Oblomovka

2002-08-30»

I haven't seen this before (except from whence I stole the link, at web-graphics). It's Edward Tufte on the uses and abuses of Flash. He likes praystation!

2002-08-28»

Warren Ellis, comic author of the perfectly respectable Transmetropolitan, creator of the mighty hypercolumnist Spider Jerusalem, terrifyingly prolific prose writer, and unremitting booster of the comics economy now has a blog. As well as one the best domain names you can get these days, damn him.

die puny humans is my newsmine. I wanted a place to put my research that was accessible, searchable, and, crucially, not cluttering up my bloody computer. This is it. Means I can get to my stuff from anywhere with a web connection. Anything I find on my daily trawls around the web that interests me goes up here.

Via Technovia

Tom "plasticbag" Coates just had his machine fixed by a friend, remotely via ssh for the first time, and does appropriate double-backflips of delight. Unix is so cool that way.

2002-08-27»

Doc says that I'm being a bit hard on Apple and Microsoft, both of whom sell similar applications to the home server idea.

That's true - but they're not very heavily encouraged among home users. The very fact that I can't work out a way of explaining how to do this to Sunday Times readers is an indication of that. Running a PHP Webmail app, or a home iDisk, for instance, really isn't rocket science: it just doesn't fit either of these companies current business models.

One of the real albatrosses around the symmetrical net for now is that the principal big server apps for the computers on the edge of the Network is still file-sharing. Telcos feel they can legitimately complain about "bandwidth abuse" when it's conducted by suspected copyright criminals. As Doc says, they'd find it a little harder to moan if it was baby photo album sharing.

(I'm beginning to see the big hole in both Apple and Microsoft's thinking. Microsoft treats its customers as though they were businesses. Apple treats them as though they were consumers. What if we're neither?)

Recap: I've been looking for an all-in, no messing, Webmail app, file sharer, and Webserver that would run from my home machine - saving me from forking out on .NET, .mac, and .johncobblyandall services. Lots of people wrote in with partial suggestions. Nothing leapt out for me, although a couple of people wrote in to say that if I found what I was looking for, they'd buy a copy.

Barnaby James wrote to suggest Apache Tomcat with a fistful of java servlets. A nice, and integrated idea, but I'm not sure it's the point-and-click solution I was looking for.

Dave, as you'd suspect, suggested Radio Userland , which I'd certainly thought of - but it doesn't handle mail. Yet.

Doug Hacker suggested ACI's 4Dmail Mail app.

Azeem suggested a cheapo NetApp style standalong box, perhaps integrated with your router. Bit pricey currently, and I think it's the idea of linking directly to your desktop that makes this appealing. Still, it'd be nice if home routers let you set up at least a port 80 passthru to one machine on the home network.

Henry Minsky had a very profound suggestion, which he describes in detail on his Personal Virtual Server page. If I can horrifying cripple his thoughts by summary : your personal computer is boiled down to a portable state image, on which you can install different applications. You can move this image wherever you like. Keep it at home, or on a hosting service, or on your laptop or PDA. So you effectively run your PC and all its services wherever you go.

One thing I did thrash out over a few conversations was that you'd need at least one external Net service to get this working - DNS, probably with dyndns-like dynamic updating. Azeem also suggested an outgoing mail relay, but I'm not sure that's necessary. Direct SMTP connections are hard, true - but sendmail and its simpler cousins, once configured, is a commodity. And this is a very trivial sendmail setup.

Does the need for dynamic DNS spoil the principle push of this idea? I'm not sure. I did originally conceive of this home-based server as a way of shaking off the shackle of unnecessary Web service subscriptions. With dynanamic DNS, we're left with a single one-off sub. It's less ideologically pure, but I still think it's appealing. One of the things I dislike about all these other Web services is that while each of them is pretty cheap, it'd cost a huge amount to subscribe to all of them. And I hate the paying less for bundles when not everything in the bundle is the best in class. It's an unnecessary compromise.

