Planet Swhack

Redmonk: A Move Apart

Steve Ivy — 2008-09-05T16:25:13+00:00

I can finally (with sincere apologies to Zeldman and crew) talk about new developments in my personal and professional life, and I’m stoked to do so!

For the last two years, I’ve been working for GoDaddy.com as first a production designer, then as a front end developer for our ecommerce application. But for the last 10 years, my passion has been blogging, community, and content management. Over the last few months, I’ve felt that I was ready for a new direction professionally - one that would put me back in the middle of the kind of work I love - blogging and helping build blogging and community tools for cool clients. I’ve also felt that I was ready for a new direction personally - our kids are now being home schooled by my amazingly talented wife, and I want to have more time to focus on the family and helping Jodi with the up-training of little minds.

So, I’m excited to announce that I’m going to be joining Six Apart’s team of professional services developers and designers, working with some sites you may have heard of, and helping to improve blogging in general and one kick-ass blogging engine in particular.

The bonus is, I’m going to be working from home - “Six Apart Phoenix” will be my home office - which means I get back 2 hours a day that I won’t be commuting. It also means that I’ll be available more to my family, which is a great thing.

I’ve loved working with the team here at GoDaddy. It’s a fast-moving company with some awesome people, many of whom I got to work with on a daily basis, and I’ll miss them as I start on a new track.

(As usual, the standard disclaimers apply: “The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy.com Software, Inc.” and “The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Six Apart, Ltd.”)

Kevin Reid

2008-08-31T17:14:00+00:00

“Language-independent” just means they invented a new language.

Aaron Swartz: My Life With Tim

2008-08-26T00:43:53+00:00

I wrote this years ago (probably the summer after college), filled with nostalgia, in a small notebook on a plane to or from Boston. (I finally understand how people can write books long-form!) I meant to type it in as soon as I got back and post it here, but I lost it and never got the chance. While moving recently it turned up again and I thought I should seize the opportunity to type it in while I still had my hands on it. (Also, coincidentally, I had lunch today with Tim.)

Apologies for the poor writing; I've improved a bit in the subsequent years and it's rather hard to write well when you're pouring your memories into a notebook on a plane.

In 7th grade we were asked to do a project on the Great Men Who Made America, or something like that. Other kids chose civil rights leaders and politicians and even scientists. Then a big tech geek, I chose my hero, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.

One of the first assignments was to do some research and answer a list of questions provided by the instructor (one of them being "what did your contemporaries think of you?" -- I still wince at not then knowing what "contemporaries" meant). I was able to answer most of them off the top of my head and most of the rest from TimBL (as he was universally called by all but Dave Winer)'s web page. But a few, like "Do you have any regrets?" were not really answerable form such material. So, with some trepidation, I sent him an email. His website said not to email him about school projects on the Web, but I convined myself that school projects on him didn't qualify. So I carefully composed my email and sent it out, hoping for the best.

A few days later I received a rather short-tempered reply. "Regrets?" he said. "I have a few. But then again, too few to mention." (I didn't get the reference until years later when I heard the words again over the radio -- I thought he was just being poetic.) But my favorite answer was his response to one of the theme questions I asked: "How do you think your work has shaped America?" or something like that. (I was taking the assignment a little too literally, I guess.) He shot back with a phrase that's stuck with me ever since: "I was an Englishman living in France and working in Switzerland -- it's got nothing to do with America." I proudly reported this back to my teacher, complaining about his assignment's Amerocentrism.

The next time I check Tim's web page, it said not to email him concerning school projects on the Web or on Tim Berners-Lee.

I didn't really run into TimBL again until a few years later when I was visiting Cambridge, Mass., where he worked at MIT. I was working on RSS at the time with W3C employee Dan Brickly and I felt cocky enough to try to go see TimBL's office. I got as far as the nameplate outside his door when a gruff man with a beard stopped me. "What are you doing?" he asked. "Seeing Dan Brickley," I lied. "That's not Dan's office," he said. "Go wait in the hall. I'll get Dan," said the man.

The man, I later learned, was Ralph R. Swick (or RRS), and it always struck me that he hated me, or at least looked down on me because of my age. In this encounter he at least could claim to not know who I was, but even later he would ignore me, ignore what I said, or in one particular instance, make fun of me. (I'll get to that later.)

Dan, on the other hand, was glad to see me and took me on a tour of the W3C, where he and TimBL worked. "Is Tim around?" I asked casully. "Oh no," he said, "he's off in [foreign country]." "Oh," I said. "But I can take you to meet our PR director and she can answer any questions you might have."

This seemed like an odd move to me. At the time, at least, I was a co-worker, not a journalist. Still, why not. She gave me the standard spiel about the W3C, which of course I'd already knew. (Although there was one funny moment: "The Web is just 10 years old," she said, obviously repeating a standard line. "Were you everything you are at 10 years old?" There was an awkward pause as she tried to calculate my age and realized I might be.)

Eager to show her I knew what I was talking about, I decided to make an informed criticism of the W3C. Maybe I challenged is corporate control, or the bylaws' undemocratic requirements that the Director (TimBL) approve everything, or maybe that and more. She gave me standard responses, but I kept pushing and she got increasingly agitated and eventually started shouting. I wasn't hurt, and pressed on, but against my will I started crying (although I imagine it may have looked intentional -- a cheap arguing tactic, perhaps). She offered me tissues and toned down, asking me to send her some concrete suggestions by email to consider.

As DanBri took me out, he tried to console me. "Don't worry," he said, "she scares everyone. That's what makes her so good." For whatever reason, she always seemed extra-nice to me after that.

I next ran into TimBL at a W3C conference in Cambridge, where they were having a meeting on RDF, which I was beginning to get interested in. The meeting involved a series of presentations on various topics and through it all, TimBL struck me as incredibly brilliant. He would type away at his laptop the whole presentation, apparently lost in some project and not paying attention to anything. Then, towards the end, he would quickly raise his hand and ask the one question that revealed all the flaws of the presenter's assumptions, cutting through everything they said.

At the end of the meeting, DanBri insisted I meet TimBL and so I went over to shake his hand. TimBL moved and talked so fast he appeared almost as a blur, bursting with energy and bouncing around the room. DanBri took my camera and TimBl slowed down for a moement to grab me around the shoulder and pose for a picture, a photo which I later used frequently. (God, I looked so young!)

