Oblomovka

2008-10-09»

Me: So, guess what they’re showing on a huge movie screen at Dolores Park tonight?
Ada: Ooh, what?
Me: [TRIUMPHANTLY] The muppets! Want to go?
Ada: Oh god.
Me: What?
Ada: Is it the Muppet show?
Me: No, the Muppet movie!
Ada: Oh man. That’s even worse.
Me: What, you don’t want to see the muppets?
Ada: No I do not! You know what I do when people put on the muppet show for kids to watch?
Me: What?
Ada: I pretend to watch it and when they’re gone I go do something else.
Me: But… but… the muppets are great!
Ada: Hmmph.
Me: You’re a kid, Ada, how can you not like the muppets?
Ada: Because they are scary monsters that talk. [ FOLDS ARMS ]

Meanwhile, all the grown-ups I knew were sneaking off work early to get a good seat.

I fear this will be the splinter issue the boomers will use to pry us away from the millenials.

5 Comments »

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!

2 Comments »

2008-10-08»

So you may have noticed that I’m not quite posting here daily. That’s because I’m exercising my precious new freeedoms. The second month finished a while back (on the 17th?), and I’ve been running on inertia and the powerful fumes of trackbacks and comments since then. As everyone says it does, the blogging has helped out in a bunch of other areas. I’m writing better and faster in other spaces, I’m paying a bit more attention to the world, and I end up finessing ideas instead of going “huh, maybe I should write that down somewhere, one day.”

Most of all, I impressed by the magical power of public guilt. I am thinking about other potentially humiliating things to do to get ORG more members; I am also thinking a little of new beginnings. It looks like I’ll be moving apartment again pretty soon (sainted flatmates’ toddler is getting very walky, and they want more room). I might have a studio on the top of Bernal Heights to look down on the city. My work is picking up again, too: for a while, one of our team was telecommuting from the East Coast, which is good for the fact that we have to deal over lots of timezones, but not so great for co-ordinating between us. He’s been here in SF now for less than a week, and we’ve already picked up a little pace. I like to keep work out of this blog, but the issues do wriggle so, begging me to form half-baked opinions, if only ones highly tangential from what I do during the day (where we spend much of our time baking our opinions until they are perfect).

I also, God help me, have been thinking about what the next administration will actually be like. I keep thinking back to the local campaign manager for Howard Dean in San Jose, sitting with me in a cafe crammed with Dean-fans writing letters and exchanging email addresses, back in August 2003. Months before the election, his movement had already shown the others what was possible with the Net, and carried him to the frontrunners table by fundraising and publicity. A year or so before the election, I asked the campaign manager: suppose Dean does get in. Suppose he becomes President. What happens to all of this, I asked. Do you just put it in mothballs for the next election?

The campaign manager’s eyes got all dreamy, and he said: well, think how having this communications network works for a Whitehouse. Think about being able to explain your side of the story to your base like this; build on them to work with other candidates. Report back on how they feel the country is going.

Me, I’m not sure that’s something you can really achieve and stay Presidential. American Presidents are supposed to be folksy, but then ascend into Whitehouse heaven and live apart from the mortals. Not mail them every four hours like MoveOn. And it would feel a little Chavez to have the Obama fans still wired into the secret messaging while he’s also running everyone else’s country.

But the question still remains: when you have a wired campaign, do you run a wired whitehouse?

4 Comments »

2008-10-06»

I like T-Mobile. I’ve been a subscriber to their mobile service in the US for years, and they’ve been pretty good: their support has always answered my questions, their online interface doesn’t suck, and their signal in the Bay Area has been good enough for me. They’re GSM, so you have a choice of phones, and I’ve never had problems unlocking their phones for when I travel abroad and cavort with foreign SIMs. At the moment I have one of their Nokia 6086 phones, which lets you use your WiFi hotspot to make calls, which means that I have free calls at home and work, and I can use it as an EDGE Bluetooth modem for my laptop when I don’t have Internet access otherwise. It only runs signed applications, which shows that T-Mobile’s love of entirely open hardware is profoundly limited, but, hey, as long as I can just treat it as a pipe to my really open device, I don’t care.

When the Android HFC G1 came out, I was tempted. Temptation was as far as it went, because I really can’t afford another gadget right now. Prodding around, though, I was a bit disappointed by Google’s Android OS. Android applications are Java apps running in their own sandboxed VM (Google’s Dalvik). There are APIs, but they don’t give you complete access to the metal, and everything is running in Java-time. That means that, for now at least, it looks like you have to write in Java, and you can’t try clever tricks outside the API.

