I got a new alarm clock this week. Well new to me, at any rate. It’s one of those nifty ones that can wake you up with music from an iPod (and charge it all at the same time). Truth is that, I’ve not even had a clock in my bedroom for a number of months: I tend to wake pretty early on my own/with cats, my coworkers aren’t in my timezone anyway, and I unplugged my old alarm clock because I needed the outlet, and never got around to plugging it back in.

The experience of waking up to the alarm clock has been overwhelmingly positive. I tend to get up regularly and earlier first and foremost. This is a good thing, because I think I was slipping into the habit of sleeping too much. And too much sleep--counter intuitively--can wreak havoc on my energy levels and mood, so I’ve just felt better all around. It makes sense that too much sleep can lead to decreased mood/energy--your body gets used to sleeping more, and so it gets to need sleep so you get tiered more--but your millage may vary.

The second great thing about this alarm clock, and the waking up to music, rather than a buzzer is that I’ve found that I wake up more “gently,” that is, rather than being jarred awake by a buzzer, the music comes on, and I drift towards wakefullness, I listen to a song or two (if I like it) while I think about what the day holds and muster the strength to get up. And then I’m up. I’ve found that when I get up, I’m not groggy, and I’m generally ready to get started at the things that I need to do.

How cool is that?

I think this whole “sleep management” thing is worth something. Sleep is important, and having an unadjusted sleep schedule is never fun, but I’ve realized that sleeping the “right” ammount is something that I have to pay attention to. Maybe this is a product of our sleep rythms being a little more than a day long, but who knows. My general sleep-related goals are:

• Sleep a little less than I’m inclined to. Not by a lot, but 90 minutes or less seems to leave me feeling better.
• If I feel like I need to take a nap, I almost always try to do it for sometime between 1-3 in the afternoon, which is when I’m the least productive/creative anyway.
• This alarm clock, and “waking up softly” seems to be helpful.
• With the choice between being up in the morning and being up late at night, I always chose the former.
• If I feel like I’m having trouble falling asleep, I ususally get up and read or do something else. The end result isn’t that I get more sleep, and though tired I feel better the next day.
• I also try and time caffine intake so that it doesn’t muck up my sleep schedule, though the truth is that I can sleep through a caffiene buzz if I’m tired enough. I tend to think of caffiene as a having a “focusing” rather than an “alertness” effect. But that’s just me.

Anyone else think about their sleep like this? Generally? It has a big effect on how I work and how I approach work, but I think it’s probably a little bit wierd. Anyway…

Onward and Upward!

Here’s a little bit about emergence/systems theory and open source, as promised in my `change process <http://tychoish.com/posts/theories-of-change>`_ post a while back.

I was reading this article about linux and complexity theory last week, which I think is a pretty good frame for any discussion of open source and linux from a systems approach. There are a few things that I had issue with. First, the article is 3+ years old, and so it doesn’t have the benefit of seeing what’s happened with ubuntu linux, netbooks, the AGPL, rails and web 2.0, let alone things like Drupal and the last two major iterations of Firefox, which for all their assorted faults have really changed the face of open source.

Secondly, the empirical study focuses on the kernel development, and takes the kernel to represent the entire Linux eco-system, which I think it doesn’t do very well. Kernel development is really high level, really niche, and despite its size, represents so little of what people think about when they talk about “Linux.” GNOME, KDE, the GNU Toolchain, X11, pyton/ruby/perl, let alone the superstrucutral elements that projects like Debian, Gentoo and Arch represent are really more important than the Kernel. Debian and Gentoo more or less work with various BSD kernels and given enough money--to inspire interest and caring--full BSD based releases wouldn’t be technologically difficult. The dominance of the Linux Kernel in the free-operating system space is--I think largely the result of momentum and the fact that the kernel is damn good and that there’s not a lot of a need for another kernel option.

In any case, the paper is in a lot of ways a 21st century review of Eric S. Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” paper. Raymond’s argument is taken as a statement in favor of bottom up organization (Linux, and the bazaar) in open source projects, and the author uses this insight to explore kernel development with some good-old systems theory.

