Topic: Internet

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.

So I get a Google alert in my RSS reader for “emacs,” this way when anyone mentions that operating system text editor on the Internet, I know.

I did it, initially, as a gimmick. The interesting thing, is that it’s been really interesting. In the grand scheme of things, I’m pretty new to emacs so I’m like a sponge for new information. I’ve learned, chiefly, about emacs-fu, which is a delightful little blog.

Perhaps more interesting is the fact that fully half of the sites that pop up on the emacs alert are sites that I’m already familiar with, or worse (better?) things that I’ve written. This leads me to think that the active discussion/community regarding emacs is actually pretty small, in a day to day sort of way.

It’s possible that most people who use emacs don’t feel the need to really talk about it, but given how vehemently many people feel about emacs that doesn’t seem terribly likely. It’s also possible that emacs’ niche is shrinking in the face of competition from the Java IDEs, TextMate, and Firefox.

Another theory is that most of the conversation regarding emacs happens on the emacswiki, and that the sort of “here’s a protip, about emacs,” is too much of a niche, and not the kind of thing that’s really appreciated, so the blogging happens here and there. Or… no one’s doing search engine gaming/hacking (SEG? SEH?) on emacs, so the alert isn’t clogged up with crap from dweebs and industry.

In whatever case, it’s interesting. Or interesting enough.

Onward and Upward!

(ps. sorry for the short post and the weird schedule this week. Next week should be better. --ty)

I recently read the anti-web manifesto, which I found refreshing. If you haven’t read it, go do so. If your too lazy to read it, the gist is that we’re trying to get the web to do too much (ie. run applications, pixel-perfect layouts) and that quality browsers can’t exist, because what we use the web for these days is beyond the scope of what the web was intended to do. The document is also refreshingly snarky, in the long tradition of both hacker writing and the genre of manifestos in general, but don’t let that offend.

I’ve been known to say, “I hate the web,” which is an ironic thing to say given my line of work, but I think it’s mostly true. To be fair, I don’t hate the web, I just hate what it’s become: the only way to access what happens on the Internet. It’s great for publishing and accessing content, but for applications? Somewhat less great.

The Manifesto centers on the notion that the perfect web-browser is impossible to implement: Browsers have to implement inefficient scripting languages, and multiple implementations of the various web standards (because you have to implements both “how it should be done,” and “how the old, broken implementations that everyone wrote pages to, did it,” with the end result being that browsers themselves suck. And it’s not a case of just writing the perfect browser because, current expectations of the technology is flawed.

The course of action (theses?) are to:

• Eliminate CSS; use a little basic HTML formatting instead. Let the text stay in its natural format.
• Only basic font faces ([sans]serif, monospace), relative sizes to be supported.
• Eliminate scripting.
• Separate information from empty multimedia content: use Flash for the latter.

I’m not sure that I agree with this solution. I think HTML 5 will take care of the multimedia content, and I think flash should be avoided. I think scripting should be the first causality of the post-web Internet. I don’t see CSS as a problem, (the author sees it as a symptom of design orientation in website creation), though I’d concede that it’s used improperly most of the time.

Given this, I think four bullet points from tycho regarding “The ‘Post-Web’ Web” are in order:

• Eliminate JavaScript and all scripting in web-environments. JavaScript is the table of the ‘aughts and ’teens.
• Develop/concentrate efforts on alternate (ie. non HTTP) protocols to facilitate the movement of dynamic information across the Internet, including well implemented clients.
• Develop robust/lightweight cross platform frameworks for developing applications on the desktop. Where’s GTK-on-Rails?
• Write a HTTP server that provides navigational meta-data automatically with pages, and a browser with the ability to construct site navigation based on this information. This way the architecture of the site depends on the file layout and a configured file, but is generated locally. Basically gopher, except designed in the casual manner of the ‘aughts.

Any takers?

In the last six months or year (or two years) I’ve written a lot here, about technology open source software and related topics. In a way this was a new thing for me. I majored in Women’s Studies and Psychology in college. I wrote about gender and queerness, and knitting for many years. My big thing (or one of them, at any rate) is science fiction literarture, where I’m interested in very historical/“soft” sub genres. While some SF writers feel ghettoized by the “hard”/“soft” boundary in the genre, I love the fact that there’s (a very popular) field of science fiction that isn’t based on firm understandings of existing science/technology and tightly formed elaboration thereon. I love being non-technical on some level. Despite my current technological musings, this is very much a past that I must contend with.

But I digress.

Before all of this hippy-drippy stuff, I wrote a lot about technology. Back in 1999/2000/2001 I was reasonably active in the discourse surrounding mobile technology. Indeed through this I discovered blogging itself. There are a couple of subtitles to this that I think are appropriate: first, the state of mobile technology about 10 years ago was much different than it is today. Much different. Laptops were significantly bigger and less portable, cellphones were much less “smart,” and disconnected PDAs were the light of the times.

But sooner rather than later, I broke down, bought a nice fountain pen and just kept a notebook when I was away from my computer. It worked. Eventually I got a cellphone, but I always tended toward the “dumb”-phone type that were incredibly simple. They worked. The paper worked. When I went away to college I got a 12 inch iBook (as my only computer) and it was great. Small laptops with wireless and long battery life seem to be a great solution to the “mobile technology” problem, and as--at the time--it seemed like my life/work was trending around in a different direction, I stared writing about different things, which when you think about it is all for the best.