I met a bunch of other cool people at the meeting -- B.K. DeLong, who introduced me to Tantek (then at Microsoft, he looked for all the world like a Borg; he later joined Technorati and hounded me incessantly to take a summer internship there (I was at dinner with him the other nigh and apparently he still thinks I should!))), libby, and the elusive mnot. But the one I remember most was Dan Connolly, or DanC as he was called.

At first, for some reason, I thought he was a kid. He wore a simple t-shirt and pulled out his guitar during breaks. His enthusiasm was even greater than TimBL's and he was clearly just as sharp, although in some ways more so, since he had a programmer's logicalness that he applied to every aspect of his life.

He worked from home in Kansas City, where he lived with his wife and kids. TO balance work and family, he worked out a contract with his life, which meant that at 5:00 he would stop whatever he was doing, no matter how important, for Family Time.

I would follow him around on the RDF chatrooms and could feel myself growing more logical just by listening to him. When I could I would sort of apprentice under him, following along and helping as he wrote programs to do various tasks. I even considered going out to visit him in Kansas City at one point.

He was an enormous influence, despite his socially conservative politics (which I always attributed to his location). He was usually quiet about them, but once he posted a petition in favor of parental abortion notification laws. At the time I was a radical on children's rights at least, and thought parents shouldn't be notified about anything. He also mentioned he was trying to figure out why his school wasn't teaching Intelligent Design (then a new phrase to me), absurdly suggesting he had to follow the money. It turns out following the money is much better at finding why people do teach Intelligent Design.

Still, I suppose everyone has flaws, and these were relatively minor. It's clear why TimBL chose DanC to be his right-hand man, handling the details for anything important.

The next time I met TimBL was at the WWW2002 conference in Hawaii. DanC invited me to wake up early for a "Semantic Web Swim" with him and TimBL but, ashamed of my body at the time, I stupidly declined -- a move I still regret.

One night DanC, some other people, and I went out to a place on the beach. I, I have to say, didn't have a sip of alcohol -- I still haven't, actually -- but everyone else got hammered. (I was worried some of them might walk into the ocean by accident and get swept away.) I left my participation ambiguous, however, when I posted a short note in an obscure place on my blog, but John Robb, then-CEO of UserLand Software (Dave Winer, founder) found it and quoted me on his blog with the comment "Aaron is 14. Someone should tell his parents." (No one ever did, as far as I know.) The next day, when I went to see UserLand employee Robert Scoble give a talk, I accidentally let my badge in the hotel room and was dragged out of the talk by security.

On Semantic Web Developer Day, I gave a short presentation about a project I was working on. Ralph Swick (the gruff fellow, you'll recall) also gave a presentation. I got in line to ask him a question, but I was last and we were out of time. "It'll be quick," I lied. "OK, they said. "Have you thought at all about the privacy implications of this?" I asked (for his software was a total privacy nightmare). "Yes," RRS responded and everybody laughed. I went back t the audience feeling like a jerk and RRS ignored me when I tried to ask him to elaborate one-on-one.

It was in the hallway one day that I first really talked to TimBL. He was breezing down the corridor when he spotted me and ran up. "Aaron!" he said. "I really appreciate all the work you['re doing -- it's great stuff. Do you think maybe you could help with a little project?]" Flustered, I said of course. He outlined a project having to do with encrypted RDF and I eagerly volunteered, amazed at my good fortune.

A few days later, at a conference dinner, I got my food and was looking for a place to sit, when TimBL came by. "Here," he said, "I think I've got a place for you" and he brought me over to the W3C table, seating me directly across from him, which was simply amazing. The table was full of good cheer and Tim commemorated the moment by passing his camera around it and asking everyone to take a photo from their point of view.

I last saw him as we were leaving when he pulled my mom aside and introduced himself. "Aaron's doing great work," he said, "but I'm a little worried. The other night at dinner all he had was rice." "Oh, he's just a fussy eater," my mom explained.

The last time my path crossed with TimBL is when I was applying for Stanford. My Dad happened to be in Cambridge at the time and insisted on asking TimBL for a letter of recommendation, by going over to TimBL's office. Apparently he had better luck than I, since I'm told TimBL agreed and I was later accepted to Stanford. I guess a letter of recommendation from the creator of the Web counts for something, even if he is an Englishman.

Aaron Swartz: Everyday Utilitarianism: Who Gets the TV First?

2008-08-24T22:43:57+00:00

I've often thought it would be fun to write a book on "everyday utilitarianism" -- how to apply mathematical formalizations of utilitarianism and game theory to help you solve everday life dilemmas, like who should get to use the television first or whether you should go out with that guy.

The basic idea would be that each chapter would revolve around a particular mathematical principle and demonstrate it using a concrete example from everyday life. Since I'll probably never get around to writing such a book, I figured I'd just write up such examples on my blog when I encountered them and maybe someone else would take the idea and run with it.

So here's the first example:

It's 8pm, and you settle down in front of the television to watch American Idol. Unfortunately, at the very same time your roommate is also settling down in front of the television to play one of his video games. Quickly, the two of you get into a tiff about who will get to use the television first. You both would prefer using the television first rather than second, yet, since American Idol is a live show, watching it now is a rather different experience from watching it later, while the video game will remain the same all night. How can you prove mathematically to your roommate that you should get to use the television first?

Let U(TV_0 = A), which we'll write AT0, represent the number of utiles (essentially, a measure of enjoyment) you get from watching the TV first, while BT0 represents the number of utiles your roommate gets from watching the TV first. (AT1 and BT1 represent the utiles from watching it second.) Obviously our goal is to maximize the total number of utiles (i.e. enjoyment) in the world, by picking the solution that leads to our greatest number.

First we write down what we know. Obviously you both would prefer to watch the show first, rather than second:

AT0 > AT1
BT0 > BT1

But since Amereican Idol is live, we can also say that the benefit you get from watching it first is bigger than the benefit your roommate gets from playing his game first. In other words:

AT0 - AT1 > BT0 - BT1

Finally, we want to find out which is bigger: you going first and him second, or you going second and him first. Let >< represent "which is bigger?"

