Topic: Internet

In light of my otherwise fried state of mind, I would like to present a list of things that I dislike. Because I’m snarky like that.

• HTML emails. I’ve yet to send or receive an email that really requires rich text formatting provided by HTML emails. While multi-part emails (which send multiple copies of the same email in rich and plain text) are a good thing, it’s a huge pain in the ass to get an email (particularly a long email) three times, just for the pleasure.
• Sites that recreate twitter without adding any useful features or discussion. It’s as if the dimwitted internet people said “holy shit, if we give people 140 characters to say banal things on our site maybe we’ll get traffic like twitter,” except this isn’t how the internet has ever worked (or worked well.)

Facebook is coming out with “usernames,” I’ve gotten an invitation to microblog on niche-social networking site, and everyone seems hard set on reimplementing this whole “status” thing a la twitter in the beginning, without any thought of interpretation (a la laconica) or doing something cool like jaiku-style threads, let alone the next big thing.

• Malformed emails. Dudes. Sending a plain text email is really simple, there’s no excuse for it to look like your cat took a nap on the tab key. I’m not chiding anyone for neglecting to test every email “blast” they send (because I’d be that lazy) but I am chiding folks for not testing it once. Writing a text file and sending it isn’t that hard.
• Reimplementation of email. I really hate getting facebook messages, and direct messages on [microblogging service], and each and every other fucking social networking site. Just send me email. Real email. It works, I have a good process for dealing with it, and I don’t have to screw around with anything. Thanks.
• The Twitter Fail Whale. Dudes. There was a while about a year ago, when a bunch of geeks were sitting around and thinking, “you know this twitter technology is going to be really cool, and there are a lot of possibilities here,” and there were, and I suppose there still are, but the truth is that I see the fail whale several times every day, and most of the cool things that I wanted to see in twitter two years ago and then a year ago (real xmpp support, track, federation, custom filtered feeds (a la LJ-style friends' filters),) still haven’t materialized. I think the addition of OAuth is a great thing, but it’s a baby step.
• The continued prevalence of IRC. Dudes discover jabber/xmpp. Thanks. A while back, I had a lot of nostalgia for IRC, and its true that IRC has a lot of history and is a standard to be reckoned with, but jabber is so much more elegant, secure, and provides features (persistence, logging, independence, etc) without having net-splits and complicated ad hoc registration schemes.

That’s all for now. What do you hate about the internet?

Several notes to with regards to information fast that I’m undertaking. And because this is the internet and this is my blog… Well here goes:

• I had initially suspected that the cause of my ailment was the special thinkpad-track point driver that deals with scrolling didn’t get updated when I upgraded to jaunty. This turns out to not be the case, as I had a freeze (again in firefox) just moving around with the arrow keys. That theory gone.

• C.K. and I determined that--counter to my supposition--the slight/occasional clunking noise is probably the drive head parking itself, and doesn’t seems to correspond with the problem. So replacing the drive is both awkward (weird form factor) and not likely to fix the problem

• I installed emacs-w3m on both computers. It’s not entirely intuitive. There are debian/ubuntu packages, but if you install the emacs-snapshot package, then the sequence is upgrade to the latest emacs-snapshot, install w3m-el, uninstall emacs22, and then add w3m code to your emacs init file (.emacs).

  It’s, remarkably nice, particularly for looking up links while I’m writing something and reading content-rich pages. The key-bindings are, by default excessively lame and require attention (which I haven’t figured out yet). I always thought that emacs web-browsing was way too dweab-y for me, but learning that it’s actually really cool is a good thing indeed.

• This isn’t a real fast, as I am still using firefox a little bit bit, and I suspect that I’ll always need to have it installed, but I think it’s generally good to not have firefox be the default environment for everything that isn’t emacs or the terminal.

• I’ve basically been avoiding my RSS reader during the course of this experiment. Which I need to spend some time tending to, at least so that I can start using some other reader. This has been an issue since I switched to Linux, and I’ve failed to come to anything that I really like. I’m tempted to use the gnus news reader to read the RSS, but I fear this might be incredibly awkward/complciated for a very small amount of pay off.

