tychoish, now without a net

This is a post that’s just meant to keep you all updated of projects that I’ve talked about recently, but haven’t had time to write or talk about extensively about recently.

• I’m writing. Not as much as I’d like, but pretty regularly. I expect that come hell or high water I’m going to start the new fiction site the week of July 14th.

• I suspect in my next post to tychoish I will cross the 400,000 word mark for posts on this website (and tealart which proceeded it). Thats crazy, though my verbosity should come as a surprise to no one. Also, I think that July 1 is probably as good a marker as any for my first anniversary of blogging at tychoish.com. It’s been awesome, and I’m not stopping anytime soon.

• I’m making a formal effort to learn how to program in Python. I’ve gotten the O’Reilly “Learning Python” book, and I’m enjoying it, and I think I’m at a point where I might actually be able to make a go of this.

  • I’ve done a little programing in the past, mostly a little PHP (for the website) and some shell scripting for day to day stuff that I do around here. But I’ve never actually tried to learn something, opting to just tinker around instead. But I’m starting to get to a point where there are things that I need or want to learn how to program, and I’ve decided that python is probably the best/only language that I need to learn. It seems to combine both straightforwardness with flexibility, and does away with the aspects that I find most annoying about other languages (Perl, not straightforward, lots of modules; PHP, not incredibly useful outside of website programing; ruby, oy; C/C++/Objective-C too much overhead; anything else, too marginal). So I’m looking forward to it and enjoying it mightily.
  • Having some moderate level of proficiency in a real programing language will–with luck–be helpful in the job search.

• Another high level project for me at the present is my job search for the intermediate term. I think I want to go to graduate school at some point, but I’m more interested in doing something in the interim that might flow into graduate school eventually, and something that isn’t just marking time. More than anything it’s weird to go from having things so thought out and certain-seeming, to not throughout at all. I’m not sure that this is a bad thing, it’s just wierd

• Now for a couple points of geekery:

  • I’ve changed the color scheme for my terminal window, and as a result have found myself using vim more often. It’s teal, which is better than the navy that it was before. Easier to read, and it’s sort of fresh and inspiring. Oddly. I like vim a lot, though I must say that I need to spend some time learning emacs key bindings, because I don’t know them and Cocoa on the mac uses them, so not knowing them is a hinderance.
  • I might have mentioned this earlier, but for the past eighteen months or so I’ve been using subversion (svn) to organize/collect/backup my files. I write a lot (no really) and spend my working day and night munging text files in various ways and it makes a lot of sense to me to use version control to stay on top of this. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about switching to git recently and I think I’m going to go through with it later this fall. Here’s my thinking:
    • My current setup involves having svn repositories on my hard drive, and then backing up dump files semi-regularly to a flash drive and to the cloud. This replicates a lot of functionality of git (the local repository) which makes commits fast and frequent, but I’m unsatisfied with the backup/offsite component.
    • Though svn solves the problem with copying and moving files and their histories which CVS (apparently) couldn’t deal with, merging and reverting to previous versions is a royal pain in the ass, as a result I’m not prone to doing it. Git would help ameliorate this problem.
    • A lot of svn “features” (tagging, etc) rely on you lying out the repository in a certain sort of way from the get go. This is fine if you’re a programer, but the truth is that I don’t often think to arrange my writing projects and whatnot in this way, and as a result a lot of this is lost on me.
    • All the cool kids are doing it, and I’m nothing if not a joiner. (Ha!)
  • A few weeks ago I completely hosed the installation of ruby on my computer. Lets not talk about it. I have something marginal working but I should probably do a reinstall of the operating system, but I’m resistant.

I think on the whole I’m doing pretty good, I’ll (of course) be in touch.

permalink • • zero comments
tagged: journal • technology

So part of my job deals with listening to interviews conducted as part of a documentary about the civil rights movement. So as a result I get to hear all sorts of people talk about the civil rights movement, with a bunch of different perspectives. From people who knew and worked with Martin Luther King personally, to liberal (and radical) white activists, to community leaders and so forth.

I also apologize for the political digression, I usually try to avoid discussions of current politics, because they are difficult, and so often fail to address the important issues that are at play in our world. As an aside, thats why I write fiction. But with this as a backdrop, I was posed with a question that I think bears a little bit of collective pondering.

I was listening to an interview with a former member of Lyndon Johnson’s administration, who was largely saying, “look at all the wonderful things we did,” and I have little tolerance for this, because it’s clear that this is really just posturing. I mentioned this to someone I work with and they said, (as many liberals these days say,) “yeah, and he was probably better than what we have now.”

