Topic: Posts

We tend to tell (and think of) our histories as progress narratives. That is “things sucked, we changed them and now they’re getting better.” Taken to the next level, progress narratives force us to think about the future in terms of “how much better things are going to be,” as a required part of the progress narrative itself. On the one hand, there have been a number of rather dark moments in our past; on the other, in a lot of ways the present is really as much of an elaboration on the past as it is a progression. Because the present isn’t particularly rosy.

This is, you might think, an odd perspective for a science fiction writer. SF is supposed to be forward looking, and optomistic, right? Well, maybe that’s the “critical” part in “critical futures.”

With that in mind, I’m very wary and hesitant to accept progress narratives as being particularly indicative of an actual developmental process. But they’re all around us, history, political development, medical advancement, and particularly technology are all formed as progress narratives. While there’s nothing wrong per se with this approach, it constrains imagination about the future and the past. That’s not a good thing.

Since information technology/computers are a relatively recent development in history, and are in such a rapid state of development, it’s particularly hard to avoid the technological progress narrative. And it’s true, from one perspective that technology is getting faster and more powerful with every passing year. On the other, with OS X and Ubuntu gaining at least a little bit of the operating system market (let alone the linuxen in mobile devices and netbooks), it looks like we’re headed towards a greater adoption of Unix-like systems. Which despite an ongoing evolution, are remarkably similar to the kinds of systems that were the height of new technology 40 years ago. And indeed a great deal of the ongoing evolution in Unix-like systems is in response to new kinds of hardware (wireless, cameras, etc.) rather than anything paradigmatic.

Another issue in technology is the possible confusion of development with progress. It’s very true that processors are getting faster, hard drives are getting bigger, and everything is getting cheaper. But is this progress?

While faster processors are better, when I bought my desktop computer about a month ago I opted to save a hundred dollars by going with a slightly slower processor. I haven’t noticed, and while I’m not doing anything that might require extra performance (video editing, or even sound editing, say) most people aren’t either. Same story with storage: the only real way to fill up a 500 GB or 1 TB drive is to take a lot of high-res pictures or collect video (which is hard to do legally). Even Vista--noted by some for its bloat--only takes up 15 or so gigs. The biggest technological issue for storage is power-consumption and redundancy, which aren’t exactly the makings for a good progress narrative.

Netbooks also represent the failure of the technological progress narrative as they aren’t so much bigger/better/faster as they are a recomercialized version of the very best of laptop technology circa 1998. This isn’t to say that the march of technology hasn’t made netbooks possible, because that’s a terribly flawed perspective. Rather, the fact that many people have realized that a good deal of their computing tasks need not be accomplished by the bigger/better/faster hardware. In my case, editing text files is never going to get more difficult, or take more resources.

My past, and even pretty recent attempts at thinking about technology, focused on “what’s next,” but I think right now that’s largely irrelevant. What’s happening now is by far much more interesting, don’t you think?

Onward and (ironically) Upward!

I’ve been using my new computer a fair piece yesterday and today, and I’ve even gotten my dad using the computer recently (long story) and it’s going really well, and the speed that I’ve been able to get it setup and adjusted has been really amazing. (Is there anyone else in St. Louis MO, USA who wants to switch to linux and needs a little bit of encouragement?)

I’m also remarkably close to getting all the way switched to linux. I still haven’t messed with my RSS feeds (still mac only on that, but that’s a user-issue as much as a technological one) and I need to bite the bullet and get XAMPP set up on my desktop, and get something set up to be able to share files on the network.

But I digress, this post is really about the whole “tablet computer” thing, which was supposedly going to be “the next new thing” five or so years ago. Clearly this was not the case. First of all tablets (especially convertible tablets) are hard to get right from an engineering perspective: more stress points and screens with digitizers don’t often look right. Secondly, there’s not a lot that tablets are better for than conventional laptops.

We’re still better at typing than we are at writing long hand, and applications and user interfaces aren’t really designed around a tablet-like interaction metaphor. It took apple designing a phone in 2007 for people to realize that we might need an interaction paradigm where you would have more than one pointer at a time (so called “multi-touch”).

