The first project is that I’ve been working on (re)designing a website with/for my friend Scott, who is a composer/voice actor/podcaster type. While he has a lot of HTML skills he’s never done any of the–even very elementary–web-programging (a la the PHP code/templates that wordpress uses) that one needs to do to have nifty dynamic websites.

So I’ve been working with him to use wordpress to build a basic portfolio site and blog. It’s a pretty straightforward kind of a site, but you have to know wordpress pretty well to know how to design a theme so that all of the right content ends up in the right place. I’ve been using wordpress, more or less since the beginning so it’s the kind of thing that I’m pretty good at.

The second project has been to design and implement a version of the tychoish.com theme for a new wordpress installation that I can deploy for various members of my family who want to use wordpress as a note taking platform. While I use a wiki (with a blogging plugin) for this task personally, the editing interface for wordpress along with its metadata system (tagging and categories) makes for a really ideal notebook-solution. There are other features like comments for annotations and revision tracking for storing document history that have been really helpful, and make this a really good solution.

And of course the fact that I’m building these sites around wordpress makes a couple of things possible. First, it’s open source so we can run these notebooks and portfolio sites on our own (or rented) hardware, and the data is easily exportable into a lot of very useful formats if we ever want to change. Second, the software isn’t very resource intensive to run, particularly for lower volume sites like these, so it can run almost anywhere.

The truth is, that the biggest part of both of these projects was talking to the people who would be using the software to figure out what they already did with their existing websites/notebooks, and then figuring out how to do the same thing with the new solution, and finally also learning enough about what they wanted to do to be able to figure out with they might do that they couldn’t do before.

I guess that makes me something of a consultant.

Weird.

Even more wierd is the feeling that I actually like doing this. And I find it ties together a lot of things that I do. My “day-job,” does similar sorts of things (for different kinds of “clients” with different sorts of problems), and what I’ve done thusfar is very much inline with my musings here about open source and productivity, which is kinda cool.

In a weird way, this is very much inline with my initial forays into the web-world which seemed to center around organizing creative types (in the largest sense) on the internet. This was nearly 10 years ago, but the threads are there. That’s something that I’ve realized as I’ve started new projects and new directions recently: even when I think they’re new and novel, I realize that they resonate with things I was working on and thinking about during high school.

Go figure.

At the moment, however, my biggest “linux transition” thought is a workflow issue. Basically I’m thinking about how I’m incorporating both a dual monitor setup and a laptop into my workflow. Because of the way that Awesome works there’s a sense in which both of my monitors really can function as two different computers. Not to mention the fact that I also have this really rather awesome (and capable) laptop.

My first approach to using two monitors was to put them right next to each other, and I arranged my windows such that I put half of all the tasks on each screen an what I found, was that I used the “middle” half of both screens” almost exclusively, rather than balancing my computing evenly across both screens.

So my second strategy has been to position the screens so that I have a primary screen dead in front of my keyboard, and then a secondary screen on my right at a forty five degree angle. The primary screen has things like writing projects (work, fiction, blogging, research) and my email and IM client on the main screen. Then “refrence” things on the second screen, so like the web browser lives there, my notebook (also a web-browser, but to a local site), IRC and microblogging, and the Calendar app all love over there. I’m not sure that this is totally ideal yet, but it’s a good start.

As an aside, I’d love to hear how people with more than one monitor make use of all the extra screen space. Particularly Awesome users.

My second issue/question is that my desk is too small to hold both the new monitors and the laptop, so I tend to have the laptop stacked off to the side and take it down when I want to go in the other room or do something that’s still mac-centric. I wonder how people who have two distinct computers (laptops and desktops) deal with and make use of having two computers. The data synchronization isn’t an issue, I think I have that pretty well sorted out, it’s the work-flow issue. Particularly in a couple of weeks when the computers are functionally equivalent.

Thoughts? Suggestions? I can’t fathom that this is something that people, far smarter and more creative than I, haven’t already solved. I can’t wait to hear it!

Onward and Upward!

On the whole I think things in the land of tycho have been really good of late. I’m writing, I’m learning and settling into a new computer and text editor, I’m working (perhaps not enough, but nonetheless), I’m working on an exciting academic project, life is good.

But having said that it’s been one hell of a week(end).

My grandmother, who has been a mostly faithful reader of this site for many years except recently when her recovery from knee-replacements has kept her away from her computer, recently came down with a rather nasty gut bug. So my father and I rushed across the state and spent a rather long time fighting with various medical red tape to get her admitted to the hospital and then to begin shepherd her through various thises and thats. The end result: she’s healing quite well, and doing pretty well.

For a while there she was the only patient conscious in the ICU but a few others have started to wake up. But at the moment of this writing I’m pretty sure she’s the only patient doing a crossword puzzle in the ICU. Truth be told, we’re mostly just waiting for a single room to open up on another floor (because of the gut bug, they have to keep her in semi-isolation, and I’ve spent a lot of time wearing gowns to keep everyone else safe).

So this has been an adventure. And it’s not over yet. But at least I have a good laptop and the wireless at the hospital is top notch. Oddly I haven’t been able to connect to IRC (I think the hospital is blocking 6667). Wierd.

The one thing that is the most striking is that I’ve been, since Saturday really tired. Yesterday I took a nap in the afternoon with my boots on and still slept a full night. I’m making a point of writiting at the hospital while I’m just hanging out rather than waiting till I go home at the end of the day. Lets hope this helps.

Onward and Upward!

I’m not particularly of the mind that stories are ever really “done” as much as they are abandoned. I have an old writing friend who rewrites and re-imagines his stories every so often, and if you listen to him talk you’d think he’s spent the better part of the last decade revising the same couple of texts. While I haven’t read the latest iterations and am purely speculating here, I suspect that I’d call each of these iterations independent stories/projects. Because I like that kind of accounting. And we all tend toward the same basic characters and story structures anyway, besides it’s not like you can actually write a rip-off of yourself.

