Oblomovka

2003-07-10»

More trailing-edge con watching. I’m spending more time observing the audience than the speakers, trying to overhear conversations that will give me a wider view of what’s happening here. You can’t keep track of everything, though. I’m most conscious of what I’ve missed. I’ve lost contact with the “whither open source in the enterprise” attendees – apart from Chris diBona, who is asking business model questions everywhere. The only bit of the corporate world I’ve heard about was various agog folk talking about a blistering Morgan Stanley talk on their internal Perl use. They described an amazing CPAN archive they maintain which has all the previous versions of the 280-so modules they use, all versioned so that their systems always use mods that are guaranteed to work with it. Plus all kinds of scary international desktop synchronisation over AFS. “They maintain a Perl system for 15000 programmers that we can’t keep going for ten”, said one guy.

I missed the Ruby folk too, much to my annoyance. They were a bit the underdogs at the conference, but everyone liked them. Most of the guru-level Perl coders admitted to messing around with Ruby for fun. You can see a few Ruby ideas percolating into Perl6.

One of the big themes for me was hearing the Perl guys wanting to help out everyone else, whether the other languages wanted them or not. That fits in with what’s best described as the irrational exuberance of the Perlees. They run around like big slobbering St Bernards, knocking over the quietly studious Python guys and barging into the BOFs, barking and licking people whenever they found them. They really, really want everyone else to have a CPAN, for instance. That’s one of the aims of the freepan project.

Freepan, along with FIT and YAML, is a Brian “ingy” Ingerson project. Looking back through the archives, he’s always been fairly ubiquitous at OSCON, but he was very much in the epicenter of my OSCON this year. He’s not necessarily the brains behind every good idea here, but he’s usually a degree of separation away from it.

I think the next few weeks trackings will all come from here.

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2003-07-09»

I keep being late for things. Here are my notes on the second half of Ward Cunningham and Brian Ingham’s FIT talk, and the second half of Damian Conway’s talk on Perl6 (aided by Larry Wall who heckled from the back using a scary “voice of god” microphone). I think I’m beginning to get Perl6, but it still does feel like I’ve stumbled into a shiny white room with bits of Ruby, Objective C and Python smeared up the walls and all of the Perl guys giggling in a corner.

FIT, though, looks very tasty, and social software if ever I saw it. It’s unit testing meets wikis, which means that using it is like renting room in Ward Cunningham’s head. I wonder a little if it doesn’t require a bit too much futzing around in HTML textareas, but that’s easily fixable with a front end.

I did meet up with esr. We didn’t kill each other. It was touch and go for a bit though. Thankfully, it turns out you can block a lot of killer martial arts moves by holding a little baby in front of your face.

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2003-07-08»

I’d tell you about the monster State of The Unions speeches, but I spent most of them either ferrying a cranky child around, or background-coding a blosxom moblogger for quinn and I to picture-o-gram the rest of OSCON. It’s in no fit state to show anyone, but if you’re interested, the program is really just a punched-up version of stripmime, some old code that ripped attachments out of mail so you could IMAP or POP them faster. I don’t multi-task welll, so I’m going to have fun refactoring it later to remove all the lines that say $copyfiletolarrywallsbeingquitefunny = $doesadaneedachange++ and so forth. (Yoz has been doing the same sort of thing with Moveable Type if you want proper code from a proper programmer).

Larry Wall was funny (and Ada, generally speaking, did need a change). I’m always unsure what new technical details one can pick out of these talks when so much is available online. I listen mainly for the personal stories, the emotional inflections you would otherwise miss. Wall, in his gentle way, touched on how he’d sacrificed a fair bit of his career and his mortgage to work on Perl 6. He’s just come out of hospital for ulcer treatment and it doesn’t sound unrelated. He wasn’t asking for pity, but he seemed relieved to announce that Damian and he had largely finished the Perl6 core language design.

I’m hoping to find my aha! moment with Perl 6 here. I think a lot of the Perl mongers are too. I heard a bunch of British Perlies cheering the new name for the Perl5-on-Parrot compiler, “Ponie”. As in the cockney rhyming slang, “pony and trap”. “There are many reasons for calling it Ponie”, said Larry, “none of them good.”