Of course, being the ornery sort that I am, I’m wondering if this is really the case.

Johnson started (or escalated) a war that was a farce, and lost control of the political situation to such an extent that he deployed federal troops to put down riots in ‘66 and ‘67. Let Johnson also not avoid responsibility for J. Edgar Hoover’s behavior in the 60s. There are also plenty of reports that Johnson, was as a person, something of a creep (though we don’t have a good comparison on this point) I think it’s not worth ignoring.

And while Johnson is credited with passing the civil rights act and the voting rights act (and what has Bush done that’s that good?), I’d argue that the civil rights acts are hardly an example of timely and forward thinking/progressive government. Not that I think they’re bad, just that they were “as little and as late as possible.”

So what do you think?

permalink • • coments
tagged: academia

So these Creative Commons Licenses are pretty popular with the kids today. And they are. Creative commons is a great way to compensate for some of the short fallings of the contemporary copyright system that tends to privilege corporations rather than individual content creators. I’m a big fan, and I often find myself talking about the goodness that is CC in the world, so this is not a critique of the copyleft movement or anything, but rather a critique of the mood that a specific kind of Creative Commons license.

Lets back up. The basic idea of a creative commons license is to grant permissions to do things like distribute/share or create derivative works (e.g., video adaptations, audio books, fan fiction, and so forth.) which under a standard copyright would be infringing behavior and technically illegal. In some situations this seems perfectly absurd, after all if someone likes your work enough to put creative energy into a related project, they’re probably not the kind of people you want to sue. Creative Commons licenses amend this situation by explicitly allowing behavior that doesn’t harm the creators business model.¹ The hope is that by explicitly allowing certain kinds of usage, “the commons” benefits, and possibly as a secondary effect the original creator benefits even more (by gaining greater attention and then selling more of whatever it is that they sell.)

Creative Commons gives you lots of options in terms of licensing, so that you can customize whatever you want. You can allow commercial usage (like the GNU-GPL and the GFDL which wikipedia uses)², you can choose to allow derivative works (or not) or as long as the derivatives are distributed under a compatible licensee (”Share Alike;” this is akin to the “viral” aspect of the GPL), and you can choose to require attribution with all future distributions or allow people to distribute without attribution. Or any combination of the above.

One combination that I’ve seen a lot of recently forbids commercial use, forbids derivative works, and allows redistribution with attribution. This is probably the most restrictive CC option around, and it seems to be the default. This isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, this is a great license for anthologies where the producer of the specific work might not have total control over all the works–for instance–or other works where it’s really crucial for the body of work remain together as a unit. I don’t think it makes a particularly good general purpose license. In effect what it says is “I own it, and if you want to do my marketing work for me, thanks–not that you would have asked anyway, and not that I would have complained elswise–sorry if you want to do anything more…” While it’s a step in the right direction, I’m not sure that the gift to the commons is very great.

I think I’d be more comfortable if the derivative-attribution were more default for more people, with or without the share-alike. It just strikes me that the really exciting thing about CC is the clauses allowing derivative works. Particularly with attribution and no-commercial clauses, the derivative works do nothing to hurt the original creator that I can possibly fathom, and are often a boon to the original creators. Most importantly, it seems that the opportunity to inspire new work and/or act as a substrate for new work is a huge gift to the commons.

So I guess what I’m objecting to is the sort of feeling of being put-upon as the the only benefit of the license is doing a favor for the creator. Which hardly seems fair, particularly if the creator is also selling the content in some capacity. Creative Commons, at the core–at least for me–is about creating a more cooperative/collaborative relationship between creators and consumers, and the no-derivatives license seems to run counter to that.

Just my gut feeling, I apologize if it’s a little raw. I think in fairness I’m not entirely sure that the ramifications of this work are always very thought out, that people assume a connection between commercial use and derivatives, or something, so I don’t think a lot of creators are always making this decision based on all the facts, but I think it’s paramount that when people use Creative Commons and other free licences that they think about all of the ramifications.

permalink • • one comment
tagged: interwebs • media • technology • writing

I was reading this article in review of the kindle and I had a couple of thoughts about digital distribution and media.¹ Now of course, I’m pretty sure that the Kindle is not the end all device for digital text, but I think it gets a lot of things right, and is a good development for technology. Some thoughts:

Reasons the Kindle is a Failure

• DRM. If you’re not allowing people full access to their files in open formats your not really selling the books. Period. This is a hugely ideological complaint, but here the impact: the prices are too high given that they’re not really selling you the book.
• Given the above, I think 5 dollars (half of what they charge you now) is probably the most they could reasonably charge for a book and likely something within a dollar of $2 USD is probably ideal. Mass Market paperbacks are 7 bucks, which is lower than the ten that an ebook. More on pricing.
• The device is overpriced and they nickel and dime you to death for service. Getting books/texts converted cost 10 cents. Certain RSS feeds cost recurring fees. I think either they have to subsidize the price of the device and then have a service contract (that includes credits for a given number of books, possibly tied to amazon prime?) or keep the price of the device high and really give the service away for free.
• The obligatory complaints about the objects design and interface.