And the truth is, that’s more or less what I do. A lot. Station Keeping is a loose rip-off (adaptation?) of what would have been my second novel that I wrote about some tens of thousands of words on before and during my senior year of high school. The novel fell apart, I liked the story, but I didn’t have any way of rescuing it as such, and I was busy, and by the time I could get back into it, I needed to be working on a project more like Station Keeping and less like a lame high-school student’s second novel.

Knowing Mars has a similar history. Right before the home stretch of the first novel (see above) I took a week of writing time to put together a prologue. I took the “Matthew Connor” character (named, unsurprisingly “Matthew Connor,” why? because you can’t rip-off yourself) fast forwarded him fifty years or so, and had him as an old man relate the history of telepathy in his world. Sound familiar? Anyway, the story from that novel was dumb by that week of playing around reads the world like a series of novella length stories. I stole a lot more from that novel for Knowing Mars, and it manages to neither be an extension nor a retelling of the earlier story, but it’s still a rip-off.

Projects don’t disappear, and I don’t think that they end, so much as they go away for a while and with luck come back a little more wise and rich.

But projects do occasionally conclude. And projects like Station Keeping–because of it’s “season”-based structure–conclude more often than others. I’m taking a break to let the first three chapters of the new novel project sink in, and spending some time with other important projects like Trailing Edge and Station Keeping. It’s good to visit the “old friends,” and I think it’s important that stories–particularly semi-published ones–get to a point where it’s acceptable to abandon them.

It turns out, that Trailing Edge, which I thought was just a different perspective on a similar sort of universe to a story that I abandoned last spring, is really more like a prequel to that story, and I think there are parts that I wrote last spring that I’ll be able to drop in largely unaffected into the “new” story. In the end, while I think it’s been a fun trip and a good experiment for Critical Futures, I’ll probably hack it down to short story length, (it’s going to end up in the novelette range) and rewrite it so that I can (try to) sell it to the old media. Plans subject to change and the interference of reality, of course.

On the theme of “projects ending up somewhere you didn’t expect,” Station Keeping–after 16 “Episodes” (well 15, really) of normal “column like” stories, for the remaining eight episodes of the second season I’ll be writing in the form of a screen play. Because screen plays are fun to write, pretty easy to read, and because Station Keeping serves as a regular “break” from the larger stories that I post on Critical Futures having a screen play is an even better “break” format. I was planning on doing season 3 as a screenplay and I think it’ll be fun to just… start a little early.

That’s what I’ve been working on in terms of fiction recently. So there.

Onward and Upward!

ps. I think it’s interesting that by breaking my “don’t post about writing rule” in honor of NaNo, I’ve also taken to inadvertently breaking my “don’t post endlessly about your projects,” rule. In any case, I’m on it now.

Production

Given the nature of my work (both vocational and avocational), I use and rely on computers extensively. While I’ve done a lot of things to backup my computer in the last few months and days, I cannot abide by a system that won’t do what I need it to when I need it. While most computers are pretty reliable these days, the understanding that a computer is going to be there and ready with the programs and the data is as much a matter of trust as it is technical capability. Users need to be able to trust their production systems to keep their data, to run as expected, and to not fail them.

Another factor is user-comfort. While I’m not 100% comfortable with my new computer yet, I know that this is something that comes with time, as we use a system more, we all learn quicker ways of accomplishing common tasks, and it becomes easier to perform our most important computing tasks, and the “price” of converting a project from your mind/speech/analog source goes way down. That’s a good thing.

A lot of my own musing on this site about productivity and technical usage, could be classified as being about making systems and users more production ready. While I think hacking on technology is really interesting, and technological development is really important, at the same time doing things with technology, is always the more important thing.

Linux

Chris and I are pretty technical users, admittedly, but I think we also have a pretty low tolerance for stuff that just doesn’t work. Which says something really fundamental about the status of Linux in 2008. While there are rough spots, the applications are pretty much right where they need to be. For instance, even before I began to seriously consider getting a Linux desktop set up for my own purposes, the vast majority of the software that I use on OS X has very viable Linux ports. While the general usability of Linux-based systems have gotten much better in the last couple of years (thanks Ubuntu), the ecosystem is very vibrant, and that’s incredibly important.

Having said that I think we’re probably still a few years away from seeing an Ubuntu/Linux Mint that’s ready for the general public. There are a few things that need to happen before that, such as:

• Hardware makers need to continue to make and build computers with Linixes pre-installed. Ubuntu’s installer isn’t more painful than windows’ or OS X’s, and convincing average users to switch for ideological reasons after they’ve just bought a new computer is difficult. Also, given hardware compatibility issues, having companies like Dell and HP make sure that there’s support in the OS for the hardware is a great service.
• The interface needs to get a lot better. This is “just wait and see” issue mostly, but I think GNOME needs work, and without a really good and fun UI, Linux is sunk.
• X11, the primary graphics/interaction layer for all (?) unix/unix-like operating system GUIs (other than OS X) needs some work. Dual monitor support is lackluster, support for laptop displays is tenuous, and while I don’t think we should throw all of X way, a lot of the UI problems are rooted in X’s limitations. Of all the parts of the UI in most Linux systems, X is the weakest link. While this is a pretty low level concern, making X better will make the whole experience better. And that’s what counts. I may be able to get really impressive system up-times, but unless I can get impressive up-times for X, the former isn’t worth much.
• End User distributions (Ubuntu, etc) and bare-bones distributions (Arch, Gentoo, etc.) need to become even more distinct. Ubuntu should probably attempt to use a more “rolling release” approach to package inclusion and should attempt to cover up command line access the same way that OS X does, say, and the bare-bones distributions should probably avoid delusions that they’re going to capture the end user market, and focus at being even more awesome bare bones distributions. The great thing about Linux distributions is that they don’t really compete with each other and while the geeks might know this, I’m not sure the general public does in the same way.