Guido mostly replayed his EuroPython keynote, which apart from the junking of the mooted Python equivalent to C’s (a?b:c), was straightforward, uncontroversial and reliably, Pythonically, dull. Guido said he’d strip down the language even more, if he knew how. Lots of pictures of his new son, which seemed to me to be perfectly in order.

We ran away from the talk with a klaxxonning Ada after Guido, and only skipped back in to hear the final talk on the State of Linux from Ted T’so. A fair bit of discussion about how 2.5 is more Java-friendly, although the Linux guys still insist it’s all Sun’s fault for their approach to threads (and T’so did manage to slip in a comment about “Write once, run screaming”). A bit of snippiness, too, aimed at Eric Raymond’s CML2 venture.

I’m actually meeting up with esr tomorrow. If he doesn’t shoot me dead in the first five minutes, I’ll hazard asking him about that.

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2003-07-07»

We didn’t make it to Damian Conway’s talk. Ada was fine, but had sufficiently tortured her dear mother by rising early that by 4AM it was all we could do to slide into a motel just halfway up the six hundred miles. We ended up pulling into Oregon around seven this evening.

At least being out of of the Net gave me a chance to catch up on some writing. It’s also a good way of keeping me from my usual procrastination-through-overresearching gig. For instance, I have recently been ploughing through a huge pile of academic economics research on ebay which I’m belatedly realising won’t quite fit into a 1500 word how-to-sell-online-for-novices piece. Worth it if you’re looking for a few white papers for your pez dispenser futures consultancy business, though.

As is traditional with long road trips, we listened to too many show-tunes.

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2003-07-06»

I’m off to Portland, Oregon in a few hours. We’ll be driving through the night, because Ada (pictured below eating my tie) isn’t a great traveller, but happens to be a member of the US Olympic Sleeping-At-Night Team. We’ll see.

It’s for the O’Reilly Open Source Conference, which I’ll try and document as much as I can.

I think this may be my last O’Reilly conf for a while, because I’m beginning to feel like a Deadhead, following them around like this.

Also, it’s really about time I settled down and did something, instead of zooming around talking to other people about the somethings that they’re doing. Or at least I should write much longer things about other people doing something. Stuff with indexes. Because if you don’t write things that have indexes, you’re nowhere.

Part of that search for a something is leading me to arrive, unshaven and sleep-deprived, having spent ten hours in the echo-chamber of my daughter’s screams, to head straight for Damian Conway‘s 8.45am Monday talk, “Inside ~damian/bin”.

I have this crazy idea for a book, and Damian’s bin directory is just the thing to convince me it’s a stupid undertaking. Or get me far too excited about it, one of the two.

After that, I’m just praying I don’t collapse and sleep through the rest of the week, and miss Ward Cunningham‘s talk on the unit-testing for users, fit.

The rest of the time, I think I’ll be moving in an unstructured haze between talks, ADHDing my way through the conference as usual. At Emerging Tech, I jumped around like this, but had this terribly embarassing experience of leaving every talk just as Tim O’Reilly was dropping in, leading him to deduce I’m sure that I was spending my time melodramatically storming out of every event. It didn’t help, I don’t think, that on the one occasion I was stable and sitting down when he entered, I’d just stolen Jeff Bezos’ chair. Like Jeff Bezos needs a chair.

Anyway, anyway, come up and say hello if you’re there. I’m the taller, dorky-looking gentleman above.

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2003-07-05»

I’m sorry I’ve been so grudging in dumping stuff here. Partly, it’s mental constipation. I have four interlinked essays that I’ve been mulling over for an eternity, and they’ve become so intertwined with everything that I am considering right now that I’ve been apprehensive about pre-empting any of them by blogging a single smaller thought.

Which isn’t the way to do things on blogs, of course. I should just dump material here willy-nilly, and tidy it up later. Tidy it up, and sell it, too.

I say all this, because I’ve just made a set of resolutions to myself for the next three months. One of them involves blogging daily, which I felt I should warn you about. But to understand them all, I’d have to explain that I’ve just gorged myself with a great deal of Ben Franklinabilia, and it has, as ever, made me very excited and determined. And I’ve never adequately explained to anyone why reading about Franklin would make me behave in such a way, except in a very long essay. Which you haven’t read because I haven’t written it. Yet.

