Oblomovka

     July 2008      
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2  3  4  5
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31      
                    
<<Jun  Aug>>

2008-07-19»

wide anarchy»

Prompted by Dave Birch's talk on digital money at OpenTech, I've been going on a long mental escapade through my own political roots, and the history of the Net.

I think that it's inevitable that the dominant explanatory context and the direction of successful advances in technology and society heavily influence the politics one subscribes to. I grew up cheerleading microcomputers and later the Net, and lived through the vindication of their (material) success, so I'm naturally going to be a fan of decentralisation -- actually, that's a pretty empty statement. I don't think anyone actually comes out as against decentralisation these days. Nobody says "Me, I'm a big fan of increased concentrations of power." It's like being against democracy -- by the time you've explained why you have your doubts about it, no-one is listening to you any more. The main question on this topic in our time is not "is decentralisation good for the body politic?" but "how much of it should we have?".

Which is not to say that the conventional answer would be "a lot". People get rather shifty if you start on any project of power dilution, because such projects represent a loss of control to almost anyone who matters in the current system: even Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition want something to remain loyal to. You can disagree with the direction a ship is taking without wanting someone to come along and pull out the steering mechanism (or replacing the captain with a voting committee of the passengers).

Decentralisation deliberately pulls power away from the center. Either it works, and total control ebbs away. Or it doesn't, and power gets re-concentrated in entirely random (or worse, actively dangerous) hands. Since almost anyone making a decision to decentralise has at least some access to the current levers of power, that makes it an unpleasantly radical decision to make.

Those who first built the Net and first to be drawn to it (the two groups are inextricably merged) were fans of decentralised power structures.(One of my favourite second-hand stories of the early years of the Net was from someone who wasn't involved, but was around the research labs at the time. He claimed that the ARPANETters were always the flakes who everyone else avoided; obsessives out to pursue an idea that no-one else took seriously. If you wanted to have tenure in computer science, you stayed well away from packet-switching loons back then. He may have been bitter.)

If you're a real fan of decentralisation -- and your sole lever on power, as a packet-switching loon, is designing and distributing instruments that deliver decentralisation to everyone -- the question "how much" becomes much more pertinent. Just how far can and should you take this? What happens when you turn all the dials to 100%?

Anarchy is the answer to that question. The truly hardened advocates would then say: "And would that be a bad thing?"

Those hardened advocates, in the middle history of the Net, were the cypherpunks. The strongest statement on their position was -- is -- the Cyphernomicon, and in particular Tim May's Cypherpunk Manifesto: a prediction and prophecy of a radically-decentralised world, created inevitably by virtue of the widespread use of strong cryptography.

Would it be a bad thing? Just as it's hard to cheer on extreme centralisation of power as a good thing, it's hard to imagine complete elimination of central power as a good thing. I'm not saying that you can't advocate for it: in fact, most people in liberal democracies in our times default to advocating for it, with the assumption that it'll never get so far as to turn into something horrific (or transformatively beautiful). Call it a lack of idealism, call it a failure of creativity. It's just hard to imagine it. Go on: imagine a world without governments. Despite what John Lennon (or Vladimir Lenin) claims, it's not easy at all.

I've been thinking a lot about that difficulty, because I think it illuminates what we want from decentralised power, and what we think the practical limits are. It also challenges us to see beyond them.

One of the most vivid positive descriptions of a world under the Cypherpunk model of anarchy would be David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom. But Friedman's book is a series of arguments, not a vivid picture of daily life in such an environment. The closest he gets is a depiction of what he says is a close equivalent to the anarcho-capitalist vision, medieval Iceland.

Right now, I'm intensely enjoying S. Andrew Swann's Hostile Takeover Trilogy, a space opera which includes as its backdrop an anarchist planet of Bakunin. It's a great counterbalance to re-reading these broadly positive depictions of extreme decentralisation: Bakunin is a rough and vicious world, the sort of anarchy that most people would imagine would follow the collapse of an all-powerful State. On the other hand, it also paints a strong picture of sympathetic characters who rather like Bakunin's backdrop. They remind me of the cypherpunks. Is that what extreme and irreversible decentralisation would lead to: a world order only a cypherpunk could love? Or a place where ultimately, any group could find comfort and freedom?

2008-07-18»

everyone's a critic: Eddie Izzard in San Francisco»

I never say anything about a performance I've just watched until I'm about half a mile from the venue. I'm not entirely sure why. I always used to think it was because I was scared that my scathing appraisal would be overheard by somebody's doting mother, and she would knife me or tut loudly or somesuch.