While it’s very true that there isn’t a monolithic organization in the Kernel development, it’s not exactly a free for all. Linus (or whoever is at the top of the project) provides a measure of top-down structure. This makes it easier for contributions to bubble from the bottom up. I think it’s no mistake that many open source projects have “dictator”-type leaders that are pretty consistent.

This says nothing of the barriers to entry for most kinds of development in the open source world, aren’t trivial (commit access projects that use non-distributed version control; eg. Drupal), let alone the burden of engineering knowledge for Kernel-level development, and other lower level projects. These--largely--informal standards none the less, constrain what happens on the kernel development.

Even if a lot of the day to day work on the kernel isn’t done by Linus himself, his presence, and the importance of his branch/tree gives structure. Particularly before the advent of git, but even now. And I’m not saying that this is a bad thing--quite the contrary, top down forces are often a good thing--but I do think that overly romantic depictions of open source development as being bottom-up/anarchical aren’t productive.

Doest his mean that Linux is a Cathedral? Or that it’s headed that way? Not at all. But I don’t think that the Bazaar is necessarily as bottom-up as Raymond (and those that have followed) thought it was. Open source is also much more commercial now than it was ten or twenty years ago, that can’t not have an impact.

Just thoughts…

Onward and Upward!

All of the outlines for the novel length projects I start, have a space at about the three-quarters point that says “overflow area to catch up before the end”. I always have a couple of scenes that float between chapters, and having a place before the end where I can sort of take a deep breath and get things lined up perfectly for the climax and end is a good thing. Anyway, this isn’t really a writing post, but the current project has one of these areas, and I’m so going to need it. In part because of chapters like the one I’m writing now. It’s full of great stuff, that needs to be in this book, and I love the way it feels to write it. At the same time None of it was in the outline. All this by way of saying that after a few weeks of not really “having any fiction in me” I’ve returned with a vengeance to this novel, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. Great stuff.

The Linux switch continues pretty well. There’s not a lot new to report, except that I’ve not really used my mac very much in a week, and while I could easily set things back up and roll right along with it, there’d be a lot of stuff to sync with when I get back to it, and I don’t have any really compelling reason to do that for day-to-day tasks. Lets go through and see how things have shaken out:

RSS Reading

I’ve basically just given in and started using Google Reader. I don’t think this is the final resolution to this problem, but it works quite well and I’m happy with it for the time being. I think newsbeuter works with bloglines, and that might be the best solution but I haven’t made the jump yet. After years of syncing with the newsgator service and NetNewsWire on my mac, downloading on my own seems much less ideal. But google isn’t evil… yet, and so I’m very glad for reader.

TextMate and Text Editing

This was one of my largest concerns when I thought about switching. I was really attached to TextMate, and it was comfortable and very mac-y. While I had some trouble when I was using vim the, TextMate to emacs transition is pretty smooth, though I have a lot of emacs-ground to cover, all of my basic text-editing tasks are taken care of.

What I learned in this process, is that my text-editing requirements, which I thought were pretty intense, are actually reasonably simplistic. I’ve not yet mastered really powerful find-and-replaces in emacs (I tend to use vim for this, though I’m sure I’ll be able to give this up at some point), or multiple file find-and-replaces (my gut says that I should be able to use sed but, I’ve never had much luck with sed.

Learning this about my process has been helpful, and I think I’m able to concentrate better in my Linux environment than I am in OS X any more. Powerful lessons.

IM Clients

Interestingly, the more I used Pidgin, the more I realized that the inconsistencies in the way the buddy list was maintained, and that I didn’t like in Pidgin existed in Adium as well. I just hadn’t noticed them: this is a great testament to the UI design of Adium. In the end, Pidgin works pretty well and I’m reasonably pleased with it. As near as I can tell I don’t have a lot of options because I need the kind of multi-account/multi-protocol support that libpurple-based IM clients have.

I’ve tried running BitlBee locally, but I found the buddylist/roster hard to track in irssi (my IRC client of choice), who knows. If I ever switch from Pidgin, something like mcabber (if I can convince enough of my friends to reliably be accessible via XMPP), or BitlBee. But for the moment, I’m reasonably happy about this.

Web Development

Right after I got my Linux machine, I started work on a new web-development project for a friend, and I realized that all the things I was used to using (FTP clients, etc) weren’t setup on the linux machine. And my web developent style tends to be pretty chaotic/frenzied and “test driven” (ie: “hey, lets see what this does! (pause) crap! what about this? (pause) crap! etc.") so I thought it would be a royal mess.