I backed into this tablet thing. I realized that ThinkPad hardware was probably the best laptop hardware for linuxification, and I knew they had a 12 inch tablet. Since I’d been jonesing for a 12 inch laptop, more or less since I gave up my 12 inch ibook 5 years ago, the x41/x61 tablet seemed like the coolest thing around. When I found a great deal on one of the x41t’s, the rest is history.

What’s most surprising is how much I like it.

I got the digitizer working in pretty short order and xournal not long after that. I’m struck by a few things. First, the “writing” experience is quite good. I’m sort of prissy about writing long hand, and have been using fountain pens and moleskines for years, so this is no small endorsement. Secondly, for somethings like reading PDFs and some note taking, this could in time totally replace my use of paper notebooks. Aside from the whole “needing power” issue.

Would I get another tablet? Probably, though I wouldn’t be inclined to pay a great “tax” for this feature, and the fact that this is a tablet is really nice, but not in the top few reasons why I like this computer (size, and lightness, the lack of a touch pad, and it’s linux-compatibility.) So go figure.

It’s nifty, but I don’t expect things to rush towards tablets quite yet.

Onward and Upward!

I’ve written here a little about the problems I have with the options for user interfaces in linux, and while for me Awesome goes a long way toward s fixing these issues, particularly/even on smaller screens, but I continue to think that paying more attention to user interface issues will be a very good thing for the platform. This new laptop is the second linux install I’ve done recently (third if you count the VM on my mac, and fourth if you count the multiple attempts it took me to get my desktop to working order) and the expereince has--I hoped granted me some useful perspective on some UI concerns. And since this is my blog… I bet you can see where this is going.

While I think as far as non-tiling window managers go, OS X/quartz/aqua still is the leader of the pack, I’m not longer as appaled by everything that is GNOME, but it took me a while to realize this (which is a huge barrier for new users, and a big problem, but not a problem I’m quite equipt to suggest.) If you’re new to gnome, and geeling a little offput by it’s “clunkyness,” here are some suggestions to make things a little less painful (espically if you’re the Awesome type).

• Tweak and change the system fonts. As near as I can tell sub-pixel rendering is turnned off in GNOME by default (it’s on in KDE), which is what makes fonts look smooth and pretty. Turning this on, and making the fonts smaller, made a world of difference for me. Adding in good fonts for screen reading (like the forbidden MS Verdana font, and the Google Andriod Fonts) really added something to the experience. I think it’s easy to forget how much a really good, really readable font can affect the way we interact with a computer. First order of business.
• Do something about the GNOME panel. The GNOME pannel (that would be all the status bars and such) by default takes a huge amount of screen space (particularly on smaller screens). For starters, I turn off “auto-expand” and move the top panel into the right or left corner, though there might be some advantage to moving it to the bottom left-or right corners, as we tend to have more horizontal space on our screens than vertical, but that depends a lot on your personal prefrence. My second move is to ditch the bottom pannel, and move things like the “multi-desktop” chooser, and a drop down list of open windows to the top pannel. Move things that you use every day to the pannel and take away things that you don’t need to see. One of the reasons that I like OS X so much is that it does a pretty good job of focusing the UI on “content” inside the window, rather than the UI of the window/system itself. GNOME can do this too, but it doesn’t automatically.
• This is an elaboration of the earlier too points, but tweak the theme settings, which--at least in Ubunut--are cartoonish by default. I’ve found that the “Mist” interface buttons tend to take up a little less room, but try your hand at desiging something new. My M.O. of late has revolved around “making everything smaller” because I don’t like UI bloat, but no matter what your goals are, I think everyone needs to spend some time customizing the finer aspects of their UI.

It’s a start in the right dirrection at any rate.

Onward and Upward!

This is a post that reflects on international character of the community around the `Awesome Window Manager <http://awesome.naquadah.org>`_, though it takes a while to get to that. There’s this theory of blog post writing that says you should write like newspaper articles and front load your arguments. Save this editorial note, this post is an epic failure at this formula. Apologies.

It will come as a surprise to no one that I am not only an avid user of open source software but also a keen observer of the open source community. Communities, particularly digital communities, seem to be my thing, and participating and watching various parts of the open source community has reminded me a lot about what I liked most about the Internet back when I started my travels in cyberspace and (slightly) more recently when I started blogging.

