Oblomovka

2009-03-24»

I gave up picking just one woman in tech who has inspired me over the years. I certainly knew that I couldn’t list them all. Here’s a roughly chronological list, which breaks down at the end when I realise that there could be no end.

I worked a Saturday job as a teenager at an IBM dealership when I was around thirteen. The first professional programmer I’d ever met worked there. She was incredibly smart and calm, and I remember being very impressed that you could actually make a living wage coding, instead of having to hide away in your bedroom hacking up ZX Spectrum platform games until somebody mystically gave you a Jaguar.

To save time, I will now skip a little arbitrarily (hello, Verity Stob!) across a few decades.

Out of my entire generation of Net-inspired London geeks in the Nineties, Pouneh Mortazavi was the only with enough initiative to do what everybody else dreamed of: she upped sticks to San Francisco alone. First she worked at Wired, holding together their databases; thereafter she started the Flaming Lotus Girls. She was always like some George Washington of a self-collected militia, marshalling and deploying technology and resources, cajolling and inspiring.

My ex-wife, Quinn Norton, has a aircraft-carrier full of skills and virtues, but if I had to pick a technological trait I admire most in her, it would be her ability to see its historical context, as well as extropolate it into the far future (and also her Perl coding style, which is the weirdest damn thing I ever did see).

Leslie Harpold simultaneously drove up the standards of web design, usability, and common human decency online. She’s still missed.

Annalee Newitz and I worked at EFF, and shared a career in writing 1000 word pieces on 1000 year topics, before she finally ran off to join the io9 intergalactic circus and exploration unit. She’s the embodiment to me of the one of the sublime joys of technology: jumping into the deep-end with just a laptop and a head filled with implications, and asking smart questions until you know as much as the expert will admit.

Cindy Cohn, legal director, and Shari Steele, executive director, of the EFF: I simply can’t list how much you owe those two people — but free crypto, and a censorship-free US Internet is probably a good start.

Suw Charman-Anderson, the creator of Ada Lovelace Day deserves a place on this list just for that, but she’s takes her place here because of her work binding technology and civil liberties together as the co-founder of the Open Rights Group.

I suspect Valerie Aurora will be on many people’s Ada Lovelace Day lists. A kernel hacker who can write, and whose writing can make me laugh out loud or smack my head in revelation.

Liz Henry wields technology as it should be: a fire to protect what’s right, and a blast of fresh air to winnow out what’s wrong. I’ve never seen any quite so able to pounce on new tech and bring it swiftly to bear on a societal problem, as well as explain its uses to those who might otherwise be bypassed by this revolution.

Becky Hogge was ORG’s second executive director, and another forger of ideas. Astoundingly good at herding other geeks, tech wonks, and MPs into spaces where they could all understand each other.

I get far too much attention for doing one single lousy talk about “life hacking”, whereas Gina Trapani deseves all of the credit for turning a dumb idea into a a brilliant, long-lived work of real usefulness — and for cranking out the code.

On the same note, butshesagirl’s Getting Things Done application, Tracks, got me through some tough times. I admire anyone whose managed to keep an open source project on course, but I was particularly impressed by bsag’s skills. I watched and I hope learned.

And now no time to talk about the community chops of Cait Hurley, Rachel Chalmers’ piercing analysis, Rebecca Mackinnon’s work at connecting the world, Sara Winge’s genius at O’Reilly, Anno Mitchell’s sardonic Web 2.0 charisma, Strata Chalup’s sysadmin and southbay knowledge, Kass Schmitt sailor and LISPer, Silona Bonewald’s politech savvy, Sumana Harihareswara’s geek-management hybridism, Ana Marie Cox’s snark, Cherie Matrix’s cultural vortex, Elly Millican’s web aesthetic, Wendy Grossman’s sceptical optimism, Desiree Miloshevic’s globe-trotting ICANNoclasm, the piercing tech analysis of Susan Crawford (now working at the Whitehouse!), Sarah Deutsch, Kim Plowright, Paula Le Dieu, Charlie Jane Anders, Violet Berlin, Biella Coleman, Alice Taylor, Sophie Wilson who designed my entire teenage life…

These people make the world my daughter, Ada, lives in. I’m honored she has such shoulders to climb.

This was posted as part of the Ada Lovelace Day project; if you’d like to read more, I enjoyed Liz and butshesagirl’s entries, spent a long time thinking about this sad and all too typical story, and saved the story of En-hedu-Ana, mapper of the stars, for Ada’s next storytime:

The true woman who possesses exceeding wisdom,

She consults [employs] a tablet of lapis lazuli

She gives advice to all lands…

She measures off the heavens,

She places the measuring-cords on the earth.