That’s what I have for now, do any of you have ideas about what more Linux needs before it’s production ready for the general use user?

Which is a really interesting argument, I suppose, if you’re living in the 1980s (or before really.) In the earlier days of computing and open source, having unencumbered access to source code meant something very different. Most computer users ‘back in the day’ had a stronger programing background, and computer systems (software and hardware) were less reliable and required more tinkering. Open access to source code had a functional meaning that was fundamentally different from what it means today.

Today, most computer users and users of open source software don’t have a particularly strong background in program. My desktop, with the exception of a few encumbered media codecs, and a closed source video driver, is all open source. While I write shell scripts that do cool things, and I can dabble in PHP when needed, I’ve never tinkered with an C code, and never really done anything that could be rightly considered a “program.” And this says nothing of all the people who use open source programs like Firefox, Open Office, and Pidgin.

While I am a fierce proponent of open source (as traditionally defined) in a strictly pragmatic sense, the fact that I can download the source code of software is largely irrelevant to me on a day to day level. This is to say that the “source” in “open source” is as much a symbolic identifier as it is a meaningful technological feature.

So what does open source symbolize and signify in the contemporary moment? This is a huge question that I think we requires a non-significant amount of attention. Is open source really about larger freedoms in our society? Is open source software about smaller/more concrete freedoms in terms of flexible and customizable systems? Is open source just the only viable way to practice the UNIX philosophy of small modular tools, rather than large monolithic tools?

There are also other angles that we can run with this question. Is open source the only way to gain a large enough user base (cite prevalence of LAM(P/P/P/R/J) stack vs. Microsoft’s server technologies?) Given current economic instabilities, might open source be a more viable way of generating wealth and participating in an authentic economy?

I expect that I’ll probably be tossing this question around, in various ways for years to come, but you have to start somewhere.

Onward and Upward!

Though to be honest, I think that the lag is a bit more than 30 seconds, but I’m not sure and I’m not going to quibble for now. Actually I’m not convinced that this redeems twitter, given the number of other features that they’ve turned off (can’t delete posts anymore, can’t elect to not receive updates from people you follow, not to mention track) but it’s a start. When they get Oauth and Open Micro Blogging implemented,¹ I won’t worry. But in the mean time, there are people on twitter that I want to be able to talk to, and this is a much appreciated move.

In any case, what this week has taught us is that real time services are here, and that companies and developers are beginning to realize this and provide services based on that. The man said “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing,” and I don’t think you need an ubergeek to know that realtime is on the way.

Which means, its my turn–as a resident uberworkflow/user interest geek–to parse out what this means. You might think that this means that there are geeks who are wanting as much data as possible as quickly as possible. But I don’t think that’s the case. Really i think it’s about, having as much control over that data as possible.

Ken Sheppardson, one of the folks behind enjit, talked about wanting to have was all about consuming as much data as he could. said ” I only want a notice every hour or so when somebody’s talking about something I care about, but I want it in time to participate.” (Edit Note: I totally flubbed up the reference and introduction to this section and have edited to make me seem like less of a dip. Apologies.)

The secret is that real time means push, and the truth is I think that I read less content and spend less time reading content that comes at me real time, than I do reading the same content that I have to check on in a special client or on a web page. Why?

Because the time/energy spent on checking disappears. So if twitter is coming at me in an IM, I can trust that there’s no reason to visit twitter.com, unless it’s to look at someone new to follow. And it’s easy to tell if I’ve seen something before, and avoid reading the same content that people blast all over the internet again and again. (Ping.fm, how I hate you). And when you get your data real-time, it’s easier to make filtering decisions, which is a good thing.

Converging these data streams in real time/xmpp (ff, twitter, laconica, etc.) means that your data comes to you, not that you get more of it. So from a usage/workflow perspective, I think this is wonderful.

This is a question that I find myself wondering about a fair deal, and I think the answer–which I haven’t come to a firm conclusion on–has a to do with the potentials of the wiki medium.

I should jump in and say that, while wikipedia is a great reference, a great tool, and an important project, because it’s the example of “what a wiki is” it has shaped how we think of the medium in a way that I’m not sure is particularly useful. The biggest wikia projects are encyclopedic studies of Star Wars and Star Trek, and while their material isn’t quite suitable for wikipedia it is certainly in the same vein and tone.

The encyclopedia form has been revitalized by the wiki, by decentralizing the review process, democratizing (more or less) the focus and the creation of articles, but most importantly by removing the “space limitation” on content. Nevertheless I continue to be convinced that wikis as a forum are capable of so much more.

On the one hand, big projects, like the kind that might be recorded in a wiki, are never really completed as much as they are eventually abandoned. That sounds pessimistic, but I think it’s ultimately productive: eventually a project has done what it needs to do, and what with perfection being unattainable, the productive thing to do is move on. The decision of when to do that is perhaps one of the most important decisions that a creator/artist can make about a work.

But who makes that kind of decision about a wiki? Is there a point where people just abandon a wiki? While wiki’s are collaborative, that’s not to say that they don’t have leadership (wikipeida’s leadership organization is epic, for example,) but who makes these kinds of decisions?

While I’m prone taking an entire wiki as a single document, the fact that a wiki is really a network of tightly connected texts surely has baring on the answer to the question.

Software projects use the concept of “stable releases” and a “release cycle” to ensure that a project can both continue to develop, and exist as finished cycles. The debian project has it’s own procedure for encouraging ongoing development of their system/packages and creating rock solid stable systems.