Oh, and Lloyd pointed out another advantage to working your Web services from home. When you don't pay yours subs at a Webmail service, they suspend your access to your own e-mail.

I think there may be a market for a product here. That is, if Thomas C. Greene of the Register doesn't convince us to turn off our broadband connections in terror.

2002-08-26»

So I wrote a piece in this week's Sunday Times about running services from your broadband-connected home computer: mainly, services that you'd otherwise have to pay for, like Webmail, online file space, and calendaring. It got a huge response, with dozens of people writing in asking how they could do this.

For most of them, I admit I have no idea - I'm a Linux guy, so all of these server-ish features come pretty easily to me. I feel a bit dumb replying to people with "Use SSH! And Debian!", though. If anyone has any suggestions on how you could reasonably set up IMAP, Webmail, Web folders (WebDAV) and maybe even a calendar server on a home Windows install, I'd love to hear it.

The piece, incidentally, is currently here, but it's registration-protected up the wazoo. Brits can log in as cypherpunk/cypherpunk. Anyone else has to pay. Also the link will die soon, as NewsCorp shovel the piece into their exclusively-priced archive, so what's the point?

Hold on though: I do believe I own the copyright on this article. I'll stick it here, and then when I've time, I'll set up a proper archive. It's all about DIY, after all.

This virtual life: Danny O'Brien: Why I am not paying

All over the web, companies are switching from offering free services to charging a fee. The latest to cross the line is Apple, who recently changed its @mac.com webmail and iDisk online file-storage service from zero to a £65 annual subscription. That has prompted many to ask whether others such as Hotmail or Geocities will follow.

I am always sceptical of paying for web stuff. Most of it is, frankly, ripping off the gullible. People are tempted to pay for these subscriptions because they appreciate not having to search high and low for freebies. But as the net improves at delivering what we want, finding the cheapest price grows simpler. And online, the cheapest price is almost always "free".

And so it is with web e-mail and file space online. Checking e-mail on the move and dumping Word documents or photo albums where others can find them are, to me, indispensable. If Hotmail started charging a subscription, or Geocities refused to give away its precious web space, you would think I would be the first to pay up.

Think again. Because I have those services free - from my home computer. I have an always-on broadband connection, so I can check my mail from anywhere by logging in to my home computer from any net connection. And I do not need spare storage on someone else's server as I have enough spare disk space at home, thanks very much.

There are other advantages to being able to connect to my own computer. I can grab a webcam snapshot of what is going on in my flat; I can print out documents ready for me to pick up when I arrive home. I even run a little website off my home machine to pick up important documents.

It is not difficult to do any of this - in theory, at least. The software is readily available, but advice on how to set it up is remarkably scarce. Even though connecting to your home computer from anywhere is a great feature, broadband providers, if they mention this at all, generally couch it in protective terms. "We'll provide you with a firewall, so that nobody can get into your home PC," they promise. What if I want to get in?

Software companies such as Microsoft and Apple seem very reluctant to write the software that would make setting up your home computer as a server a snap. Of course, Microsoft owns Hotmail, and Apple charges for all those .Mac services. Maybe they do not appreciate competition. Especially from the likes of you.

2002-08-24»

Anyone who is interested in both the W3C and usability online might want to check out the proposed W3C User Interest Group, and the workshop they're having in Maryland in October. (I know this appears to be a bit random in my blog, but I appear to be one of the few people who know about this, and it looks like deserves wider coverage).

Dyson, the kitten double-agent who spies on my household to find the secret of human food preparation, has a congenital bug in her optics. It's called nystagmus and means her eyes constantly quiver. It's not very noticeable and doesn't, as far as we can see, affect her eyesight. But I would have conceded that combined with her mild strabismus, it does make her appear a bit thick.

But that's all changed for me now. Looking at her now, I've realised that she looks like she's accessing data on a tiny retinal display.

What is she up to?

