Oblomovka

2008-08-28»

Watching the Barackticon today, I remembered Mark Andreessen’s conversation with Obama before the nomination battle began, and this bit in particular:

We asked him directly, how concerned should we be that you haven’t had meaningful experience as an executive — as a manager and leader of people?

He said, watch how I run my campaign — you’ll see my leadership skills in action.

At the time, I wasn’t sure what to make of his answer — political campaigns are often very messy and chaotic, with a lot of turnover and flux; what conclusions could we possibly draw from one of those?

I’m drawing the same conclusions as Andreessen did: I’ve been really impressed by the confidence and professionalism of this campaign, right down to the sheer chutzpah of putting on that concluding speech in a sports stadium.

Part of it, I suppose, might be down to simply being able to throw down more money than the next guy, but when I think back to the awkwardness and slip-ups of the Kerry democratic convention and campaign, it really stands out that there’s a great team at work here. You can pick good people to be on your team, but it takes real expertise to pick good people who themselves can pick good people, and so on.

I thought the same thing about both Bush campaigns: they weren’t quite so picture-perfect as this, but you got a feeling of a well-oiled party machine grinding into action — albeit using old (and to me unfamiliar) tools to do so. I remember reading an inside-the-Bush-Whitehouse book extract from a young speechwriter who talked about how you never saw anyone not in their business suits in the Bush campaign, which I can believe. It was a print-out and spreadsheet, pinstripe success.

This Obama campaign, which I have probably cursed by saying this out loud, looks from the outside like a well-run, contemporary business: seemingly the right mix of enthusiasm and discipline, encouragement and focus. I view organisations like that as a sort of minor miracle, because the working environment has changed so radically in the last decade that I despair of anyone getting it right. You’re safer using the old disciplines, but at a cost: that’s what makes your company or image appear distant and inhuman compared to the bumbling, chaotic but adventurous alternatives. Bush’s skill was appearing human despite that kind of frozen discipline, and you only had to see how badly Gore and Kerry were at imitating the same relaxation to see the challenge of covering up all that machinery.

I suspect that if Obama gets in, they’ll be an awful lot of Fast Company-style books written about this campaign, and how to build your business the same way.

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2008-08-27»

Yuck. Nasty fistful of hours, full of drama and not-much done. The only tiny island of glee (I like wading desperately out to those when stuck out on some muddy estuary of despond) was sitting in a ten minute taxi ride, listening to the roll-call of the Democrats end with Hillary propsoing for the unanimous support for Obama by acclaim.

I remember watching the American conventions at home, and — as is correct behaviour in Britain — sneering in projected shame at the display: not of the emotion, but of all that self-congratulatory pomp. And so pre-rehearsed! What’s the translatable metaphor here? It’s like if Americans were to turn on the television and see Mexicans greet their new nominee by taking giant cakes made in advance in the shape of their candidate, and then individually smearing it over their bodies going “love him, love me, loooooove meee loving himmmmm”, while the camera obscenely zooms in on their smug faces. That’s what American pageantry looks like to Brits. It’s not the show of emotion, it’s the horrid self-reflexive, self-glorifying appearance of it.

These days, I rather like it (the pageantry, not the cake smearing) — the constructed joy is infectious, even as I dimly hear the echo of a million English voices going “Oh, do come off it!”.

To translate backwards, here the rollcall is like an English person going into the corridor, doing a little jump and saying “yay! me!”, being caught by your best friend — and then have them give you a knowing wink. Americans are allowed to do all that, somehow choreographed in advance, on TV, with thousands of each other, in pursuit of their political ideas, and smeared with cake, I mean, with streamers and big banners.

Forget the cake. It’s a distraction. When I get back to the UK, I’m going to go to a football match, because I think need more metaphors for all of this. Also, right now I could do with the anticipation of some big happy emotions. If they do that at West Ham these days.

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2008-08-26»

So yesterday was my first sincere attempt to get up at 6AM, in preparation for Ada not having to take letters to school apologising for my absence. It went pretty well: I successfully bludgeoned myself to sleep at around 10PM, and my gazmodic Sleeptracker Pro watch woke me up when it caught me in a light sleep cycle a little before the alarm went off (the watch spots this with an accelerometer — if you’re rolling around, you’re sleeping lightly and ready to be woken up).

Admittedly, I don’t actually have Ada to take to school today, so I mostly blundered around doing chores until I collapsed asleep around 8.30. That would be 8.30AM, unfortunately — I work up around tennish with my subconscious definitely smug about having made me simultaneously early to rise and late to work. Psych!

