Oblomovka

2008-09-16»

(Here’s another column from the archives of my Linux User and Developer columns, written in 2003/2004. This one eerily predicts next month’s Seasteading Conference.)

When you’re signing the fifteenth online petition about software patents this month, or clicking on a Slashdot poll about whether the RIAA is right to shoot BitTorrent developers before they’re born, do you ever throw up your hands at the world of politics, and wonder: “Gosh, wouldn’t it be easier if me and a bunch of mates ran off and set up a utopian independent sovereign state?

Congratulations! You’re not the only one (which is good, because if you’re starting your own country, you really need someone else to be deputy King).

Starting a new country is a popular response by geeks to any problem that might involve other people, especially people in uniforms knocking at their door at 3AM, or those who don’t seem to reply to email and ask them to “phone” “them” in the “morning”.

Most independent free states form by either moving to somewhere that is friendly to their aims, or constructing some sort of floating island or platform in international waters and living there.

An example of the former is the Free State Project, where a bunch of American libertarians plan to move to New Hampshire, there to influence local politics with their independent-minded theories.

I originally thought of a similar plan for free software advocates. But then I realised that if we moved to New Hampshire too, we’ll all end up voting down each others’ “Initiative To Start Charging For Inhaled Oxygen” and “This House Believes In a 200% Supertax on Lusers Who Use Microsoft Messenger”, and so forth, and no-one would get anywhere. Except to New Hampshire, which is cold this time of year, and really not as nice as they make out on The West Wing.

An example of the build-your-own-island plan is Marshall T. Savage’s “Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps”, which I read a when a young man. Mr Savage’s step one is easy: forming a new independent state by creating a floating platform made of accreted seacrete from which to launch spaceships powered by lasers. Steps two to eight I recall being not much harder.

But what if our plans are humbler? What if we intend to create a new micro-state, not to colonise the universe, but to pursue our open source coding, unmolested by politicians who would have us kowtow to their delusional belief that bits need owners, or require us to shower more often than Nature’s God requires?

And what if eight steps smacks to us of typical managerial over-planning?

I’ve been slowly filling out my own blueprint for the formation of the new country of Linuxania. So far I’ve done the flag, and set up a website, mailing list and a wiki. By my estimates, that’s already around 70% of the way to being recognised by the United Nations.

I’m now working on some of the nitty-gritty, niggling little details of my five step plan. And here’s where I’m hoping to get some help from the Linux User and Developer community – accompanied, I hope, with billions of euros of speculative capital investment.

Constructive criticism only, please!

First, we must play to our strengths. Very few open source developers and users have succesfully started a country. But many of us have organised or attended conferences in hotels.

As any independent witness will attest, a hotel with any kind of volunteer-driven software project conference in it is very similiar to a country occupied by an enemy army composed entirely of bearded men in braces.

So my first step is to stage a traditional conference with no posted end date. Attendees will simply remain at the hotel for as long as it takes to the existing owners to give up and leave.

In the early days, we’ll survive primarily on the contents of the mini-bars and those tapas they sell at the bar. Soon, we’ll learn to cultivate our own miniature liqueurs and hydroponically-grown salted peanut crops.

My second step revolves instead around taking our sovereign hotel and somehow getting it into the middle of the sea.

My first idea was to just cut it out of the ground and flush it down a giant toilet, like how the fishes escape in “Finding Nemo”. Poo-pooers with some experience of constructing things bigger than a desktop PC inform me this may be impracticable, despite the fantastic proof-of-concept drawing on my web site.

So my new plan is to use our newfound hotelling skills to plan and build a new floating convention hotel in the middle of the sea. Money to finance this will come from risk-taking entrepreneurs in the bigger-than-a-desktop-PC construction industry, paypal donations to our sourceforge project site, and extorting money from the New Hampshire libertarians by threatening to turn up there instead and vote down their “Create an Internal Free Market For Snow” proposals.

Once we’ve built one conference hotel, we can easily build another, which is step three. Money for this will come from other micro-state planners holding their conventions in the first hotel (and not taking us over, because that would be rude).