That seemed to rule out the two applications I would love to have on a G1: a VoIP app, and a modem tether to connect my laptop to the phone’s 3G network. Of course, those are exactly the kinds of application that T-Mobile would blow a gasket to see on their phone, but that’s not a coincidence. Telcoms only fret about software that their users would snatch in a second.

Now, though, I’ve seen a couple of comments in the Android developers’ community that make me more amenable to buying it. The first is this official statement that the G1 lets you run the Android debugging shell and install files and apps via USB. If cross-compiling for the G1 is as easy as it is on the emulated environment that comes with the SDK, that bodes well for writing tethering links — or even a VoIP application.

This comment saying Android will support the Java Native Interface (JNI) in the future, which would mean that native apps could access the Android Java API, and vice-versa, is also comforting. It looks like JNI is already supported, but undocumented.

It’s funny how, even when the entire OS and development environment is open source, there are still concerns that production Android phones could be locked down, and really no indication whether they are or not in tech media coverage of the phones. I don’t even know if the G1 will be upgradeable to later Android versions, whether I can install my own version of the OS (once Google release the source) or what future restrictions may be placed on my usage. These are questions that aren’t just pertinent to hackers — they are what will determine exactly how flexible the G1 and Android platform will be against the more tightly-controlled, but fast-moving iPhone target.

4 Comments »

2008-10-05»

Even though I end up being the person at the party who is (almost literally) contractually obliged to defend a fairly radical set of positions with regards to the Net, I’m often far more fascinated in probing other people’s views on how the Net works, and how it should work — even when they appear to agree with me. Of course, there have been alternative points of view since the Net began: it’s not everyone who was comfortable with the individualist libertarian free-speech default settings that dominated the early Net. But beyond the surface policies, I think there might be a deeper divide in expectations about the future of the net, even among believers in a common set of values. Those who believe in the positive values of having an open Internet, with unencumbered free communication, with non-proprietary solutions to most problems, often have diverging ideas about how those positions should best be defended.

The first, and earliest stance, is technological determinism, which is the stance that assumes that the technology just naturally rolls along to maximize the right degree, and kinds of freedom. The internet is genetically immune to censorship; privacy is provided by encryption, and those who don’t use it deserve to lose theirs; corrupt empires are always stupid, and always fall. If you feel this way, then you probably don’t feel much of a need to overtly defend anything, apart from in Slashdot comments. If a particular situation occurs, you might even argue that its existence gives it a kind of moral credibility (Huge privacy violation? Inevitable consequence of sharing too much online). A lot of people still hold with this position. If you become disillusioned with it, you often end up with a far more sceptical position of the Nets benefits than average. I often read critiques of the Net that starts with a personal voyage of discovery that begins with this stance, and ends with wholesale cynicism of the corporatist, ad-ridden, society-undermining filth of the interwebs. It’s also the most common position to project onto your opponents if you’re criticising “techno-utopianism”.

A modified version of technological determinism states that while the Net and allied systems doesn’t always provide positive values, it can certainly protect its best values when assaulted by alternative models. I guess the earliest model for this is the pragmatically-arguedThe Cathedral and the Bazaar. In this, open systems are presented alongside more closed systems, and it’s posited that they while there’s no inherent technological inevitability about them, their benefits are such that they can hold their own in a free market against other technological futures. There’s still a touch of determinism: Windows’ market share was always going to be eaten away a little by little by Linux; but only by virtue of the fact that Linux’ openness provided key advantages against a more closed system. AOL and TCP/IP can do battle, and AOL could win, but TCP/IP would more likely to, because its’ values of openness provided for better solutions than AOL. Call it open exceptionalism: the open solution will triumph, not because it’s right, nor because it’s built into the nature of technology, but because it has an unassailable market advantage. I think that open exceptionalism is probably the default position of the Google/Linux generation. It implies a greater degree of activity in the world in order to achieve good results than technological determinism, but not by much. It’s sort of the difference between salvation through faith alone and salvation through faith and good works.

And then you have a Lessig-like pessimism about the inevitability of those positive values. Openness is good, but the Net doesn’t always show it, and the preservation of its best attributes requires constant vigilance against vested interests that would undermine it. There’s no exceptionalism here: the Internet was incredibly lucky to reach the place it did quickly enough before anyone realised it would be a threat. It existence is a good in itself, but it can always be bent to bad ends, and may already be collapsing without us realising. We must use all our political tools to protect it, or risk losing any benefits it might once have offered us: a defensive politicisation of the Internet’s basic values.

it’s surprising how these frames of mind can put similarly-thinking people on the opposite sides of policy decisions; think about net neutrality, ISP filtering, DRM, open standards for government in any of these contexts and you’ll see what I mean. I personally oscillate between defensive politicisation and open exceptionalism.

