Oblomovka

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.