This evening, I didn’t have much to tell you lot apart from the fascinating vagaries of my sleep pattern, so instead I tinkered around getting the Sleeptracker Pro database software working. The watch not only wakes you when it sense your in a light sleep cycle, it stores all your lighter moments in a database which you can suck down over USB using a dangerous-looking crocodile clip. Somebody wonderful has written a Linux version of the Sleeptracker Pro client software (called “napkin”, marvellously), and I’ve just got it to work:

There, now burglars will know the best time to rob me. It’s not often that I have to compile software from scratch these days, and as I did so, I marvelled at the absolute trivia stored in my head that let me stumble towards getting this working. Oh, it needs gtkmm to work — well, that means it’ll need the libgtkmm-dev package. Hmm, actually it’s now saying it doesn’t have a MODULE. I’m guessing that’s not a thing called “MODULE” but that I don’t have the right gtkmm module. Let’s grep for gtkmm in the configuration file. Aha! Here we go, it’s expecting gtkmm version 2.4, so that would be libgtkmm2.4-dev. And so on.

It’s times like this when I wonder about what I call false consciousness among technology users. We’ve so often invested so much time learning all of this eldritch magic, that we end up loving the tyrant machine because of its trickle of rewards, and despise anything that gives us those rewards without vindicated the sunk costs of the trivia that we’ve so painfully learned. I wonder if OS X is popular among Linux ex-pats partly because it is both shinier, and one ends up having to use all of this craziness whenever one needs to do something tricky there, too: as opposed to Windows where all of this Unix knowledge is like knowing the Ancient Mayan for “browser plug-in”.

The worst part is that there’s no easy way to put this knowledge into words, because it’s practically unconscious for me now. I don’t think I could tell you how I got this program to work, even five minutes after I manhandled it into existence. It’s like my fingers and lower brain-stem knows Linux better than my conscious brain does.

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2008-08-25»

So I’ve been a partisan now for exactly a month, and it’s been great fun. If anything, it’s allowed me to be far more outright about my (oh so many) doubts about libertarianism, because I’ve been able to eschew any kind of neutrality and just lay in there, enthusiastically scouring the literature for what sounds right. I also immediately bought some of the crazier books I could on libertarian history, which means that I’m reading a far more interesting and curious subsection of American and European thought than the usual Howard Zinn and the Whigs.

So far, as I’ve said, I loved the trashy but glorious Hostile Takeover Trilogy, thought the L. Neil Smith’s the Probability Broach to be quite barking. On the more academic side, Defending the Undefendable and The Not So Wild, Wild West were new takes on contemporary issues, and a propertarian view of the Frontier culture. Defending the Undefendable felt like an exercise in imposing an ethical system masked as undeniable economical truths (undeniable because precious few facts were brought into the discussion). It was less about being convincing, and more about giving blowhards more fuel to be annoyingly contrary. The Not So Wild, WIld West led me to start seeking out more literature on what, exactly, anarchic or minimal government systems might have looked like historically, which is why I’m looking forward to reading Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and drudging through various core anarchist texts, although frankly that is fairly tedious rehash of the readings I’ve previously made of canonical overexcited Marxists 1910-1979. Great for inspiring you to write Rafe talks about here: that the best way to solidly test an idea is to adopt it wholeheartedly, and see what shakes out. It’s a real shame that very little in our politics or our culture permits this kind of immersive experimentation. It’s not surprising to me that I first sought out science fiction to try these ideas on for size. Everyone other vehicle for discussion seems to think that the trick with big ideas is to treat them like Gulliver in Lilliput: trip them up, tie them down, and poke them with very very tiny sticks to see how they quiver. Surely it’s better to saddle them up and go for a long ride, like Ken Macleod?

I’ve also managed to lose far fewer friends than I thought. No-one has stalked out of my life angrily, though a few have given me pitying looks, and one of my best friends keeps drawling that it’s such a shame I’ve become a “librarian”. It seems to provoke the same reaction as if I’d suddenly decided to start carrying a security blankie around with me: childish, but harmless.

I’ve also become somewhat of a receptacle for crypto-libertarian confessionals, where my lefty friends confess they’re not so sure of the government, or my right-wing friends… wait, all my right-wing friends all pretend to be libertarian already, so that doesn’t work…

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I frequently find myself on an isoguiltotropic plane: any new thing I can think of pursuing, or any old thing that I could abandon, makes me feel slightly guiltier than I am now. If I take up a new project, I will be forcing myself to pay less attention to the worthy projects I am letting fall by the wayside currently. But if I abandon a project, then that is one less worthy thing I am doing. I reassure myself that this means in economics terms I am perfectly guilt-efficient. Or possibly I am in a local minima of guilt, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way.