• By moving web browsing, insofar as it needs to occur, into emacs, the windows I see are: stuff inside of emacs (mostly org-mode and writing); and stuff inside of terminals (mutt, Micawber, bash, etc.). As a result, I get the feeling that all of my windows look the same. I’m interested how people might solve this problem themselves. How do you make an entirely text-driven, undecorated environment have texture? Have… variety between windows that might provide some context to specific tasks.

  This is an aesthetic/design question more than a programmatic one I guess. I’ve tried playing around, a little with colors in emacs, and still use the default for emacs23 because the others seem difficult to read. I’ve tried different fonts (in both programs) and I’m quite wed to my current font. I’ve tried transparency (which doesn’t run well for emacs on the laptop)… I’m thinking that adding Conky, or more informative widgets might be helpful, but I’d love to get some feedback from you all…

So, my laptop (where I seem to be doing most of my writing these days) seems to have developed a wee-glitch. It seems, that (somewhat randomly) the system just freezes irrevocably whilst, get this, scrolling on twitter.com. No really. I’ll be minding my own business, and suddenly firefox freezes, I can’t interact with the window manager, I can’t kill the window server and start over, I can’t switch to another virtual terminal to fix things, nada. Hold down the power button and restart. Interestingly throughout all of this the mouse still works, as if to taunt me.

I’ve not been able to produce the freezing in any other application, and I’m concerned that it might be hardware related (disk access has been sort of weird lately, it’s an older computer,) it could also be related to some of the dependencies in Awesome 3.3. I’m waiting for things to sort of even out on a number of fronts before I assign blame. (And switch distributions of GNU/Linux.)

My response, of late, has been to just avoid the web entirely. This isn’t a huge problem, as I try and avoid the web as much as possible. I mean, I lead a very networked/digitally connected life, but it turns out that most of it isn’t web-based on a day-to-day working sort of way.

The experiment, then is to see just how far in my avoidance of the web. The “information fast” isn’t a startlingly new idea, and I’m sort of interested in seeing how this affects my computer usage on the whole. Information fasts work, by forcing/allowing you to take a cold turkey break from the information that you consume and then re-evaluating your information consumption habits and seeing what’s worth sticking with and what’s not. So basically I’m using this as an exercise to see: What changes, if I say “ok now web-browser,” what tools and workflows do I develop, and is this a better way to work?

Hints and suggestions would be helpful. There are some practices that I need to get set up with, and using more effectively. Twitter and identi.ca via IM (check). Offline, multi-computer RSS reading. Offline access/browsing to common resources (eg WikipediaFS and other fuse resources; YaOddMuseMode for the EmacsWiki, some way of reading c2 wiki and so forth.)

We’ll see where that leads me. Do people have suggestions for tools in this (and other directions)? Has anyone done this before? Would anyone else be interested in doing the fast with me?

I look forward to hearing from you!

Update: I had a non-twitter related crash. I was browsing, loading a new page and scrolling on the existing page. Bam! I have, in response: upgraded the think-pad touch-point (or whatever) drivers to their jaunty versions as the sources were disabled during the upgrade.

I’ve also, in this vein, installed and have a fairly effective copy of w3m, an emacs-accessible browser, running. While I don’t think this is the way forward forcing myself to use an editor-based browser, might allow me to focus more effectively and rely on the Web more for information than for entertainment. As it should be!

This post is the spiritual sequal to my (slight) diatribe against database powered websites of a few weeks ago. And a continuation of my thoughts regarding the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Just to add a quick subtitle: Oracle is a huge vendor of database software, and about 18 months ago (? or so) Sun acquired mySQL which is the largest and most successful open-source competitor to Oracle’s products.

With all this swirling around in my head I’ve been thinking about the future of database technology. Like ya’do…

For many years, 15 at least, relational database systems (rdbms') have ruled without much opposition. This is where Oracle has succeeded, and mySQL is an example of this kind of system, and on the whole they accomplish what they set out to do very well.

The issue, and this is what I touched on the last time around, is that these kinds of systems don’t “bend” well, which is to say, if you have a system that needs flexibility, or that is storing a lot of dissimilar sorts of data, the relational database model stops making a lot of sense. Relational databases are big collections of connected tabular data and unless the data is regular and easily tabulated… it’s a big mess.

So we’re starting to see things like CouchDB, google’s big table, Etoile’s CoreObject MonetDB that manage data, but in a much more flexible and potentially multi-dimensional way. Which is good when you need to merge dissimilar kinds of data.

