Topic: Posts

So this is totally a “just for fun” post. As you might have noticed from all the blogging I’ve done about rearranging computers, switching to Linux and getting a new phone, the second half of 2008 has had a lot of computer acquisitions and changes. I try to thematically name computers/partitions and hard drives, and I’ve been through a couple of naming schemes, but I have a new one that I kind of like: Great names in western philosophy.

Now technically, the best name schemes for networked computers are groups of related nouns. So in a big network, you’d have printers named after flowers (violet, daisy, petunia) and laptops named after sheep (merino, finn, coopworth, jacob) and desktops named after crops (corn, wheat, soybean, tobacco) say. Actually these are pretty bad choices, but choosing common, inoffensive, and generic nouns is probably idea. This way, if you’re browsing a network you can tell what things are pretty quickly, and you won’t run out of names and have to have more than one system.

So knowing that drawing every name from the same pool is probably the wrong thing to do, here’s the list of my little collection.

• Leibniz: the desktop
• Spinoza: cellphone/blackberry
• Hegel: the ThinkPad
• Levi-Strauss: the wireless access point.
• Deleuze: the linux partition of the macbook
• Guatteri: the OS X partition of the macbook

My knowledge of modern and 19th century philosophy is way more limited and touch and go than my knowledge of 20th century. You could of course make the argument that Levi-Strauss was more of an anthropologist than a philosopher, but I tend to cast a pretty big net, and think that Clifford Gertz would even qualify for the list too. I suppose that I could have made had laptops be German philosophers, and desktop be French philosophers; or I could have divided it up by centuries. Anyway, it’s fun, and here’s a list of possible names for future gear:

• Gertz
• Derrida
• Spivak
• Marx/Engels
• Ricoeur
• Foucault
• Kierkegaard

You’ll notice that I didn’t include Nietzsche on the list. I think it’s poor planning to name a computer (or anything) after someone whose known for being crazy. I include Foucault out of personal fondness, but have avoided other neo-Marxists, though I suppose that would open things up to Gramsci and Althusser (if he hadn’t gone crazy) or Merleau-Ponty (but I never spell that one right on the first go).

Other suggestions of favorite philosophers are of course welcome.

Do you have a naming scheme? If so, what is it?

I have a semi-long standing tradition of doing a little refresh of my blog/website during the week before new years. Obviously I didn’t make it this time, but I’m starting to think that it’s about time for me to do something different anyway. And because I have to think through everything beforehand on the blog, I thought I’d collect a few thoughts here.

When I started tychoish.com, I was running a site at tealart.com¹ which was supposed to be a big umbrella site for a lot of projects, and I started tychoish as a place to collect regular thoughts and blog in a more “bloggy” sort of way. I felt at the time that TealArt (TA) had become too much of a magazine, and not light hearted enough.

When I gave up on TA, as it were, I was displeased with where the site was going and I felt like I needed a fresh start. I got that, and for all it’s ups and downs, I’m really pleased with were tychoish has taken me. So this redesign isn’t about needing to fix something that’s broke, as much as it is to provide the opportunity to expand and explore additional options.

I am, admittedly a bit worried about expanding the focus of tychoish so that I open myself up to the “scope” problems that I had with TA. Nonetheless I’m not thinking about fundamentally changing what I do or what I write about, but more some look-and-feel modifications that would take this site from being “just another blog” to a “big tent” that would cover a lot of personal projects.

Because I’m a geek and my day job deals a lot with content management strategies, I’ll start first with the way I envision the new landing or “front page” and then think about the technological solutions that I envision for this purpose.

Rather than have tychoish.com point to a blog, I think a sort of dynamic page that presents some content and links to other sub-sites (and more content), and has a layout that’s different from other pages of the site is the way to go. I want to have the most recent “esssay” (my typical blog posts) an excerpt from the next essay, and then a list of links to the next 5 or so posts. I also want to have a few posts from the coda sub-blog, (longer forum microblogging and more “journal”-type posts).

I’m also thinking that it would be nice to include archive navigation, search, and other information that’s now in the upper-right of the site, in the bottom, in a “hemmingway style” footer. I think that I could probably also link to and pull in content from other parts of the site, that represent projects that don’t quite exist yet. I’ve been working on the foundations of a wiki-project that would be a resource collection for scholarship on open source stuff, and I think it would be good to pull in links to critical futures, and other projects. The blog would still live here, but other projects would as well.

