software, it ends up looking just a bit foreign on all OSes (though I’ve not worked very much with it on linux, so to be fair, it might seem less out of place.)

Still, Chandler has become my “home” Calendar Application. There’s something nice about the way that it syncs to Chandler Hub, and all the cool things I mentioned above. And I like it’s dashboard a lot. When I started doing this job, I went from being able to handle a month’s appointments on an index card (or equivalent) to having to having to keep track of tasks and meetings in at least 3 time zones, and Chandler gives me enough flexibility and power to be able to do this without getting in the way.

ICS format

I think the last time I tried to use calendars on the computer, it was before people were seriously using a standard format. So you’d spend a lot of time putting your data into one program, only to have it die a horrible death, or discover something even better and then be stuck in your old program. Not so any more the .ics format is used by (nearly) all programs and by google calender so you can subscribe and sync calendars to your hearts content and it will all work. In all of your programs. Which means, you don’t need to chose the ideal calendar program, as long as it supports .ics files.

iCal

I’ve had a pretty tortured relationship with iCal, Apple’s stock Calendar program. In previous versions of the OS it used to be really crappy. And while it’s much better now, there’s nothing special about it, and it’s just a bit too hard to use it to enter events, and it’s task management is farcical.

Having said that it looks really good. Before you laugh at me and call me an apple fanboy allow me to be clear: data visualization is 60%-75% of a good calendar program (with the rest being performance and data entry/manipulation). The whole point is to be able to see what’s going on throughout your day/week at a glance. Good visuals are key.

The great thing, is that with Chandler Hub / Google Calendars and the .ics format, you can use both programs and still keep all your data together pretty seamlessly

Ideals

Like I mentioned earlier, I’m open to hear what other people use. At least for the moment I’m reasonably happy with what I have. It might be nice to have better command line access to be able to quickly review upcoming appointments and enter new tasks, but that’s mostly a pipe dream. Is there something I should be looking for that I don’t know? Other cool OSS projects that I’ve missed?

Onward and Upward!

So, I was tooling around the internet (it’s my job!) and I came across yet another website that wanted me to “create an account” in order to do something that I wanted to do. And so I did. I mean, this is what we all do on the internet, right?

And then it struck me--a bit late--that this was patently absurd. It’s already a little odd/annoying that seemingly every website on the internet forces us to create and manage a new account/identity, let alone multiple identities on the same service. I mean no one has more than one twitter account, right? And nearly every account that we make with every service has it’s own “identity” and password.

Which means, practically, that we all have (at best) two or three passwords which are mildly to moderately secure, and we use those over and over again, and rarely change. Which is not secure at all. But it’s also a problem if we use passwords that are really secure and then can’t remember them. Solutions like 1password are great, and help those who want to be really secure with this problem, but this really just treats the symptom, and not the problem that a user-generated password is the way to find security. And while passwords are better than no passwords, there are better ways.

There are, as I see it, two solutions to provide better user security on the internet:

1. Open ID. This is a protocol by which users can create an access an account on site A by signing into and verifying their identity with site B. It works, and it means that we end up signing into fewer sites and have fewer versions of our passwords in circulation.
   • This works best I’m convinced, if we use big openID providers like Flickr, Blogger, and LiveJournal, and then delegate that openID to a third party website (a domain that you own, say), so that if your account ever gets compromised/abandoned, all the sites which depend on that openID aren’t compromised/abandoned as well.
   • You wonder how this identity can be trusted? This is really an existential concern more than a pragmatic one because OpenID is no less legit than providing your (fake) name and (freely available) gmail email address.
2. Public Key encryption. Using PGP/GPG the internet should develop some sort of handshake for the web where by, we sign up for sites, upload a public key, and then when we want to sign in the server generates a dynamic string and encrypts it with our public keys and sends it to us. Our computers then ask for our key pass-phrase (or not), decrypt the string, and send it back. The server compares what we send to what they sent, sees that it works, and then lets it in.
   • This is really secure, particularly if the handshake happens over SSL.
   • This is relatively simple from a computer science perspective. All that really needs to be done is) write something sexy that makes the UI work, and then get Google or someone to start using it. Everyone else will follow.
   • It’s subject to man in the middle attacks, but then, everything is, and unlike a password that you only have to “hear” once in order to steal, guessing someone’s private key, based on only a few encrypt/decrypted strings is computationally (I understand) damn hard.