So I can tell the winds are blowing in a new direction, but this is very much outside of the boundaries of my area of expertice or familiarity. This leads me to two obvious conclusions

1. For people in the know: What’s happening with database engines, and the software that is built upon these database systems. I suspect there’s always going to be a certain measure of legacy data around, and developers who are used to developing against RBDMS' aren’t going to let go of that easily.

At the same time, there’s a lot of rumbling that suggests that something new is going to happen. Does anyone have a sense of where that’s going?

2. For people who lost me at when I said the word database: In a lot of ways, I think this has a huge impact on how we use computers and what technology is able to do in the near term. Computers are really powerful today. In the nineties the revolution in computing was that hardware was vastly more powerful than it had been before; in the aughts it became cheaper. In the teens--I’d wager--it’ll become more useful, and the evolution of database systems is an incredibly huge part of this next phase of development.

I’ve been reading the autonomo.us blog and even lurking on their email list for a while, so I’ve been thinking about “free network services,” and what it means to have services that respect users' freedom in the way that we’ve grown to expect and demand from “conventional” software. This post explores issues of freedom in network services, business models for networked services, and some cyborg issues related to network services. A long list indeed, so lets dive in.

I’ve been complaining on this blog about how much web applications, the web as a whole, and networked services on the whole suck. Not the concepts, exactly, those are usually fine, but suck for productive users of computers, and for the health of the Internet that first attracted me to cyberculture lo these many years ago. I still think that this is the case, but I’ve come to understand that a lot of the reason that I have heretofore been opposed to network services as a whole is because they’re sort of brazen in their disregard users freedom.

This isn’t to say that services which do respect users' freedom are--as a result--not sucky, but it’s a big step in the right direction. The barrier to free network services is generally one of business models. Non-free network services center around the provider deriving profit/benefit from collecting users' personal information (the reason why open-id never caught on), from running advertising along side user-generated content (difficult, but more effective than other forms of on-line advertising because the services themselves generally provide persuasive hooks to keep users returning,) or when all else fails, charging a fee.

So to back up for a minute, I suppose we should cover what it means to call a network service “free.” Basically, free network services are ones where fundamentally users have control over their data. They can easily import and export whatever data they need from the providers system. That users can choose to participate in the culture of a networked computing by running software on their computer. There are ideas about copy-left and open source with regards to running code on networked services that are connected to these ideas of freedom, but this is more a means to an end (as all copy-left is) rather than--I should think--an end in itself.

Basically, data independence and network federation or distribution. Which takes all of the, by now conventional, business models and tears them to bits. If users are free to move their data to another service (or their own servers) then advertising, leveraging personal information are all out of the window. Even free software advocates look at this problem and say, we have a right to keep network services closed. Which is understandable given that there aren’t many business models in the free world. While a lot of folks in the FNS space are working to build pillars of free network technologies, I think some theoretical work on the economics are in order. So here I am. Here are the ideas:

• The primary “business” opportunity for free network service is in systems administration, and related kinds of tasks. If the software is (mostly) open source and design and implementation can’t possibly generate enough income, then keeping the servers running, the software up-to date, and providing support to users is something that provides and generates real value and is a concrete cost that users of software can identify with and justify.
• Subscription fees are the new advertising. In a lot of ways what a particular service provides (in addition to server resources) is a particular niche community. While federation changes this dynamic somewhat, I think often people are going to be willing to pay some fee to participate in a particular community, so between entrance fees (like meta-filter) and subscription fees (like flickr) you should be able to generate a pretty good hourly rate for the work required.
• Enterprise Services. We could probably support free network services (and the people behind them) by using those networks as advertisements for enterprise services. See a service on the Internet, and have a company deploy it for internal use on their intranet, and have the developers behind it sell support contracts.
• Leach money from telecoms. This is my perpetual suggestion, but while most of us Internet folks and network service developers may or may not be making money from our efforts in cyberspace, the telecoms are making money in cyberspace hand over fist, largely on the merits of our work. It’s not really possible to bully Ma' Bell, but I think it’s a part of the equation that we should be focusing on.
• Your Suggestion Here. The idea behind business in the free network service space, is that providers are paid for concrete value that they provide, rather than speculation on their abstract value, and as a result we can all think about business models without harming the viability of any of these business models.