Andre Torrez is the man behind my current all-consuming obsession, Filepile. Here he explains the subtle difference about writing a great idea you had in your blog, and just doing it

I built FilePile in a couple of hours at work. The original design had no user accounts. I had never heard of a "remix". I wasn't even familiar with Fark or all the sites mentioned in this Wired.com article. I just thought it'd be neat to see how much bandwidth I could waste. It was an exercise in excess. I didn't even think about it, I just did it.

And that's what's got me so bothered about people musing in their weblogs about projects they'd like to do. Stop talking about it an just build it. Don't make it too complicated. Don't spend so much time planning on events that will never happen. Programmers, good programmers, are known for over-engineering to save time later down the road. The problem is that you can over-engineer yourself out of wanting to do the site.

2002-08-21»

The Campaign for Digital Rights has released their first look at the British implementation of the European Copyright Directive, which I will insist on calling "The European DMCA" until I'm physically restrained from doing so. Close up, it has some important differences - but that doesn't make it any better. CD-R's step-by-step demolition of it is a corker.

The writing exercise today, then, was pretty clear cut. STAND now has a potted description of just some of the problems with the new statutes, and what you can do about it - and why this may be even harder than the Blunkett RIP provisions to fix.

Oh Christ, that's such an Anchordesk way to plug it, isn't it? I'm getting far too into this pro journalism business. Talking of which, I haven't cross-checked all of the STAND piece with CD-R yet, so there may be some errors of interpretation I've fallen into there. I did spend a week staring at the legislation so I'm pretty sure they're not too egregious. I'm waiting on sending out the message to the few thousand STANDees though; some things you can't undo.

2002-08-20»

Well, I must be doing something right. I just got a prominent cyberrights activist to accuse me of misrepresenting the facts. Yesss! I've sold out, and I haven't even bought in yet!

[ correction: said activist (who will not be named but it is Cory) pointed out that I misrepresent the facts by saying that he said that I misrepresent the facts. I have no defence here except my usual one: I was joking! Joking! Just a joke, m'lud! Ahaha. ha. damn. ]

Reuters beat me to it - their story ran at 9:45 EST. Curse you, Elinor Abreu. Wired News's piece was longer than I thought it'd be: it explained filters and their effects far more carefully, and covered the angle of publishers having their work blocked as spam, rather than going into the detail of how Habeas' scheme worked. Anti-spam filter's false positives do seem to be a big deal at the moment: Dan Gillmor covered that today too. (We occasionally get hit by this at NTK, but I don't try to re-edit for it. The only way for these dumb filters to learn is to have people lose the occasional mail. Much worse are all the prudish corporate filters, which constantly bounce NTK on the basis that it contains "sexual content", "unsuitable language", and on a couple of occasions "joke".)

The one story I don't think any of the proper media covered adequately was how the haiku infringement blackhole list will work, and just how controversial blackholes are in general. And that's where the blogs pick up the baton.

2002-08-19»

This is an amazingly clever legal hack to deal with spammers and the problems of false positives with automatic spam scanners. Anne Mitchell, ex of MAPS has copyrighted (and trademarked, and patented) a haiku. She'll let anyone who isn't a spammer include it in their headers. And she'll go after spammers that do include it with the full armoury of the intellectual property legal framework. She's taking them down for breach of her haiku, not their spamming practice! I don't know whether it'll work, but it's the the cleverest use of IP law I've seen since the GPL.

I've written up the story as a news item, as per my grand writing project. If you want to forward this link around, you might want to link directly to that. (This one's in the style of Wired News, trivia fans: a fair amount of presumed knowledge, slightly informal style, standard US news piece packaging. Wired update their site at about 3AM PST, so don't be surprised if there's an equivalent, but better researched piece, over there by the time you read this.)

I *knew* spam and haiku were interlinked somehow.

Oh, and by the way - I originally got this from the astounding TBTF Irregulars mailing list.

So, I'm living through some interesting times right now. I just hit 33, my wife's expecting our first baby, and I've recently discovered I owe the US federal government quite a few pork-barrels worth of tax.