I’m yet sure if the argument that “open source is qualitatively different from other sorts of cyberspace communities” holds water. Unlike the communities that form around collees (eg. facebook), special interests (eg. blogs, podcasts, and discussion forums), or around established “real world” connections (eg. email, instant messaging) open source communities form in order to produce something reasonably concrete and specific. But other communites online form around shared goals (eg. many communities on livejournal), and certianly open source hackers weren’t the first to use technology to collaborate. And open source communites use all the same internet technologies (IRC, listservs, newsgroups) that we’ve been using for years, so there’s nothing particularly novel about the communities.

But I digress.

While the Internet is techincally world wide, and does allow for information to be exchanged globally, communities on the internet are often pretty localized. Even if a community isn’t rooted in real-world connections (and many are, more than we might initally expect) they’re often constrained by language and time-zones to a great degree.

The community around the Awesome Window Manager provides a great counter example to this. JD, the original/primary author/leader is in France, and I’ve interacted with people in the Awesome list and chat room are from all over the world. While I know of a few Awesome users in the United States my impression is that the core of the user base isn’t particularly American, though some further research into this might be in order. Interestingly most of the conversations and documentation happens in English.

I don’t have a lot of idea about why this is the case exactly. My current working theory is that the kind of advanced user that Awesome attracts, is more likely to use Linux/BSD outside of the US (Apple being less prevelent outside of the US, and interntaionalization and what not driving people to Linux in the non-english speaking world.) But that’s just one idea.

Ok, so I know it isn’t November anymore, and I should shut up about writing already, but it’s a good change of pace, and I have one little point to make/explore that makes sense to talk about post-nano. It’s about the habit of writing. And I think it can be applied to all sorts of creative work.

A lot of people think that NaNo is all about “a big push,” and getting past the internal editor and so forth, but even more importantly it teaches a valuable lesson about the power of momentum. The begging is the hardest part. Writing the first 10-20 thousand words, is really hard work and takes time to get used to the characters and the situations and what it takes to sit down every damn day and write a lot of fiction. Once you learn what it feels like, once you’re situated, things get easier. It’s easier to figure out what’s going to happen next, and it’s easier to sit down and write.

Ultimately, knowing how to push yourself and get in the habit is the best part of NaNo, and other than the rhetorical objectives, it’s probably my only real “writing hack” and gives me the feeling that means that I say “I’m a writer” when someone asks me what I do.

While I don’t want to endorse procrastination, I’m of the opinion that the “writing habit” is something that needs a lot of nurturing and help. Having something like a blog that can help you “warm up,” or a journal, or a lively email correspondence, can sometimes help get things moving, and though it seems counter productive really help fill in the gaps between larger projects. There’s such thing as “too much” odds and ends writing, but if you can get your mind moving and used to writing two to three thousand words a day, it becomes easier and easer for a greater and greater portion of these words to end up being on a fiction project.

A while back my motto was that the key to creative success, if it exists, lays somewhere in the confluence of “persistence” and “experimentation.” Basically you have to try lots of different things, and keep trying lots of things because eventually something will stick. While I still think it’s true on the level of “careers” on a developmental scale, I now think that’s its also true on a day to day level with regards to the process of creation. Writing good content (or knitting good sweaters, or recording good audio) isn’t dependent on a ritual or a specific setting, or divine inspiration; but it is dependent on writing lots of content (good and bad.)

NaNo’s over. Congratulations to those who attempted and those who won. I hope you have something that you’re proud of and that you learned from. I’d also encourage you to not stop yet. Edit what you have, get a good sample together. Start a new project. Keep writing.

Onward and Upward!

So, after all my talk the other week about netbooks and such things, I broke down and got a new computer. Which wasn’t exactly needful, but it’s quite nice, and I think it’ll feature rather heavily in m posts this week. Sorry if this is too far afield for some. I hope suspect that it’ll make sense in the end.

Rather than wait until one of the other computers in the house died, (which would call forth my macbook in as part of the obsolescence cycle), I got a used ThinkPad x41 tablet on ebay (from a local vendor). This is probably about 3 years old, but in it’s day it was a damn nice computer and although it’s a bit puny in many regards its former glory shines through. It has a gig of ram, the construction is sturdy, and it has a lot of the features that are common place now like bluetooth and an SD card slot. So it’s good hardware.