Additionally, while most wiki’s have semi sophisticated version control systems, they for the most part don’t have a concept of “branches,” which might be helpful for implementing a stable wiki/wiki branch system. Even ikiwiki, which can use systems like git to store history, doesn’t have a good display system for switching between branches/revisions.

I’m not sure–of course–if there are really good answers to these questions. While I haven’t begun to post any of them, there are a number of projects that I’ve been playing with in my mind (and locally on my own computer) that are wikis, but I’ve been hesitant to let them go into the wild in part because of issues like the one discussed above. And above all, if the wiki format is going to grow away from and independently of the encyclopedia format, I think we need to begin discussing questions like that.

So there. Onward and Upward!

I’m working on a long novel/novella that fits loosely into my interest series of “historiographical science fiction” stories that I’ve been working on for a while now. It’s a totally new world, and deals with a couple of different groups of characters active in the same–singular–moment of time, but who all have a very different historical perspective and lineage.

Some of the characters live on a human populated outpost dozens of light years away from Earth (and have lived on this world for generations), other characters have never left the Earth system, the main characters belong to the space faring class, and have spent most of their adult lives going between worlds (and due to relativity) which makes them hundreds upon hundreds of years “older” than everyone else.

It also has elements of military SF and political drama, the story is all about living on the cusp of great social change which I thinks is pretty relevant. In all I’m pleased.

A lot of people say that ideas for novels are cheap and bountiful, and that writing a novel isn’t as much about having a good idea as it is about having the stick-to-itness to finish writing a (pragmatically) 80-100 thousand word document. Indeed NaNoWriMo is founded on this kind of idea. While I don’t disagree that stubbornness is a much needed skill in a novelist, nor do I disagree that ideas a bountiful, I’m not sure that good ideas are a dime a dozen, nor do I think that flawed conceptual work can be entirely compensated by a skilled execution (or inversely that briliant conceptual work can hide less than perfect execution). These are two factors which have a sliding and dynamic relationship, and that’s part of the reason why fiction writing is an art and not a science.

So with that out of the way, allow me the indulgence of a little introspection. My previous stories have been interest enough, and I’m pretty sure that my execution has improved in the last six years, but my largest regret as I go over my older stories is that there is often some huge conceptual failure. The tensions are too simple. The characters don’t feel/read as being distinct enough. The plots are simplistic and a bit improbable, and there’s a point in a story where I always seem to loose the forward drive–not in writing momentum, but in the plot–where the characters are sort of looking at each other saying “hrm, what next,” and that’s bad.

For this project, I took the position to focus on these conceptual issues. Not because I’m satisfied with my technical ability at writing fiction, but because that’s something that I can a) fix later, and b) will improve gradually with time, as long as I’m attentive to that development.

The last time I planned out a novel, I concentrated on getting the “what happens next and next and next” details of the plot worked out. I have a stack of note cards in my desk drawer that outline all of the scenes (settings, present characters, plot goals, etc.) and as I began to write the story, I realized that I didn’t have a clue who the characters were, or any sort of deep understanding of the world outside of what the characters were doing. That was a problem.

This time, I opened up a new page in my personal wiki and I just started writing. Not the story, but stuff about the story, the major characters, the big political groups and institutions that I’d be dealing with, stuff about the technology as it related to the plot and the customs of the worlds I knew I’d be dealing with. And after a few weeks and several thousand words, I realized that I needed more not just more details so that I could write a stronger outline, but more things going on, more tension.

About this time I listened something Cory Doctoorw said in an interview about how the key to dramatic tension was “making it more difficult for the key characters to get what they wanted on every page, and as long as that happens, you’re doing your job.” Which you can’t do unless your story is very short (which presents its own dramatic challenges), or you have a lot going on in your story. Given the advances of digital technology, we (or I) can sometimes lose track of the fact that even though novels are long, their length needs to be worthwhile and justified.

So I added stuff until it felt full, and I was excited to start. Not just because new projects are exciting to start, but because there was so much going on. And in the end? my notes directory has almost 7,000 words, which is about half what the story itself has these days.

Oh and you’re wondering about the title? When I started the story I thought it was going to begin in medias res with a warship in siege of a colony world, and it would be about the Siege, hence the title of this post, and the working title of “The Siege of Al-Edarian,” but it doesn’t begin in the middle of that story, and there isn’t really a Siege any more. So I need a new title. There are worse things to be in need of, though.

Onward and Upward!

For some unknown reason I tried to upgrade to Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) last weekend. Which failed epically. So I reinstalled, which has gone… less well?

Explaining the problems I’m having are incredibly complicated. Everything works well, except the dual monitor support, which is just bothersome. I have a work around that seems to work pretty well, but I’m not sure if pretty well = production ready. When I’m using it, I’ve taken to running all of my important windows in screen, so that if the X server panics and I have to kill it, I can pick up right where I left off with everything. I think I mostly have the problem kicked, but I’m not quite to the point where I trust it.

I’ve also traced down about 80% of the problem, but I don’t have quite enough to file a bug report.

And the truth is that I’m adjusting pretty well to the linux world. Emacs is a giant ball of confusing, but that’s to be expected, and I have it rigged to read my normal text file format and do all the right highlighting. The scope of what my fingers know how to do is pretty limited, but it’s a start, and I’m purposely going slow so that I can learn things the right way. The last time I mentioned something about emacs on the blog, Jack emailed me something about emacsclient and emacs server mode, which I haven’t totally absorbed yet.

My current conclusion is that I’m going to have to find some sort of new way of managing and interacting with my text editors. Rather than have a bunch of different instances of the editor open (as I might do with vim or TextMate) I’ll probably figure out some way to work with two instances of emacs open, one for each screen and just move things between them. This is subject to change.