AT0 + BT1 >< AT1 + BT0

Now, to solve, we take what we know:

AT0 - AT1 > BT0 - BT1

And we add AT1 to both sides:

AT0 > BT0 - BT1 + AT1

And then add BT1 to both sides:

AT0 + BT1 > BT0 + AT1

Which precisely answers are question above: it's better for you to go first.

By this time in the proof, however, your roommate should have wandered off, leaving you to watch American Idol in peace. Unfortunately, not having seen your proof, he thinks you're just a selfish ass as opposed to trying hard to do what's best for the whole world.

Aaron Swartz: How To Launch Software

2008-08-22T20:58:34+00:00

37signals recommends that software developers pursue what they call the Hollywood Launch. They don't give any argument for this method, except perhaps the title (as if Hollywood was a business you should try to imitate?) -- I guess the idea is that you're supposed to do it since 37signals says to.

The basic idea behind the Hollywood Launch is simple: you release a few hints about your product to build buzz, slowly revealing more and more until the big day, when you throw open the doors and people flood your site, sent there by all the blog coverage and email alerts.

This may work well for Hollywood -- if your movie is a big hit at the box-office on opening weekend, then the movie theaters are more likely to keep showing it in the weeks to come and you get credit for being "one of the weekend's biggest films". But for software developers, it's moronic. Your software isn't being released in theaters, it's available over the Web. You don't have to worry about the theater no longer showing after week one; you can keep pushing it for years, growing your userbase.

Instead what happens when software developers try the Hollywood Launch, and I've seen this many times, is that users indeed do flood to your site on launch day but...

They bring the site down from the load. You scramble to get it back up and succeed by coding like a mad man, only to find...
They discover some big bug that you never quite noticed before, which makes the whole thing look like embarrassing hackwork. (What? You forgot to test that last-minute JavaScript change in IE6 1/2?) So you're desperately rushing to fix the bug before the traffic dies down, rush-patching things and restarting the server when...
You bring the site down for everyone because there was a syntax error in your patch that keeps the server from coming back up. You fix it while cursing yourself madly. Finally everything seems to work. You take a breath and decide to see what people are saying about you on the Web, only to discover...
Everyone misunderstood what your product does because your front page wasn't clear enough. Now they all think it's stupid and wonder aloud how you even know how to breathe. So you reply in all the comment threads and fix your front page to ensure no one could possibly misunderstand what it is you're doing just in time to find...
All the traffic is gone.

Tomorrow, hardly any of those users come back. Your traffic graphs look like the sharpest mountain you've ever seen: a huge climb up and then, almost immediately, a similarly-sized crash back down.

So what do you do then? Well, you do what you should have done all along: you grow the site.

I'll call this technique the Gmail Launch, since it's based on what Gmail did. Gmail is probably one of the biggest Web 2.0 success stories, so there's an argument in its favor right there. Here's how it works:

Have users from day one. Obviously at the very beginning it'll just be yourself and your co-workers, but as soon as you have something that you don't cringe while using, you give it to your friends and family. Keep improving it based on their feedback and once you have something that's tolerable, let them invite their friends to use it too.
Try to get lots of feedback from these new invitees, figuring out what doesn't make sense, what needs to be fixed, and what things don't work on their bizarre use case combination. Once these are all straightened out, and they're using it happily, you let them invite their friends. Repeat until things get big enough that you need to...
Automate the process, giving everyone some invite codes to share. By requiring codes, you protect against a premature slashdotting and force your users to think carefully about who actually would want to use it (getting them to do your marketing for you). Plus, you make everyone feel special for using your product. (You can also start (slowly!) sending invite codes to any email lists you might have.)
Iterate: give out invite codes, fix bugs, make sure things are stable. Stay in this phase until the number of users you're willing to invite is about the same as the number you expect will initially sign up if you make the site public. For Gmail, this was a long time, since a lot of people wanted invites. You can probably safely do it sooner.
Take off the invite code requirement, so that people can use the product just by visiting its front page. Soon enough, random people will come across it from Google or various blogs and become real users.
If all this works -- if random people are actually happy with your product and you're ready to grow even larger -- then you can start building buzz and getting press and blog attention. The best way to do this is to have some kind of news hook -- some gimmick or controversial thing that everyone will want to talk about. (With reddit, the big thing was that we switched from Lisp to Python, which was discussed endlessly in the Lisp and Python communities and gave us our first big userbase.)
Start marketing. Once you start using up all the growth you can get my word-of-mouth (and this can take a while -- Google is only getting to this stage now), you can start doing advertising and other marketing-type things to provide the next big boost in growth.

The result will be a graph that just keeps accelerating and climbing up. That's the graph that everyone loves to see: solid growth, not a one-day wonder. Good luck.

Since 37signals quotes from people who followed their advice, I thought I might as well do the same. mojombo:

I find this to be excellent advice. This is exactly the approach we took at GitHub almost down to the letter. It took about 2 months until the site was good enough to use to host the GitHub source, another month until we started private beta with invites, and three more months until public launch.

Artificial scarcity is a great technique to generate excitement for a product while also limiting growth to a rate that won't melt your servers. We worked through a huge number of problems and early users gave us some of the ideas that have defined GitHub. By doing a Hollywood launch, things would have been very different and I am convinced, very much worse.

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT underestimate how much your users will help you to define your product. If you launch without having significant user feedback time, you've essentially thrown away a massive (and free) focus group study.

Let me also say that when we finally did our public launch, there was plenty of buzz, and all of it was the RIGHT kind of buzz. The buzz that attracts real, lasting customers (and no, we weren't on TechCrunch, that traffic is garbage).

Aaron Swartz: The Predator State: A Summary

2008-08-19T20:17:06+00:00

James K. Galbraith's The Predator State is undoubtedly one of the most important books on the economics of our era. Galbraith sets himself the task, not only of exposing the discredited economic orthodoxies of our generation, but also documenting the economy as it really exists, and setting an agenda for the future. It is a book that desperately need to be listened to. And, even better than all that, it's a fun read. Go out and buy it immediately.

That said, here is a brief, abbreviated summary of the book, to better pull out its themes and spread its message. It is of necessity less clear and less well-argued than the book itself, which I you should actually read if you want to argue, but it should give the gist of things.