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2008-10-12»

Walking down a Bernal Heights street, I heard a guy shouting from behind me to a woman in a garish, oversized white t-shirt with somebody’s name on it. “Hey, you guys are doing well — I see posters for Tom everywhere!”. The woman shouted back, “Thanks! Who are you walking for?” “Eric!” “Cool!”. Later, a bunch of bicyclists fly by in convoy, playing an upbeat latino tune on speakers, and waving flags for another candidate.

It’s election time in San Francisco. As well as the presidential election, there’s the usual Bible-sized selection of other plebiscites to be plebbicized, including the election of the supervisor for my local neighbourhood. You can decide whether you should vote for Eric or Tom or Eva or David or Vern or Mark or the other Eric by thumbing through the 268 page local voter guide here. I believe that’s on top of the 166 page State guide.

I was going to witter here a little about the vibrancy of American elections, and then I remembered where else I’ve lived where elections were this vivid and fun. When I was eight, I remember the cars driving around with loudspeakers balanced on top, and posters, and speechifying and lots of local excitement to a British election. I grew up in Basildon, a marginal constituency (Ohio-on-the-Thames, if you will), and ground zero for those wanting to extrapolate results from their glib little parodies of voting patterns. You had to admit though, both sides fought like prize-fighters for every voter there.

San Francisco is about as far away from a swing state as you can imagine (unless you mean between Cindy Sheehan supporters and Nancy Pelosi fans), but the internal city politics are gloriously internecine and bloody. Supervisors have a surprising amount of power: en mass they are a counterbalance to the major. One of them just pleaded guilty to take $84,000 in bribes. I admire the huge encyclopedia of political explanations that turn up on everybody’s doorsteps every election, as well as the miles of columnage in the local papers analysing the minutiae of the city’s internal politics. Even the alternative free papers here often have front covers with titles like “REVEALED: JUST WHAT THE HELL DOES DEPUTY VICE ALDERMAN DIFRAMBRIZI THINK HE IS DOING WITH THE MANHOLE COVER FINANCIAL ALLOCATION FOR FINANCIAL PERIOD 2007/2008?”. To give a less made-up example, I have just read a (genuinely fascinating, actually) three page piece expose on the fines builders have to pay for having their cones in the wrong place. It is all connected with police graft, of course.

I honestly wonder who reads all of this, and yet I love that it’s there. I was reading Linus Torvalds slightly agape bemusement at how uncivilized American elections are, and wonder: is it better that politics be such a loud carnival? Or would all this corruption go even more unnoticed if no-one was watching?

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2008-10-09»

It’s awful to say that there are parts of recessions that I rather like. Maybe it’s just familiarity: I came of age in the early eighties, and left college in the 1990-1994 recession. My sense of what’s important gets confused in upturns: everyone is talking all at once about matters that I just can’t get excited about, but I feel somewhat silly for even thinking they might be wrong. Then the recession comes, and all my clever cynicism is (selectively) rewarded. In a recession, the signal to noise ratio seems greater. It’s easier to pick out promising ideas, and it feels better for the soul if you can express optimism when everyone else needs some extra.

I bumped in Jake Applebaum today, and we talked a little about NoiseBridge, the San Francisco Hacker Space that he is helping to launch. It’s a little surprising that SF hasn’t had one before, but I think that’s partly because there are lots of informal, ad hoc spaces, and also because during boom times, there’s little need. Every start-up has a tiny piece of what you need to make a hacker space, and won’t give it up.

The timing to me seems perfect, though. It’s a good time to pool both resources and ideas: gather together everyone to work and talk together about their projects, and co-operate on relieving some of the burdens of getting ideas off the ground. I’ve already thought about how, given that I’m probably going to be moving into an even smaller space myself, how I could deposit some of my most valuable textbooks at NoiseBridge: saving me space, and increasing their use. A lot of people will be wanting to broaden their skills, or spryly cross over to wherever there is a demand for hackerish minds (I remember well the great Perl hacker bioinformatics migration of 2001), so crossover technology like a chemistry lab and dark room is useful.

Something I noticed about the old recessions – the eighties, the nineties, the noughts, was that technology became a route out of poverty and dead-ends: there’s a huge proportion of system administrators and programmers who never made it through college, or high school, and found themselves in Silicon Valley, being airlifted to a sustainable life by one another’s efforts. I imagine this will happen again in this recession too. If we hunker down to build what comes next, it’ll be good to do it in a place where teenagers can help lead the charge.

Now I’m thinking of backspace on the banks of the Thames: an engine that seeded excitement behind a bunch of art and business projects (especially those that could not decide which they were). Is there a new hacker space imminent in London, Edinburgh, Manchester or elsewhere? I think it’s about time. Plenty of city business spaces going spare and empty, soon! Lots of advice available!