Here’s the rundown:

• Other advances made recently:
  • I have figured out a cool way to implement multiple mail profiles using mutt. I have a lot of different email addresses/identities that I need to send email from (real life contacts, professional contacts, work contacts, etc.) and being able to automatically switch? A divine thing.
• Advances yet to be made:
  • I need to figure out/use a news reader on the new computer. This requires segmenting my current OPML file into “laptop reading” and “desktop reading.”
  • I need to figure out some web-browsing solution, that really works. Vimperator seems to be the Awesome default, and while it’s the best Firefox around it’s still firefox, and FF doesn’t impress me on a personal level. (I use a browser incidentally, and mostly for viewing static pages, not as an application platform.)
  • Still don’t have my calendars in a place where I can start accessing them on linux.
  • I’m still using the laptop to serve my personal wiki/notebook(s), though I have a clone of the repository on the linux machine, which is really the inverse of how it should work.

And a thousand other things… The truth is I think it’s all going pretty well. I will of course keep you up to date

More importantly, probably, it proved that Unix and Unix-like operating systems were viable and usable for desktop use cases. While we’ve been able to run BSD and Linux on home computers for years, I don’t think we’ve thought of Linux as being something that anyone could run without needing a lot of technical background.

Ubuntu Linux followed this trend, pretty persuasively. Ubuntu makes desktop unix-like experience possible. Which is a really big thing. Chris and I are both using Ubuntu these days for our primary desktop computers, and it’s been really interesting to compare notes. One thing that we keep coming back to, is that despite the fact that the core of the OS is great, the user interface (UI) is tragic. OS X proves that it’s not only theoretically possible to have a nice UI, but it’s possible to do that on a unix-like system.

As an aside, I’d bet good money that Apple has an in house version of Aqua/Cocoa/Carbon/CoreServices (all the UI and application frameworks that make OS X, OS X) running on the Linux Kernel. Betcha.

And by tragic, I don’t mean that GNOME and KDE are unusable, but they’re flawed. GNOME doesn’t use space efficiently, it’s applications are functional but not exceptional (and because of the way the GNOME project is there aren’t many ‘third party’ alternatives), and it feels sort of behind the curve. It works, and it does everything that you might want in a graphical user interface (GUI) but it’s not exceptional.

Thankfully KDE fails for completely different reasons. It’s attractive and usable where GNOME isn’t, and the interface is unique and exceptional where GNOME feels stale and aged. But the applications aren’t nearly as compelling, and it suffers from having an interface/look that’s too flexible, such that it’s pretty easy to get a setup that looks like crap. Not to mention the fact that the kind of rich GUIs that KDE emblimizes don’t mesh particularly well with the mostly hacker audience that Linux (and it) attracts. But that’s a larger critique of the GUI paradigm, which isn’t quite on topic.

So where does this leave us?

I’d say the biggest shortcoming of linux systems is the window management options. I like Awesome and I think there are a bunch of people who might really like it–but it’s not for everyone, and I’m admittedly not up to date with enough of the other options to provide a really clear analysis, but I know that this is the the next big issue for open source operating systems.

I’m not sure that I know enough

This shouldn’t be particularly large surprise, they sell goods at prices that undercut all of the competition, and probably aren’t that much above the core cost of the goods (if that).

And yet the companies are profitable. How? My understanding is that they take their gross income and invest it in short term things–bonds, stocks, and the like–which generates enough income that the entire operation can turn a profit. In the mean time, to make sure that the trains run on time (ie. that they make payroll, keep the lights on at the retail locations, etc.) they borrow against their non-liquid assets, which are busy earning the profit.

Depending how widespread this is (and I’d be inclined to think that it’s pretty rampant) we can explain a couple of phenomena with this understanding. First off, it explains why the market tends to move as a whole. Not because investors panic when they see the number dropping on the trading floor, but because they know that if company B doesn’t perform at a certain level company A can’t perform either.

That’s pretty straightforward.

The more disturbing realization is that the entire basis of our economy isn’t about the exchange of money for goods and services, but rather the exchange of money for other money. The hope being that by exchanging money a lot, it will somehow turn into more money. Which given the legal fictions of the banking industry, it does. More or less. Until it doesn’t. Enter the present.

In the banking industry–the one that was recently bailed out by the federal government–we know this. Banks make money by charging interest on certain kind of transactions, and while this is kind of creepy and odd when you think about it, it’s not surprising. The exchange of material goods, on the other hand is completely absurd and troubling.

The conventional wisdom for the last hundred years, or so, is that big corporations are able to be more successful because of economies of scale and standardization, the largest lesson that I’m taking away from this right now is that while big corporations might be more efficient, they might not–in a concrete sense–be more successful/profitable. Outside of the profits made by ridding the money-holding-financial game.

One of the reasons why I’m interested in open source software is because it proposes and requires a very different sort of “economic” (in the generous sense) perspective. Open source is very business centered, but the exchange of money is all centered around wealth-for-services, rather than wealth-for-money-holding, say. These kinds of alternate (and it’s sad that it’s the alternate) means of generating and distributing wealth are the inevitable conclusion to the current economic crisis. It’s unclear how long the current system will linger and limp, but eventually something better/different will emerge.

This isn’t the kind of subject matter that I typically write about on tychoish, and I don’t want you to worry that I’m going to turn into some sort of political blog. Except insofar as I’ve always had a (lower case p) political side focus, I think it’s interesting to think through these kinds of issues to try and figure out what’s going on. While I think change is afoot, and a more authentic economy is on the horizon, this is a systemic change that will not come easily.¹

Onward and cautiously Upward!