Deeper in the site, the pages might look reasonably similar to the way that they do now, but those pages are mostly shorter anyway. One of my fears is that the entry page has too much content and not enough context, and I think by re-flowing the layout the site might make more sense. While the “wordpress-esque” look gives sites context, I’m not sure that it’s the right context for tychoish. More deliberation and feedback on this is encouraged.

As for the backend, I’m toying with giving up Wordpress. While I’ve used wordpress for four years now (and I used b2/wordpress for a couple years about six or seven years ago; after using a custom CMS that Amy wrote for a couple of years), I’m starting to think that it’s not quite right for what I’m trying to do.

I’ve realized that I need to write a post about monolithic and microkernel approaches to web-content management, I’m starting to think that tychoish isn’t so much a site that needs a unified content management system, but rather a site that needs to be able to flexibly pull together content from a lot of different, but related, sources. I’m not talking about aggregation in the way that “tumblelogging” pulls together diverse connect, but more like I don’t need one content management system that can generate my entire website. I’m pretty technologically adept after all, and I don’t need a piece of software designed to “make my life easier” that doesn’t quite conform to the way that I work.

So I mentioned last week that I was thinking about using a tool called “Jekyll” to power the essay section. I’m still following that train of thought, albeit slowly. Given that wordpress can import from RSS, I feel pretty safe that I won’t be locked into anything. Truthfully the main thing I need to think about hacking in is possible support for multiple authors (easy, I just need to do some reading) and figuring out a way to draft posts (easy, just have a local branch, I think), and cue up posts for timed release (harder.) I’ve gotten to use post scheduling a fair bit in the last couple of months, and I could be convinced to not schedule posts except for times when I want there to be content and I’m not home.

Critical Futures will stay with Wordpress because while I think I can handle a much more ad-hoc website, if Critical Futures ever gets another editor I wouldn’t want “massive UNIX chops” to be a required skill.

So here’s a list of things that I need to do:

• Do some editing of the categories on my current wordpress directory
• Start using disqus comments with the current tychoish.com wordpress site, as that’s what I’d be using in the new site.
• Explore Jekyll’s wordpress importing feature, and potentially write my own wordpress theme to handle the export (with wget). Because I need some way to maintain the category data. Conversely, figure out how to get an RSS import into jekyll. Just have to see what’s easies.
• Design a new landing page and hack around with CSS, because I’m my own design team.
• Cobble together something reliable that can aggregate RSS feeds from various parts of the site. Such a tool certainly exists, I just have to find it and get used to it.
• Possibly move to a different webhost. Long story.
• Implement the new landing page. I’m inclined to use PHP to pull together content (includes and what not), because that should be peppy enough without needing a database, and even though the backend would be ruby, PHP seems uniquely suited to handling the display-related functions. And I’m used to it. So there

Thoughts? Feedback? Cheerleading and/or other generous offers of support?

Onward and Upward!

I’m writing you all today from OS X for the first time in months. Also, I’m writing another journal entry in honor of the weekend-like quality that the holiday has, and I’m writing it right before I post it rather than in my usual bi/tri-monthly binge writing style. Very strange.

Just to comment on the experience of the new/old environment, I’m sort of distraught by how uncomfortable it feels I mean OS X is pretty, and it does a better job with the hardware than Ubuntu (more on this later) but I’m just not used to it any more, and even though I really like TextMate… meh.¹

I rang in the new year by wrapping up a scene in the novel that had been nagging at me for several weeks. It’s the longest single “chunk” of writing in the project thus far, and the oddest, but I like it a lot. It represents, I think, a number of developments for me as a writer. First it’s a big plot twist, and it’s action, two things that I’ve felt I’ve not been able to capture correctly thus far. I’m just over the 19k word mark, and the next scene promises to be fun. By my estimates this is about a third of the story, which feels about right in terms of the plot right now.