Step four comes naturally: a flotilla of hotels, filled with open source geeks, enjoying the camaraderie and productivity that a continuous conference will bring. The hotels will be connected by the Starbucks and car rental places that naturally spring up around hotels. Each hotel will be named after a popular open source project; whenever anyone needs to fork, they just need to build a new hotel, and move.

What do you think? If you’d like to join me in Linuxania, simple register for our first (and last) conference, to be held sometime this year. The venue will be announced nearer the date. I’m thinking somewhere by the sea.

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Went to the inaugural social meet-up for those who interested in Seasteading. Now, this is the kind of utopian, enthusiastic, optimistic, small-chance-of-not-being-doomed, high-chance-of-being-fun libertarianism I can get behind!

Well, perhaps more a brand of meta-libertarianism: Patri’s underlying theory is that the reason why governments aren’t terribly efficient is because the market for governments isn’t very competitive: there are terrible barriers of entry to becoming a government, and your customers don’t have much room to shop around. The solution? Dynamic geography — in which one builds states composed of units that can wander off when the state they’re in (or rather, tethered to) becomes less than ideal. Homestead the seas with mobile, inhabited, relatively self-sufficient platforms, able to join together, outside of current jurisdictions, and you can create competitive governance experiments with free movement between them. Allegedly.

I’ve actually been tracking seasteading for some time — long enough, I notice, to have written a fond parody of it back in 2003, herewith enclosed below.

Sitting in and arguing the finer points of it with a crowd of fellow bipolar skeptic-enthusiasts was fun: like a Marvel no-prize, you really only scored points if you could come up with an objection and a potential solution at the same time. My parochial objections were about bandwidth — Ryan from Sealand, who’s back from wiring Iraq, ran through the possibilities of getting Kb/s out into the deep sea, and we ended up talking about the positive benefits of being a radio-frequncy test-lab relatively free from ITU and FCC regulations. Your latency to the bigger Internet might suck short-term, but the intranet would be fantastic. Oh, and the perennial social problems of creating an environment whose selling point is a freedom from current jurisdictions, but which runs into attracting only people who are primarily interested in escaping current jurisdictions because they’re doing things that no current jurisdiction (or sane person) would like: what I’d describe as the Freenet problem.

At the risk of being the person who postscripts their letters “I am not a mental or anything”, the Seasteading group aren’t your straightforwardly crazy idealists. They’re far more practical, and rather better funded (they got half a million of funding from Peter Thiel to play with this idea, and are already dancing with nautical engineers to run up a model of their idea in the waters near to SF).

It’s really easy to see the first-order problems with seasteading, but I don’t think those are the ones that will sink them, because they have mostly good responses to those. It is however a lot harder to envisage the problems that are one or two steps after that. Crazy ideas don’t fail to work because they cannot be implemented: it’s that they can’t be implemented and stabilised to work for fifty years or more. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, and it doesn’t mean you can’t be skeptical, hopeful, and willing to help out simultaneously.

The first Seasteading Conference is next month in Burlingame; it has all the hallmarks of being one of those fascinating meld of pies-in-the-sky projections and gritty earth engineering arguments that spells everything I like the most about California conferences. Come along!

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2008-09-14»

Went to Angel Island, a state park in San Francisco Bay (7.9 miles north of my house: so, that would be about Tufnell Park to my Clapham South (here is the right tool to build these metaphors)), where we sailed out for $7, and poked jellyfish and ate chicken and talked about the Singularity and political action and Tom Waits and Internet jurisdiction hacking and mandatory utilities that search your computer for other people’s private information as though it were a dangerous virus, and hurricanes and saw deer and watched the yachts go by. Then I travelled to Oakland, where the houses are run-down, and hid in an alcove of a house filled with books I wanted to read, and spectated on people playing fascinating board games, and talked, as aging gen-xers will, about what the hell it was the boomers thought they were doing in the Seventies (with even more aging boomers as confused as we), and offered that even if we did work to save the world, it would not help, because now we would never remember what directory it was we saved it in. We ate brownies with marshmallows and cayenne pepper, and played Jenga Xtreme and Pandemic, and so on.

Then I went home and finally picked up the book that contained the essay that months ago my flatmate, eyes blazing, declared I had to read after hearing my latest variant on one of my oldest my oldest rants, which is “Romancing the Looky-Loos” by Dave Hickey in Air Guitar. It is very good, too good, and I have to spend too much time chewing over it.