Yeah, me too. I don’t have a particularly good answer for it either. I think the sociological/psychological reasons are pretty straight forward: the conversations linger because the medium is time-shifted, each party of the conversation has to contribute less resources to keeping the discussion going. This is why flame wars are/were such a big issue on listservs and usenet, or at least part of the reason.

This isn’t to say that flame wars aren’t still an issue on the internet, or that usenet/listservs aren’t still important, but I think a lot of the discussions that happen on the interent happen elsewhere these days. Usenet and group email, are still prevalent, but I think the inhabitants of both tend to be hacker types or old timers (and more likely both), and these are two groups who are on the whole pretty adept at how these kinds of communications work.

In the last five to ten years communications on the interent have really changed. We’ve gone from very structured mediums that come with built in threading, topically segregated conversation, with some semblance of push functionality and even web-based discussion forums, to unstructured and chaotic mediums like blogs, blog comments, and wikis.

While I am a bit nostalgic, the truth is that these changes have enhanced the ways that we can collaborate and really democratized the internet, and this is unequivocally a good thing. At the same time, as I visit really active conversations in threads or prolific ravelry, my brain hurts. There’s too much to follow, too much noise not enough signal, and the strict chronological display changes the way that people read and respond non-productively (and probably is the root of most of my complaints).

There have been a number of “hacks” that various communities have deployed to help keep conversations together. Threading blog comments, or including comment numbers makes the comments on a given post easier to read help, but they don’t change the fact that conversations on the new internet are really hard to organize and orchestrate, and after a certain point, enter.

I don’t want to be a hipster and say “no one has genuine conversations on the internet anymore,” but I think its really clear that the kinds of conversations that happen online (these days) are very constrained by the kinds of technology that are used to convey those conversations both in terms of how conversations develop, but also in terms of who can and does participate in those conversations. While this is in and of itself not a particularly striking revelation, I think it’s also clear that we–as citizens of the internet–cannot just say “it’s the internet anyone can access it,” and let it go at that.

Sorry if this is a bit disjointed, hopefully I’ll figure more things out in a bit.

Onward and Upward!

When people ask me “what do you do,” I say “I’m a writer,” which is true, not just because I’ve got a novel going on in my head (and who doesn’t?) but because my day-job is also as a writer, so it doesn’t feel so fake, but when I say “a writer,” I almost always think of space ships and distant outposts of human civilization, and not web technology. Not that I dislike the internet or the software that makes it go, but because the space ships are probably the most important/meaningful (to me) things things that I write.

In November, answering “What do you do?” (write.) “What are you writing?” (a novel) seems much less remarkable because of NaNoWriMo.

In the past I’ve been bitter about NaNo, sometimes because I’ve not been in a place where I can get started, or because I feel like it’s teaches the wrong lesson about novel-length writing, or whatever. This year, I’m bitter. To each their own, I say. I’m not participating because I have a project at a crucial stage, I feel like the biggest objective of NaNoWriMo isn’t “get a lot of writing done,” but rather “prove that almost everyone is capable of sitting down and writing a book length thing, if they can get through the crap.” And I know this. I also know that I can write at NaNo-like speeds should I need to.

But.

I am going to, for the month of November, take a brief reprieve from my “don’t write about your writing on your blog” rule, and for the benefit of NaNoWriMo spirit write a little bit about a few writing related topics. I’ll be writing other things as well like linux and open source and knitting, but I think it’ll be cool to reflect a bit on Critical Futures and my current project, and some stuff about my writing process. Because that’s what I have.

How many of you out there are doing NaNo? For the first time? If you write novels in some other way?

I wrote about my editor issues last week, which are progressing slowly. I think I need. I’ve started to use a lot of console emacs for more day-to-day stuff like writing blog posts and takin notes for work. Probably by the time this posts, I’ll have relented and started to use the GUI version for some things.

But, contrary to popular beleif, there’s more to using linux than just text editors. Though it doesn’t seem like it very much. Particularly when you write a crap ton. Let me review the kinds of things that I’ve been working on, and what I have left to do:

• I’m using the vimperator plugin for Firefox, which makes the browser behave a lot more like vim. Which makes sense in a browser, somehow. It basically means that I don’t have to use the mouse very much, except when I want to, and that’s a good thing, given how awesome works.
• Awesome works great with both monitors as I expected. In a way, it’s not so much that I got a new computer, as it is that I got two new computers. And they’re “both” really peppy. It does mean that my desk is way too small for everything I need to do with it. The linux, the Mac. I got a stack of paper to read yesterday, and I tried to set it on the corner of my desk and it was commical how little flexabile room I have on my desk. I’m anticipating a move pretty soon, so I don’t want to get new furnature quite yet.
• I’ve been using the “terminator” program for terminal emulation, and it’s delightfully simple. Wheras with most terminals I think “wow this sucks,” with terminator, I’m only a little grumpy that the copy and past commands are bound to non-standard key combinations.
• I still think pidigin stucks, and I’ve been over this before, but the more I use it, the more I can recognize flaws with Adium, so it’s very much a “you can’t go home again,” situation. Pidgin is an instant messaging client, and Adium is based on the same core software, but packaged for OS X.
• It took me way too long to figure out how to turn on the font smoothing so that everything doesn’t look like crap. Which it did, but it meant some config file editing, because all of the gnome-settings functionality won’t work because it doesn’t like the dual monitor set up. I don’t mind, because I’m only using bits and pieces of gnome as it is, but it’s worrying. I love this computer and this interface, and I wouldn’t like to work in some other way. But I’m acutely aware that except in very controlled situations, I wouldn’t trust it to non-specialized users.

I’ll probably continue to write lists like these, as much for your edification (and mine!) as for record keeping. Thanks for reading!