A lot of people seem to be writing blog posts and journal posts on their review of the past year and their thoughts for the future year. This year has had it’s trials (the ongoing grandparental health issue; the not getting into graduate school take 2; the lack of knitting) and its high points (a new job that I adore, linux and a new academic direction, more writing, still being alive.) And I expect that the new year will have more of both: though certainly I’m working towards more high points and fewer trials.

My resolution last year was to keep a list of books and fiction that I read. I was pretty successful at this, though certainly I haven’t figured out the hack to carve out time for me to read fiction in the sort of concerted way that I feel I need to be reading fiction. But I’ll continue to keep the list, that’s been fun.

This years resolution is more complex, I suppose, and I’m not going to spell it all out here. This year promises to hold a number of big changes: a move, some trips, more awesomeness in the job, some new big project, and so forth. If nothing else, I think my overall approach at the moment is to work on getting closure with old projects before starting with new projects. Seems like a plan. I’m not sure if that’s a resolution though.

In any case, be warm (or cool) and well in the new year and I’ll be back with our regularly scheduled programing very shortly.

So I know that I talked earlier in the month about starting to knit a new sweater. I cast on after thanksgiving: it was a cabled sweater, my first, ambitiously chosen from Alice Starmore’s “Aran Knitting” book. While I worked on it over that long weekend, I hadn’t worked on it much since then. What I realized rather quickly, is not just that it was complex, but rather there was literally something different happening on every fracking stich. The design in question, for those familiar with Starmore, was “Irish Moss,” which is knit with lots of twisted stitches.

I was forced to admit defeat, not because I was incapable, I got an inch or two done, but because it was attention intensive that had no real interest in knitting on it. So I didn’t knit on it, and eventually I had to come to grips with the fact that I needed to plan to do something else. So, being the determined sap that I am, I went through that collection, and decided to cast on for Na Cragga a slightly simpler (and more iconic) Starmore design.

I cast on last weekend, and have found a great joy in the pattern. The cables are all simple 2x2 and 3x3 cables all combined to great effect. I’m still at the beginning, so rather than show you all a shrimpy picture of a set of circular needles and some knitting hanging off of it, I’ll talk a little bit of the project because my modifications are not insignificant.

The sweater designed as written is a very standard Aran design. Simple boxy constructed of flat pieces, shoulder straps (extending from the collar to the top of the sleeve to join the front and back of the body), and a crew neck color.

So I basically kept the cable patterns and ditched most of the rest of the pattern.

I’m knitting it out of a DK/Worsted weight wool, rather than the worsted/aran she calls for, and I dropped the “filler pattern at the sides (because I’m skinny). I might need to add some stitches in as I go along if I’ve over compensated for the fact that the book came out in the 80s and all the sweaters have 8 to 10 inches of ease. I did a swatch over plain stocking stitch and got 6 stitches to the inch (and a nice fabric) and my math suggests that given how many stitches I cast on (260ish, see why the “ish” later on) this could either be big enough erring on the large side, or a bit too small for the whole sweater but fine if it’s the bottom hem. Some tapered shaping might be nice, so I’m not worried about this.

I also added a 9-stitch braid cable at either side of the sweater. This is to counteract the massive amount of subtracting that I did, and because I’ve been really intrigued by such cables. And it’s my sweater. I however counted this wrong, thinking that I needed purl stitches for the border, and thus cast on initially for 262 stitches. There were some other issues with counting in the first round that I’ve gotten nailed out now, but it leaves me realizing that I don’t quite know how many stitches are on the sweater and given that the patterns seem symmetrical and everything is working out.

The astute among you have probably realized that I’m knitting this in the round, rather than in pieces. I’ll probably steak it because the wool is right for steeking, and I really despise turning my work. (Steeking = knitting a tube and then cutting it open to get armholes/neck openings/cardigans). So that’s another modification.

Rather than knit a ribbing, I cast on (actually my mother cast on for me :-o) provisionally, and started knitting the pattern immediately. I expect that I’ll knit a turned hem and facing after the fact, as I think something will be needed to hold to bottom of the sweater “together” and I think a hem might be just right

And given that I’m only a few inches into the sweater, I think that’s pretty good.

I’ll probably set in the sleeves a bit, by at least 9 stitches (more if I increase on either side of the armhole) and potentially a bit more that even, depending on how things are looking by that time.

