Oblomovka

2002-08-26»

So I wrote a piece in this week’s Sunday Times about running services from your broadband-connected home computer: mainly, services that you’d otherwise have to pay for, like Webmail, online file space, and calendaring. It got a huge response, with dozens of people writing in asking how they could do this.

For most of them, I admit I have no idea – I’m a Linux guy, so all of these server-ish features come pretty easily to me. I feel a bit dumb replying to people with “Use SSH! And Debian!”, though. If anyone has any suggestions on how you could reasonably set up IMAP, Webmail, Web folders (WebDAV) and maybe even a calendar server on a home Windows install, I’d love to hear it.

The piece, incidentally, is currently here, but it’s registration-protected up the wazoo. Brits can log in as cypherpunk/cypherpunk. Anyone else has to pay. Also the link will die soon, as NewsCorp shovel the piece into their exclusively-priced archive, so what’s the point?

Hold on though: I do believe I own the copyright on this article. I’ll stick it here, and then when I’ve time, I’ll set up a proper archive. It’s all about DIY, after all.

This virtual life: Danny O’Brien: Why I am not paying

All over the web, companies are switching from offering free services to charging a fee. The latest to cross the line is Apple, who recently changed its @mac.com webmail and iDisk online file-storage service from zero to a £65 annual subscription. That has prompted many to ask whether others such as Hotmail or Geocities will follow.

I am always sceptical of paying for web stuff. Most of it is, frankly, ripping off the gullible. People are tempted to pay for these subscriptions because they appreciate not having to search high and low for freebies. But as the net improves at delivering what we want, finding the cheapest price grows simpler. And online, the cheapest price is almost always “free”.

And so it is with web e-mail and file space online. Checking e-mail on the move and dumping Word documents or photo albums where others can find them are, to me, indispensable. If Hotmail started charging a subscription, or Geocities refused to give away its precious web space, you would think I would be the first to pay up.

Think again. Because I have those services free – from my home computer. I have an always-on broadband connection, so I can check my mail from anywhere by logging in to my home computer from any net connection. And I do not need spare storage on someone else’s server as I have enough spare disk space at home, thanks very much.

There are other advantages to being able to connect to my own computer. I can grab a webcam snapshot of what is going on in my flat; I can print out documents ready for me to pick up when I arrive home. I even run a little website off my home machine to pick up important documents.

It is not difficult to do any of this – in theory, at least. The software is readily available, but advice on how to set it up is remarkably scarce. Even though connecting to your home computer from anywhere is a great feature, broadband providers, if they mention this at all, generally couch it in protective terms. “We’ll provide you with a firewall, so that nobody can get into your home PC,” they promise. What if I want to get in?

Software companies such as Microsoft and Apple seem very reluctant to write the software that would make setting up your home computer as a server a snap. Of course, Microsoft owns Hotmail, and Apple charges for all those .Mac services. Maybe they do not appreciate competition. Especially from the likes of you.

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2002-08-24»

Anyone who is interested in both the W3C and usability online might want to check out the proposed W3C User Interest Group, and the workshop they’re having in Maryland in October. (I know this appears to be a bit random in my blog, but I appear to be one of the few people who know about this, and it looks like deserves wider coverage).

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2002-08-23»

Dyson, the kitten double-agent who spies on my household to find the secret of human food preparation, has a congenital bug in her optics. It’s called nystagmus and means her eyes constantly quiver. It’s not very noticeable and doesn’t, as far as we can see, affect her eyesight. But I would have conceded that combined with her mild strabismus, it does make her appear a bit thick.

But that’s all changed for me now. Looking at her now, I’ve realised that she looks like she’s accessing data on a tiny retinal display.

What is she up to?

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Andre Torrez is the man behind my current all-consuming obsession, Filepile. Here he explains the subtle difference about writing a great idea you had in your blog, and just doing it

I built FilePile in a couple of hours at work. The original design had no user accounts. I had never heard of a “remix”. I wasn’t even familiar with Fark or all the sites mentioned in this Wired.com article. I just thought it’d be neat to see how much bandwidth I could waste. It was an exercise in excess. I didn’t even think about it, I just did it.

And that’s what’s got me so bothered about people musing in their weblogs about projects they’d like to do. Stop talking about it an just build it. Don’t make it too complicated. Don’t spend so much time planning on events that will never happen. Programmers, good programmers, are known for over-engineering to save time later down the road. The problem is that you can over-engineer yourself out of wanting to do the site.

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2002-08-20»

The Campaign for Digital Rights has released their first look at the British implementation of the European Copyright Directive, which I will insist on calling “The European DMCA” until I’m physically restrained from doing so. Close up, it has some important differences – but that doesn’t make it any better. CD-R’s step-by-step demolition of it is a corker.

The writing exercise today, then, was pretty clear cut. STAND now has a potted description of just some of the problems with the new statutes, and what you can do about it – and why this may be even harder than the Blunkett RIP provisions to fix.

Oh Christ, that’s such an Anchordesk way to plug it, isn’t it? I’m getting far too into this pro journalism business. Talking of which, I haven’t cross-checked all of the STAND piece with CD-R yet, so there may be some errors of interpretation I’ve fallen into there. I did spend a week staring at the legislation so I’m pretty sure they’re not too egregious. I’m waiting on sending out the message to the few thousand STANDees though; some things you can’t undo.

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Well, I must be doing something right. I just got a prominent cyberrights activist to accuse me of misrepresenting the facts. Yesss! I’ve sold out, and I haven’t even bought in yet!