(I wrote this entry in emacs, and I think it has me sold, particularly if I can get all of the important modes to come on by default, which I haven’t yet. I’m also running in console mode and I’m getting this weird “echo” cursors which hang on the screen in an annoying way that I can’t predict. running “M-x redraw-screen” cleans things up, and if nothing else running that every so often in an automated way would probably clear things up, unless this sounds familiar to anyone?)

This is probably the result of the fact that most of my personal text processing (like 80%) is prose of one form or another, with the remainder being very limited code-related things. Vim is great if most of what you’re doing is jumping around in a file, re-factoring code, and hunting for little bugs to tweak. It’s not so good if you’re writing a novel or a story and you only put carriage returns after each paragraph. I like vim a lot for short editing tasks, for writing email, for proof reading a document. For heavy duty lifting? I’m not yet decided.

I should introduce another character/factor into this story: my editing habit. Basically rather than grouping similar files into one window/buffer and toggling between various files, I really like having a bunch of different windows open. A bunch might understate it. At this moment I have 4/5 TextMate windows open, and I should probably have at least 7 (if I were more on top of my tasks) and more like 10-15 wouldn’t be out of the norm.

Console vim works great with this usage paradigm, open a bunch of terminal windows, open them to the documents that they need to edit, and tag the terminals properly in Awesome, and I’m good go, except we run into problem 1 (editing prose in vim is bothersome). I’ve tried (and quite like) a GUI vim called “Cream” that totally fixes problem 1, but utterly fails at problem 2 (the usage paradigm).

So this leaves me? Using a hodge podge of solutions. I’ve taken to using gedit–of all things–for most prose writing. Gedit is the Gnome editor, and if you customize it right, it’s reasonably functional. I haven’t been able to hack Markdown support into it (and I haven’t bothered with vim, so I must not be to keen upon it), and it won’t post blog entries like TextMate, but it’s decent, and I can have a number of different container windows, so I don’t end up with a window with 20 different tabs open that I can’t find anything in, and I use vim for anything that it seems like I can get away with.

Jack has been pestering me to convert to emacs for a while now, and after all this fuss, it’s tempting. Emacs can handle blog posting, it’s fundamentally a bit more like TextMate,¹ with “longlines-mode” it seems to handle prose pretty well, and the quirky things that I like about TextMate like its Screenwriting Bundle and LaTeX support seem to be handled a bit better in emacs. The multi-window usage paradigm is counter to the general emacs way of thinking, so that might be an issue. But the largest problem by far, is that to a newbie² like me it’s like an alien world. Surprisingly enough, (e)lisp code is pretty easy to read, and the key commands are pretty easy to deal with.³ So who know, I might make the switch yet.

Stranger things have happened.

Clearly I was being a little over the top, but it’s more or less true. I’ve come to ways of using the internet and digital data that means I spend as little time in a web browser as I have to. While the obvious–and predominant–reason for this is generally that I think most browsers are utter failures, there’s another reason that I’ve not written about explicitly: browsers lead to inefficient data consumption methods.

Browsers, with the exception of some very subtle trickery are an entirely “pull” based technology. That is to say, there’s nothing in your web-browser that comes to you and says “hey there’s something new out there for you, come look.” It’s as if the entire web is out there, just waiting for us to check it out and see if something new has changed.

This is a huge issue with the internet, particularly as data begins to migrate from our own computers to the internet–by way of web-based applications. Web programmers/content creators have a couple of ways of counteracting this problem. First, they can do little programing hacks to make the content rearrange itself even if there’s little if any new content, so it looks like it changes. Adding “interesting dynamic” content is a sort of “user hack” that gets people to check back more often with a website, and is pretty low tech solution to the problem, and sites like facebook and twitter are really good at this.

The truth is, that if you have a pull technology, where users have to check to see if there’s anything new, the only way to make it work like a “push” technology (one that notifies you when there’s new content), is to check it again and again and again. If it’s automatic the frequency is high enough it almost looks like a push. This is how most twitter-apps work, for instance. This is also how most email clients work. Though email is a push (because other people push email to your server) in most cases you have to pull email yourself, but that moves us more from the “usability effects” to “technological semantics,” and I digress.

While this might seem like a really minor complaint about how we access technology it has a profound impact on the communities that we form on the internet and how we use technology on “web applications.” Here are a few of examples:

• “Critical mass” for online communities that are push-based (twitter, IRC channels, listservs) are much smaller than for pull-based communities (web forums, blogs). An IRC channel seems active if there are 25 people in the room and 5 people really active. A listserv with 200 subscribers is lively and bustling. A blog needs thousands of regular readers before comment threads start to seem lively, and most “successful” websites have tens of thousands of regular visitors.
• Pull based applications must be both “useful” and “compelling,” and I often find that the later interferes with the former. This is mostly a personal preference issue, but I think it’s important, and I’d like to think that my concerns are rooted in efficiency rather than curmudgeonliness.
• Data that we have to go out and look for means that we spend our time on the computer looking for new data rather than consuming data. I, begrudgingly, spend a lot of my internet time for instance reloading my LiveJournal friends page, because there’s no way for me get that feed all rolled up and pushed to me (even semi-pushed, like RSS.) I feel the same way about twitter, frankly.

The astute among you will realize that RSS works over pull technology, and I accept this but I think that the interaction paradigm for RSS is more like push based services. Because while your RSS reader has to pull from a lot of feeds every time you check for updates, you probably only see “unread articles,” if there are new items in your feed reader. So maybe the push/pull–while rooted in a technological division–also represents an independent interaction paradigm.

Maybe it’s not that I don’t like web-technologies (because I so clearly do), but rather that I want them to suck a lot less? It’s not so much that the applications are “in the cloud,” but that the ways we interact with them (like browser based interfaces versus desktop apps built around XML-RPC) are flawed.

Onward and Upward!