And it’s tiny. There’s something about a 12 inch laptop that’s just the right size. You can fit two standard withds of text next to each other on the screen, the keyboard is fullsized without sacraficing very much, and just like a netbook, any hit in performance is compensated for by the fact that your tasks are likely to be pretty minimal.

One thing that I realized while I was away a couple weeks ago, was that there’s something really good about the Awesome Window Manager and the way that it tends to focus my attention and keep me from checking LiveJournal constantly. Which I’m very prone to doing when I’m using the Mac. So it made some sense to me to work on having a laptop that I could be more productive on. And it helps that this model has some other features that I think are nifty. Like it doesn’t have a touch pad (opting for the “nipple” button between the ‘g’ and ‘h’ keys) and it’s a Tablet, which makes it ideal for reading things

One thing that I had been really worried about before hand was the ease of getting linux onto this system. Laptops are fineky, or they can be and on a laptop, if the hardware you have isn’t supported, there’s not a lot of recourse. And it would kind of suck to have a laptop with a video card that was unsupported, or a wireless card, say. Thankfully, I was able to crib off of someone else in this case, as I knew that Emperor Linux had sold this computer in the past with linux preinstalled and they were able to get all the hardware to work. So I figured I was fairly safe.

What I didn’t expect is for the instalation to go so well. I downloaded a utility that would make an install-stick (as this machine doesn’t have an optical drive) on my desktop, and that took some time, but but the instaliation itself maybe took half an hour. And then it just worked. There was a lot of messing around to be done, tweaking to Awesome for the smaller screen, and it took me some time to get all my data downloaded and setup, but not particularly long. And now it all works. Just like that.

It’s not perfect: the battery only has about 90 minutes on it at best, I can’t get the tablet to work when the screen’s upside down in tablet mode, there’s an accelerometor that should reorient the screen, but that might just take some elbow greese. The biggest problem, frankly, was remapping the keyboard so that it was both comfortable for tycho useage (ie. getting rid of the Caps_Lock key and making it another Control Key) and making the keyboard suitable for awesome (ie. taking the normal control keys and making them “mod4” or “Windows” keys for all the custom keybindings). That’ll also take a litle bit of work to get right, as a few things appear to be wonky. Who knows.

Anyway, what I really need is a suitable sticker to cover up the IBM logos. Which, unlike an Apple logo, isn’t the kind of thing that one might show off with pride. Suggestions?

In lieu of an actual essay on this quasi-holiday, I have a funny exchange from earlier in the week. Continue to have a good holiday, and I’ll see you on Monday.

tycho: so I was thinking about getting an old(er) ThinkPad x41 tablet and linuxifying it, so I’d have a linux portable and we’d have another computer around here because most of the computers in the house are older and the last time an old computer went south, there was major familial strife.

chris: ah which is the x41

tycho: [passes a link]

chris: you really do obsess over some of the strangest hardware. It’s kinda slow and old.

tycho: it runs emacs and stuff, it should do fine.

chris: trufax. I forget little you demand of your computers. Why would you want a tablet though?

tycho: reading stuff.

chris: I just don’t see the point of sacrificing performance for a nebulously useful tablet functionality.

tycho: Well, why are you looking at net books constantly?

chris: reading stuff.

[silence]

So it’s Thanksgiving today. (So good holiday to you all in blog land!) And in honor of the holiday, my post today will be brief, and I’ll be taking the day off of Critical Futures as well.

I don’t really have to say much about the holiday itself, as the big holiday’s go, it’s probably my favorite. Though I think I speak for many of my fellow non-Christians when I say, the one where the big bunny bringing children chicken eggs always makes me smile.

In any case, what I like most about the holiday is the long weekend. I don’t care much for the food, in fact for a couple of years in college I made a point of getting Indian food for thanksgiving. Which was amazing.

I’ve always welcomed the holiday because it’s a nice long weekend in what is often a trying part of the year. There aren’t many holidays which provide a four day holiday, except for Christmas in some years. This is a shame, I think on the whole we work too much.

I’ve been mulling over this article about our work week and the relationships between productivity and standards of living, and how that tracks against the amount of time we spend at work.

I’ll leave you with that thought, and enjoy your break!