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

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

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

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

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

I talk to people from time to time about working in cyberspace and successful new media participation. If I were a hipster, I might even say, “I do SEO,” but I’m not, and I don’t, really. The truth is that I don’t have a good, simple, answer to the question, “How do I succeed on-line with social media.” I do have a lot of ideas on the subject, as you might expect (many of which I’ve already written about here before.) The core of my approach revolves around a conviction that word of mouth--like offline--is the most effective way to promote events and products in cyber-space, with the corollary that “meatspace” connections are among the most powerful and valuable “cyberspace” resources.

During college I spent a long time reading and rereading an essay by Samuel R. Delany, called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue about the process of gentrification in Times Square and it’s affect on cross-class/cross-race social/sexual contact. The argument was that environments and geographies that promoted situations were individuals would come into contact (randomly, casually) promoted opportunity, satisfying social interaction, and interesting conversations in a way that “networking” opportunities (conferences, workshops, cocktail parties, etc.) couldn’t. In illustration of this, Delany describes situations from talking about philosophy in the pornographic theatres of the old Time Square to finding a vacuum cleaner repair service in the checkout line of the grocery store. Furthermore, “contact” between people of different classes (as was present in the pornographic theaters of the old time square,) promotes the destabilization of class-based injustices.¹

Contact has been an incredibly powerful and useful concept for me in a number of different contexts, because it provides an method for affecting social change in “every day life” and in creates a notion of “politics” that’s closer to “people interacting” and further from something tied to institutions of power (“government,” etc.,) which suits my disposition. I think, largely the internet is most powerful when it promotes something closer to “contact” and further from something that resembles “networking.” And by powerful, I mean a number of things: most likely to positively affect people’s work, provide meaningful opportunities for commerce and social relationships, to develop unique cultural environments.

While there are opportunities for contact on contemporary social networking websites, they mostly specialize at helping you find people who are actually quite like you, like people you know in real life, people who are interested in the same things you’re interested in, and people who are friends with people you know in real life. That’s not contact, in the sense provided by Delany.²

There is still, I think, contact. I think microblogging (twitter/identi.ca) particularly with “track” features,³ represents (or did) a move away from “networking” to contact. The communities that form around open source projects, promote contact, as they are often interest specific, and contain members with disparate skills and backgrounds. Once upon a time, general population/topic (ie. non-project specific) IRC channels (chat rooms) were an immense source of contact for their users.⁴

I’m not sure what this means. I remain convinced that contact is a useful and important way of looking at social interactions. I also think it says a lot about my interests in open source. I also think that as technologies and memes in cyberspace (eg. blogs, social networking, microblogging) develop in ways that promote “contact,” and eventually become “networking” opportunities not that the latter is bad, but it is an important conceptual shift. It’s also quite likely that we’d be able to see what ideas are going to be the next big thing based on the degree to which they promote contact. There are other implications I’m sure, but I’ll leave those for another time.

I’ve been tweaking the site for a few weeks off and on. Busy schedule and what not. A while back I made a list of things that needed to change: updated links, clearer sidebar, better system for the “mini blog” (coda), and different interior page designs, and every few weeks I’ve gone through and changed something, until now, when I think I’ve done enough to warrant a small post about these changes.

In the right column I took all the menus and put them in little “JavaScript” toggles, so that they take up much less room, but when you click on one of the links in the “menu box” above the menus expand for your viewing pleasure. I also did some cleaning up of the links list, and have expanded the list of sites that I’m linking to. I like giving the “real content,” a lot more attention, while still keeping all the “sidebar” content accessible when possible.

The second big part of this revamp was to create a more customized “home page” for the site that displayed content productively and clearly, without and endless overload of content that word-press can provide if you’re a) wordy like me; b) not careful. Basically I now have a bunch of custom “loops/queries” to pull the right kind of content onto the home page, and I can append “recent articles” lists, to provide access to the content without displaying all of it. On the essays, I even use a toggle script for a couple of entries for some added punch.

The final piece--this last weekends work--has been to change the “interior” page so that when you go to see a specific article the page is much less cluttered. I’ve also started using disqus for comments, and with some CSS magic I’ve gotten pretty satisfied with how this works. I really like having unique interior pages.

If something doesn’t work on your browser, or you have additional suggestions, I’m all ears. Back to your regularly scheduled programming.