Who’s with me?

Most of the time when something new happens on the internet, I’m hopelessly behind the curve. I only really figured out wikis a few months ago, and I was a bit too young to get blogging out of the gate. And I was late to live journal and even then it took me years to figure out why that was so cool.

But microblogging? I was totally there, I mean I wasn’t there at the very beginning, but from the moment that there was any amount of steam behind twitter, I got it. Which is really cool, at least I think it is. Basically micro-blogging is a short, 140 character, “blog/messaging service” which combines the best parts of group chat and

And as you might know from your own experience or from my previous posts, I’ve tried a lot of services and have a few opinions about what makes a service better or worse. I can hear you saying, “What tycho opinionated?” but suspend your shock, and hang with me.

Twitter

Twitter’s “killer feature” is the fact that there are so many users, and that it focuses on ease of usability, so people “get it” pretty quickly. There’s a lot of power in the size of the community, and the fact that the crowd is no longer “just geeks.” The cons are that they don’t have IM access (which isn’t good) and that it’s all “too simple” so that it can be hard to track conversations and ideas and/or to have enough granular control over conversations.

Jiaku

Jaiku started in Finland, and bought by google, innovated in two big ways. First, it combined the lifestreeming (a la whoisi and friendfeed) with microblogging. Secondly, it has threaded comments, which make a lot of sense, and provide a helpful way to get around the 140 character limit. There are also “channels” which users can join and form to create (almost) ad-hoc groups based on topics and events to keep discussion of events out of “general feed.”

Plurk

I have less experience with plurk than the other services. The features of this one seem to be: an innovative display (which I hate) and a greater focus on conversational threads, but I think the Jaiku solution is better, frankly. Also there’s this “karma” system which I think is clearly a cheap ploy to get people invested in their Plurk activity, but it’s too transparent and makes me feel like I’m in a game theory experiment which isn’t cool at all.

Facebook

Largely irrelevant, to my mind, but facebook has had “status” for a long time, and this is basically a microblogging feature. It now has comments, and isn’t prefixed by “is” (though for a while, there was some humor in how people used or didn’t use the leading to be conjugation.) I think as a serious microblogging competitor, it doesn’t really pan out.

Pownce

Pownce, is nifty, and as of today, has file sharing abilities that other services don’t have. That’s cool. Pownce is also the only one that I know of that has abandoned the 140 character limit, which I’d throw my hat behind. It also has threaded conversations, but I think jaiku’s implementation is a bit better. There’s IM but it’s not incredibly intuitive. It’s been a while, which brings me to the major down side is that despite having a semi-compelling feature set, the community has never been that large or active, or grown beyond the usual core of early adopters (etc.) that I’ve grown used to seeing everywhere. If we’re just talking about features though, I think pownce has a lot going for it, unfortunately this isn’t a features game.

Identi.ca

Clearly this is where I am right now. Fundamentally, I’m not sure if the laconica software solves (m)any of the problems with twitter. For the moment it uses a CMS rather than a messaging model, it doesn’t have threaded conversations (really), the graphic design/theme needs a good once over, and there isn’t that huge community that twitter has going for it. The people who use identi.ca tend to be really into it, and that makes up for the relatively small size. It helps that there’s a real-time push-based IM/xmpp connection, and the scaling problem is solved by making growth a horizontal (federation) rather than a vertical (architecture/infrastructure) problem.

So that’s the major players, at least of the open networks (not counting yammer, say) and of the sites that I’ve had any real interaction with. The most interesting thing about this is that it’s all going to be different in six months or a year, and it’s cool to be here now to watch as things unwind.

I’ve posted a bit a while back about Jabber and my trials with finding a good client, and how I think that jabber is the key to making microblogging really work. As I’ve been dealing with these issues/ideas in greater detail, I’ve had some more thoughts on the subject that I think I’ll collect here.