So, things that I have recently considered re-investigating, but am not, because of the pain of the guilt:

• Getting involved in the new DRM battles around @font-face and the catastrophic threat of downloadable fonts. Man, do we have to explain the rules of physics to every industry that touches the Internet? And damnit, surely the font world is at least relatively sanguine about the nature of copying by now?
• Re-entering the world of Squeak. They have just decided to base the new version of Squeak on Spoon, which is super-ultra-minimalist, and I think that means that you’ll be able to pick and choose what you want from the rest of the Squeakiverse. I always imagined that most of Squeak was actually a fairly stuck-together and unextractable blob, like Ruby after thirty years of monkey-patching. I love projects that sound like a monologue from the Mighty Boosh, but … must … not … get … drawn … into Smalltalk.
• Talking of which, am also writing “No Messing with Freebase on my belly with a sharpee. I am like Wesley Crusher in “The Game” with regards to Freebase. I would love to play around with it more, but I suspect that as soon as one does, one will become strangely drawn to do everything in this huge monolithic namespace, and then aliens will take over the Earth while you are fiddling with the semantics of the “person with moustache” topic or something. Instead, I will observe those messing with it from a distance, to see if they suddenly start exuding green gunge or talking about the “semantic web” with a straight face. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they called it Freebase. Is that not enough of a clue?

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2008-08-24»

So I’m just back from a riot grrl anniversary celebration. I ended up reading lots of Liz’s zines and flashing back to 1993 when Dave and Andy and Ed and Kevin and Andy and Ben and Sue and I were holed up in terrible flats in unfashionable Streatham, living off the dole and housing benefit and shitty code sold to Personal Computer World. We worked on, but never actually finished a zine called “Graduate Loser”. Somehow I never actually managed to get hold of many other zines either, but would religiously buy Factsheet Five and marvel at the wealth of information out there, in much the same way as when I was 14 and in Chelmsford I’d buy Time Out but never dare to go to London, sixty whole miles away.

Anyway, I’ve always felt that there was a direct lineage between the mid-nineties zinesters and the early web. Zinesters were bunch of overeducated media-obsessives in a recession that had no space for them, who worked dead-end jobs that gave them access to technology that let them reproduce their own work and distribute it to a small, but satisfying, coterie of like-minded people, who were sceptical of the mainstream, congenial to conspiracy theories, and fiercely in favour of radical free speech. When nobody else saw the potential of the Internet, it was inevitable that that generation would have the motive and the opportunity to recognise it for what it was: the world’s most powerful office photocopier, and run with that. To quote myself blathering onto a group of social media theorists on this topic a few years ago:

Now zinesters were the direct ancestors of the early beginnings of web designers. Why is this? Because they were very used to the idea and the appeal of self expression, un-moderated by anyone else. They understood the value of [self-expression]. They also understood the costs. Essentially the way you made a zine was the same way you did it in the 1960s. You crept into your work place after work and ran off hundreds and hundreds of copies on the photocopier, and that was sticking it to The Man, costing him over 20 pounds worth of photocopier toner. This was still going on when I first joined the internet industry in the 90s… I remember very distinctly the quiet Goth girl who did web design coming in late at night, when I was sitting there working on my own zine, and photocopying hundreds and hundreds of her Goth zine, and no one said anything of course because they were doing the same thing.

The appeal of the web of course was that it got rid of that problem. Rather than having to distribute to a hundred different people, you would be distributing it to the whole world. And all of the appeal and the dream that you had of having control over your artistic project was there for the taking.

You only see fragments of that lineage now — the most obvious being Boing Boing, which was a zine before it was a blog, and whose lineage went straight through Wired. A generation proud to write the ephemera of their age, because nobody else had much room to let them do anything else.

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2008-08-22»

So I remember when my friend and deputy-nemesis Ian Betteridge and I were arguing about the difference between “proper” journalism and blogging. In the end, I rather liked one of his definitions: “Journalism is when you pick up the phone”. That’s to say, journalism requires some actual original research, rather than just randomly googling or getting emailed something and writing it up as news.

I like it, because it’s not platform-specific. There’s a great deal of blogging with original research, and very large quadrant of mainstream media “journalism” that really doesn’t fall under that banner: at it’s best it’s analysis, at its worse it’s anti-journalism: taking readily available facts or rumour and divesting them of the context that would allow you to accurately judge their accuracy or provenance.