Now most people who know me will realise I'm a laid back kind of guy, where "laid back" can be interpreted as "bone idle". But there comes a time when, even though you've reached an income bracket that keeps you in pizza and comics, you have to think about changing out of your pyjamas, going out into the wide world, and earning some proper money. This time is known as the "completely broke" time, and I'm so there. I need a career path.

I've always rather avoided the term journalist. Partly because, obviously, journalists are the Two-Faced and Turncoated Enemy Who Will Be The First Against The Wall When The Blogolution Comes. Mainly though, because proper journalism involves training and grammar-checking and talking to people on the telephone and selling out to the man in weekly installments.

I've been a journalist in the past (straight out of college). For the last five years I've been doing something I guess not dissimiliar to investigative journalism at NTK. And I've been writing newspaper columns for three years - which is what journalists are supposed to do when they've been journalisting for so long they can't stop, even when they're too senile to fact check. I even helped start (and kill) a magazine, which even I'll grant is a bit journalistique manque.

But: I'm not a journalist. Journalism is hard. It takes practice, regular practice, and a degree of teeth-gritting determination I've been avoiding for a very long time. Worse, in America it involves knowing off by heart a bunch of strange quasi-legalistic rules - a discipline taught by high-falutin' Professors Of Inkstains here, and generally replaced in the British model with going down the pub. And you have to be fast. I've always been a bit slow, and nowadays I'm slooooooow.

But sooner or later, I'm going to have to be a journalist again. I need the money; there are issues that need to be covered. Also Declan, my long time inspiration in this area, appears to have gone a bit mad.

But I need practice. So, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to practice on you. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to file stories with you (and hopefully with STAND also). I'll be messing around with styles a bit, to see if I can get the hang of the different tones of different news services. They'll be like writing exercises, but the content will nonetheless stand on its own. They'll be proper interviews, and exclusives, and all that rubbish.

Let me know how it goes, and if I'm improving. If "you" are an editor, and I get it right, you can probably run them straight, but you might like to pay me, or give me a job, or some advice. Or take me down the pub.

The first story will follow in a couple of minutes. We'll see how it goes.

Rhys says "at least you didn't do a course which meant you had to pretend to understand Bayes Theorem". More helpfully, he pointed to a Bayes explanation which made it click for him. Now the probability of me understanding something, given that Rhys understands it is about 0.4, but the probabilty of Rhys understanding given that I understand it is... no, it's gone again.

Which is Macintosh-flavoured Word, just bombed out on me. Again. It's the second time in a month. Oh, Microsoft, they said you'd changed.

Back to Vim. I think it's eaten my work once, on an alpha version, two years ago. Oh, sure, it has a steep learning curve and sucks a bit for prose work. But I learnt all the keystrokes a long time ago to impress a girlfriend, I've just found out that 'gG' tells me my word count, and it now has an interface for the Little Brother Database, so la-la-la, I don't care..

Oh, and look - somebody's working on a user friendly version. My UNRECOVERED FILES WILL BE AVENGED.

Wow. So, just days after Paul Graham put up his Plan for Spam page on a possible Bayesian filter for spam, people have already started implementing it. This one is for Perl and qmail, but I'm sure I've seen another somewhere. And I'll bet there'll be many many more.

Bayesian analysis is one of those concepts that is so counter-intuitve I find impossible to understand it for more than five minutes. Must try harder.

Matt Jones has been in NY, having fun, and indulging in the latest WiFi hobby: noderunning (warning: noisy webpage)

To begin each team gets a wireless laptop with software that scans for nodes, a digital camera, and cab fare. Each is briefed on how to use the gear. Both teams take photos at Eyebeam and leave for Bryant Park.

The clock starts once both teams to leave Eyebeam. The teams have two and a half hours to connect to and photograph as many nodes as possible, collect a log (with the node scanning software) of nodes along their way, and arrive to the Bowling Green.

1 point is given for every 5 nodes the team's scanning software logs.