And, because I’m me, and this is how I am, I’ll knit some sort of slit open neck, for a little bit of extra ventilation wearablity. This means setting the middle cable aside as I near the neck, and then knitting little plackets, probably in garter stitch. Conversely, I’m considering some sort of braid cable, worked horizontally around the collar, that would meet in the back and miter with short rows. We’ll see how ballsy I"m feeling when I get to that point.

I’m also planning to knit the sleeves off the shoulders rather than up from the cuff. For starters, I can make that fit much more easily, and I don’t think that the upsidedownness will bug me at all, and I suspect other people won’t notice either.

I’ll keep you posted as this project progresses.

I’m not a programmer, really. I mean I’m a huge geek, and I understand some pretty heavy computer-science related problems, but coding isn’t what I do. This is true of a lot of computer users these days, and it wouldn’t be such a big deal if I weren’t such a huge geek about open source software. I suspect that most of the users of open source software these days aren’t that different than me in this respect--though many are programmers, in most cases they probably don’t make active use of the source code of the software they use.¹

This realization probably sounds familiar to some, as I’ve been trying to pull apart the contemporary modifications for open source software. One obvious answer to this question is, “freedom:” that open source software provides its users an non-tangible freedom and power over their interactions with technology. I’ve posted about why I think this is imprecise and while I need to spend time developing this argument further, there’s some merit.

Another possibility is that open source represents a rethinking of intellectual property that is appealing, and that “free software” is an adjunct of a “free culture” movement. While this is an interesting theory and a good story, certainly there are parallels, I’m not sure that it’s the case. I don’t know if free culture movements (like wikipedia and creative commons) and free/open source software grow out of the same kinds of historical moments, or share anything more than inspirations and morphology. More pondering is required.

I’ve always seen Creative Commons as a sort of “legal activism,” to provide mechanisms to push laws to reflect the realities of copyright in digital spaces. Creative Commons isn’t a technological advancement, but rather a formal account for extant practices. That is, consumers of a CC license aren’t able to do anything (except potentially access) with a covered work that they couldn’t do with a conventionally protected work.

The same is not true of nearly all open source software. A free/open source software license makes certain rights available to the users of that software that they’d never have otherwise. Always. Even though we don’t often take advantage of this accessible source code, it strikes me that “intellectual property reform” doesn’t really cover why people are either contributing to open source or using open source. Additionally, there are relatively few--that I’m aware of--Creative Commons projects/works that are themselves collaborative, which presents another contrast between these two modes. While most FOSS projects originate with a single author, all successes create communities. I’m not sure that the same life cycle exists in “free culture” works.

Open source is successful in a way that “closed source/encumbered freeware” has never really been, outside of some moment-to-moment bubbles. I think this point about “community,” and the mode of authorship is a huge part of what makes open source attractive and vibrant moving forward. Not the only reason, of course, but a key contributor. Works with creative commons licenses are “X by Author, released under CC license,” whereas open source projects eventually become “X is GPL’ed,” even if key original authors are well known as Linus is for Linux or Dries is for Drupal.

This is important. I’m not sure yet how, but that’s what makes this whole ‘blog thing interesting. There are other arguments too, but this is a start.

Thoughts?

I love Nancy Kress' blog. Just saying. If you don’t read it, start. It’s good stuff.

She wrote the other day about her approach to developing SF stories and I wanted to explore her little hint in more depth here. First, a quote from the conclusion:

The larger point here is that, in my view, SF should be more than its “idea.” I am not writing about a “galactic empire” or about aliens who “lord” anything over humans. It may be that my story fails on these other literary dimensions -- character, emotion, human insight, moral implication -- as well.

Of course she’s correct. The best SF stories deal with a lot of literary dimensions, many conventional--emotions, character development, morality, and insight--and many less conventional--aliens, technology, and space. At the same time, I don’t think it’s quite fair to dismiss “the idea” (the science fictional aspects) as being sort of secondary. While I can appreciate that our main goals for writing science fiction isn’t to deal with things like spaceships and alien worlds, the boundaries between the aspects of any given science fiction story that are “the literary core” and the literary features that are just background, are difficult to draw.