Anyway, this is a long-winded way of doing some non-journalism of my own. If you’re interested in what UK ISPs are telling analysts about the future, Carphone Warehouse’s company presentations page, and in particular this Analyst’s Day from April 15 of this year is worth a look. Skip the stuff about phones and go to their discussions of broadband and their plans for their network. It’s full of interesting statistics about P2P usage (before and after they introduced traffic shaping), the effect of iPlayer, and the costs of network and customer retention.

My broad summary would be: yeah, bandwidth usage is an issue, but it’s not like we expected it to go down, and the sensible thing to do is to upgrade our network so our costs per bit drop 80%, something we can do with an investment of tens of millions of pounds, not hundreds.

Stuff that’s interestingly unspoken: upstream rates and their growth, a characteristic obsession with “streaming” (see last post), and which ass they pulled out the estimate the consumer IP traffic will quadruple in 4 years (see the graph with “Web 3.0 in 2011” on it).

But it’s late on a Friday, and I suspect some of you are better at pulling out interesting facts from this than I am, so go right ahead…

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We went to Ada’s school’s — well, I forget the correct word for it; my subconscious tells me it’s “indoctrination”, but that can’t be right. Maybe something in Spanish? Everything was in Spanish. Her teachers explained (via an interpreter) that they don’t speak English when the kids are around, so that they learn to convey their intentions in the second language. This got weird when the tallest most anglo blonde woman from Lake Tahoe introduced herself in I think a Chilean accent. Then you realise that kindergarten teachers all speak the International Language of Caring Emphasis, and it was pretty easy thereafter.

I’m fascinated to see how this plays out. I am terrible at languages. Fortunately, Ada has made me swear that I not learn Spanish with her, so she can have a secret language of her own that I can’t understand. Currently she is fairly confident she can speak Spanish fluently anyway, although she really just spouts nonsense that if you don’t know Spanish is actually rather convincing. (She can also hold down a whole conversation in fake Tagalog). I do hope the teachers can spot this kind of thing. Maybe Ada will be all like “Well, I’ll pretend I don’t know you can speak English, if you’ll pretend you don’t know I can’t speak Spanish”

Orientation! Orientación! That was the word. Seriously, the school seems lovely, and we all learnt a song about soy pizza. Or maybe it was “I am pizza”. I now know the spanish for “pepperoni”.

Seth points out that I got the gender of “kindergarten” wrong in the last post. I am so doomed.

I walked home over Great Big Hill (like Edmund Hilary, because it was there, and unlike him, because I couldn’t work out how to get around it). I accidentally phoned Merlin. There’s a guy out here recording us both for a documentary about Life Hacks and slowly becoming more disillusioned about how unmotivating we are. I was calling to flake on today’s appointment, and found I’d written down the wrong number. Yes, terrifying self-motivating organizing machine, me.

Merlin and I haven’t really spoken much since the book fell through, (both of us on long aboriginal treks to rediscover our mojo I think) — and it was awesome to hear him again. We failed to work out how to meet up soon, created about fifteen hanging “open loops”, and giggled far too much.

Went home and looked up URLs. Somebody had come up to me at the end of the orientation with a gleam of geek recognition in her eye and said conspiratorially, “I’ve started a blog and a mailing list for our class!” Like a spy confirming the secret passphrase, I replied “But what about the wiki?” The spanish-speaking teacher looked at us as though she had caught us speaking fake English. She’s probably right.

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2008-08-21»

I’m a great fan of Andrew Odlyzko who I think you can picture as the network economics equivalent of the early Jakob Nielsen, long before he got drunk with power and started challenging beautiful waif-like designers to chicken-wire cage matchs. By that I mean Odlyzko is rather good at explaining what you at some level instinctively understand, but maddeningly no-one else higher than your pay grade does. Handily he explains these characteristics using actual facts that you can clutch onto in the next futile argument you are forced to re-justify over the self-same self-evident truths. You will still lose, because the people who believe the opposite of you are your employers, but you will go down in full righteousness instead of just bleating “but.. but…”

In this recent short note on streaming, Odlyzko explains, as slowly as he can, why content and telecom business executives (erroneously) think that streaming movies need them to demand special network-neutrality-busting queue-barging privileges on the Internet.