But really that's unlikely to be the real reason, because I'm not even very negative when I'm safely in the car. I start with an insufferable sigh, and then start obsessing about tiny points in the act that no-one else noticed, but which I'll then blow up into huge theoretical frameworks of the nature of drama. At no point will I really give away whether I had fun or not.

Really, though, at comedy, I almost always have fun. I love going to see terrible comedians, and I love seeing brilliant comedians, and I'm usually canny enough to avoid seeing all the boring stuff in the middle. My favorite gigs are where the terrible comedians suddenly becoming brilliant, as though ridden by Loa, and when brilliant comedians failing miserably, all their clever tricks and mischeviousness failing like corked wine.

Eddie Izzard was about the fifth reason I gave up comedy, maybe 15 years ago, because he was already a master at a style we only haphazardly ever managed to pull off.

Our internal name for it was "barely rehearsed", which I think was a term we pulled out of a glowing, but confused reviewer who simply could not understand why he was enjoying such rank amateurism.

The trick with being barely rehearsed is to have a firm structure with maybe five perfectly-rehearsed set pieces that you can hop to, with the rest broadly improvising around some key call-backs and themes and set pieces. The two tricks are knowing when to hop out of the improvised bits, and -- and here is the HIDEOUS DECEPTIVENESS OF ALL ART -- how to suitably disguise which bits are improvised, and which are not.

The beauty of hiding the joins is partly it makes everything seamless and ironically uncontrived, but most of all because you get the constant extra points everyone gets for improvising, and apply them to the multiplier of actually having worked it all out before hand. Some comedians feel that this is a cheat, but every comedian thinks the tricks that others use are cheats, and while their own are perfectly acceptable "comedic shorthand", so there you go.

I think most people marvel at Eddie Izzard's ability to go on extended flights of improvised fancy, but I (being special and uniquely insightful) m more admiring of his ability to back out of them as they crash and burn, while still holding the audience's attention. He's also fantastic at managing the segue between improvisation and set-piece. Nobody in the audience seemed to notice (only I, being special and brilliantly perceptive, etc) that he wasn't pulling off either last night that well. It was like those bits where really awesome acrobats actually fall off their perches into the big net; I don't think it really distracts from the show, but you can sense people having to donate some of their good will to get the show back on tracks.

Anyway, it was a good show which you can see often has better nights. It plays a bit safe with the material, but you know, anyone with ten minutes on Wikipedia, EULAs and iTunes auto-upgrade policy is going to win me over. If he starts doing "Scrappy Doo" material in a panic, just let it ride over you, and concentrate on his brilliant physical gestalts which still rock.

2008-07-17»

what ubuntu packages did i install again?»

Deciding to upgrade to Ubuntu's alpha-state Intrepid Ibex because of a hope that tiny bug might be fixed: not such a good idea. Deciding that, because your beautiful composite set-up was broken by the Ibex kernel upgrade that you should maybe try out the even-more-alpha intrepid-proposed repository: frankly ill-advised. Struggling with the consequential collapse of all your wireless networking by attempting to remove and re-install dbus from the old Ubuntu: not so much asking for trouble, as drawing a pentagram in your own mother's blood and hollering in Aramaic for same. So I was without a working laptop for much of today.

Well, as I've heard people say in the same circumstances, at least it was a good test of my backup policy. In the end I just threw up my arms, re-installed from an old Ubuntu Huffin' Heron, and pulled my home directory off the backup drive.

Of course, the painful bit with re-animating an old and familiar set-up is trying to recall all the tiny mods and tweaks that one gave one's system back in the ice age, then re-implementing them individually on the new system -- all without saddling it all with your later, senile wanderings.

I actually do backup my /etc folder, so it wasn't that bad -- Debian is pretty good at keeping most of the configuration files in etc, on pain of maintainer death. But I hadn't kept a list of the many extra packages I'd installed. Fortunately, Debian/Ubuntu machines, positively trembling with racial knowledge of how badly its users screw up in the past, keep their own backup copies of this list, in /var/backups/dpkg.status.0 .

If you're ever in the position of checking this list with your current system to try and work out what packages you should install to get to your old state, try package_list. You feed it the dpkg.status backup file as a command line argument, and it spits out the packages you need to install.

Here's some of what it spat at me. I'm off to see Eddie Izzard now -- when I get back, I'll highlight some of my favourite Ubuntu packages here:

Hello, I am back. I don't know whether your RSS reader will notice this, but here are my all new summaries of my dpkg list.