2002-08-16»

Large scale structure of Internet appears to be fractal - ginormous poster at eleven. I love the way that we now know as little about the shape of the Net as we do the shape of the universe. And why is this categorised as "condensed matter"? Is that some kind of hidden Physics insult?.

2002-08-13»

NTK has now moved to its new, ultra fast server! Yay for the all-powerful Flirble Organisation!

(Actually, the old server wasn't bad at all, but there was something very awry and skewiff and borken with the Perl installation. Still unresolved, much to the confusion of the *BSD Perl porters involved.)

Ten Thousand Statistically Grammar-Average Fake Band Names, including:

Unsent
Absentee
Injection Hourglass
Hole <--- aha!
Bran Enchantment
Each Pinks
Bill Inducer
Swimmer Reign
Penitent Pioneer
Coachman Amongst
Landslide
Heliocentric Minus Another Redhead Peripherals
Base
Regulator Thugs

2002-08-12»

AOL subscribers using AOL's new MacOS X client will see the Web through Mozilla's rendering engine. I'm guessing that's a tiny subset of the online population right now, but it's a sign that we're moving towards slightly more diversity - both in operating systems and browsers.

2002-08-10»

A bad brew. Stayed up all last night trying to crank the UK Patent Office's draft EUCD legislation into my brain, then relaxed today by learning Squeak the small mammal language left over after the Xerox dinosaur swallowed the meteor. Now my brain's all broken.

Squeak's a mess, which surprised me. Its developers are on an ongoing voyage between two paradigms - from the old Model-View-Controller idea that SmallTalk pioneered, and this new Morphic ideal, which seems to be visual programming on steroids (lots of dragging of boxes which represent methods next to boxes that represent numbers, then throwing them into buckets that represent data, etc). This trip has been going on since around 1998 as far as I can work out, and, in true SmallTalk fashion, they've been rewriting their whole environment as they went. Squeak now looks like this bastard hybrid of a Disney Children's Constructor Kit and an explosion in an object factory.

I understand now that Extreme Programming is a response to the awful temptations of power that come with a SmallTalkish environment. Fiddle with code forever! Redefine everything, every day! SmallTalk (and Squeak) is a bit like having a development environment based on the same instincts that make you fiddle with your screensaver settings all afternoon. It's the sort of environment Jack from "Heat Vision and Jack" would code in. Viewed like that, XP is an Zen Monklike act of profound discipline, rather than the anarchic disruptor that everyone seems to think it is.

Anyway, after traipsing a bit depressingly through haphazard Swikis and online Squeak Foundation manifestos from 1999, I finally found out where all the Squeakers hide out. As always during major upheavals, the true believers hunker down on the the mailing lists. So if you're interested in playing around with Squeak yourself (and it is fun), I think that's the first stop after the obligatory Squeak FAQs

2002-08-07»

Good news, everyone! Leonard found the secret elephant in Mozilla.

2002-08-06»

Dave Eggers talks about his latest book. I'm glad he's living in San Francisco. Seth took me to the Pirate Supply Store a while back. There were these extremely McSweeneyesque-style signs all over the place - on lard, and scurvy, and the use of eyeglasses. I'd be a bit afraid if anyone else was aping Eggers quite that precisely. Turns out it's Eggers and the McSweeney's Permanent Staff all along, and just a the flimsy front for his children's writing lab out the back. Apparently it's all funded from the pirate lard sales.

2002-08-05»

According to this Slashdot post (and who could possibly doubt those), in Kansas you can check your home's power consumption online on an hour by hour basis. I'd love to have those data points to snick into my evil number-crunching bots. Sadly, I live in California, where such eldritch magic is viewed as the work of Satan by our beneficent energy companies.

The unstoppable Lloyd Wood sent me this PDF presentation, The First 31 Years of the Internet -- An Insider's View, for NTK. I'm going to stick it here first otherwise I'll forget about it. It's just the slides for a talk, but it stands alone as a great thumbnail explanation of a lot of the historical and future issues with the Net - including the Rise of the Stupid Network and the less-than-smooth political machinations behind the Net's organising powers. It's written by Bob Braden, who took over from Jon Postel as keeper of the RFCs.