First off, a subtitle and introduction to XMPP:

The easiest way to understand XMPP (or jabber, which I’ll use semi-interchangeably) is that it’s like email: everyone can run their own server, there’s a specified message metadata (like a header) that makes it possible for lots of servers to talk to each other. Non-jabber IM systems have a central server, which everyone authenticates with and that receives and distributes all messages/statuses between users. So why is distributed good? It solves a lot of scale issues, if most individual servers only need to handle the traffic for a very limited number of users, scaling becomes a horizontal (more servers) rather than a vertical problem (bigger servers.) Also distributed in this case means more individual control over computer usage without sacrificing potentially huge (or at least dunbar’s number sized) social networks.

While this is all very interesting truth be told, this stuff has been around for a decade or more, and for a long time jabber has been the kind of thing that you used a little and then went back to AIM because the clients all sucked, no one really understood or used it, and frankly AIM worked better. In the last year or two things have really started to come together, I think, and XMPP is starting to seem really cool, and really powerful. Truth be told, I think this has a lot to do with critical mass, and the fact that google’s IM platform (Gtalk) is XMPP/Jabber based and interoperable, and so there are a lot more people who are now jabber capable.

I think it also has to do with the fact that jabber gives web based software developers a way to offer push based access without resorting to polling APIs which doesn’t scale well and gets ugly pretty fast.

The breakthrough moment for me--or moments--have to do with multi-user chats. Now the internet has been doing group chats longer, I think, that we’ve been doing one-on-one chats, but IRC--the typical mode--is also centralized, or it’s distributed, in the sense that there are lots of servers, but the servers aren’t interoperable, and it doesn’t scale well at all, and it requires IRC specific software that most people tend to just use (anymore), and that means multi-person conversations aren’t incredibly common-place.

While XMPP multi-user-chats or “MUCs” aren’t too common yet, and (probably) have a host of problems which I’m totally incapable of addressing, I think there are a number of reasons that MUCs are really cool and already beat out IRC in a number of ways. The two biggest “pros” are the fact that users only have to sign into one thing, with an account that most folks already have,¹ and that since servers are interoperable, you don’t have to manage a bunch of different connections with centralized servers.² I’m convinced that the scaling problems of both IRC and XMPP (as technologies,) are nothing in compared to the scaling problems of human-text-based conversations.

And as if that wasn’t enough friend of the blog is putting together the web-based front end/xmpp group chat service that might just make this all make sense to everyday users. While I might not be a big fan of the web-based service for day-to-day computing, there are times when it makes a lot of sense (particularly for capturing new users).

There’ll be more thoughts, as there always are, but I think that does it for now. I try and sprinkle the really-geeky posts in with the more accessible posts because I think it helps me to understand things more clearly, and because I know the geek-quotient varies a good deal. If any of you want more details or have a particular interest in pushing me in one direction or another, I’d love to hear it.

Onward and Upward!

Dear Readers,

I’m--or my alter-ego[^two name]--is going to be at Drupal Camp Chicago on the 24th and 25th of October, baring an unforeseen catastrophe.

So this presents several possibilities:

1. You are already going to Drupal Camp Chicago and want to hang out with me or talk me into presenting something with you. To this, I say rock on.

2. You are or will happen to be in Chicago that weekend and don’t give a rats ass about drupal, I’m going to be (hopefully) meeting friends from school on Saturday after the conference and I’d love to have blog people there too.

In addition I’m thinking of proposing a session on Open MicroBlogging and drupal, which I think might be really fun. If you’re interested in contributing to this, I’d love help/co-conspirators. And I’m just a guy who thinks this shit is cool.

I’m cross posting this but lets try and coordinate meet-ups and whatnot in the comments thread of the tychoish.com post. You can always email or jabber/xmpp me at garen@tychoish.com Rock On.

[^two name]: I so need to figure out how to have two buttons made/get some sort of official “tycho garen” name tag. Ideas?

I posted a while ago about redoing my assbackards email downloading system. I finally did it. And it works great (and runs a bunch faster). The main sacrifice is that I now have to store two copies of my email directory on my server, but disk space is cheap and git is really effective at saving disk space/transfer speed, so it’s not a really big deal.

It’s also much more straightforward, and I’m going to post the two (2!) simple shell scripts that I’m using along with a couple of recommendations/hints if you want to try this at home. I do recommend that anyone who does this should be familiar with git before attempting this. Sound good?

Great! Here goes.