Hickey’s statement is about the relationship between participant and spectator in the creation of art in a democracy, and is mostly about what precise damage we inflict on an artist when they are raised out of their creative domain into the spectacle; especially when artists are not trained to see this as damage, but something to aspire to and expect inspiration from. This is beautifully allied to the old question #1, how many people do you want to be famous for, but with a better twist:

“When I play a little club,” [Waylon Jennings said], “I’m playing songs for people I know. Up there in the lights in front of a stadium crowd, I’m just playin’ Waylon for strangers.”

I met somebody at the party who did the “oh wait, are you Danny who writes that blog?” question. It was great, because he was clearly exactly the sort of person who I wanted to engineer to meet by writing this blog (of course, being dorks, neither of us said a word to each other for the rest of the party, but you know, now we have an excuse to email).

I’ve been worrying a bit that as my Official Blog Sponsorship days wane that I’ve been veering this site to being too personal, but sod it. The personal stuff will chase the looky-loos away, and we can be left to talk in peace, and poke squids, and see deer and hack really bad code into something more reasonable.

Hey my flatmates are back from sailing the Hudson! The house fills again!

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Spent today wandering the used bookshops of Valencia in a daze, recovering from Annalee‘s bad movie night. I’m not sure I’m ever going to entirely mend from an evening that included Nude on the Moon and Dead Heat, the definitive living/zombie wacky cop partnership starring Joe Piscopo.

To recover, I spend the evening scanning in my backlog of boring paperwork. I have an HP all-in-one printer that I got for its automatic document feeder and decent Linux support. It’s got Wifi built in, and if you have the hplip drivers and sane utilities running on your server, you can type something like:

at the command line, and have it magically come to life, scan a pile of documents, and then send them over to your linux box. I hand tag the files, but also run them through Google’s open source Tesseract OCR software, which often comes up with enough text to let me search for keywords. I assume that local OCRing will get better, if not with free software, then with me running it through some commercial OCR offering when I have the chance. The most important tag is the date of the paperwork — once you’ve scanned and tagged the paperage, you can just file it by date, and then dig it back out again when you need the original. Or just junk it over time.

I’m not entirely won over by the usefulness of scanning, but it’s nice to have offsite backups of my paper life, and it lets me actually go over my correspondence without wanting to slide off the chair with boredom. Whee! Look at me! I’m digitizing, just like in Tron!

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2008-09-13»

Okay, here’s my penance for missing a day’s blogging: I wrote a couple of ubiquity commands. They’re not very clever, and it’s more scratching my itch than yours, but they do a couple of things that are useful in my own obsessive areas. The first, state-code will tell you the two-letter US zipcode abbreviation for a US state name (ie Georgia == GA, CA == California). This lets me fake understanding the electoral-college-speak that now replaced ordinary conversations in my favourite discussion areas online. (“So, O’s best gambit if FL and OH are lost with this bounce is to secure the Kerry states, and secure NV and CO”).

Slightly less topical, yet also less parochial, is country-code, which will switch you between English country names (“Germany”, “Serbia”) and the official ISO 3166-1-alpha-2 two-letter abbreviation (“DE”, “RS”). I use two-letter country names to categorize global digital rights news in my delicious feed. God knows what filthy use you put it to, but when you do, you can use this command to help you.

Both country-code and state-code live over here, on my ubiquity page, or you can grab the source from state-country-code.js. They’re embarrassingly easy code examples to follow, so hopefully they’ll inspire you to futz around with building your own ubiquity commands, which really is fun.

Also fun is Vimperator, which I think I linked to back when it was just funny — a Vim-like interface to Firefox. Now I’m actually finding it kind of useful, which scares me almost as much as it should scare you. Its keybindings clash a little with Ubiquity sometimes, otherwise I would now be living in a total command-line-Amish lifestyle online. Also dangerous by the same author, Muttator, bringing mutt/vim like keybindings to Thunderbird with the hubristic motto “All mail clients suck. Mutt just sucks less. This one just sucks less than Mutt.”