For the intervening years, I’ve been sort of cool toward a lot of gadgetry. Laptops are small enough and powerful enough and frankly cheap enough (considering) to account for a huge percentage of digital mobility, that the remaining need is actually pretty small. And it was my experience that mobile technology wasn’t there, for the in between spaces yet. Recording bits of minutia in a usable way on a PDA was never quite as quick and seamless as doing it either on a computer or with paper.

Eventually I’ve gotten back into writing about technology, but by this time it was a different kind of technology: unix/linux stuff, cyborg stuff, tools for writing, usage methodologies, and organization stuff. The technology itself (for me) has taken a backseat to the ways we use technology.

But in the mean time the mobile technology has mostly caught up. At least somewhat. Cellphones became a lot smarter, the data transmission got cheaper (and unlimited), syncing tools through google and mobile me (if that’s your style) make the experience much more coherent. In a lot of ways, the fact that cellphones and connected devices can--independently of host computers--interact with the internet has made them infinitely more useful. And the fact that, at least in my case, do this via protocols that we’re already familiar with (REST API’s or email) makes this even more attractive.

I also think, at least in some cases, that a lot of this “web 2.0 stuff” makes the most sense in the context of mobile devices. While I don’t often think about twittering, or dicking around on facebook when I’m sitting somewhere with just my Blackberry, the applications that connect with these web 2.0 services on phones are really clever. Maybe it’s that limited functionality apps make more sense on phones/PDAs than they do on desktop computers, but that could just be me. In the end, I’m still dubious of all this “web stuff,” but I think it at least makes sense now.

So there.

Onward and Upward!

I’ve always rather enjoyed this post that I wrote about instant messaging programs. My issue is that I use IM a lot. A lot. I communicate with colleagues, friends, and frankly, if you want to get a hold of me, IM is often the best way to do this, and frankly for a lot of communications I prefer it to the phone.

Nevertheless, IM clients, on the whole, are mostly pretty bad. Right? They distract, they filter information poorly, they take up a lot of room on the screen, and are as a class pretty inconsistent. This is probably because no one really expected people to use instant messaging technologies in a serious way.

But here we are.

The leading IM client, really, for people who rely on this kind of thing is Pidgin (and the other libpurple based clients), which make it possible to connect to lots of different services at the same time but only have one roster/buddy list. It’s a good solution to the “multiple networks/accounts” problem, but the truth is the quality of the implementation varies, and the user interface is… awkward and rigid¹.

There is, however, this program called mcabber that provides the ability to connect to one xmpp account, in a terminal-based (ncurses?) environment. It’s not perfect, nothing is, but its a lot better than the other options.

While I’ve not been able to switch to using only it for my IMing needs for a couple of reasons, mostly related to my xmpp server/provider, but I have used it exclusively for a number of days and the experience is pretty good. Reasons I like it:

• Everything lives in one window, and chat windows have equal footing, like buffers in emacs, say. That’s really nifty.

• The key shortcuts are really simple, and quite intuitive. Thats key in a terminal application

• I can run it in screen, and pull the screen over ssh to my laptop when I’m not in front of my computer. Though xmpp is generally really great about multiple connections, sometimes it’s best to not have to deal with that fussing.

• I like that it supports PGP encryption, though I don’t have anyone with whom I can encrypt conversations with, but that always seems to be a minor detail.

  Though, this isn’t to say that it’s all good. There are some problems that I’ve had. Though to be fair, my complaints here are much fewer than with most other XMPP clients, so that’s a good thing, right? Complaints:

• No support for service discovery. Which means you have to install psi--basically--if you’re serious about getting the most out of XMPP. This is… unfortunate.

• It takes a lot of work to get configured and get key bindings set up. I’m mostly of the opinion that it’s always best to give users a set of key bindings to start with and then let them customize as needed, and the default screen layout isn’t particularly useful or economical (put the status window at the top, and make it smaller, for starters).

• It doesn’t support multiple connections/user-ids. This is a biggie, and while I don’t (really) object to the fact that it doesn’t support other protocols, I think the reality is that most users probably have and need to use more than one identity at once, so that’s a noticeable hole.

• I’d also like an easy interface for producing system notifications give me a setting option to pile messages (username, excerpt of x characters, time) to a pipe (|) and I’d be very happy indeed.

• I couldn’t decide if the fact that there was only one “text entry field” (mini-buffer) for all outgoing message buffers. Which meant that, particularly with scroll back, that it was easy to cross contexts unintentionally.

My last complaint isn’t so much a complaint about the software itself as it is a complaint about the instant messaging space in general. Basically, I think there has to be a way to filter this kind of communication. Ways to setup client-independent rules regarding statuses, auto-responders, and notification level. I’ve said that this should be “along lines of procmail,” but I don’t quite know what, even that, would look like. But someday, it’s coming, and I for one can’t wait.

But all in all. It’s a great program and you should check mcabber out, if you’re intense about jabber/xmpp and instant messaging (and living in the console).