1: The Reaganites swept into power on the arguments of economic conservatives: lower taxes, tight money, and an assault on all opponents of market forces (government, regulation, unions). Their views were tried and failed completely. They have no remaining defenders in academia and only slogans and cronies outside of it. There is no longer any vision on the right; the left should leave its defensive crouch and start proposing something new.

2: Friedman and friends said that markets would lead to democracy -- that "economic freedom" begets political freedom. But economic freedom isn't what it sounds like; it's not freedom from economic want but instead, as Friedman put it, "the freedom to choose" or, in other words, "the freedom to shop". But control over production is as unfree as in the Soviet Union, with advertising for propaganda, R&D for planning, and Wall Street analysts for government inspectors. "Lines form, under capitalism, every day."

3: Supply-siders argued that a) saving is a public good because it leads to investment, b) America does not save enough compared to other countries, c) saving would be unleashed by lowering taxes on it, d) the resulting investment would spur an economic boom. Every piece of this is wrong: a) in an efficient market, all the benefits from investment are captured by the investor; thus investment cannot be a public good unless markets are inefficient, in which case the government should step in more, b) the correct amount of saving is a policy decision, there's no reason to believe other countries have it right (the Soviet Union had a 40% level of saving right up to its collapse), c) rich people save most of their money anyway (it's impossible to consume that much) and changes in interest rates dwarf changes in tax rates; furthermore, real investment is encouraged by high personal taxes, since this forces people to keep their money in corporations, d) personal saving is less than 1% of GDP; almost all investment comes from corporations or overseas.

4: Milton Friedman claimed that high inflation (it was 10% in the 1970s) was just the result of printing too much money. Reagan's Fed adopted this belief, sending the US and many foreign countries into deep recession. Eventually, the policy was completely abandoned and high inflation has not been seen since. Serious inflation isn't caused by printing money, but by wage-price spirals -- the price of oil shot up, causing rising prices to cover oil costs, causing workers to demand higher wages to pay those prices, causing prices to rise even higher, and so on. Today, most prices are set by overseas manufacturers and labor unions are so weak that workers can't demand wage increases. Inflation is dead.

5: Democrats (and some Republicans) repeatedly insist that we need to balance the budget or face fiscal collapse. But the budget is ruled by a simple equation: the total amount the government owes + the total amount the public owes = the total amount we owe to foreign countries. This is simple logic: whatever is not owed within the country must be owed to another country. But the international economy depends on other countries keeping large reserves of dollars (see 14), meaning our trade deficit must be high. As long as this is so, we must either have the government run large deficits or ask people to do so. The budget deficit was closed in the late 1990s because citizens picked up the slack with high credit card spending and home equity loans, inevitably leading to a slump. Balancing the budget is for suckers; Democrats should spend the money on public goods instead, promoting economic growth and thus raising tax revenue.

6: The argument for free trade comes from Ricardo's "comparative advantage" -- a clever textbook exercise, but irrelevant to the real world since it assumes constant costs. In reality, either you produce manufactured goods, in which your costs go down as you make more, or you sell off commodities, in which case your costs go up as you make more. With the former, it takes time for local industry to build up the advantage (requiring protectionism). With the latter, you end up like Mongolia, which opened up its animal husbandry market, swelling herd sizes, turning grass into permanent desert, and killing off the entire market. With no other exports, such a country is in big trouble. Ricardo was wrong: diversification, not specialization, is the way to develop -- and how every successful country has. Unfortunately, we've forced this broken system on most of the world. (China has escaped, letting state-supported banks fund money-losing new companies until they grow large enough to succeed as exporters. In the mean time, they dump their products on local Chinese, allowing them to have a very high standard of living at very low wages.)

7: There is no trade-off between equality and efficiency. Instead, equality leads to efficiency. Denmark is one of the most equal countries in Europe, and as a result one of the wealthiest. The rest are on a continuum down to unequal and inefficient. Full employment and high wages require companies to make the most of the employees they have, increasing efficiency. Raising the minimum wage doesn't raise unemployment, it lowers it -- unemployment and inequality have risen and fallen together since 1920. Higher wages lead to more jobtaking and less quitting. The remaining increase in inequality was caused by stock market giveaways to dot-commers and Bush giveaways to government contractors -- which is why it was limited to Silicon Valley and the Potomac, respectively.

8: The US is not a free market. Of GDP, 17% is health care (where experts, not consumers decide how to spend), 16% is housing (subsidized by quasi-public mortgage firms and tax deductions), 15% is federal welfare, 14% is local welfare, 4.5% is military spending, 3% is higher education (paid for mostly by government or conspicuous philanthropy¹ and consumed for status and not value). Together, 70% of US GDP is planned; it's just that our facade of a free market makes us less efficient at planning than other countries (especially in health care).

9: In the 1970s, American industry (particularly steel and cars) was being challenged and weakened by Japan. Reagan's assault on inflation (see 4) dealt them a death blow, sending their foreign and domestic markets into deep recession, driving up the value of the dollar (making their exports more expensive than their competitors'), and raising interest rates. In the 1980s the technical staff left for Silicon Valley, and 1990s financial fraud killed off what remained. When new startup founders paid themselves exorbitant salaries from VC money other CEOs rushed to keep up, making them all wealthy enough to become a separate class. They used their new power to prey on the corporations that they ran.²

10: Previously, regulation kept the predators in check -- unions, NGOs, and progressive businesses pushed government standards to kill regressive competitors. But newly-wealthy predator CEOs had the Republicans take over and gut regulation. The result is the Predator State, where every new law is a corporate giveaway. Prescription drug benefits for Big Pharma; NCLB to defund and deskill schools (building support for vouchers); and Social Security reform to give workers' paychecks to Wall Street. (Democrats have so far prevented the latter, but corporate-funded think tanks now aim to take them down from inside.) The programs allow further predation; privatizing college loans has led loan companies to bribe student loan officers. It's not that Republican government fails at tasks like stopping Katrina; it's that such tasks of governance are not its goal -- opening up New Orleans for Halliburton contracts is.