A wireless RS232 cable, courtesy of 802.11b. I really badly needed one of these about two years ago. I wonder if they'll be able to do the same with USB?

2002-08-04»

I spent a good hour ploughing through SuperSnail's images of OSCON last year. And now he's done the same for the people of OSCON 2002, and they're just as funny and revealing.

Dave Green angrily suggested I get a fucking search feature working on this site, so I've done so. It's to the left. It doesn't work very well if you search for URLs. It tries to "highlight" the search term, and so mangles any thing inside a tag, but I can't work out a way of fixing that without parsing HTML.

One nice spin off, though, is that now my RSS feed does searches too. So if you want to keep an updated list of all entries where I mention the word "BBC", say, you can subscribe to http://www.oblomovka.com/rss.php3?q=BBC and you'll get just that.

I have a feeling that sooner or later, I'll wish I optimised that code.

I have made an unsolicited promise to my editor that I will never ever mention the looming arrival of my kid in the column. It's a rule I'll break eventually, but, well, you've got to exercise some discipline. (Except here, of course, where I can bang on about the topic all the time. Ha!)

I'm not sure why I made this commitment. I think it's because I know at some deep level that my family is not as Universally Fascinating as I am currently being rewired by my own endochrinology to believe. Of course, computers aren't either - but that's okay, because those of us who are deluded into loving them are in a minority. So I still feel I'm catering to an underappreciated taste, which is the next best thing to being tasteful.

The other reason is because no matter how much I write, I'll never be as good at discussing parenthood as my friend Juliet Jones, whose chaotic, mournful, celebratory and hilarious cries for help live on an obscure site in the middle of the Web, instead of the front page of the Women's bit of the Guardian, or wrapped up in a best-selling book, or plastered in mile-high letters at the North Pole, or something.

One of the reasons why I hate columns about parenthood is you just know that the writers are mincing everything to make a good story - convey that they're a good parent. Even the "my life is chaos!" pieces you get in the funny papers are junking the truth for a joke. Juliet's pieces are bone-jarring honest.

Billie is a "lie in bed and yell till someone comes merchant". Olly on the other hand, arrives like some dishevelled traveller carrying his most important possessions (pillow, toy, book) and sobs by the side of the bed. The Zombies to his Witchdoctor influence we rise, make room for him and one or other of us wanders off to find a new place of rest. One of the most bizarre and Kafkaesque stories I heard of nighttime waking was from a guy who did some plumbing work here. He said that every night his child comes into their bedroom, wakes them up and asks them to take him back to bed. Talk about playing with your mind.

The consume.net mailing list folk have spotted a bargain: British branches of PC World are selling the SMC 2632 PCI WiFi Card for £49.95, which is about half the standard price. And, coincidentally, just two-thirds of the monthly subscription for BT's new WiFi hotspot service. BT either have no idea about competitive pricing, or no idea about how to roll out a cheap network. Maybe both.

2002-08-03»

A random mail from a random someone asking for advice.

Dear Sir, Imlooking for advice, & i went onto the net to seek it, please can you help me? my son had an accident, & i was put in touch with a solicitor...

I don't know jack about what to do about this, so I told this man what I would do. I'd find the local Citizens Advice Bureau, and ask them. I googled for a bureau near him, and sent him the URL and phone number.

Mail like this arrives about once every six months. Last time it was a woman in a Pakistani cybercafe asking about her brother. He'd run away to Britain and she hadn't heard from him since. We tracked him down to a prison in the north of England. I found out the address and phone number for her - again not much, but something.

Cory talks about using spare brain-cycles across the planet to solve problems. I think this is the closest I get. Not that my brain-cycles are that precious anyway. I'm wasting them right now, thinking too much about the strangeness of one word: bureau. We don't start bureaux enough these days. We need to start the Distributed Bureau of Investigation.