Oblomovka

2007-08-16»

I love the secularism of America’s holidays: Thanksgiving, Labor Day, Festivus. It seems funny to me that the only one commemorating a Christian martyr, Martin Luther King Day, is the one most grudgingly celebrated by the religious areas of the country.

But I like Independence Day the most. I get to make a joke that all Americans smile at. “Good riddance day!” I say in my toy British accent. Ahaha. Americans like to win, and the British like the purifying sting of a sustainable loss. I have my own ritual of sitting through “1776: The Musical” and singing tunelessly along to all the songs. (I have a friend who really is a Lee of Old Virginia, and sings that song more enthusiastically than the Lee in the film).

Last July 4th was the best. All in all, I’ve had a horrid two years, and July 4th was the best day in a long, long time. Ada and I went down to the beach. On the way I explained about how some countries had birthdays and that this was hers. When we got to North Beach, she screamed with joy to find the beach so close to her home, and ran into the waves, soaking herself and laughing like a sea-spirit. We wieved through the holiday crowds, still ten times thinner than Britain’s beach packs, past a brilliant Eighties cover band that made her stop in amazement and then dance until she ached, onto a shop where I converted an outsized tanktop into a warm jacket for her, to pizza, to carrying her across darkening San Francisco, asleep and happy.

I also thought a little about independence. I’ve seen endless technology booms now: the Eight-Bit Ascendancy of the seventies (I was a kid, but used to play games where Apple battled Atari), the British Cambrian Explosion of 1981-1986, the Windows Anchsluss of 1990, the False Boom of 1995, the Even Falser Boom of 1997-2001, and, lately, the Ajax Restoration of 2005.

If you want to make no money at all but find the interesting ideas, I’ve found the trick in these booms is to tack against the primary trends. If everyone is talking about portals, seek out single-function websites, if Windows is imposing a monopoly, look for where everyone who likes multiple OSes is hanging out. These ideas won’t necessarily form the components of the next boom, but you’ll be able to import the best ideas in these spaces cheap. And when you say them to others, you’ll seem a very clever controversialist with outrageous yet fruitful ideas. You can trust me on that, I’m a columnist.

Anyway, a trend you couldn’t help but notice in this latest overexcitement is migration of data from the edge to centralised servers. Email moves to webmail, documents move to Google documents, private data moves to Mylinkedfacefriendbook-or-not?, Amazon S3, Flickr – even Blogger.

I’m curious as to what happens when one tries to buck this trend. There are clearly some functions that really should live on centralised servers: I’m not sure I can imagine how you can do web-wide search without camping out in the Googleplex or equivalent (Wikia notwithstanding). But there really isn’t any need for Google Documents to live on Google servers. The two functions that Google Documents provides over desktop applications – shareability and remote access aren’t aspects of Google’s mega-servers. They’re just workarounds for the lack of distributed ID and unfindability of edge nodes. With alternate workarounds that otherwise allow your friends to log onto your home PC to edit documents, and find your home PC in the first place, you could easily host your docs, run your webmail, hold up your end of the social network, store and share files, display your photographs, and run your website, from your home.

If that sounds terrifically inconvenient next to letting Google and Yahoo run the shebang, remember that the move from ghastly inconvenience to one click bliss is always just somebody’s smart UI innovation away. There’s nothing about Google Docs that requires shitloads of servers, except the fact that Google is singlehandedly having to deal with shitloads of users. Lovely though Flickr is, somebody, somewhere could follow its rearlights, and knock up an open source clone that runs on your own machine in the fraction of the time it took for them to polish their UI. Maintaining your own server, handling security updates, fiddling with the optimum settings, are all high hurdles now, but they don’t need to be. Running a Unix desktop used to be a nightmare until MacOS and Ubuntu came along.

There’s also a pressing civil liberty reason to start leaning back towards holding your data close to your chest. Data held by a third-party in the United States just isn’t safe. Terms and conditions deny you any recourse for leaked or lost data; courts and Congress both deny citizens the protections of the Fourth Amendment for *any* data that you share with others. That even means data you expect to keep private, or have no way of keeping to yourself (the key case here is United States v. Miller, where the court decided that you have no expectation of privacy in your bank records, because you *shared them with your bank*!)