You need:

• A repository on your server where your email will “land.” This should be a git repository that’s origin is:
• A bare repository that is also on your server. These directories should not be web accessible, and indeed, technically need not be on the same server even, though they need to be always-on servers at static locations, so that you can clone repositories on:
• A repository on your personal computer(s).

Inside of the repository is a great place to keep your scripts (and indeed all settings for mail-related programs.) The two scripts you need are:

syncserver:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Get situated
cd /path/to/mail/

# Pull Changes from the centralized (canonical) repository
/path/togit pull origin >/dev/null 2>&1

# Add in the new mail and push to the central repository
/path/to/git add .
/path/to/git commit -a -q -m \
"server: mail drop commit, pre-push to central"
/path/to/git push origin >/dev/null 2>&1

syncmail:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Do things on the server  synced
ssh USERNAME@DOMAIN.TLD sh /path/to/mail/syncserver >/dev/null 2>&1

# Do things locally to get changes upstreem to central
## Get Situated:
cd /path/to/mail/
## Pull new mail down,
## everyting after the | is to produce a mail notifciation
##  using growl on OS X

/path/to/git pull origin | /usr/local/bin/growlnotify -n mutt -a Mail.app -t "tycho garen (or maybe sam)'s mail status:"  >/dev/null 2>&1

## Getting setup and then pushing any changes upstream
/path/to/git add .
for i in `git ls-files -d`; do
   /usr/local/git/bin/git rm --quiet $i;
done

/path/to/git commit -a -q -m "mail changes from NAME_OF_COMPUTER"
/path/to/git push >/dev/null 2>&1

Feel free, of course to change the commit messages and take out the comments. Other thoughts on usage:

1. Have public key sign-ins enabled on any machine that you use regularly. It’s more secure, faster.
2. By all means, run “syncmail” in a launchd daemon/crontab.
3. I’ve used absolute paths, starting with a “/” so that the shell doesn’t have to look for relative paths in order to run, which probably only gives me a marginal speed advantage, but you’ll want to figure out where your executables are and then put the right locations in. It’s a short script.
4. While eventually, you’ll be able to tweak the syncserver file and after two runs, the changes will propagate, you have to put the file there manually (or run the pull yourself.)
5. If you need to download mail from more than one source, you can run fetchmail at the beginning of syncmail

This almost makes sense, finally. The only thing that I’m still trying to figure out is if I were to get, say an iPhone or a BlackBerry into this system. IMAP into my existing gmail account would be ok but not desirable for a number of reasons. I suppose I could forward email from my server/computer to a “mobile” account, but that would be like having an email cadet branch and there wouldn’t be syncing, which seems bad. On the other hand, it means I could pull out only the stuff I really need. It’s a ways off, but it’s pretty complicated.

Onward and Upward!

In my fair city this week and last there’s been a lot of Scottish music. There’s a woman who’s been active in the local Scottish community (who knew?) for years, and she’s a retired music teacher and she does a program each year where she brings in top notch Scottish musicians to teach in local schools. It’s pretty cool, and it means that a lot of great Scottish musicians do concerts here. Anyway, this is a much more macro entry into this story than you really need, but it’s my blog and it seems fitting.

Anyway, Ed Miller, an amazing folklorist and singer did a concert and sang “A Bottle of the Best” which some googleing has revealed is written by Jack Foley. It’s a perfectly good song, and one that I’d heard dozens of times before, but it wasn’t something that had really stuck with me as you might it expect. It does, however, have the following “make fun of the English” verse:

And the English like their ale warm and flat, straight oot the pail They aye slitter wi’ their bitter; it would slaughter Jack the Ripper, And they sip their cider rough, they huff and puff and sniff and snuff, And as if that’s no’ enough, they start tae sing.

When Jones’ Ale Was new, or John Barleycorn’s fine brew Fathom the Bowl, the Barley Mow, Bring us a Barrel, just a few But their songs are far surpassed by the tinkle in the glass When you’ve broken oot a bottle of the best.

Which is, on the face of it, not a particularly clever verse as these things go, but he was able to sing it in a way that perfectly captured a very English way of singing. It was hilarious, or at least I thought so, because while it’s a fine verse, the musical pun really made it.

It helps that I really like that kind of singing. There’s something really cool about standing around in a doorway with friends or strangers singing a song, and it’s not so much about the redeeming musical value--I happen to like it, but it’s admittedly an odd taste--as it is about the value to the community/spiritual¹ sense.