11: The great liberal economic agenda is "making markets work" -- small fixes for market failures. The canonical example is job training to fight unemployment. But job training does not create new jobs, economic growth does; the tech boom was the last time we saw a real decrease in unemployment. Similarly, some Dems propose universal preschool since experiments find kids with free preschool grow up to get better-paying jobs. But those preschools did not create jobs, they just gave their students an advantage in getting them. Universal preschool would give everyone that advantage, leaving no net impact. And creating markets in unmarketable goods (health care, energy, the climate) is doomed to failure. In these industries markets will not work; planning is required.

12: Planning is alleged to have been disproven by the Soviet Union's fall. But it is unavoidable. The market, even when it does work, fails to take into account the wishes of the poor and the needs of the future, since neither can buy things today. New Orleans fell not because of a lack of foresight (it was predicted by the local paper) or technology (the Army knew how to build strong levees) but because we lacked a plan -- nobody in power bothered to do anything about it. Similarly, climate change will melt Antarctica and drown New York, Boston, South Florida, Houston, the Bay Area, London, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Shanghai. Stopping it requires a plan; an enormous one ranging from elementary school classes to government-funded research centers to a WWII-level restructuring of the economy.

13: Deregulation can have three effects: 1) increasing competition and lowering wages and prices, 2) speeding technological change and increasing quality, 3) creating monopolies and raising prices. Trucking deregulation did 1, airline deregulation did 1 and 2, but telecom, banking, and energy deregulation did 3. Charles Keating donated to the government, leading VP George H. W. Bush's task force to deregulate his industry and allow the Savings and Loan Scandal. Ken Lay was Bush's largest contributor, leading VP Dick Cheney's task force to deregulate his industry and allow the Enron energy scandal.

The solution is to lower CEO pay, raise the minimum wage, and set wage standards in between. Some liberals claim trade is the problem and the solution is to set environmental and labor standards on other countries. These are unenforceable and will be ineffective (companies moving overseas already build clean factories since that's most efficient and no significant exports are made using child or prison labor). Instead, we should set wage standards at home, like Scandinavia, forcing companies to increase productivity and pay fair wages. Wage standards should also apply to undocumented workers; illegal immigration is caused by employers who send recruiters to Mexico for compliant and low-paid workers. Applying wage standards to all will end these abusive practices.

14: Any country that can pay for its imports entirely with exports can organize its internal economy (its people and resources) however it likes. Countries that do not balance their trade depend instead on global capital markets and must play by their rules. But the US is a special case: after World War II (1944) it set up the Bretton Woods system of international exchange, pegging all currencies to the dollar and backing the dollar with gold reserves. But during Vietnam's deficits (1971), Nixon broke the system, devaluing US currency and wreaking havoc on the rest of the world. Reagan's tight money policies (1981) caused so much instability that other countries were forced to build up reserves of US Treasury Bonds in exchange for military, economic, and export security. US bubbles and the Soviet Union's fall make this system less secure than before, but as long as it remains the US can do whatever it likes economically. And it might as well, since economic success will strengthen the system and the policies proposed here will lead to economic success.

Conspicuous philanthropy is like conspicuous consumption, a way for the rich to flaunt their wealth, only far more effective -- you can outdo your neighbors simply by adding another zero to the check, the buildings with your name on them live on after you die, and the government gives you a tax deduction. ↩
See the classic Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class for more on predation. ↩

Aaron Swartz: Utilitarian Equilibriums

2008-08-11T23:13:48+00:00

Utilitarians believe that people should work to maximize total happiness across the population. They believe that the only reason to do something or not to do something is because it will make people happier or unhappier respectively. Thus, whether something is good or bad depends to some extent on people's preferences -- whether it makes them happy or sad.

But this might leads to some odd conclusions in the case of what might be called "perverse preferences". For example, some members of the Bush Administration say they get very sad when they see others eat ice cream in public. Yet many people like to eat ice cream in public. Should we stop them from doing so just because it makes others sad? Moreover, should they decide to stop doing so if they're utilitarians?

Or, to take a more realistic example, many people like having sex with other people of the same gender, while others insist that such sex makes them sad. Should a utilitarian gay person remain quiet about how they're having gay sex because speaking up will upset homophobes?

A naive utilitarian might say yes, while intuition says the right answer is no. I think the actual right answer is no, and here's the reason:

Distaste for gay sex is a perverse preference, in that it's a preference about other people's behavior that doesn't directly affect you. And, empirically, we find that such preferences don't usually withstand frequent exposure to the behavior itself.

In other words, the more public people are about the gay sex they're having, the less hearing about gay sex tends to make people feel bad. Thus, being public about the gay sex you're having is the optimal behavior because it:

makes you feel good,
makes people who don't like gay sex less afraid of it, which leads to
letting other people be public about their gay sex, making them feel good

That is, being public about the behavior helps transition from a society with lots of closeted gays and lots of homophobes to a society with lots of proud gays and few homophobes. There's more overall happiness in the second society so it's right to do things that bring us closer to it.

Christopher Schmidt: MetaCarta Labs is Hiring

crschmidt — 2008-08-06T14:00:45+00:00

MetaCarta Labs is looking for a new employee again.

MetaCarta Labs is a small team of enthusiastic, fast paced developers working directly under the CTO to develop prototypes and new products and facilitate developer outreach. MetaCarta Labs is taking a key role in geo-enabling the Web — helping existing content owners to add geographic information to their content — and has a long history of working with external developer communities through open source projects and conferences.

ландшафтoptical communications
Most people who’ve been long time readers know that I’ve been working at MetaCarta for two years, and I’ve really had a great time there. Some of the smartest people I know are my coworkers, and I’ve learned more working with them than I have anywhere else. I’ve travelled to conferences in other countries, met people from around the world, worked on several open source projects, and directly participated in a number of interesting revenue-building things within the company.

Interest in geo a must: experience in geo optional. We’re looking for a web hacker, primarily: interest and experience in HTML and JS is pretty much a prerequisite for what we’re looking for at the moment.

It’s a cool gig: if you know anyone who might be interested, feel free to send them my way, either directly (crschmidt@metacarta.com) or via the link above.