On the one hand the combination of a traditional literary core and “the extra stuff,” is what makes SF so special. While space ships can be distracting, these and other aspects of a story create all sorts of situations that make the “core literary” material possible or interesting. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Also, there are defiantly SF stories, I think, that are more about the ideas and “the world” rather than something about characters, or humanity, or traditional literary ideas. William Gibson’s work always feels this way to me, for instance.

While I think I end up writing very character-based SF, and my tastes tend much closer to the literary parts of the genre, my interest in science fiction grows largely out of my love for the ideas of science fiction, both as a reader and as a writer. Not because I like reading about “cool stuff,” though I do, but because I respect the way that the idea gives rise to the more standard literary features.

Maybe this is part of what defines SF for me, and why I don’t often stray into fantasy. Also, to be clear, I don’t think that Nancy Kress' statement is particularly in conflict with mine: I find her stories to excel at using conceptual material to generate powerful literary stories. For whatever that means.

Onward and Upward!

After a long time toiling with the ThinkPad that I got (as my primary laptop) a few months back. I decided to rearrange my laptop usage. Not that the ThinkPad is a bad machine, but I felt bad because my MacBook was langishing, and I very much missed having a machine with a usable battery life. While I thought about trading the macbook for a PC laptop, it finally dawned on me that I could just linuxify it and be done with it. I have the hardware, and while it isn’t pro-grade like the thinkpad, it’s contemporary. It also means that my initial intention with the thinkpad--as a spare to keep peace among the family when one of my parent’s older macs dies--is finally fulfilled, without my need to give away the macbook. Win win. I installed dual boot with OS X, which seems like it might be useful. The hard-drive is certainly big enough--and I’m not going to be keeping anything mission critical on it anyway. In honor of this, I’ve rechristened it “Deleuze and Guatteri” (deleuze=linux; guatteri=os x) as an addition to my family of continental philosopher named electronic devices. I have the linux system set up, next up: getting the right click emulation to work right/at all, figuring out how to partition the shared space (a thousand plateaus, heh,) setting up the OS X part, and afixing the ordered tux stickers to the top of the laptop.

If anyone has experience with linux and macbooks, and can help with the right click issue, that would rock something fierce.

This post is very much in my vein of “tycho talks about what its like to be a geek that doesn’t really programmer,” posts. Because I don’t really fancy myself much of a programmer, I often have a hard time explaining the kinds of things that I do out side of saying “I write fiction,” or “I work with web developers,” or “I help people with websites,” or “I write blogs about technology,” which while factual in the strictest sense, is not a particularly honest capture of “what I do.” Or what I think of as my secret superpower.

“Secret superpower?” you ask? Well, we all have something that we kickass at, some skill set that makes us valuable at our jobs. It’s not a fixed thing, of course, it can change as we learn and grow, not to mention as our responsibilities change. But it’s there.

At various points, I’ve counted “leading kickass meetings,” and “knitting kickass sweaters,” and “doing kickass research,” as my superpower, but these days I think it’s probably “translating geek talk into more general purpose information. So I write blog posts about technology, and I edit notes that other people write, and I write documentations and training documents. Right? Pretty useful superpower? I think so, and it seems like other people think so as well.

And more than just success doing the kind of work that I find myself doing right now, my ongoing academic projects tap into a similar superpower. I’m trying, on some level, to figure out what--if anything--is so unique about open source development practices, and how do these practices effect the way that the rest of us interact with technology. Or something that stems from that.

In the strictest sense possible, I don’t need to be able to be a programmer to kickass writer/editor/academic/consultant but given the frequency with which I find myself in a circle with a bunch of other programmers I often have the sense that I don’t belong.

Maybe this is just impostor syndrome-type stuff and I’ll get over it as I get my barring. But here’s the counter example:

There are times when I really feel like a programmer. I have this incredibly geeky, (and as near as I can tell, reasonably original,) way of downloading my email, that is amazingly useful and powerful. Built on-top of existing tools, I totally hacked it together myself with like 13-26 lines of shell script.

And, while I don’t do it very much, I do end up building some small number of Wordpress websites every year, and by now I’ve realized that from that I know enough PHP and Wordpress-isms to not be a complete idiot.

And maybe the taste of knowing what it’s like to program, to write code that works, is why not being a programmer (superpower or not) is something that I’m sensitive about. Who knows?

Onward and Upward!