So here’s the question: how much of our life that we share with the Web 2.0 giants do we really *need* to share? How much of these services can and should we be running from the comfort of our own homes?

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2007-02-18»

Just as it’s polite for host and guest to wear the same style of clothes, I feel that it’s right to be late to a wake; Quinn and I turned up nearly five hours late to Robert Anton Wilson’s memorial service. We missed RAW’s trip out to the beach and beyond. “Don’t they do that at the end?”, said another latecomer, confounded by Wilson’s disregard for chronology to the very end. (Or at least, three hours beforehand.)

But it was a fine event, with a string of wellwishers climbing up the steps of a stage showing clips and pictures of the man, reading their surreal, syncronicitous, or personal note, and then stepping back to join the waiting crowd.

Quinn and I agreed that our favourite moment was at the end. We were all mulling together to raise a tune to Bob’s last written words, “Keep the Lasagna Flying”, by singing a simple modification of Old Langs Syne, “For the Sake of Old Lasagna.” By this point, many of the members of the congregation had wandered from their seats to stare out at the crashing Pacific beside us, perhaps to mull a little about what they’d seen and heard. The singer asked if someone could get their attention and bring them back to the room. Instantly, an old guy went tearing off toward the wandering sheep, shouting “FIRE! FIRE! THERE’S A FIRE INSIDE!”

Everyone returned, quick time.

My photograph is of Wilson’s miraculously empty box. Schrodinger, Houdini and the Trickster Jesus would all have been proud. Dead or alive? Worse – he’s not even there anymore!

Comments Off on bye bob

2007-01-16»

So, Robert Anton Wilson died again. I snuck, I hope, an obituary masquerading as a tech column into this week’s Irish Times, documenting RAW’s influence (and, collaterally, drug culture) on tech culture. It should be out on Friday. Jesse Walker did a far broader and finer job on RAW in Reason. His excellent anecdote about Illuminatus!’s banned status in Soviet Leipzig reminds me of a story that typifies the chaos Wilson injected into my own life.

At university, we had one of Britain’s copyright libraries, which meant in theory that they had claim to one copy of every book and periodical published in the United Kingdom. I blew a lot of time trying to probe the library with requests to see what obscure volumes I could pull out from the stacks. One day, I looked up Sex and Drugs by Robert Anton Wilson.

I went up to the nice librarian with my chit to call up the book. She looked at the slip I’d written out, and took me to one side. “You’ve called up one of our restricted set,” she said. “You’ll need your tutor’s permission to read that, and only in a special room we set aside for that purpose.” I said it didn’t matter, and left the desk.

I looked at the piece of paper I’d given her. The shelf mark that I’d scribbled down from the catalogue began with the greek letter ϕ (Phi) and a series of numerals.

The library had recently installed an electronic catalogue, accessible from terminals in the library. I walked over, called up the shelfmark search, and typed “Phi”. There, listed and catalogued, were all the Damned Things anyone might want you not to know about, carefully gathered and presented.

The trick still works, although you have to use the telnet interface to the Bodleian’s OLIS system, and dig down to the extended search screen. I see that the damned now includes books by Norman Lindsay, Elton John, Madonna, the Consumer Association’s 1963 Which? review of contraceptives, Aleister Crowley, Monty Python, Fiesta’s Reader’s Wives special, W.H. Auden’s The Platonic Blow, Razzle, Davey “Wavey” Winder, Henry Miller, Wilhelm Reich, William Burroughs, Sacher-Masoch and Charles Platt.

I find it reassuring that I’ve met four of Oxford’s banned authors since I left. When I met Robert Anton Wilson, I asked him if Father Christmas existed. He told me and I’ll keep that secret until I join him in the grave. See you after the circus, RAW.

Comments Off on another fine mess

2007-01-05»

Rose snagged me.

1. I got engaged to be married when I was sixteen. Aw, sweet. Her mother was ex-colonial from the isolated heights of the Seventies South American Anglo upper-class, suffering the culture shock that British ex-pats get when they return from abroad and instead of Olde Englande, find 1980s Essex. Her mother used to chaperone us to the movies (I watched Ghostbusters for the first time with her sitting between us), and she spent her remaining money on antiques which she grew to love too much to sell. My girlfriend was desperate to escape, I was very in love, and the nature of her family’s cultural timewarp required that we get engaged and married in secret to do just that. In the end, she ran off with a muslim chap she met on the tube.