And of course like everyone else I spend a lot of time trying to clarify the often incredibly vague ideas of “open” and “free” that muddy any of these stances.

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2008-10-02»

There’s a lot of people who have written off the OLPC: a pet project of Negroponte that lost momentum the moment the old staff got jettisoned and replaced with a CEO who said “the mission is to get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible” (in stark contrast to Negroponte’s original “It’s an education project, not a laptop project.”. I think the worst criticism has come from those on the Get-One-Give-One projects, who have regularly expressed disappointed with Sugar, the OLPC’s user interface, and the general state of the software.

What I find fascinating — and this isn’t just true of open source projects, though I think it’s more transparently noticeable — is what happens after that bump of enthusiasm fades. I’m beginning to believe that the great advantage of more open software (whether it’s open standards or open source), is the growing importance of slow-cooked software.

Firefox is a great example. The original Mozilla project, in a commercial context, should have been shuttered long before Firefox was developed: it pretty much was shuttered, by AOL, its major sponsor. But still development trundled along, fixing bugs, developing new enthusiasms, attracting young turks, accreting knowledgeable coders. And it slowly got better. Far too slowly for anyone to notice, until the Phoenix/Firefox team turned it all inside out.

I’d say the same is true of Unix in general. People say that those who do not understand Unix are condemned to repeat it badly, but in everyone else’s defence, Unix’s smug position is largely due to Unix folk making all the mistakes, and then veeery slowly backing out of them over a period of decades. When other, proprietary, systems go over a cliff, you frequently never see them again: and certainly the market gives them no time to learn from their mistakes. Who knows the lessons that PenPoint learnt? A lot of OS X’s benefits come from being a slow-cooked product: years of gently baking the Cocoa class library under the faint heat of NeXT’s limited audience.

With everyone’s attention off the OLPC, it nonetheless abides. The platform has shipped something like 400,000 laptops already. They’re getting ready to release a new update of the software, based on the latest version of Fedora, and with a whole bunch of UI and activity updates. Most G1G1 users won’t know all this, sadly, because they’re not a school, and consequently miss out on a lot of the support that the OLPC is designed to benefit from (if you do have a XO sitting on a shelf, you might want to try the latest builds).

It’s still not quite there, in my opinion, but it’s getting somewhere. They’re learning lessons, and the lessons they’re learning are school lessons, taken from educator’s experience in developing countries. The hardware is still gorgeous, especially the screen, and they’re only just beginning to exploit its potential (the only bugbear being the mousepad which turned out to be a bit a of lemon: there’s a great deal of hacky code in place just to stop it from jumping around, and I believe they’ve abandoned its graphics tablet mode entirely).

It’s true — there was a great deal about the initial rollout of the OLPC that was screwed up, and if it was a strictly commercial concern, I wonder if it wouldn’t have gone to the wall by now. But it wasn’t, and it didn’t, and I’m fascinated to see what happens next.

5 Comments »

2008-10-01»

So, I’m sympathetic to being frozen in the headlights, and I guess I can certainly disregard my current Obama-love-in as being a fairly emotional, culture-wars kind of choice. I was pretty upset with Palin’s convention speech, but I guess it’s the case that such things are aimed at the base. And, heck, sometimes I have days when I don’t remember the names of the papers I read.

But, dude, when you confuse federalism with its exact opposite: there you lose me permanently. If you’re supporting state’s rights, as Palin says she does in this clip, that means you’re opposed to federalism, not a supporter of it, as she then goes on to claim. Handy mnemonic: strong federal government is what the Federalist Papers were all about.

Goddammit: maybe Alaska should secede, and that way Palin would have to pass a real civics test for once in her life. Consider my non-vote clinched for the constitutional lawyer ticket.

Anyway, here’s my prediction for tomorrow’s debate: Palin will do okay for most of it, yet there’ll be two or three spectacular screw-ups which the Democrats will spit their coffee out at, and the Republicans will defensively (and somehow, vaguely convincingly) claim is all down to the evil, evil moderator. Swing-voters won’t care a jot either way, and Obama will continue to hold the lead.