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2008-09-11»

For the last four years or so, I’ve been telling my daughter stories at night and, in an attempt to keep her fine skill at spotting inaccuracies at bay, struggling to keep the narrative universe consistent. The basic premise is usually the same:

One upon a time, there was a little girl called Ada. And whenever Ada wanted to have an adventure, or see something she’d never seen before, or do something she’d always wanted to do, all she had to do was to climb into her bed, close her eyes, hold her hands really tight, and make a wish. And suddenly — I don’t know how — her bed would rise into the air beneath her. And suddenly — I don’t know how — the windows to her room would slowly open, and the bed would fly out, and whatever she wanted to see, or whatever she wanted to do, or whatever adventure she wanted to have, the bed would take her to it.*

We had a couple of long serials — one in which Ada and friends investigated a secret polar world inside a fridge, and another one with an tree with an elevator in it, that could take you to different worlds — but me and Ada have agreed we prefer the short, Star Trekky, story arcs rather than the long drawnout multiple bedtime Babylon 5 scenarios.

This is good, because generally Ada’s been picking up a magical device every night, and after a few weeks we basically have an entire thaumaturgical armoury at our disposal, which makes for tricky plotting. I’m already learning to limit the powers of each device to stop it being brought up as a potential solution.

Another tradition that makes for tricky plotting is that before we start, Ada gives out a laundry-list of items that should appear within the story, which sometimes makes for Whose Fairytale Is It Anyway feel. Last night for instance, my director stated that the story should:

1. Be about her dinosaur toy coming alive
2. Should involve Dyson (our cat), but only in a side-role.
3. Should have a glowing magic sword.
4. Should have exactly one unicorn.

Together we worked on a story that involved the magic bed in a rare solo flight going off to get the magic sword, which brought the dinosaur to life, but with unfortunate consequences. The more the dinosaur ate, the bigger it got, until it got too big for her bedroom, and we had to fly off, with it holding onto the flying bed with a single paw, to find the owner of the magic sword, and undo the magic. One magic forest and unicorn later, and we discovered that this magic sword was always available to be lent out to children who wanted to give their toys the gift of life. But the unicorn (who was the keeper of the sword) explained that it knew the downsides to being alive, having once been a tiny toy unicorn itself. The world was full of toys who had come to life and got to big or too bored in their own toyboxes. And that’s why this forest had been made, so there would be a place for all the magically alive toys to live happily, where their old owners could visit them and say hello whenever they wanted.

I’m writing this down, because I think the Forest of Living Toys is going to make a comeback, along with the Volcano Monster, and the Endless Tree, and the Planet of the Lolcats, and the Feather of Every Color, and the Warm Mittens of Truth, and I need to keep it somewhere…

Plot factory shamelessly stolen from Enid Blyton’s Wishing Chair series, cheers.

2 Comments »

2008-09-10»

Both in blogging, and pretty much in real life. One of the things they don’t tell you about being the continental United States is that everyone on the east side of them likes to punish everyone on the west side of them by starting teleconferencing calls at six in the morning. Meanwhile, I was also running to a Geneva morning deadline the night before. Then I went into work. Then I went to a kindergarten parents-meet-your-new-parent-friends thing. And then I went home, and closed my eyes for a few minutes. Fourteen hours later, I wake up, and it’s time for a GMT teleconferencing call with the ORG advisory board. Honestly, I feel like Sputnik.

Anyway, I missed a day, so I will try and reward you with an extra item some time this week.

Right now, I’m puzzling over my “future blog title ideas” notes. My favourite one just says:

“I Can’t Stand It I Know You Planned It — I’m Telling Y’all It’s Arbitrage”

I think this comes from me mulling about how poorly-distributed information continues to be. I recently spent a (for me) large amount of money on a dental crown done by a (fantastic) San Francisco dentist, even though I have a fair hunch that I’m a good candidate for dental tourism.

I was recently smart enough to avoid the used-car-salesman miasma of mattress shops (do not ask me why mattresses are crazy mark-up commission shyster heaven in the US: I imagine there’s some inspirational bed-bilionaire in the twenties who wrote something called “Bed bucks! How to take $$$ from other people’s mattresses!” that led to it all). But I didn’t go really low; at some point I ended up thinking “well, a bed should cost slightly higher than I think possible, otherwise why would everyone else spend this kind of money?”