   Hi, Alison!

2. I was born in Basildon. It was a home birth, in a self-build house, in a new town. my family didn’t make the house ourselves, but we bought it from someone who had. An electrician, he engineered many many electrical outlets in every room, which I now remember every time I have to string extensions across corridors. It was a fluke of my introverted nerdly childhood that I grew an accent that was more BBC presenter than Basildon cockney. I got bullied over that a lot.

3. I have one of those birth marks that if it were anywhere visible you’d stare at me when you thought I wasn’t looking. Fortunately for me, it covers most of my right shoulder blade instead. I can’t see it unless I really strain around, and I generally forget about it until either I go swimming, or a new love says, politely, “What the hell is that?” It totally ruins the odds of me being James Bond, but marginally increases my chances of being a Evil Master Criminal.

4. I write “please” on my checks. As in “Pay Foo Bar twenty-two dollars only please”. I figure it helps them to clear.

5. I have publically kissed both Pauline Calf and Al “the pub landlord” Murray on the mouth.

I nominate Stef, Begbie, Justin, Seth, and Rachel.

Comments Off on if you don’t know me by now

2006-12-12»

I’m in complete denial. I’d like to think that if Leslie were here, she would be the same.

Kass says that in this situation Leslie would make herself useful, and make us all feel amateurs, in the nicest possible way, which is true.

The last time I saw Leslie, she was mad at me, but hiding it. We were up impossibly early because I had an appointment to make, and I’d asked Leslie to give me a lift and she’d said yes because she always says yes and then it was hideous o’clock in the morning and she’d been working along all night in the dark on her monitor doing some godawful freelance work, and I was staying on her couch, and she gave me a lift in her awful, medical-lawsuit-required beaten-up car which she couldn’t get rid of because the fucking medical establishment would have gone “look, you see, you’re doing okay, therefore we shouldn’t give you a penny for throwing you into a coma”. And we drove around looking for the Caltrain, and there was a look of such grim determination on Leslie’s face to forgive me for putting her through this, to get through the pain, and to *do a good job*.

And what such good advice came out, concentrated, from that! Leslie gave me and everyone tips about fonts, love affairs, music, etiquette. She ran the drunken sub-committee that decided my daughter’s name one night. She told me what to do in New York; she showed me, by example, how to bear San Francisco.

Leslie didn’t talk much about the terrible shit that kept. on. happening. to her. I got the sense that this was because she didn’t want anyone else hurt, even by merely the retelling of it: the death of her husband, loss of her domain, her apartment burning down. You could piece it all together, if you of were determined. She didn’t hide anything, but she didn’t want to tell that kind of story. She wanted to tell stories of optimism and beauty, and they would have to wait. In the meantime, forgiveness, grim determination, getting through, doing a good job. Marking time, until the good times came, and then seizing on them like a joyous animal hid there in the dark.

Mark has the best first last word. Leslie still has the best pictures, and the right answer.

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2006-12-01»

So I’ve made an important life decision to spend more time with Python. I think this may be a sign of middle age. I’m of the opinion that there comes a time in one’s life when one should settle down with one language, and slowly encrust into COBOLic fuddy-duddyism in preparation for barking at youngsters about Lisp, and my time has come. I’ll still flirt with Ruby, and Perl, and Smalltalk, but I’ll try and actually get good at Python. Also, EFF is, if you really tied it the ground and submitted it to extraordinary rendition until until it admitted a preference, a Python shop at heart (with scads of PHP littering the floor).

The one painful goodbye from the fun I’ve been having with Ruby was the lovely gems package system, which, as so much of Ruby, was like Perl’s CPAN in rehab. But I’ve just discovered that Python’s setuputils utility includes an easy_install program that does much the same as gems: seeks out packages by name, downloads them from the ether, seeks out dependencies and downloads them too, and then drops it all sensibly in your site-packages.

Easy Install and setuptools were going to be included in the latest Python 2.5, but for good reasons the author decided to withdraw them. It sounds like the infrastructure is being slowly put in place though. I’m looking forward to finding out what else the Pythonistas have been doing in the past year or so.

And now I’m going to look at Eclipse. Christ, what’s happening to me?