Turns out it wasn’t. I started using gFTP which is nice. For my own servers I use some SCP based shortcuts I’ve written up for myself and I SSH into the server and edit things directly there, but for some things on this project having something graphical was a very good thing. It seemed to work. I’m not complaining.

Blog Posting

So I haven’t found a really good XML-RPC client for blog posting on Linux to make up for the TextMate blogging bundle and MarsEdit options. While I’m thinking about trying out some of the blog posting software for gnome (to revive the “coda” sub-blog). I’ve switched to posting using the web interface.

This is good, because I can automate blog posting much easier, and it means my work schedule in the morning doesn’t revolve around getting things posted. And the truth is that the WordPress interface is pretty good. So in someways maybe it’s good that I’m doing things this way.

Music Syncing

Yeah, I’m still doing this on the mac, such as I sync my iPod mostly I just listen to music on my ipod, and tend to sync about every other time I go out of town. I’m thinking about switching to listening to Podcasts on my phone, and if I do that it wouldn’t be a huge issue to move the music to the Linux box after the initial import. But I’m in no particular rush, given how often I sync my iPod, so this might linger for a while.

Does this mean that I’m an ex-mac user?

Onward and Upward!

I just upgraded tychoish today to the new, “WordPress 2.7” which has a great new user interface that I really like. We’re finally getting back to b2/cafelog and wordpress 1.5 ground. Heh. Anyway. I’m going to be reviving this little mini-blog on the right hand side of the site. The rule this time? All posts written off the cuff and nothing with paragraph breaks. Sounds like a plan? I thought so.

Things change. People change. Societies change. You might not be able to get social scientists and cultural theorists to agree on very much, but the fact that change happens is pretty easy to stomach. The difficulty come in when we start to think about how things change. What follows is a review of the competing approaches to what I’m calling “theories of change,” I hope this helps me (and you!) organize some thoughts.

There are, near as I can tell, three major schools of thought that attempt to explain “how things change:” evolution, complexity/emergence (chaos), and development. In turn:

Evolution

Derived of course from biology, there’s a great deal of evidence that biological systems have evolved and continue to evolve. Evolution is predicated on the assumption that the most adaptive variations in a given population will propagate themselves more than less adaptive variations, which will propagate themselves less. Evolution is a very “big picture” process, and--at least in the biological sense--refers to change and adaption on the scale of the population on the whole.

There are a few things that more casual applications of the theory seem to forget that I think are key:

• Evolution values adaptability and diversity over just about everything else, adaptable individuals and diverse populations are more resilient to shorter term changes in the environment, so evolutionary analysis that’s grounded in survivability in a particular situation are relatively week.
• Evolution takes a long time. Many generations. Many many generations. So many that it’s really hard to think about evolution “happening” given the way that we think about time. In many ways, its easier to think about continents moving around than it is to think about the way populations evolve.
• There’s little good evidence that evolution occurs in non-biological systems. We use evolution as an analogy for many change-processes, but as a mechanism, outside of biology its limited.

Complexity

I really like complexity or emergence theory, but I’m not a math guy, and I don’t have a very good grasp of it. The basic idea is that in the right conditions, systems of independent “actors” that interact with each other will given time develop some sort of organization, and that these “systems” (as actors) combine to form higher level systems. And so forth.

So for example, humanity can be seen as an example of emergent complexity: our bodies are made up of molecules that interact with each other to form sub-cellular structures and cells (actors), which make up tissues and then organs (systems), which make up our bodies. Our bodies (and selves) are actors in social systems… and so forth. I’ve left a lot out. Obviously evolution is an example of a complexity theory, but complexity theories have been used (successfully, I’d argue) to explain how systems work and form in non-population scale biological systems and non-biological systems, and also on time scales that are shorter than anything evolution could work with.

The organization of photographs in tags on flickr is largely emergent (as are google’s search results), and intelligence is often described as being emergent. There are more, and I’m sorry if I don’t have really good examples of this.