Reasons the (right) next “Kindle” could be amazing.

• If they fix the price/DRM/etc. problem, sales go up, total revenue goes up, it’s more successful.
• Given the always on internet, people buy a kindle book for different reasons then they buy a regular book: You buy a kindle book because you have time, you’ve read the first couple of sample chapters and you want to read more. You buy a dead tree book because you see it on the shelf and you think you might enjoy reading it later on. I have lots of print books in my collection that I’ve not read. I think you’re probably less likely to collect digital books in the same way.
• Digital distribution does away with overstock, and most distribution costs, which means the reasonable limitations on publication becomes editorial/production staff time, and available good manuscripts.². This doesn’t mean that there won’t be codices anymore, they just won’t be produced in the same way, and they won’t be bought and sold in the same way.
• If this or some sort of digital reading device becomes more ubiquitous (and cheaper and therefore more accessible to a greater segment of the population,) such a device could be the main way that we we do a lot of our reading of text, and I think it isn’t hard to imagine a revival of greater interest in book length forms as result of the proliferation of such a device.

Just a few thoughts at any rate.

permalink • • zero comments
tagged: technology • writing

Here’s another post in my general theme of “using a technology/comp-sci metaphor for creativity, new media and productivity” … In the generous sense.

For the non technical: compilers are computer programs that take raw computer code and turn it into something binary that a computer can run. This makes it much easier to write programs, because compilers let programers abstract certain functionality¹, and because compilers can do some consolidation and tuning as they run.

While traditional compilers are used for the heavy duty code situations and applications written in C (and C++ and Objective-C, and so forth), when you think about it there are lots of situations where creators, in the digital world, are making something that is then processed by a computer script. In a way, web pages are like that, (though that happens every time their accessed rather than once.)

The wiki program that I use, ikiwiki, works in this way by taking a directory of files and turning into web pages that I can read in the browser. This is basically how the wonderful LaTeX typesetting engine works. Also, interestingly, I suspect this is how most pro-level video/audio editing apps like FinalCut work (make a lot of edits and then render something out. Edits are made as a series of instructions to XML file, which the program then renders or compiles.)

So what’s the benefit to this? Here’s what I’ve come up with:

• It makes it easier to write software that works with your data. Editing text is easy, particularly when that text is created either by you or by a program in a regular and expected way.
• Compiler modeled systems are less taxing generally on the system. Most of the time, what you’re doing with the computer is just editing a text file. That’s low power. Then when it comes time to compile it just has to crunch through some data. And then it’s done. In WYSIWYG and live editing, the computer has to be working constantly to get from you to what you see.
• Any repetitive task can be automated or template, and the chances are that there are a very limited repertoire of kinds of documents that you’re making. I write academic papers in APA format, (or did), formal letters, and full page knitting patterns. That’s about it. I have templates on hand that mean that I can push the same block of text into a template and get a perfectly formated document. I can push the same block of text between the wiki and the blog and it’ll compile (basically) the same way.
• It makes it more feasible to work in smaller files. I wrote a book in Word, and while I started writing the chapters in separate files, it quickly became apparent (and I think this holds true). If you’re using a program like Word, the best bet is to make really long files, and keep projects together in one file. On the other hand, if you’re working in plain text² it’s trivial to mash-up a bunch of text files, and this makes it easier to edit and organize a project.

So more than anything working in this way makes a lot of sense. Though I think to be fair there is a learning curve (but isn’t there always?). The question I’m asking myself (and you, dear reader) is other than the general improved efficiency and cleaner workflow, is there a bigger extrapolation or application of this that we (or I) could apply to another phase of the creative/productive process? Rather than just automating the presentation, is could someone take the model where some sort of raw file is “put together” later and have that assumption shape the way that they create content?

I’m not sure what that would look like, or even if it’s a good idea, but its something to think about.

permalink • • zero comments
tagged: productivity • technology • writing