Oblomovka

2007-11-24»

It's in some degree a little tragic that holidays give me a chance to REALLY GEEK OUT - as though I don't have endless opportunities at other times. But, honestly, and perhaps equally as tragically, geeking out is what I do when I need to become philosophical and retrospective and moody and irritated at everyone. It also encourages me to drink heavily, all of which I think are the true meanings of festivals in the human condition anyway.

My geeking out this Thanksgiving (apart from a hard-to-fight urge to buy consumer electronics, which I swear to God must be down to morphic resonance, because I'm really not that interested in retail usually, have successfully ad-blocked most of my life, and don't have any money right now anyway), was a day zero purge of my servers and laptop home directories.

Usually this kind of thing ends up in complete disaster, like deciding one day to take your car apart and put it back together again.

This time it's been working out rather well. Instead of naked and crying on the floor, I'm clear-headed though a bit chilly.

There wasn't really any reason for it, except that recently I've been very forward-looking: as though I've been trembling on the edge of a precipice in a wing-suit. I've not been looking down, and I've not been jumping, but I've certainly not been looking behind me either. So it was about time to push myself over.

rm -rf! goes the urge, and I gave into it. I'm slowly re-introducing (or rewriting) all the scripts that I use, and taking into account the lessons I've learnt in the last few years.

It's really easy to be frozen in the headlights when you delete your existing directory structure and start again, because you end up thinking so much about the future. But you can't tell anything about the future, so there's no point to being frozen. You just have to express confidence that it's not going to be awful, and jump.

I have a fairly concrete aim, which is to see how close I can get to having a setup that is a) replicated everywhere, and where I can b) fall-back to different machines if one breaks, and c) I can throw at an EC2 instance as easily as I can throw it at a Nokia N810 or my Mac laptop, and d) shares as much as I can to the rest of the world.

God knows, I won't get there, but as this has been my aim for some years, I have some lessons learnt, and some new technology has been rolling along for it. For instance, for years I've been following Joey Hess's Living Life In Subversion credo: version-controlling my home directory, and trying to keep as much of it as public as I could.

It's a great way to think of your digital life, not because of the fact that it keeps all your documents as revertable backups (like MacOS's Time Machine) or allows you to sync your home directory across many systems so much, as the discipline of thinking "how much on my computer should be private, and how much should be public?". Joey keeps a huge chunk of his home directory in a public repository, and it's incredibly educational - both for readers and for him, I suspect.

Being more public is terrifying, and yet freeing at the same time: apart from anything else, you quickly learn to discriminate between public-because-i-created-it-and-want-to-share and public-because-it's-not-actually-mine. That's to say, I have a bunch of free ebooks, say, that I can make public because they're public documents. But at the same time, I don't worry too much about backing them up, because I have a world of backups out there already. I'm sure those of you who torrent films or used to file-share music will recognise that feeling. Why should I keep this, when so many others have a copy I could obtain easily enough? My copy of Brian Eno's albums takes up a few megabytes on my hard drive. Should I back it up? Or should I just keep the receipt, knowing I could get a new copy so quickly if it was lost locally, here?

Thinking about what's really private is also very clarifying. Passwords are private. Are bookmarks? Which bookmarks? What's the minimum set of bookmarks I can make private? More people are asking this after their heavy del.icio.us use, I bet.

Here's my current new directory structure. Like the old one, the public bits will appear sooner or later as a browseable repository on this machine. The private stuff is ghettoised into a single folder - directories that hold things like ssh settings are symlinked into it.

meta    # scripts and Changelogs that I wrote to track all of this
private # projects with data I don't want the world to know
public  # everything else, listed by project directories
mail    # Archives in mailbox, current in Maildir
src     # symlinks to any folder called "src" below private, meta or public
bin     # a nest of symlinks to files in folders claled "bin" in private, meta or public
web     # websites, including this one
tmp     # anything older than ten days in this is deleted. It's where I save files.
logs    # growing files (not many: I'm not going to default to logging this time)

Most of this is (now) kept under Mercurial, a distributed version control system. The scripts are in Python, where I can help it. The structure is replicated across all my machines, with the same contents. Not everything is amenable to version control, but I have some ideas about how to keep the other stuff mirrored across all my machines too.

2007-11-19»

Update! Becky says that the sainted Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust have offered up to 10,000UKP of matching funds for every supporter ORG gets -- so if you join for a fiver a month, you'll be giving ORG ten pounds to play with!

So Join Now! Join Twice!

It's hard to believe that it's two years since the Open Rights Group got its first public support from a thousand British Net pioneers. Flicking through their annual report today, it feels like they've been around for decades.

What ORG's staff has done is astounding. When we first sketched out what could be done with a thousand people's fivers, we thought we could just about pay to have someone clueful on the phone 9-5. That would be enough: redirecting uhh, clue-misdirected journalists to the unheard-from Net users, and real tech experts (not just blowhards) who could explain without the usual fearmongering or special interest hype.

Honestly, I felt that if we just managed to have someone next to the music industry spokesman next time a TV show swallowed the "Internet is full of pirates and criminals, and must be smacked into obeyance" line, ORG would have paid its way.

Instead, here's what ORG has done with its scant resources. After two years, it's not just a media clearing house, although it does that too. It battled a celebrity-studded publicity campaign that sought to extend copyright terms. It fought the hype with with clear facts and economics, and won - the first time that has happened anywhere.

Its advice to the Gowers report on Intellectual Property helped give the British Government the most progressive outline of future IP policies in the world.

It organized Britain's first ever volunteer analysis of electronic voting, and showed that bad e-voting counts could have changed who won in Scotland: a revelation that still shocks me.

Right now, is planning to advise British businesses on how to work with the new norms of copyright. And to guide it, it's assembled an amazing group of British-based advisory board members, including the coder of Apache's SSL support, one of Linux's key figures, the co-founder of the UK's first commercial Internet provider, and the drummer off of "Blur" - match the names to the reputations. They really are involved in the strategic and technical decisions that ORG makes every day - and it shows.

If you want just a recent example of the sort of in-depth knowledge ORG already shows, check out this GrokLaw interview with Becky Hogge, ORG's Executive Director. Detailed, smart comments on the BBC iPlayer, a messy but vital part of the UK online debate right now. Now imagine that kind of knowledge being inserted, behind the scenes, in press rooms, Whitehall offices, and TV studios, day in, day out.

Part of the reason it's been so successful is because of the incredible input of ORG supporters. It's hard to point to the offline work this incredible team manage, but just give you a taste: If you want the most vibrant, wide-ranging, sensible discussions of IP and privacy online: subscribe to ORG-discuss, a list that has representatives of the music industry, her majesty's sceptical press, security mavens, and free software advocates. It's knowledgeable *and* very civil, a minor miracle in itself. You might also want to check out ORG's equally smart wiki.

To get our ballpark income, ORG would have had to have converted every single one of the pledge-signers. I think we got around 50%.

So to celebrate two years, I encourage everyone to try and push the membership up to the promised one thousand. No, two thousand.

If you're an ORG supporter, pressgang two of your friends to join. Find that online pal who is even more fanatical than you in pursuit of digital rights. Tell the blowhards on Digg or Slashdot it's time to put their pounds where their posts are. Heck, buy one in your mum or niece's name for Christmas: it's their Internet too. And check whether your own membership has lapsed (It happens - *blush* mine expired earlier this year, and I missed the memo - I'm back in the black now). Just click here.

Think what ORG can do in the next two years. Think what we can do with 2000 members. Think what we can do with 20,000.

Most of all, think what will happen if we don't do something.