2 Comments »

2008-09-30»

I studied economics at college at a time when the two great questions of economics was: How Did Stagflation Happen? and How the Fuck Did Monetarism Manage To Fix It When Most of Us Still Believe that Strict Monetarism Was Just Mad Monkey Moon-Juice?

Stagflation is when you have rampant inflation, and low growth. It isn’t supposed to happen. Monetarism isn’t supposed to happen either. Britain and America tried it briefly in the early eighties, and it almost broke the economy, but when things recovered, the stagflation had gone away too.

In some significant ways, you can argue that inflation is a state of mind. Or at least, stagflation was. People had grown so used to inflation in the Seventies that they factored it into their future models of the economy, especially when asking for raises. People would envisage inflation being 10%, so they’d ask for 15% more money this year. Unfortunately, one of the key engines of inflation are wage increases. You can see where this is going: even if inflation was actually going down, the expectation of it caused workers to demand more money, which caused inflation to rise, which made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

That inflation is largely generated by the belief that it already exists is not a shocking statement for economists to make. Still, it’s surprising to me how rarely they say it out loud. Instead, economists (especially those employed by central banks) spend a lot of time really loudly declaring how inflation is their number one enemy, and that they will do anything to reduce it. The monetarists were particularly emphatic about that. I hope you can see why doing this plays a key part in reducing inflation; why it worked for the monetarists, and why it works now. If you tell everyone you’re going to do everything to reduce inflation, and people believe you, you’ll reduce one of the key engines of inflation. (Especially if you also wipe out the unions and hitch up unemployment so no-one dares to ask for better wages, but that’s another story)

It was the great trick of Reagan and Thatcher to use their ideological fixation to convince the markets that, by gum, they were going to reduce inflation, even doing so meant riots, mass unemployment, and destroying their industrial base. It’s sort of like proving you’re serious by carving “FOR REAL” on your arm in blood.

What I’m trying to get to here, is an explanation for this line from Forbes that has been banded around so much recently:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

That sounds incredibly, upsettingly, vague, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing: the main job of the bailout package is to convince the markets that everything is going to be okay, and that if the foreclosures go on, the US government will pick up the tab. If the markets believe that, there’s a vague chance that they’ll stop panicking about the foreclosures, and the economy will unfreeze. If it does that, there’s a chance that the foreclosures won’t happen, because the economy won’t suck as much as it might have done, people won’t lose their jobs, and they can keep up the payments.

In the same way as inflation only goes away if a government can convince everyone that it really is going to do everything to diminish it, so a bailout of this size only works if the government can convince everyone that it’s willing to do anything to save the market.

If the markets don’t believe the bailout is sufficient (or there’s no bailout at all), the markets could collapse in neurotic self-pity, the economy will tank, and the foreclosures will happen. And if the half-baked bailout is around, then the government will have to pay for all those foreclosed mortgage risks.

It is therefore really important that the number be very very big. Insanely big. Far bigger than will actually be necessary. If it’s any smaller than that, then no-one will believe it will be enough to save them, so the market will collapse, and whatever amount it is, it will be necessary, because we’ll have foreclosures up the wazoo. Better to say “Don’t worry, capitalism, my darling, I will save you, even if I have to pay you a quadrillion gazillion dollars”, and successfully reassure the current neurotic marketplace, than say “My darling capitalism, I will save you, but the taxpayers say I can only lend you a fiver.” Chances are in the second case, you will lose your lovely capitalism and your fiver.

No-one says from the administration or Congress, because they can’t, just as no-one could have said at the time “Look, just between you and me, the only thing holding up the Eighties deflation is everyone’s believe that Reagan and Thatcher’s would eat a baby on live TV rather than see inflation go up again”.

That lone Treasury spokeswoman was speaking the truth, but she wasn’t supposed to.

Now, say what you like about Bush, he is capable of displaying Thatcher/Reagan-like pigheadedness when needed, and that’s exactly what is needed right now.

Unfortunately, Bush is the President that cried Wolf. As the Daily Show pointed out perfectly, Bush has already managed to convince the American people to trust him to do something radical, without him really spelling out the reasons why — in Iraq. Now, no-one trusts him, which means that no-one really trusts his bailout package, which means there is no party unity, which means that the bailout plan can’t weave its magical confidence spell.

There’s a reason FDR said that the country had nothing to fear but fear himself. And there’s a reason why FDR refused to help the lame duck Hoover in the months leading up to his inauguration. To truly pull off a return to confidence when the country has lost confidence in almost everything, you need to have a sharp break, a clean pair of hands, with a message of hope, and a figurehead whose job is largely just to calm everyone down.