These are ones that I snuffled from other, non-official Ubuntu repositories. The SHAME!

amazonmp3

Amazon is a popular book-selling merchant and music distributor. They have a Debian friendly MP3 downloader.

avant-window-navigator-bzr

Avant is in no way a fake MacOS dock applet.

chandler

I tried Chandler for a bit, but now I am all about the Kontact

ec2-ami-tools

Amazon is a popular book-selling merchant and music distributor and virtual machine rental site

isight-firmware-tools

Yes, I run Ubuntu on a Macbook. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is screaming

skype

And I use proprietary software, so that's Stallman screaming back.

Here are the official Ubuntu packages.

adblock-plus

Who knew you could install Firefox plugins using the Ubuntu package system? Me, clearly, at some point.

alien

Alien lets you convert Redhat RPMs into Debian Ubuntu deb packages. Useful!

apache2

If MacOS laptop owners can run apache locally, then so can I.

apg

More useful! APG is an obscurely named password-generating utility.

avahi-utils

Avahi is the Linux name for Apple's Bonjour which was the name for Apple's Rendezvous which was the name for the Internet's Zeroconf.

blogtk

When somebody says "What can I use instead of Ecto on Linux", tell them about BloGTK. Then hope they don't ask any more questions, because it's not really that polished.

cheese

This is like Photobooth. Not quite as polished, but quite as useless.

compizconfig-settings-manager

This is, by contrast, awesome and lets you turn your poor user-interface into the most tweaked, weird, and customized cube-spinning zoomey wibble-wibble monster imaginable. Makes everyone sick with jealousy. Or vertigo, hard to say.

dillo

Dillo is the rude-sounding super-minimal super-fast browser. Good for checking what your site looks like to Victorians.

discover1

This is discover1, of course.

dovecot-imapd

Dovecot is about as sane an IMAP server as you can muster.

gammu

gnokii

gnome-phone-manager

gnome-vfs-obexftp

These are all for talking to my Nokia phone, and pulling addresses off it, and sending it SMSs and kissing it and hugging it.

gnumeric

I have a soft spot for Gnumeric, which was Gnome's competitor to Excel, and yet has somehow managed to not become as crazy-ass as Evolution (or OpenOffice, for that matter).

gsynaptics

If you have a Macbook, and you run Linux, this lets you set up your trackpad just the way you like it. Sixty hours later.

hfsplus

If you have a Macbook, and you run Linux, and secretly keep MacOS on it because you're not entirely crazy, this gives you some utilities to look at them.

idle

Idle is the standard Python editor. It's sort of funky.

imagemagick

Imagemagick is actually what you need to do all that graphical image conversion.

iodine

This is that program that lets you tunnel IP over DNS, like in Little Brother. The technique was popularised by Dan Kaminsky, who later went on to save the world.

kontact

Even though I use Gnome, Kontact rules my world. I live with the pain of all the background KDE libraries coming in and spilling their strong German beer everywhere.

lynx

Lynx is the text web browser. It's useful for "lynx -dump http://thiswebpageinasemblenceofatextfile.com/"

midori

Midori is another lightweight browser. It's useful for when you are tired of only having seven other browsers.

miredo

Miredo gives you IPv6 when other people only give you IPv4. Useful for ... well, it'll be useful one day.

miro

Miro is the new name for Democracy, which has been less popular ever since Iraq.

mnemosyne

I forget. Oh wait, it's a flashcard memory aid!

mozilla-firefox-locale-en-gb

What can I say? I miss the old country.

mysql-admin

mysql-client

mysql-navigator

mysql-server

ndisgtk

Do you know how long I've been scared of relational databases?

nmap

For portscanning the hell out of strange networks and broken machines.

ntop

For working out who the hell is using all the bandwidth on your network.

oolite

GPL'd Elite! For Linux! And MacOS! And SGI Irix!

pandoc

Incredibly useful for converting to and from various markup languages, like HTML, Markdown, RTF, etc. Written in Haskell for extra cred points.

pdftk

For doing hideous things to PDF files.

pidgin-libnotify

For actually telling me when someone is trying to get my attention on IM.

pommed

Handles Macbook hotkeys. From the really useful, somewhat obscure Mac support Ubuntu repository.

powertop

Use fewer watts!

privoxy

Part of my tor setup, natch.

pylint

Horrifically pedantic code style checker.

python-beautifulsoup

Leonard's damn fine, damn tolerant HTML parser.

python-feedparser

Mark's damn fine, damn tolerant RSS/Atom parser.

python-mechanize

When you want to webscrape like a pro.

python-nose

Python unit tests handled gently and kindly.

rtorrent

The best of the background, text-based torrent handlers.