Development

I use the idea of development to help describe smaller scale adaptations and adjustments over time. I studied a lot of Developmental Psychology for a while in there, and I think a concept of development is really important to thinking about the ways people change, and grow. Just as we know that evolution happens to populations over time, we know that humans (and other animals) are continuously developing throughout their existences.

Human development has two major divisions: the intrinsic biological processes and the process of adapting to different contexts. The biological stuff is pretty limited: it’s impossible to walk or develop speech before a certain age because the vocal/skeletal musculature isn’t developed enough. Stuff on that scale. These sorts of biological/physical limitations are developmentally relevant mostly because they limit the possibility for external experience.

The adaptation to context part of development is grounded in learning theory (cognitive/behavioral psychology), and helps explain how individuals interact and change with regard to their world, and it all depends on experience. What language a child learns depends on what language they’re exposed to. Our sensitivity to heat and cold, is largely dependent on where we live. The way we cope with stress depends on the outcomes of past stressful experiences, and how we witness other people cope with stress.

Development describes how individuals (actors/systems) are shaped and changed by experience. It’s something that happens over time, at varying rates and is dependent on context. Non living things can be thought of as “developing.” Institutions, intellectual projects, science and technologies, and so forth.

Right and?

That’s what I have. It’s really easy to just say “evolve” when we mean change, and similarly easy to recognize “stuff changes,” when the really interesting and powerful part is to understand the mechanisms that produce change. The processes of change differ depending on what is changing, which is only fitting. I’m going to try and get a little bit clearer on complexity theory, and I’ll probably follow this post up in the coming future.

Lets start with the facts: I got a blackberry at the end of last week. It’s one of the new “BlackBerry Bold” devices. Which means GSM/HSDPA/etc from ATT. Which is a great improvement from the sucky (but surprisingly functional) flip phone that I’ve had for the last 2.5-3 years from Sprint. This is the first phone that I’ve had that has: an Internet connection, a messaging plan, and a reliable connection (sorry sprint). Though it’s not the first time that I’ve had a PDA-class device. There’s a story…

When I was in high school I did some writing for the interent on mobile technology (PDAs and so forth) right before “smartphones” came on the scene. I had a couple of the earliest PocketPCs and a PalmOS device, and I did some writing for a number of websites that covered this sort of thing. Because it seemed like the thing to do, and even back then (when I was still using Windows, egad) I was a pretty simplistic “read things and write things” kind of computer user, so these kinds of things made more sense than a laptop (given the state of technology, circa 2000-2002). Laptops got better and cheaper, I discovered Apple computers, and PDAs moved into cellphones, and I always had nice enough cellphones, but not particularly flashy cellphones. They did their job, and I was happy.

But then I got a job that requires me to be on the phone a fair piece, and reachable in a way that I haven’t previously needed to be. And cellphones and data technology have improved and gotten a lot more reasonable and ubiquitous. And so there I was, looking at “smartphones” with only a little deja vu. I’ve written here about the iphone, and how I was leaning away from it. The near-completeness of my switch to Linux made an iPhone an even less attractive option, and so here I am with a blackberry. My response: incredibly positive. Let me go over (in list format) what I’ve done, and how my “system” works:

• I’m using a lot of these web 2.0 apps in a way that I hadn’t previously. Google Calendar¹ and Gmail-contacts sync with my phone via the Google BlackBerry Sync, which works great.
• My email arrives on the BlackBerry via one of two means: someone sends something to my work email (which Blackberry accesses via IMAP) or someone sends me a message through one of my personal addresses and said message passes through a rather complex gmail-filter. I’m still tweaking the gmail filter every now and then, but it’s it works.
• The blackberry got me really using Remember the Milk, in concert with BBrtm and Tasque on the desktop (which is in Ubuntu Intrepid). The blackberry app is sub par, but functional. I hear the official blackberry app is less functional, and you have to pay for pro-service (25 bucks a year) which I’m not opposed to, but I’ll need to think about it. Having the offline apps make this a really great service, and I’m a huge fan now.
• I of course, have AIM and Gtalk, set up though I haven’t used it much. And I have various SMS and MMS-based services set up (you tube uploading, twitter, identi.ca) set up, though I haven’t turned on the “getting messages” part of that yet.
• I have the opera mini web browser installed and like it a great deal, but I haven’t done a lot of browsing yet, but that’s not surprising: I don’t browse the internet much on my desktop.
• I have various other things that seem logical to get installed: google maps, the facebook app, flickr upload tool, the google search tool, the gmail app, but haven’t dug into that very much. But I suspect these things will be nice to have.
• For writing and note taking in the wild I have a secret email address that routes itself into a “notes” folder (I’ve used it before with Jott and I’m just sending myself emails and that seems to work just fine.