I have to say that America may be fairly screwed right now, but if it votes the right way this election, I think it may be in with a chance. Looking at the polls and the current choice, I can see why Bismarck once said that “a special Providence protects fools, drunkards, small children and the United States of America.”

Or at least, I hope I can.

11 Comments »

2008-09-29»

We took Ada and friends down to the Computer History Museum this weekend, to see the Difference Engine, on loan from Nathan Myhrvold until April.

The computer museum looks a lot better than when I last gatecrashed it — back then it was just a hangar in the local NASA airfield, and me and the guide had to clamber over its stash of artifacts to find the really good stuff. I’ll never forget him casually handing me a disk of metal, saying “Hold this a sec”. I gave him exactly the right feedline, which was “What is this?” to which the answer was, “Oh, yes, you’re British, you might be interested:It’s a piece of Colossus“.

These days, it’s a slightly more bland, but far more professional building in the sprawling business ‘burbs of Mountain View. It’s pretty tiny, unless they don’t open the whole thing on Sundays. There’s an exhibit on computer chess, one on innovation in the Valley, the temporary exhibit of the Difference Engine — and the treasure chest of the museum, the Visual Storage exhibit.

If you’ve ever wondered how best to understand the effect of Moore’s Law, the Visual Storage exhibit is the place to go. I thought the five-to-seven year olds would be bored by this part of the museum, but they visibly gaped at the size of previous generations of PCs. “LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THIS PRINTER”, screamed Ada in joy. And, then, just to make me feel old, had me lift her up to show her the exhibit I was standing, dwarfed by the room-sized IBMs, DECs and Zuses. “That was your first computer?” she said, staring at the dusty, wooden, Ohio Scientific single board machine sitting under glass. I had that feeling that older people describe, that one day they would be wheeled in to join their belongings in a local museum.

The museum was mostly empty, but their was a little pool of geeks hanging around this display, all frozen with teariness. When I muttered under my breath, “But no BBC Micro”, a guy next to me swivelled around to face me. “I still have one! You turn them on, and beep! Ready to use!”

Really, though, I was hear to show Ada the Difference Engine. At one o’clock and two o’clock on Saturdays, museum volunteers arrive to explain the maths, and crank the engine to produce a table entry or two. As we sat and watched the amazing, DNA-spiralling beauty of Babbage’s carry bits, I prompted Ada to tell the docent her name. The volunteer broke out of her patter and did a marvellous speech directed to Ada about Ada Lovelace, explaining her great imagination, and how her mother had tried to make her mathematician because she was scared she would end up a waistrel poet like her father, but how she was sure in another age, like now, when we have greater freedom to choose who we want to be, Ada would have been able to be both fine mathematician and a fine poet. Ada was wide-eyed: she had clapped her hands in delight earlier in the day hearing about the woman who could imagine computers a century before they were even made, but this sealed the deal.

I was happy, because there was nothing about Lovelace in any of the literature or talks about the Difference Engine (possibly fairly, given she was all about the Analytical Engine, but still). Later, the docent explained to me the extra irony. The building used to be SGI’s headquarters: the first room they re-named in the building was “the Lovelace Room”. When it came to fit the Difference Engine into the building, they had to knock it down.

6 Comments »

2008-09-26»

I was predicted a tie, and called it one afterwards, but everyone else seems to think Obama came ahead. That might actually have been because our stream went down during Obama’s “You were wrong” litany. We also ended up watching it in RealPlayer tiny thumbnail o’ vision, so I didn’t get to see a lot of the expressiveness that other I think many undecided voters pick up on — McCain as angry, Obama as … well, what was Obama seen as? I guess I’m going to have to tour the conservablogs to find out.

Mixed feelings on my part. One half of me is impressed at how substantive it got, and the other half was bored rigid through a lot of it. I do get the feeling that this is what Obama will be like as President, which intellectually I’m relieved about — he seemed a lot more considered and concessionary. On the more emotional side, I guess day-to-day Obama isn’t going to be some kind of magical Jed Bartlett constant rhetorician.

One of the more astute comments noted how McCain’s humor is all about punchlines, and Obama is all about the sarcasm and wry asides. I remember arguing with a friend who thought Obama couldn’t be funny, whereas one of the reasons I like him is that he’s one of the few politicians whose humour I enjoy: my friend is definitely a punchline kind of person. I wonder if it’s a generational matter?

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