sc

The 'vi' of spreadsheets. Really.

sox

The ImageMagick of sound files.

squeak

For wasting TOO MUCH TIME in happy Smalltalk land.

squeak-plugin

sshfs

Mount remote systems using just ssh.

swftools

For messing around with Flash files (like extracting images, etc).

terminator

Multiple terminal windows in the same (Python-coded) window.

tidy

Cleans up your (or someone else's) HTML.

tor

For anonymity and censorship circumvention.

torbutton-extension

trickle

A command line program that will throttle and bandwidth limit almost any other command line program

vlc

For when mplayer won't cut it.

vrms

Virtual RMS -- for nagging you about those non-free programs (see above).

wammu

The graphical bit of gammu, the cellphone software.

wine

For running Windows programs.

wireshark

For monitoring your Net traffic (and pointing out to others how easy it is to monitor theirs).

Phew!

2008-07-16»

getting this party started»

Curses. Thanks to the irresponsible exuberance of Matt R., David M., Andrew, Diggory and Adewale, I have sentenced myself and the internets to 30 days of blather (folks, if any of you would like links to your sites, send me a mail. Yeah, that's right kids, I'll trade my Google juice for your donations).

A few of my bribers mentioned some riders they'd like. First, a copy of my slides from the OpenTech talk, "Living on the Edge". That seems perfectly reasonable, given that I promised all over the place that I'd do that too. Here's the original PDF I used. There's also an OpenOffice presentation file here that has slightly more detail in it.

The blurb I sent OpenTech six months ago is below.

Living on the Edge (of the Network)

When you want to make a private picture or note available only to your friends, why do you hand it over to a multi-national corporation first? What use is a mobile phone running Apache? Does IPv6 really exist? Can we be ecologically-sound and still run our terabyte home servers? Please? These, and other whining rhetorical questions answered by Danny O'Brien, ORG founder and EFF activist.

It was mostly a reworking of these blog entries. There's been a lot of talk and independent thinking in this area for the last few months, leading to a flurry of public action in the last few weeks as many people come to the same conclusions: that we need to consider a counter-balance to the current move toward centralisation online.

The way I phrase it is that "we're back at 1984" -- not the novel, but the point where Richard Stallman realised that if he was going to preserve the most powerful freedoms of his community into the future, he was going to have to sit down and re-implement Unix with a better license.

We've reached the same point with the move to software as a service. If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC3 that can live with us oon the edge, not be run by third parties.

This is the spirit of the Franklin Street Statement and more practically, software like Laconica.

I'm sure to be blathering more on this topic in the next month: if it gets too much, I will consider taking more donations to shut myself up.

(Incidentally, if the slides don't make sense, I'll try and get around to recording a slidecast of the whole talk or uploading some video. Crossing ORG's palms with silver and mailing me will make this more likely... :) )

2008-07-15»

Join ORG *and* the RSS reader gets it»

I saw and heard far too many stirring matters in Europe this month for it to strictly count as a relaxing holiday. It was more like some sort of brisk Victorian tale of moral recuperation, where a malaise-filled city gent, falling asleep at his desk, is shown by his labouring conscience vivid images of model courage struggling against enormous odds while terrible forces swell nearby to depose civilization in the (third) highest corridors of power. Inspired and chastened by his vision he awakes on Sunday morning to sweep himself off to a church revivalist meeting and dedicate himself anew to the cause.

Of course, just as in Victorian times, the inspiration rarely lasts longer than late Sunday afternoon.

But I am determined to be good! For ever and ever! Or at least until mid-August! And you can help me, dear occasional reader!

At OpenTech, I helped the Open Rights Group launch their new membership expansion campaign to double their supporter level from 750 to 1500.

To encourage you to help fund Britain's own grassroots digital rights group, and to improve my own moral standing, I hereby make a pledge:

If five people reading this sign up for ORG (or increase their subscription from a fiver to a tenner a month), I hereby decree that I will blog every weekday for the next month.

I have lots of things to say, and they are all terrifically interesting, but I am currently too louche and feckless to express them. Your fiver will stiffen my resolve, gall me to action -- and support a worthy and fine institution.

Simply send me your ORG "scalp" (the reference code that you get when you sign up), and when I have five, I will start spilling all the beans I have at my disposal.

Or you know, you could just callously click "mark all read", and move onto the next RSS item.

Oh you wouldn't. Don't you dare! I'll put a javascript spell on you!

Update: Two and half sign-ups! (one of them backdated their increase to the beginning of the year, so I count that as one and a half). You're so close to obliging me to waste valuable time!