Perhaps blogging daily will help. But I suspect Paul Ford’s extract from Franklin’s autobiography and this anecdote might help more. If all else fails, lean hard on your links.

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2003-06-11»

You have misunderstood. I am merely not doing the dishes in order to save you from ovarian cancer.

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2003-06-06»

Feh. Just trooped up to SF to do a panel discussion at Designing User Experiences 2003 where, I may tell you, I completely sucked.

No-one to blame: the person organising the panel had a good idea to bring some outsiders to talk, and also wanted it to be a bit controversial. So we were all asked to say something controversial. So we did so. But it all came out wrong, and consequently we faced an audience of people who’d paid good money not to be insulted, all sitting there thinking “who *are* these strangers saying these rude and ignorant things about my chosen profession?”

A good question, because I at the same time I was looking out from the stage asking “Who are these people I’m talking to? What am I supposed to say that’s interesting to them again? And why do they look so angry?” By that time, of course, the former audience had lost all sympathy to their formerly interesting panellists and it spiralled downhill from there.

A very, very, very long time ago – almost as long as the panel seemed to last today – I used to do stand-up. I quit that because I hated dying on stage.

If you only see someone do comedy live on stage once in your life, and you see them bomb, you (naturally) assume they’re like that all the time. It’s really hard to believe someone is funny when you’ve seen a room full of people stare at them like they were the Nuremberg Trial defence team.

Even when I was good, and had a run of performances where I was the cleverest funniest person in the universe, I’d always be thinking back to the hundred people who’d last seen me suck goat’s cocks.

I knew they were out there. They’d be like a missing squadron who went out one night and never returned, wandering like ghosts through the streets, slowly festering with hatred at the 2.50UKP of theirs I wasted that night, my ignorance of my own material and shoddy sense of timing eating away at their poor broken hearts.

Eventually, they die young. They go to Heaven, and tell all the angels how boring I was. God turns against me. When I die, I get sent to Hell. There I met all the people who had thought I was all right – all of whom had been thrown out of Heaven for lying so unconvincingly in my defence. They, naturally, had a really good reason to hate me now, and anyway, had heard my act before.

DUX 2003 was a bit like that. Me and Quinn (who was on the panel too) were both in the same state. We hadn’t really worked out who the audience was, and we’re both a bit rusty at public speaking. Also, we’ve had three months fairly intensive dialogue coaching in going “goo goo goo goo goo issy waddy baby!”, which may have influenced our normally punchy style.

I think we managed to pull back some credibility in the end. I’m pretty good at damage control. Quinn has a background in bad stand-up gigs as well. I didn’t cry when that drunken woman in Edinburgh climbed onto a table and started singing the “Yoooor shite” song to me, so I’m not going to cry when the man from Microsoft says that we’re doing his whole industry a disservice. No, no, I sucked up to him instead. Mmm, five minutes on why Microsoft rules. Yeah, that was straight from the heart. No panic in my jellied bloodstream there.

You know what I wanted to say? I wanted to say: Hellooo former audience. I’m so with you on this. If I was sitting where you are now, I’d think I was a bit rubbish too: blurting out unconnected points, making some rather forced jokes. Squeaking a bit.

But honestly, we’re not this stupid. We think about this stuff all the time. If I had ten minutes with each of you, I think maybe I could explain what was going on, and after three drinks, maybe a meal I will generously offer to pay for, you’d even agree with me.

I’ve got a list of attendee’s names here. Maybe I can mail them all, offer them a compensatory voucher or something. Did you go to DUX 2003? Why then, beers on me! Or green tea, or gingko biloba, whatever you designer people drink.

Sigh. It’s no use. I can feel them out there. Plotting.

you know i’m going to be very upset if this is the first google hit for DUX 2003

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2003-05-29»

I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while, but then I’ve been meaning to do a bunch of stuff.

Below is the letter I wrote to Beverley Hughes, the Minister who told Parliament that only 2000 people had responded to the ID Cards consultation, when we know for a fact that five thousand or so replied via our Website. It’s not a ball-buster, I’m afraid, because we did want to open up some sort of communication channel. Also, mad political haranguing works a lot better on Newsnight than it does in a private letter. As the letter rather sinisterly implies, we’re saving the louder bleating until later.