Redmonk: Web Green: The Open Web Foundation

Steve Ivy — 2008-07-24T20:23:09+00:00

Today at O’Reilly’s OSCON, David Recordon announced the formation of a new foundation, the Open Web Foundation, with the goal of fostering development of open standards and providing an incubator for working out IPR and patent issues before standards are too widely deployed.

The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

This is an awesome step and one that has been necessary for a long time. The Apache Foundation has provided a great model for software incubation, but to date there has not been an appropriate place to work out issues with new specifications. The Open Web Foundation will provide that place.

The OWF has a mailing list up for anyone wanting to get involved or follow the discussion. Details on foundation membership, etc, are still forthcoming but knowing the participants I’m certain things will be aboveboard.

I’m really excited to see the OWF come together - the environment in which web technologies are developed has changed, and the OWF is there to help provide a buffer for these new specs to be developed out in the open. As I wrote in Web Green: Cultivating The Open Web:

Like sediment in a river, or potting soil in a greenhouse, each layer we put down supports and affects the ecosystem that grows out of it. We take IP, ethernet, and their like completely for granted - they’ve been standardized and implemented across a worldwide network. That layer is foundation and fertilizer for the next: HTTP, SSL, HTML, XML, and the feed variants that have become the everyday building blocks of our applications and services. These are now settling into the foundation for the services we’re building now: near-real-time publishing and social software stacks. These, in turn, will provide for what comes after, and the philosophical foundations we build into this layer will profoundly affect the health of the next.

So here’s to the OWF: May the foundations of the next web be as open and implementable as the foundations of the first web were, and more.

grass image from pygment.com for whose proprietor I cannot find contact information.

Redmonk: 4 Tips for a Successful Man-venture

Steve Ivy — 2008-07-24T19:43:09+00:00

After a fun trip skydiving with my father and two brothers this past week, I wrote up a guest post on Dustin’s new blog on 4 Tips For A Successful Man-venture.

Though a tad awkward to say, ["Man-venture"] sums up easily our two-day combination of fun, adventure, companionship, and mutual support. Ours was a roaring success, and we all came away from it both tired and invigorated, and swearing to do it again in 6-12 months.

Aaron Swartz: The Percentage Fallacy

2008-07-22T03:43:39+00:00

There's one bit of irrationality that seems like it ought to be in behavioral economics introduction but mysteriously isn't. For lack of a better term, let's call it the percentage fallacy. The idea is simple:

One day I find I need a blender. I see a particularly nice one at the store for $40, so I purchase it and head home. But on the way home, I see the exact same blender on sale at a different store for $20. Now I feel ripped off, so I drive back to the first store, return the blender, drive back to the second store, and buy it for $20.

The next day I find I need a laptop. I see a particularly nice one at the store for $2500, so I purchase it and head home. But on the way home, I see the exact same laptop for $2480. "Pff, well, it's only $20," I say, and continue home with the original laptop.

I'm sure all of you have done something similar -- maybe the issue wasn't having to return something, but spending more time looking for a cheaper model, or fiddling with coupons and rebates, or buying something of inferior quality. But the basic point is consistent: we'll do things to save 50% that we'd never do to save 1%.

At first this almost seems rational -- of course we're going to do more to save more money! But you aren't saving more money. With both the blender and the laptop, you have the chance to save $20. Either way, you're going to have another twenty in your pocket, which you can spend on exactly the same things later on. Yet we behave differently depending on whether we got that twenty by skimping on a small purchase or skimping on a big one. Rationally, if driving back to the store isn't worth $20 when you're buying a laptop, it isn't worth $20 when you're buying a blender.

On the other hand, don't those small savings tend to add up after a while? If you start blowing $20 every time you buy a trinket, you're soon going to be out of disposable income. Meanwhile, spending several thousand dollars is much rarer, so isn't it OK to slack off a bit on such occasions?

If we work to save 50% on everything, big or small, that's the equivalent of saving 50% of our money altogether. Whereas if we only try to save fixed amounts on every purchase, how much we save is dependent on how many things we buy.

So which is the real irrationality? I'm not entirely sure of the answer.

Morbus Iff: Wikipedia and the Zodiac Killer

Morbus Iff — 2008-07-18T16:10:50+00:00

Zodiac, a serial killer whose identity still remains unknown, continues to make headlines, most recently in the murder of Megan Touma, when a newspaper received a letter from someone purporting to be the killer, who will "start using my role-model's signature". A friend on IRC noticed that the John F. Kennedy page on Wikipedia had been defaced with a message, purportedly from Zodiac. Within 30 minutes, the message had been decrypted:

vandaljzing wikipedia is so fun it is funner than killing people or having sex because when you kill people you only destroy their bodys but when you vandalize this website you kill the soul of the poor queer pig slaves that devote their lives to the embarkment that i am now destroying with my own bare hands

Rough timeline of events:

Google indexed the same message in the William McKinley Wikipedia article.
sbp noticed that there were 26 unique symbols, suggesting a simple substitution cypher.
sbp provided a simple symbol-to-character hash, for use in online solvers.
ianivs used a cracker to solve it in 6395041 attempts.
The folks in #wikimedia found the template changes.

Morbus Iff: Drupal Tough Love #2: Signatures for Forums 5.x-2.3

Morbus Iff — 2008-07-15T11:31:25+00:00

Over at Drupal Tough Love, chx and I just reviewed Signatures for Forums 5.x-2.3 which "provides user signatures that will be familiar to users of popular forum software" such as "the administrator can choose the input filter for signatures", conditional signatures that are hidden "if a post is under a particular length", and showing the signature only once per conversation.

The Mocking Eye: Moviesneak — Stretch your movie ticket dollar

mikek — 2008-07-07T18:28:01+00:00

Ever sneak from one movie to another at the movie theatre, after only paying for one ticket? Well, I have. And I like it.

This can often be done by looking at the showtimes ahead of time and finding movies that are times relatively near each other. Although this is sometimes thwarted by placing the temporally adjacent movies in different sections of the theatre, there are often opportunities for this type of sneaking.