[ correction: said activist (who will not be named but it is Cory) pointed out that I misrepresent the facts by saying that he said that I misrepresent the facts. I have no defence here except my usual one: I was joking! Joking! Just a joke, m’lud! Ahaha. ha. damn. ]

Reuters beat me to it – their story ran at 9:45 EST. Curse you, Elinor Abreu. Wired News’s piece was longer than I thought it’d be: it explained filters and their effects far more carefully, and covered the angle of publishers having their work blocked as spam, rather than going into the detail of how Habeas’ scheme worked. Anti-spam filter’s false positives do seem to be a big deal at the moment: Dan Gillmor covered that today too. (We occasionally get hit by this at NTK, but I don’t try to re-edit for it. The only way for these dumb filters to learn is to have people lose the occasional mail. Much worse are all the prudish corporate filters, which constantly bounce NTK on the basis that it contains “sexual content”, “unsuitable language”, and on a couple of occasions “joke”.)

The one story I don’t think any of the proper media covered adequately was how the haiku infringement blackhole list will work, and just how controversial blackholes are in general. And that’s where the blogs pick up the baton.

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2002-08-19»

This is an amazingly clever legal hack to deal with spammers and the problems of false positives with automatic spam scanners. Anne Mitchell, ex of MAPS has copyrighted (and trademarked, and patented) a haiku. She’ll let anyone who isn’t a spammer include it in their headers. And she’ll go after spammers that do include it with the full armoury of the intellectual property legal framework. She’s taking them down for breach of her haiku, not their spamming practice! I don’t know whether it’ll work, but it’s the the cleverest use of IP law I’ve seen since the GPL.

I’ve written up the story as a news item, as per my grand writing project. If you want to forward this link around, you might want to link directly to that. (This one’s in the style of Wired News, trivia fans: a fair amount of presumed knowledge, slightly informal style, standard US news piece packaging. Wired update their site at about 3AM PST, so don’t be surprised if there’s an equivalent, but better researched piece, over there by the time you read this.)

I *knew* spam and haiku were interlinked somehow.

Oh, and by the way – I originally got this from the astounding TBTF Irregulars mailing list.

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So, I’m living through some interesting times right now. I just hit 33, my wife’s expecting our first baby, and I’ve recently discovered I owe the US federal government quite a few pork-barrels worth of tax.

Now most people who know me will realise I’m a laid back kind of guy, where “laid back” can be interpreted as “bone idle“. But there comes a time when, even though you’ve reached an income bracket that keeps you in pizza and comics, you have to think about changing out of your pyjamas, going out into the wide world, and earning some proper money. This time is known as the “completely broke” time, and I’m so there. I need a career path.

I’ve always rather avoided the term journalist. Partly because, obviously, journalists are the Two-Faced and Turncoated Enemy Who Will Be The First Against The Wall When The Blogolution Comes. Mainly though, because proper journalism involves training and grammar-checking and talking to people on the telephone and selling out to the man in weekly installments.

I’ve been a journalist in the past (straight out of college). For the last five years I’ve been doing something I guess not dissimiliar to investigative journalism at NTK. And I’ve been writing newspaper columns for three years – which is what journalists are supposed to do when they’ve been journalisting for so long they can’t stop, even when they’re too senile to fact check. I even helped start (and kill) a magazine, which even I’ll grant is a bit journalistique manque.

But: I’m not a journalist. Journalism is hard. It takes practice, regular practice, and a degree of teeth-gritting determination I’ve been avoiding for a very long time. Worse, in America it involves knowing off by heart a bunch of strange quasi-legalistic rules – a discipline taught by high-falutin’ Professors Of Inkstains here, and generally replaced in the British model with going down the pub. And you have to be fast. I’ve always been a bit slow, and nowadays I’m slooooooow.

But sooner or later, I’m going to have to be a journalist again. I need the money; there are issues that need to be covered. Also Declan, my long time inspiration in this area, appears to have gone a bit mad.

But I need practice. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to practice on you. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to file stories with you (and hopefully with STAND also). I’ll be messing around with styles a bit, to see if I can get the hang of the different tones of different news services. They’ll be like writing exercises, but the content will nonetheless stand on its own. They’ll be proper interviews, and exclusives, and all that rubbish.

Let me know how it goes, and if I’m improving. If “you” are an editor, and I get it right, you can probably run them straight, but you might like to pay me, or give me a job, or some advice. Or take me down the pub.

The first story will follow in a couple of minutes. We’ll see how it goes.

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Rhys says “at least you didn’t do a course which meant you had to pretend to understand Bayes Theorem”. More helpfully, he pointed to a Bayes explanation which made it click for him. Now the probability of me understanding something, given that Rhys understands it is about 0.4, but the probabilty of Rhys understanding given that I understand it is… no, it’s gone again.

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Which is Macintosh-flavoured Word, just bombed out on me. Again. It’s the second time in a month. Oh, Microsoft, they said you’d changed.

Back to Vim. I think it’s eaten my work once, on an alpha version, two years ago. Oh, sure, it has a steep learning curve and sucks a bit for prose work. But I learnt all the keystrokes a long time ago to impress a girlfriend, I’ve just found out that ‘gG’ tells me my word count, and it now has an interface for the Little Brother Database, so la-la-la, I don’t care..

Oh, and look – somebody’s working on a user friendly version. My UNRECOVERED FILES WILL BE AVENGED.

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