Is it a false economy to be simply not be bothered to care enough to do arbitrage? The perfect model for this carefully-planned laziness is my friend Gilbert, whose sofa I am currently blogging from. Gilbert’s Heuristic of Product Purchasing states “always buy the second-most expensive version of the item you want”. Obviously, only mugs buy the most expensive item. But I think you can agree there’s something a bit wrong about the really cheap stuff?

Then, on the other hand, I will always spend at least three man-years searching for the cheapest airflight from SFO-LHR. And, I should say, probably blow the money saved on the Heathrow Express instead of riding the underground with all the other cheap-ass plebs when I get home.

I think many economists would view me as being fantastically irrational. But I like to poke them in the eye and say “revealed preferences”. And my revealed preference is that I put a lot of value on my sense of tedium. Hunting down bargains needs to be more fun before I’m going to ever be a streamlined monster of economic dynamism.

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2008-09-08»

So I spent some of this evening phone-banking for Obama.

One of the benefits of being a green carded permanent resident is that not only can you give money to shore up the evil excesses of big government, you can also volunteer to help out. I justify my support by claiming that I am merely good old fashioned free market competition to other, paid, telemarketeers, because that’s pretty much what phone-banking is. You have a script, you call somebody in a swing state, and ask them who they like and why. Well, actually, you mostly call dead-end numbers or are hung-up on (I don’t blame them: when I was in a swing state in the last election, it was amazing how besieged voters were: every radio ad a political play, every call a pollster or a robocall, every mail delivery weighed down by glossy lobbying brochures and postcards).

My favourite moment was calling Lucille in Nevada. After a cheery “Hello, lover — I’ll be with you in a moment”, I was put on hold for a few seconds, and then asked what I’d like. When I said that what I’d like would be speak to Lucille, I was patched through to an older lady, who explained she handled the girls here, and anything that I wanted had to go through her. After talking at cross purposes for a few more seconds, we both realised that Lucille did not want what I was offering, and vice versa. I marked it as “wrong number”. Whose mailing lists did they buy for Nevada, anyway?

Anyway, I highly recommend doing this kind of thing (the phone-banking, I mean): I think both campaigns now let you do it from home.

2 Comments »

2008-09-07»

I spent an hour or so today trying to solve a problem that I just knew had been solved a million times before: I don’t have that knapsack of programming solutions that CS students, and other people who’ve actually read The Art of Computer Programming naturally have.

I’ve been writing a parser that would suck in Latvian legal texts (don’t ask) in Word format. I realised about half-way through that I’d have to take my parsed outline, and wire up all the various sections, subsections, and so forth into a sensible tree. Well, actually, I’d always known that I’d have to do that, but it was only this morning that I realisd that that I didn’t know how to do that, and it was going to be harder than I’d envisaged. I

My solution sucks (so badly that I can’t bring myself to show it you — oh all right then), but I was reasonably pleased that I managed to fence off my sucky solution into a separate object, only lightly connected to the code it was helping. Even its API is rubbish, but I know that at some point when it finally dawns on me how to do this in a smart way, I’ll be able to pull out this blob and slip in something a bit better.

The rest of my time has been spent hitting reload nervously on the current electoral polling (there’s a complex joke using the computer science meaning of polling, but I’m too tired to go there). Lots of people I know need to see this, I think.

2 Comments »

2008-09-06»

So my sainted mother is reading my blog, just in time to hear me talk about scary gangs: we’re fine, honest. And I didn’t mention the earthquake yesterday, because neither Ada nor I even noticed it!

There, very calming. I am also calmed by news of an eight-year old friend of mine, on hearing the plot of Crypto being explained to him, becoming OUTRAGED that the government would want to listen in on phone calls! Also, Ben Laurie (slightly older) thinking as ever about how to do security right, and coming to the age-old conclusion that it involves crypto everywhere. It’s often been said that we won the battle to make strong encryption freely available, but lost the battle for anyone using it. I started re-signing my email recently using GPG, and it’s actually relatively easy these days; I wonder what the tipping point will be for more widespread use of personal crypto. If any?

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