But instead of bothering to study movie showtime tables and such, I’ve written a little python script to do it for me. It’s rather rudimentary. Here’s how to use it:

Get moviesneak.py
Get showtimes for a theatre in your area.
1. The format moviesneak accepts is Google Showtimes, which can be accessed by googling showtimes <zipcode>, or using this url: http://www.google.com/movies?near=<zipcode>.
2. Then select all the showtimes in a particular movie theatre, starting from the review stars, not including the theatre’s address.
3. Copy these into a file somewhere.
Run moviesneak: moviesneak.py showtimes-file [optional time threshold in seconds].
- By default, the threshold is 15 minutes (900 seconds). The threshold is how long before or after the end of one movie the following one should be. So a 15 minutes threshold means the following movie can start 15 mins before the current one ends, or 15 after (remember that even though it starts 15 mins before the current ends, you won’t have to leave early, you’ll only miss the previews)

The code is under a BSD license, so just about anything can be done with it. If you have time to muck with BeautifulSoup or just plain regex, it would be nice if moviesneak could query google showtimes (or any other source) directly. The algorithm is very simple, and pretty ugly, but it can be plugged into pretty surroundings easily (such as a web interface).

Edit: I haven’t bothered writing a chaining algorithm (i.e. find the longest sequence of contiguous movies) mostly because I really can’t watch more than 2 movies in a row at a movie theatre. However, one shouldn’t be hard to write, since the corpus size is small enough even horrible algorithms will chug through quickly. Maybe when I’m bored enough/free enough I’ll write one to extend moviesneak.

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John Cowan: Dorian pictures

John Cowan — 2008-07-02T04:30:27+00:00

See the <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/7731152@N03/tags/dorian/">tagged Flickr photostream</a>. I will add to this.</content>

Aaron Swartz: Capital and its Complements: A Summary

2008-06-30T20:45:50+00:00

The following is a non-technical summary of Brad DeLong's May 2008 paper Capital and Its Complements.

Adam Smith explained that in all countries with "security of property and tolerable administration of justice" citizens would spend all their money (capital), either on consumption or investment, causing the country's economy to grow. After some contention, later economic studies tended to bare this out: a shortage of capital wasn't always the bottleneck, but when it was, removing it could lead to extraordinarily rapid growth.

The problem for poor countries is that, because of high mortality rates (which require more children to have some survive) and low educational levels (which mean those children can find productive employment quickly), they have high population growth and thus low capital-to-labor ratios. Worse, trade allows you to spend your money buying manufactured goods from overseas, for which you have only your very cheap labor to provide in return. The result is that it requires an enormous amount of domestic investment to improve capital-to-labor ratios.

And so rich country economists made "the neoliberal bet" on behalf of poor countries: they hoped that loosening restrictions on international capital flows would send capital rushing in to poor countries and build their economies, the same way that Great Britain's massive investment in a young United States (in 1913 Britain's foreign assets equaled 60% of its domestic capital stock) built up that country.

But what ended up happening was exactly the opposite. Yes, NAFTA led US companies to invest the $20 to $30 billion a year on manufacturing in Mexico that its boosters predicted, but that investment was more than outweighed by the $30 to $40 billion a year fleeing the country from Mexico's wealthy wanting to invest it in the United States. Why? In part because the US was more politically stable, and thus a safer investment climate. And in part because the US treats its own workers so poorly -- with productivity rising 35% since 2000 while real wages remain flat -- it provides an excellent investment opportunity.

But meanwhile, all this investment in the US was dwarfed by the Chinese acquisition of our debt (and thus the political risk it represents). China needed to do this, since US purchase of their exports is the only thing funding the manufacturing-led industrialization of a massive portion of their economy; there would be massive dislocation if that funding dried up.

"Recognition of these facts came slowly." First, Larry Summers said it was our unsustainable current account deficit. (That was the 1990s; today that deficit is four times as large.) Later, economists thought it must have been our large budget deficits. Then they began thinking it was the run-up in housing prices. But that, it is now clear to most economists, was the result of a bubble. And yet the flow of capital to the US continues. But, perhaps even more frighteningly, it could stop at any moment.

Morbus Iff: Help save the International Cryptozoology Museum

Morbus Iff — 2008-06-30T13:08:06+00:00

Friend and well-known cryptozoologist Loren Coleman writes that his International Cryptozoology Museum is in dire need of financial support, else it might be closed down due to an IRS audit:

"The [IRS's] audit has gone to five or more levels of meetings and appeals, as I have attempted to explain what being a “cryptozoologist” is all about, that I do make my living this way, and that the museum is an essential part of the overall plan ... To the IRS, the museum verges on being a hobby ... and it needs more income (even if donations) to support itself ... The museum has to make money, or it ceases to exist ... I need to get donations to pay the mortgage for the house-museum where it is now, to keep it from foreclosure, and to pay for the other bills associated with the museum."

I've known about the museum for years and, altruistically, supported it in any way I can. Unbeknownst to me, I was one of the first two to contribute long ago on May 14th, 2005. Back then, Loren had some books donated that reeked of cigarette smoke and, due to allergies, needed to find them a better home. I offered to take them off his hands but, more importantly, to give him some cash to hunt up replacement copies for the museum.

This weekend, I offered my continued support:

"In the last 24 hours, the first “Museum Principal Donor / Life Member” contributed $1050.00. This individual “Morbus” challenges others to join him in donating at the $1000 level to [meet] the goal of keeping this institution open."

Please, do what you can to help the museum. The alternative is that this publicly available resource, in a field already entrenched with a lack of answers, will disappear. Even those who aren't involved or interested in cryptozoology should appreciate the need to keep this information easily available and approachable.

Christopher Schmidt: Technocentric Thinking

crschmidt — 2008-06-28T22:34:52+00:00

Chad writes:

I know their “motto” is “Don’t Be Evil” .. but I think it should be “Don’t Be Smart” instead.. this is some dumb thinking from Google. Trust me.. I know better than Google on how I want to download and install my software.

This is just the latest in a whole lot of similar statements I’ve seen from many people across the web in a variety of situations talking about how “I know how to manage my machine”, with the underlying meaning being something like “You should act as if people who are working with your software know how to work their computers.”

When I put it that way, does it really sound right? Is there anyone who thinks that the *majority* of users of Google Earth actually know how to run their machines? Is there anyone who thinks that it makes sense for Google to build and QA two different install mechanisms — one for technical users who know what they’re doing, and one for those who don’t?