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2008-08-15»

After doing my reading into fiber in San Francisco, I’d learnt a couple of things: firstly, there’s a lot of fiber around, actually, and secondly, a lot of the fiber under me was owned by Astound, who bought it from RCN, San Francisco’s previously weak-as-tea competition to Comcast.

As it happened, he next day I got some flyers through the letter box from Astound offering 10Mbps for $60 a month. As I’ve been tottering along with 4Mbps/1Mbps for $55 with Comcast, I thought I should look into that.

Competition is a marvellous thing. Wherever in the US Comcast has been facing it, I discovered, they have been magically upping their rates to 16Mbps. Simply calling Comcast support and hinting I was going to shift caused them to mention this fact, and five minutes later, I’m running at around 20Mbps/3Mbps for $65 a month. Add to that the $170 terabyte turned up today, and I feel like I’ve just leapt up about twenty countries in some OECD chart. I guess what I should do now is call Astound and see if they will offer to move PAIX into my bedroom cupboard for $65.99.

Up until now, I’ve always assumed that the UK’s consumer bandwidth situation has been rather better than most of the US — a tidbit gleaned from smug Brit slashdotters, and envy-enducing reports from my friends about their DSL deal-shopping. The received opinion is that the US dropped the ball almost immediately after rolling out broadband, and was promptly outgunned by most of the rest of Europe, something that begging outside telcos for ISDN-level speeds in most of Silicon Valley confirmed for me.

Now, after spending a few minutes on Speedtest’s worldwide self-selected statistics, I’m not so sure. I was originally assuming there was some American-bias to the stats, but digging deeper that doesn’t seem to be the case. The US actually does pretty well compared to Europe (except for those bastards in Sweden, etc) these days.

One thing I’ve learnt is that nation-spanning preconceptions like this are often temporarily true, but not for half as long as they hang around. Pleasantly schadenfreuderish viewpoints have a lot of lag to them. Take mobile phone adoption in the US. When I first arrived here, the difference between US cellphone culture and the UK was stark, and I, like many foreign-media journalists, would frequently dine out on the gap. In 2000, you couldn’t actually consistently text people on other networks; nor would it be reasonable to expect a stranger to have a mobile phone at all.

Then, in I think about 2003, I was crunching some stats about the crappy cellphone penetration in the US for my European friends to gawp at. Instead of doing an us-and-them comparison, I did a time-based one. How far behind was the US chronologically from the UK? It turned out that the US had just crossed 50% of households owning a cellphone. Laughably small compared to 2003 Britain, where it was close to 80% (I am surely misremembering these stats, but bear with me). But nonetheless, pretty much exactly the same as 2000 Britain, my original basis for smugly lording it over the Yanks. America’s primitive phone culture was, it turned out, only as primitive as the futuristic super-advanced one I’d left three years ago.

Sure enough, when my family came to stay that year, my usual prattle about how Americans don’t have mobile phones like we do was swiftly undermined. “What are you talking about, Uncle?” said my annoyingly smart niece, “Look around you. They’ve all got mobiles.”. And they had, and my anecdotes were like drinking from yesterday’s half-empty, cigarette-filled party beers.

I think the same thing is happening with broadband. From 2000-2008 there was a much bigger consumer rollout in Europe than in the US, partly because of government-compelled competition in European telecom (and aren’t I a bad libertarian for even suggesting that), and some really terrible decisions both by business and regulators in the United States. But those differences are slowly closing out as both continents start reaching the limits of DSL and the current infrastructure.

I imagine folks will disagree, which is fine. I’m not entirely sure of the position myself. The real question is: how could we test this? Are the Speedtest stats enough on their own?

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2008-08-09»

I was working late at the ISP Virgin Net (which would later become Virgin Media), when James came in, looking a bit sheepish.

“Do you know where we could find a long ethernet cable?” How long? “About as wide, as, well,” and then he named a major London thoroughfare.

It turned out that one of the main interlinks between a UK (competitor) ISP and the rest of the Net was down. Their headquarters was one side of this main road, and for various reasons, most of the Net was on the other. Getting city permission to run cable underneath the road would have taken forever, so instead they had just hitched up a point-to-point laser and carried their traffic over the heads of Londoners. Now the network was severely degraded, due to unseasonable fog.

The solution was straightforward. They were going to string a gigabit ethernet cable across the road until the fog cleared. No-one would notice, and the worse that could go wrong would be a RJ45 might fall on someone’s head. Now their problem was simpler: who did they know in the UK internet community had a really really long ethernet cable?

I cannot yet work out whether being around when the Internet was first being rolled out is a disadvantage in understanding the terrific complexities and expenses of telco rollout, or a refreshing reality-check. I can’t speak for now, but ten years ago, much of the Net was held together by porridge and string in this way.