Comments Off on things which should get more publicity but don’t – easy_install, python’s package system

2006-11-23»

“The secret of success is sincerity. Fake that, and you’ve got it made.”
– Bob Monkhouse

I remember hearing Monkhouse say this as a child, and even then it stuck with me as painfully self-referential joke. At the time, Bob Monkhouse’s performing career was stuck in the wilderness: not because he wasn’t quick, or funny, or prolific, but because he came across as appalling insincere. The secret of Bob Monkhouse’s failure right then was he was trying hard to be sincere, and looking more and more false the more he attempted it. Not because he wasn’t underneath it all, truly sincere – but because in England insincerity is best described as the presence of any sincerity at all.

A friend of mine came to America from Britain before I did. He stayed for a year in Houston, Texas in the Nineties. During Thanksgiving at a local’s house, he had to bear each of the assembled take a turn very sincerely expressing, in monologue form, what they had to give thanks for this year. They spoke of their health, their family, their neighbours, their friends. When it finally came to him to make his homily – and this, mind you, is one of the nicest politest people I know – he could only say “I’d like to give thanks that I’m finally getting out of Texas next month.”

Sincerity is physically painful to the British. Delivering a sincere statement in front of them is like spraying a mouthful of holy water in the face of a vampire. Americans, by contrast, use sincerity as a subtle rhetorical weapon. It was my wife who first demonstrated this to me, delivering an explanation of its place in American society with such doe-eyed earnestness that by the end I was screaming for mercy. She pointed out the little sincerity competitions Californians play; the subtle social markers open goodwill plays in the mid-west. How in Washington politics, there were five hundred flavours of faked sincerity, which, like eskimo words for snow, my English mind could only perceive as one gormless act of yokelism.

I’ve been here nearly seven years. I’m at Ascension Island in terms of my nationality. I’ve learnt some sincerity: used it to patch up the social graces that the English universal social solvent, making dumb jokes, don’t fill here.

While I’ve been gone, Britain has been turning slowly and ineradicably alien; it’s wandered plate-techtonically from where it was when I lived there. The vein of new-agism that was just beginning to pulse when I left has got more of a hold. The buses seem cleaner. Europe isn’t as scary. Sneering at underclasses is more socially acceptable. And people are noticeably more capable and willing to be sincere at me, even when not drunk.

But I’m not there yet, and I’m not here yet. It’s hard for me to sincerely say thanks, even though on this best of American holidays, I want to express some sort of gratitude for my genius wife, and my mischevious daughter, and my extended family, and my friends, and my co-workers: Suw and the hard-working people at ORG, and San Francisco, and the mailing lists, and my cat and my computer and music and all the absent friends.

So let me slip it in as a hypothetical at the end of this entry, and just take it as read that I did, okay?

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2006-11-15»

Some of you may have been wondering where I’ve been the last few months. Others, idly mulling on why you haven’t seen me much on the Internets for the last year or so. And a few of you might be repeatedly IMing me saying “Where are you? What’s happened to NTK? Did you sell the gossip-packaged-in-horrific-web-design-and-courier meme to Nick Denton or something?”

One and all, thank you for your interest.

A core group of you – we’ll call them Team O’Brien, and give them a special hypothetical bandanna to wear – have known that I’ve been, as the English say, poorly recently. It’s true I’ve been sick, and they have been lovely throughout the last few months, and I have gratefully appreciated sucking their charitable instincts dry.

Everyone else – WHERE WERE YOU? Did you not see the signs? I thought we were friendsters! You were in my third-degree linked-in list, dammit! You clicked the “I care about him/her” checkbutton! Yet you never wrote, you never called.

Oh wait, you did, and I kept not answering or going “Mmmm kind of busy, let’s talk soon.” Almost as though I had a script that wrote that to you. Or was having an in-service-of-denial attack.

Nevertheless. I’m back now to tell you a thing or two. One is that while it’s not all better yet, doctors are now smacking their fists in frustration at not being able to prod me any further: a good sign. I am feeling much better, and I hope to become a threat to myself and others again shortly.