We sent this a couple of weeks ago. We still haven’t heard a reply. So now we’re stepping up the sabre-rattling a bit.

Dear Beverley,

I’ve been eagerly looking forward to your department’s report on the Entitlement Card consultation you concluded earlier this year. I’m one of a who participated in the discussion, along with five thousand others who entered in their opinions of your paper via http://www.stand.org.uk/ , a Website I help run.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I read in Hansard for April 28th that you had only received two thousand replies in total to the consultation.

I hear that you have decided to collapse all five thousand communications that you received via our site into a single vote.

[ This hint came from “ministerial sources” – which is to say, somebody who works closer to government than us told us that he’d heard that this happened. ].

I suppose the idea is that all five thousand entries were engineered by us, or that they all come from members of the same vast organisation, speaking as one united voice.

The chilling reality – chilling, at least, for me – is that STAND is about four or five somewhat stressed looking people, working part-time from their homes and occasionally gathering in a pub. And we can’t even agree on which pub, let alone a coherent political platform.

Aware of our own limitations, we try and keep as thin an interface between us, and what we feel is our job – which is putting people online in touch with the parliamentary process. We do enough to achieve just that, then step out of the way and let you people talk amongst yourselves.

That does have some political connotations. We’re mostly interested in putting people in touch with Parliament via the Net. In the online world some political areas are hotter than others. Digital security; censorship; the telecoms industry and radio spectrum allocation; privacy and large-scale computer initiatives; digital democracy itself. These are the topics that excite the most debate online.

Sometimes, as the name implies, we take a STAND on one of these issues. The ID Cards consultation was one. We said we thought ID cards were a bad idea.

But more importantly, we said we thought that the consultation had not sought out critical views during its collection period.

In order to solicit opinions from a wider base than previously, we put together a link between the Web and your consultation email address (and, for good measure, let people contact their local MP on the matter). We publicised it in a few areas where people who are online a lot tend to gather.

We felt that most people using our service would be against the ID card – but not exclusively. We wanted people who felt that the ID card was a good idea should also have a say. Accordingly, we allowed people to write whatever they wanted using our system. And so, as far as we can gather, they did.

Now we hear that you are viewing all of those separately considered opinions as one collective petition.

Apart from being somewhat concerned for the people who expressed a positive opinion being ascribed into what I presume would be a single negative vote, this seems to lead to a terrible waste of resources, opportunity and time on both our sides.

Frankly, if we were forewarned that this would happen, we would have told people to sign a petition (in fact, two petitions), and engineered some way of conveying that to you. It would certainly have saved some time and effort on both our sides.

As it is, I’m pretty disappointed. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

I feel that there were a lot of people involved in the ID Card consultation for whom this would be their first experience of directly contributing to a government initiative. To turn to them now and explain that their voice counts for nothing – or 1/5000th of a voice, whichever is greater – seems to me to convey the exact opposite of what a consultation is meant to achieve. They spent a lot of time working on their thoughts: far more, I’d wager, than we spent enabling their thoughts to be forwarded. They’re going to feel more disenfranchised than ever after this.

Obviously, we’re going to contest this decision, and are proceeding to kick up the usual fuss through the usual channels.

But, to be honest, whatever happens here, the most important step for us is to ensure that this never happens again. We’re going to continue to put together feedback loops to link what you do, to what the wider public thinks. That’s something that i think we can all agree is a good thing.

We’d love to avoid such short-circuits in the future. What we really need to proceed is solid criteria by which contributions are decided to come from one source, or from many.

Would your department – perhaps in co-operation with the Cabinet Office – be prepared to draft a quick set of guidelines for this?

It would make our life easier; I think you would make better informed decisions from a wider variety of sources; and your consultations would be rather less controversial.

Best wishes,

Danny O’Brien
— standing in for Stand.org.uk

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2003-05-28»

I originally typed that title as a reference to the weather here, but now that WASTE, Nullsoft’s latest naughty GPL P2P app has 404ed, I guess it has wider applicability.

Too late to be stopped, though. Here’s a link to the Linux-ported server source. Here’s a local copy to the Windows WASTE client.

Anyone want to lay bets on how long the first MacOS X and Linux clients take?

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