(Also, in my experience, most of the national press, and all of the major television networks. All I saw of the parliamentary system suggested the same, and everything anyone has ever read by anyone below the rank of sergeant in the military says exactly the same about their infrastructure. Perhaps something has changed in the intervening ten years. Who knows?)

Anyway, I’ve been reading the San Francisco city’s Draft feasibility study on fiber-to-the-home, which is a engaging, clear read on the potential pitfalls and expenses of not only a municipal-supported fiber project, but any city-wide physical network rollout. I love finding out the details of who owns what under the city’s streets (did you know that Muni, the city’s bus company, has a huge network of fiber already laid under all the main electrified routes? Or that there’s an organization that coordinates the rental of space on telephone poles and other street furniture is called the Southern California Joint Pole Committee?)

It’s also amusing to find out Comcast and AT&T’s reaction to the city getting involved in fiber roll-out:

Comcast does not believe that there is a need in San Francisco for additional connectivity
and believes that the market is adequately meeting existing demand. According to Mr.
Giles, the existing Comcast networks in the Bay Area contain fallow fiber capacity that is
currently unused and could be used at a later date if the demand arises.
…
AT&T does not recognize a need for San Francisco to consider either wireless or FTTP
infrastructure. The circumstances that would justify a municipal broadband project simply do not exist in San Francisco. Service gaps are perceived, not real, according to Mr. Mintz, because AT&T gives San Francisco residents and businesses access to: DSL , T1, and other copper based services from AT&T and Fiber based services such as OptiMAN that deliver 100Mbps to 1 Gbps connectivity to businesses that will pay for it.

My interest in it is more about the scale of any of these operations. The city will take many years to provide bandwidth, and the telco and cable providers are clearly not interested in major network upgrades.

But does rolling out bandwidth to those who need it really require that level of collective action? I keep thinking of that other triumph of borrowed cables and small intentions, Demon Internet, the first British dialup Internet provider, who funded a transatlantic Internet link by calculating that 1000 people paying a tenner a month would cover the costs.

The cost of providing high-speed Internet to every home in San Francisco is over $200 million, the study estimates. But what is the cost of one person or business making a high-speed point-to-point wireless connection to a nearby Internet POP, and then sharing it among their neighbourhood? Or even tentatively rolling out fiber from a POP, one street at a time? I suspect many people and businesses, don’t want HDTV channels, don’t want local telephony, and don’t want to wait ten years for a city-wide fiber network rolled out: they just want a fast cable on their end, with the other end of the cable plugged into the same rack as their servers. And if stringing that cable over the city meant sharing the costs with their upstream neighbours, or agreeing to connect downstream users and defray costs that way, well, the more the merrier. At least we won’t have DSL speeds and be slave to an incumbent’s timetable, and monopolistic pricing and terms and conditions.

I don’t think I would even think such a higglety-pigglety demand-driven rollout would be doable, if I hadn’t seen the Internet burst into popular use in just a matter of months in much the same way. But is the network — and demand — still ‘stupid‘ enough to allow that kind of chaotic, ground-up planning? Monopoly telcos won’t back a piecemeal plan like that for business reasons; cities won’t subsidise it, I fear, because it’s beneath their scale of operation, is too unegalitarian for the public, and undermines their own control of the planning of the city. But if it is conceivable and it is cost-effective, neither should be allowed to stand in its way.

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2008-07-27»

I grew up in Essex. One of the many exciting things about Essex is that it is tremendously flat. My aunt and uncle lived in Derbyshire, and when we went there for holidays, I marvelled at the ravishing exoticness of real hills. Now I live in San Francisco, and I have my own hill, called Bernal Heights, which has wild flowers, one (1) microwave tower, coyote, lesbians and illegal soap-box derbies. I actually don’t live on Bernal Heights, being none of the preceding: I live in the neighbourhood of Precita Valley, which is about two foot away from Bernal Heights. (San Francisco neighbourhoods are about five feet by ten feet, and are mainly differentiated by differing property prices, native language, and whether their climate is tropical rainforest, saharan, or fogbound arctic tundra.)

Anyway, today Liz wondered what Precita meant in Spanish, and looked it up in a book. “Dude,” she said, “It means ‘damned‘. You live in the valley of the damned.” I refused to believe this, and looked it up on the Internet itself. People who live in Precita deny this, and claim we live in the Valley of the Dammed. The confusion between dammed and damned may have come from the location of San Francisco’s first sewer, which, as explained in this beautiful description of the city’s adventures in sewerage, was both.

We also discovered that Bernal Heights still has a few of the old prefab earthquake cottages that were built to house the homeless after the 1906 quake. We drove to a nearby shack (maps), and hummed and ahhed at its brutal simplicity and hardiness, and I took several photographs. When we got back we realised that we’d got the address wrong and we’d been admiring somebody’s very expensive apartment instead. It’s a fine line between shack and des. res. in SF.

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