Everything else seems a bit borring. Left on my list of phone-related things that I’d like to see happen or have left to do:

• Come to some peace about my RSS reading habits, so I can catch up on things on the phone.
• Some sort of e-text reading software would be great. Particularly if there were a good way to get PDFs to appear right on the device. The screen’s is very readable, and it just makes sense.
• Even though one of my reasons for getting this and not and iphone was that I already had an iPod that I liked a lot, I have the perverse desire to listen to podcasts and maybe music on this thing. But I need to declare bankruptcy on podcast listening first and find some way to clean up the pieces there. In that direction, I think the Jabra bluetooth headset/controler looks like something worthwhile. As would a buttload of MicroSD storage space.
• I’m using the stock leather holster at the moment for a case, and it’s quite good, but I imagine that something else might be good.
• I need to spend some time getting, making, and customizing ring tones, which is something that I’ve never done before, but I feel needs to be accomplished.

That’s all the news that’s fit to sing….

Onward and Upward!

I’m knitting again!

I seem to do these posts every now and then. In any case, one of my mom’s friends from knitting camp came for a post-thanksgiving visit, and really kick started my winter knitting projects. I’d been lagging on some older projects for far too long, and having an excuse to sit around and knit was a really good thing. I got to the end of the first sleeve avove the cuff of the latvian dreaming sweater, and started a new sweater. That new sweater is what I’m here to talk about today. I’ll cover the other knitting progress in the coming weeks.

So I, uh, started a new sweater. With cables.

I should point out here that I’ve never made a cabled sweater before. Rather than design something simple, I flipped through some knitting patterns, and chose of all things, “Irish Moss” from Alice Starmore’s Aran Knitting.

For those non-knitters out there, this is a pretty rare book, long out of print and very highly valued. The designs, though a bit dated, are very easy to adapt into classic masterpieces, and they’re not exactly “entry level sweaters.”

Typical.

I’ve knit several Starmores before, but thusfar I’ve only done colorwork sweaters from her.

I also changed a few things about this sweater.

Also typical.

My modifications, I think are pretty straightforward, but none the less significant. They are:

• I’m knitting it in the round when the pattern called for a sweater knit in pieces.
• I omitted the ribbing, as the entire sweater is knit in a twisted stitch-ribbing (with cables) basically. So the ribbing was only decorative, and I like the way it looks when cable patterns start at the very bottom edge of the sweater.
• I’ve decided to knock off most of the filer stitches at the sides of the sweater, because I’m going for a 38-40 inch sweater not a 42-46 inch sweater. I think knocking off 18 stitches from the front and back was a little much (which is what I did at the bottom edge.) but I think a sweater with a little bit of tapering will be a good thing, so I’ll begin to increase after I have 2 inches completed, once I have a good idea of actual gage.
• I’m going to slit the neck open, and set in the sleeve to about shoulder width, but that depends on how many stitches I increase on the sides, and how the pattern looks. If I don’t increase enough to make it work, I’ll just make a gusset.
• I’ll slit the neck open to mid-chest, as I do on most of my sweaters so that the crew neck isn’t as restricting. The pattern seems like it will support this.
• I’ll knit the sleeves and saddles from the shoulder/collar down. That always seems to work well. Again, that’s in a while.

And so forth. I’m semi-weened from the cable needle, but I keep it around just in case.

And that’s about it. Unless you want the technical specs.

Yarn: Schoolhouse Press Quebecois

Needles: Addi Lace 3.0mm (US Size 2/2.5)

Color: Grey

Gauge: About 6 stitches to the inch in St. St. Or something close, I didn’t check closely, but it looks to be about right. There are ~238 stitches at the moment, so that seems to be about right given everything.

Ok that’s it, for real. More later. I might actually take pictures of this one. Imagine that.