This was my first “BarCamp”/unconference, and I really liked the way it felt. There was a lot of knowledge being shared, there was a lot of collaboration, and there was a lot of energy in the room. I go to Morris Dance Ales, and Knitting Camp for the same reason, really. Intense interest and activity around a shared sub-cultural identity/activity, is a really powerful and invigorating thing. This is probably the same reason that “(gay) men’s gatherings,” science fiction conventions, and the “Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival” are so appealing to so many people. (I dare anyone to find something else on the internet that lists all of these things in such close proximity).

One thing that the conference had that I think made it particularly interesting is that there was always a “back channel” on an IRC network for the whole conference. While there were downsides to this (correlating peoples handles with their faces was difficult), this was incredibly fascinating. It also made the sessions go off better: people who were confused were able to ask questions of the room, it kept the background noise down which was better for participants, and since there was only one room for the whole conference it gave me a sense of what was going on at the conference as a whole.

Someone pretty early on said something like “this is literally the subtext of the room,” and they were right. I’m a fan of creating/organizing IRC/Jabber (XMPP) MUCs back channels for various conversations. We use one at work during conference calls to pass links/notes between our side (to keep down the number of voices/unmuted lines), and we had one for the Open Microbloging Meeting which made that really productive. It’s a cool idea.

The other great thing is that I got to watch other really geeky people use their computers. While I’m not a UI (user interface) designer, UI/UE (experience) is something that I’m very interested in and have an opinion or two about. One thing I noticed was that there were more Macs in the room than you might expect. Part of this has to do with the fact that the market share for non-enterprise laptops is something that Apple has basically clobbered, I’m sure. Mac laptops are also more popular among the young hacker crowd (which drupal developers are.) There were some PCs, and more than a few people running ubuntu on laptops, which I don’t have the guts for right now, thats for sure.

In terms of actual usage, there actually wasn’t as much of the “hardcore hacker” stuff that you’d expect. I didn’t see a lot of terminal usage (except for the woman who had tsch visors and wrote a pretty complex SQL query by hand on the projector. to answer a question after her talk.) I saw a lot of people who used the gmail web app. Virtually all of the non-mac people used Zend Studio or Eclipse, though I know I wasn’t the only TextMate user in the room. The most surprising thing, was the shear number of people who I saw using gmail and Firefox. Gmail is ok I guess, but it isn’t brilliant and it isn’t mutt, and surely I’m not the only one with a gripe about firefox.

Sorry for such an odd analysis of Drupal Camp Chicago 2008. I’m going to be working on some more… Drupalish for work, but while I’m a huge geek–no surprise there–I always seem to be more interested in watching the room than in watching the speaker.

Onward and Upward!

I knit the collar and started the first sleeve for the Latvian Dreaming sweater. I’m a that point about 4 inches into a sleeve where time seems like it stops. For the non knitters, allow me to describe the anatomy of the process of knitting a sleeve for a sweater.

The top of the sleeve where it hits the shoulder goes very quickly. This is ironic because the sleeve is it’s largest at this point. I think it goes quickly because you are either near the beginning (if you start at the shoulders,) and anything new seems to go just a little faster. Conversely if you start at the cuff. the top of the sleeve goes fast because it means that you are almost done.

The cuff of the sleeve and the last 4-6 inches go reasonably quickly. For the opposite reasons as the top of the sleeve, but the ideas the same. It’s either near the end or the beginning which equals a larger compulsion or interest in the knitting.

There are about 4 inches near the top of the sleeve which take forever, because the knitting never seems to grow no matter how much you knit and or measure. This is, I think a product of the fact that sleeves are a much larger proposition than anyone expects and there’s a lot of knitting to be done in a sleeve. I think this feeling is properly thought of as “sleeve hell,” but you can call it whatever you want.

The remaining 6-8 or so inches go slowly, but not too slowly and in that can be pretty therapeutic, once you realize that you are making progress and that you may actually like the sweater you’re knitting.

So that’s where I am, anyone have any other theories?

I didn’t include these programs in my initial review for a couple of reasons. The first, is that I downloaded an early beta of Sunbird, and was (unsurprisingly) rough, and I didn’t see that there was anything particularly earth-shattering. The second is that I find the Mozilla applications to be remarkably awkward and borderline unusable.

So I’ve begun to to download and test Sunbird, in an attempt to be complete and because I suspect that the quality of the application has improved in the past couple of years. I don’t use Thunderbird because of my aversion to Mozilla and XUL (and mutt sucks less), which nixed the lightening option.

And now on to the interesting part, why I hate Mozilla apps. They all suck. Which is to say that they all look the same, and have this shrink-wrap feel that feels awkward in almost every operating system/environment. This means that everything looks ugly and functionality is never where you’d expect it to be. This might be a good thing if you use a bunch of different operating systems, and want your apps to be consistent cross-platform, but generally I think this is heavy handed and it means that your “cross platform” apps don’t work like any of the other “platform apps.”

Now of course web browsers and email clients are pretty straightforward and there isn’t a lot learning curve, but I think usability and ergonomics in contemporary desktop computing comes down to seconds of frustration and confusion, and not upfront learning curves. At least for me.

To be fair I use Firefox without complaint on my linux environments and I think they work great for that, and I think the real test of Sunbird will be how well the experience is on a linux system. I’m not sure if this is a product of the fact that everything seems a little disjointed about user interface on linux. In this direction I find it particularly annoying that Mozilla apps don’t work with the “Services” menu on OS X.

I’ve found this annoyance factor with any Mozilla product I’ve used in recent years. I’ve always blamed it on XUL (the Mozilla interface design methodology), and the idea that Mozilla seems to place a greater emphasis quantity of users than specific quality. Am I the only one who feels this way? Do other people really like the Mozilla apps’ user interface? Why?/Why not?

Cheers!