I am also having some fun raising my head above the parapet and discovering how much everything has changed in the last year or so. Apparently the dream of “hacking life” itself has become an industry (rather than the hubristic act against nature I originally believed it to be). Indeed, it transpires that almost any batshit idea anyone devised between 2000-2003 is now an industry. People who when last I saw them were living in cupboards and eating the stuff found in their keyboards are now millionaires. Okay, maybe just Linden Dollar millionaires, but still. Geeks who feared to go out lest anyone talk to them have now turned their social software upon themselves, and are now obliged to go to three or four “camps” a week merely to test the scalibility of the calendaring features. Truly, everything is new again, again. Again.

Well, almost. Some things have not changed. Debian is nearly finished, Firefox is still being rewritten. Perl people are nutty, Python people sensible, Ruby are still sensible within their domain, nutty outside it.

And I’m still burying the lede. The point is that last night I marked as unread 7000 incoming emails in my inbox, and sent them into oblivion. Your mail was absolutely right, and I’ve taken everything you said on board. I can’t make it to your thing. But I do love you. Write back, but not soon. I’m okay. I missed you.

Comments Off on declarations of absence, illness, bankruptcy and love

2006-07-04»

A new few-liner Ruby program, tagling, which uses Yahoo’s Web services to automatically suggest tags for a given piece of text. (I’ve finally grokked the Ruby nature, mainly by playing around with rake).

A new button to show your support for ORG:

More iconography on the ORG site.

I’m coming over to the UK in July, so if you’d like to meet up, give me a mail. I’m also speaking at LUGRadio Live on the 22nd, apparently on “focused discussion”, but really I’ll be talking a bit about Europe, America and digital activism. And swearing. They made me promise to swear.

Comments Off on new things

2006-04-03»

I have to admit, this is a dream event for me – in the sense that it has all the hallmarks of an event that ends with me looking out into the audience, realising I’m still in my pajamas, and then waking up in a cold sweat.

While I can’t exactly promise that for April 20th, if you’re in the San Francisco area, it should be a fascinating debate. There’s all kinds of subtleties to the pay-for-mail debate, including the nature of agorics, challenges to the end-to-end Net, transaction costs and the always-in-the-future future of micropayments. I’ll do my best to channel all the subtleties of the case for “free” email in as entertaining way as possible: and I’m sure Mitch Kapor and Esther Dyson will have no problem broadening my mind and yours.

“Email — Should the Sender Pay?”: EFF Fundraiser, Debate Between Esther Dyson and Danny O’Brien

In light of AOL’s adopting a “certified” email system, EFF is hosting a debate on the future of email. With distinguished entrepreneur Mitch Kapor moderating, EFF Activist Coordinator Danny O’Brien and renowned tech expert Esther Dyson will discuss the potential consequences if people have to pay to send email. Would the Internet deteriorate as a platform for free speech? Would spam or phishing decline?

WHEN:
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

WHAT:

“Email – Should the Sender Pay?”

WHO:

Danny O’Brien

Danny O’Brien is the Activist Coordinator for the EFF. His job is to help our membership in making their voice heard: in government and regulatory circles, in the marketplace, and with the wider public. Danny has documented and fought for digital rights in the UK for over a decade, where he also assisted in building tools of open democracy like Fax Your MP. He co-edits the award-winning NTK newsletter, has written and presented science and travel shows for the BBC, and has performed a solo show about the Net in the London’s West End.

Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is editor at large at CNET Networks, where she is responsible for its monthly newsletter, Release 1.0, and its PC Forum, the high-tech market’s leading annual executive conference. As editor at large, she also contributes insight and content to CNET Networks’ other properties. She sold her business, EDventure Holdings, to CNET Networks in early 2004. Previously, she had co-owned EDventure and written/edited Release 1.0 since 1983. Recently, Esther authored a New York Times editorial called “You’ve Got Goodmail,” defending a sender-pays model for the future of email.

Mitch Kapor

Mitchell Kapor is the President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation, a non-profit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses. He is widely known as the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980’s. In 1990, Kapor co-founded EFF.

WHERE:
Roxie Film Center
3117 16th Street, San Francisco
(between Valencia and Guerrero)
Tel: (415) 863-1087

See the link below for a map: http://www.roxie.com/directions.cfm

Please RSVP to events@eff.org

To learn more about the DearAOL campaign against AOL’s planned system: DearAOL

Esther Dyson’s editorial, “You’ve Got Goodmail“.

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