And maybe I’ve answered it, but the question I’m left with is, what makes those sorts of songs so awesome? And really, is there a quintessentially English way of singing? While we’re at it am I the only one who finds this entertaining?

One of the things that “gave” in a great life-shakedown of 2008, was my interest/intention to design/publish knitting patterns. I design a lot of my own sweaters and things, I enjoy the technical and creative aspects of knitting, and I really enjoy the meditative aspects of knitting. At the same time, I’ve worked in a number of different yarn stores, taught knitting classes and lessons, and tried to write patterns, and each engagement with the “business” side of the craft, leaves me feeling drained and weary of wool.

And so in the shakedown, I decided that while I probably have more knitting skill/experience and knowledge than I have of just about anything else, I don’t have the interest or the energy to make a go of it. Or maybe more clearly, doing the things I’d need to do to become a full-time knitter would make knitting less fun in all the other ways that I find relaxing.

As I more fully return to knitting I’ve had to revisit this decision a fair piece. I ask myself do I want to try to teach again? Do I want to apply to give workshops at Folk schools and craft centers, let alone yarn stores?¹ And I think the answer is, mostly not. I do a lot of things very seriously, and I don’t know that it’s worth my time and energy to work on knitting more seriously, given that I want to do other things and, blah blah blah.

But, and you knew there was a but coming, I’m not sure that I want to just give it up. Not knitting, but knitting seriously, and writing about knitting, and all of that. Part of this reflection are thoughts about my niche, and my role in the discourse of knitting.² Which is maybe what I should have thought about when I was trying to figure out how to teach knitting, or write patterns a couple of years ago.

Unlike a lot of popular knit bloggers, I’m not big on taking pictures of my knitting, in progress, and my knitting tastes don’t tend to suit “knitblogging” very well. I knit big projects in fine yarn and so I finish something very infrequently. And as a designer, I tend to knit for myself and I tend towards non-typical construction techniques.³ Also I’m not nearly as [funny][harlot] and/or [polished][franklin] (let alone accomplished). So figuring out where I fit into this, or what my niche is is something of a personal challenge.

The last--and pretty key--piece of this personal puzzle is what I get out of the “knitting discourse,” I don’t subscribe to the magazines, I don’t really follow patterns except tangentially and as inspiration, I haven’t made a Clapotis, I’ve never taken a knitting class (aside from Knitting Camp), and I tend to buy really boring yarn.

So I’ve thought about writing knitting patterns more as essays, and less as instructional documents. I enjoy writing essays, and I really like writing about knitting, and I like reading about other people’s knitting, and I’m not terribly interested in writing touchy-feely essay about how knitting soothes my soul or makes me feel closer to other people. But patterns as a story? Patterns that attempt to communicate not just the object, but also the design process, and the state of mind of the knitter during knitting? Am I the only person who would find this interesting?⁴

Onward and Upward!

Hey folks,

Just a quick note. I’m going to take a two day break from posting stories to Critical Futures at the end of this week.

The reasons for this are twofold. First and probably most importantly, I need a break. In the last three months, I’ve posted about 28,000 words of fiction (nearly all of it my own) and even though much of it has been old content that I’ve been editing and revising as we go, it still takes a lot of time. And because, I’m my own boss, and can do these things, I’m giving myself a break. These are the perks of “going it alone,” and besides, we’re only talking about two days.

The second reason is that I’ve just finished posting the third chapter of Knowing Mars, the novella that I finished a year ago, and that forms the core of the first six months--or so-- of Critical Futures posting. Given the milestone, I think I want to release the first three chapters as PDF files so that people new to the game can catch up. This will form the core of next weeks posts, and it’ll take a bit of extra time to prep. This means my break is effectively a little bit longer, you get special content, and we’re all happy.

I’m starting to talk to other people about writing/sending stories to Critical Futures, which is something that in my more overwhelmed moments seems really good. If you have nifty SFnal work that you’re tired of sitting on and want to see what it looks like in “print,” consider submitting. I enjoy doing editorial work (and I’m at least half decent at it, my alter-ego makes a living doing something similar,) and I think Critical Futures is the ideal space for some pretty nifty writing. Get in touch and we can talk in greater detail about this. I see great things happening.