It turns out it’s because they think that real-time streaming means that the bytes have to move in exactly real time — that’s to say, if you’re watching a movie encoded at 6Mb/s, you need a constant, unbreakable, 6Mb/s stream over the Internet. In other words, no-one told them about buffering:

I have been asking listeners [at his networking presentations] to raise their hands if they saw any point at all in faster-than-real- time transmission of multimedia … The highest positive response rate I have observed was at a networking seminar at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, in September 2007. It was about 30%. Twice, at networking seminars at CMU and Stanford, the rate was about 20%. Usually it is far lower, almost always under 10%. And sometimes it is close to zero. I had two similar audi- ences, on two separate continents, of about 100 people in each case, consisting of (mostly non-technical) mid-level telecom managers as well as government research agency staff and others connected with communications, where among the approximately 200 attendees in all, just one hand went up, and that one very tentatively.

Apparently, advocates of streaming have never wondered what that little grey bar that preloads your YouTube clip before you watch it, so you can cope with drops in the download rate, means. Or, more likely, have never actually watched a YouTube clip in their life, and just sit behind their desks wondering what everyone in the open-plan bit of their office is giggling at.

“The purpose of data networks is to satisfy human impatience.”

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2008-08-20»

I love this reassuring advice for contributors to Mozilla projects undergoing their first code review:

Bugzilla reviewers may seem to be harsh, accidentally. They aren’t trying to be harsh or overly critical, they’re just pointing out what needs to be changed, which usually means they’re pointing out what’s wrong with the current code, instead of pointing out what’s right with it. Usually they don’t have lots of extra time in their life for reviews, so they just quickly write what needs to be fixed, without spending too much time thinking about the nicest way to say it. Sometimes they also don’t go into long explanations.

You’re not a terrible programmer or a bad person. All we’re doing is telling you what’s preventing us from checking the code into Bugzilla’s main codebase.

I remember the first time that I, almost accidentally, asked somebody for an opinion on my code, a few years ago. They automatically mailed back with about thirty different suggestions, all correct, and I was mortified. Why had I been such an idiot? And why were they being so cruel and rude?

Actually, thinking back on it, I think the first time that happened was when I wrote some code for .EXE when I was 21, and had to bear about six months of readers writing in with an endless stream of bugs. “Dear .EXE, I spotted yet another error in your ‘Printing in Columns’ program from June”…

I now, at some level, realise that having somebody else go over your code is both humiliating and the best way to learn. And…

You know, this post was going to be about how I thought that was true for most people, and harp on philosophically about how personal and intimate coding is, and how pair programming is fraught with psychological drama. But, if I am honest, as I write this, I must admit that this is mostly a personal bug I’ve had up my arse (weird anglo-american hybrid term) for many years, rather than a common state of humanity. I’ve dodged a lot of things out of terror of criticism in my life. My stand-up career was aborted really before it got started because of an incident with a Scottish lady screaming into my face while standing on a table near the stage. NTK’s wilful obscurity came from, in part, a desire that people not so much be insulted, than as to be unsure what was being said about them, exactly (more on this in a future post). I generally fiddle with projects for months to protect them from even the slightest possibility of a cruel word.

In parallel with this, I’ve noticed something happen online a lot. Some absolute idiot turns up on the Net, and asks absolutely idiotic questions, and generally bumbles loudly to themselves while everyone notes what a clod they are and shoots them down in flames. Then, they start adapting to the criticisms, or facing them down, or disappear entirely and re-appear later in some other guise.

Through any of these processes, they end up transformed. Soon, they’re handing out advice to other idiots, or explaining what was actually utterly arcane to a far wider audience, or alternatively pursuing their dumb ideas to great success. I first noticed this with a guy on Cix, who called himself Nildram, and who was rude, and argumentative, and obtuse and the biggest pain (among a vast community of grumpy patrician carbuncular pains, I should say). At first I patted myself on my back for being quiet and sensitive and afraid to make the kind of humiliating public mistakes he made. And then I watched him just get better and better. I learned from his mistakes too, but at one remove. He ended up being the guy behind Nildram Broadband, which had the reputation of being one of the more responsive and customer-friendly ISPs.

This was what prompted the note I put at the end of Life Hacks, about the value of living some part of your life in public. If you can identify what are the valid criticisms of your code or your ideas or your writing, and who are the trolls, and which are the other people just being temporarily stupid obtuse geniuses-in-waiting, you can parlay all that valid feedback and move from fool to slightly less fool in quick time.

What I don’t know is how to stop the anticipation of that criticism, or the excessive idiocy of some of it, stop good people from becoming better. Today I heard of the existence of a library that is badly needed, but the person who is writing it doesn’t want to release it because “it hasn’t been tested enough”. Release it, and it will be!

I think my biggest encouragement to those who are scared of criticism to enter the public space is that if you don’t, the public space will be filled with people who have no fear of their failings whatsoever. And we all know what fools they are.

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