Very few companies the size of Google do anything on a whim. I expect that some thought went into the development of the Google Earth downloader. The fact that the thinking is not centered around technically competent users is just evidence that Google doesn’t need to target the early adopters; it’s not a sign that what they are doing is ‘Bad’ or ‘Stupid’.

Technical users are few and far between in the mass market. Google Earth is targeted towards the mass market. Just like all software that is targeted towards a mass market, there is nothing ’stupid’ about removing tools that the majority of users don’t need or care about: By doing so, you limit the number of people who are going to end up confused by your tool, and that’s not a bad thing when you care about the majority of people instead of a technical elite.

Christopher Schmidt: Printing Maps; Twin Mountain DRG

crschmidt — 2008-06-28T14:11:27+00:00

So, I’m going camping this week. While camping, I plan to be hiking the White Mountains relatively extensively, from my home base at Lafayette Campground in Franconia Notch.

One of the best part of planning hiking trips is maps. I love maps. I love looking at them, finding things, exploring things. I love having them handy to reference, I love browsing around them.

However, when you’re on a trail, looking at maps on a computer doesn’t work particularly well. As a result, I’m trying to print maps, and finding that it’s a somewhat difficult proposition.

I have DRGs from the libremaps project: These are great. I’m looking at o44071b5, o44071b6, and o44071a6, all downloaded from the Libre Map Project. Unfortunately, I then went to go open c6, only to find that… it’s not available. Argh! I know that it exists: I can check the features that should be on it in the Terraserver DRG WMS, but no Twin Mountain quad.

Oh well. Not a huge deal, just annoying; I’ve got other maps that cover the area. Now the problem is that I can’t figure out how to take a tiff like these and print them over multiple pages on a home printer. Anyone got any tips or tricks on that? Printing on one page is somewhat useful, but not nearly as much as I’d like; I also don’t want to spend all day cropping and fighting with tools. If I have to do that, I’ll just survive with what I’ve got.

I’m going to go out to the local map store and see if they have a nice Atlas for the Whites; if so, I’ll take it. It’s worth it to have a little bit of extra knowledge about a place — and who can’t use more maps?

Redmonk: Web “Green”: Cultivating The Open Web

Steve Ivy — 2008-06-26T19:08:23+00:00

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about what’s going on in the DiSo community, and I had started to prepare a list of recent developments to share, but on the way I felt that there was a theme I wanted to address first.

The DiSo Project is first and foremost about enabling/creating a new category of social-networking-enabled websites, not restricted to the large silos but grown organically at the edges of the web - the small and independent sites that are the forerunners and foundations of the communities we now enjoy. How can we best provide a fertile environment, one that encourages, protects, and nurtures this growth?

grass image from pygment.com for whose proprietor I cannot find contact information.

Fertile Foundations

One theme that’s been cropping up on the conference circuit lately, thanks to Chris Messina, Dave Recordon, Jeremy Keith, and others, is this idea of “building the open web“. The internet (based on public, open technical standards), and the early www (based on public, open hypertext formats and protocol specifications), gave “the web” we know its heart and soul. How did that happen, and what will perpetuate the process?

Like sediment in a river, or potting soil in a greenhouse, each layer we put down supports and affects the ecosystem that grows out of it. We take IP, ethernet, and their like completely for granted - they’ve been standardized and implemented across a worldwide network. That layer is foundation and fertilizer for the next: HTTP, SSL, HTML, XML, and the feed variants that have become the everyday building blocks of our applications and services. These are now settling into the foundation for the services we’re building now: near-real-time publishing and social software stacks. These, in turn, will provide for what comes after, and the philosophical foundations we build into this layer will profoundly affect the health of the next.

Building the Open Web

So for the next ecosystem of social and community applications to thrive, we need to make sure that these aspects - public, freely-implementable formats and open standards - are a part of the web as we know it now. Thankfully, it’s happening - witness the growth of open, enabling technoliges like:

Microformats, basic specs for marking up machine-readable data in human-readable web pages (XFN, hCard, hCalendar, hAtom, hEtc)
OpenID, open identity solution for web services
OAuth, an HTTP-based protocol for authentication between services
XRDS-Simple, which provides discovery for various web services and makes inter-app cooperation that much easier.
XMPP, a real-time, distributed messaging system that can be integrated into other services.

All these are publicly developed and freely implementable, and active communities have evolved around them to discuss, implement, and evangelize them. This is what building the open web is about: collaborating to build a web that is larger than any company or organization - a web that will encourage new growth.

New Growth

So, given all the effort we’re putting into creating a web that is fertile ground for what’s coming next… what’s coming next? Here’s a look at a few areas DiSo is focusing on as we work on the building blocks of the distributed social network:

Identity

OpenID has focused a lot of attention on putting the User’s online identity back under their control. Rather than maintaining an account on each and every site they use, the User can maintain one or more OpenID accounts, using them as credentials on any of the 10,000+ sites that accept an OpenID for registration and login. With the technology in place, we turn our attention to what identity means, how much of that identity we’re willing to share, and with whom.

Activity

Since the mid 90’s we’ve been working on the problem of how to track what our friends and contacts are doing online, and figure out where the stuff that’s really interesting and relevant to us is happening. Look at the social network silos, and you’ll see that a huge part of what they offer users is the ability (or at least impression) that the user can know what their friends are up to. Sites like Twitter and FriendFeed are making progress on bringing this activity tracking into the light, but to really distribute it all there’s still a lot of work to do.

Here at the edges, we’re making it easy to agregate your own activity, and working on ways to track/follow updates of your friends activity in near-real-time.

Messaging

With OpenID providing a common form of identity, we’ve begun looking at what services can be enabled using that endpoint. One of the services we’re exploring is distributed messaging - friend requests, subscription requests, and direct messages - directed to that endpoint, authenticated via OAuth, and filtered by a messaging service based on user preferences.

Cultivating the Open Web

As the builders - or growers - of this web, it’s our responsibility to look beyond the IPO, beyond the ad-sell, beyond the current crop of buzzwords. We must decide that we’re going to invest in, and give back to, the ecosystem that has supported us. Think of it as Web “Green” - protecting and nurturing and stewarding the web ecology.

Christopher Schmidt: DjangoGraphviz: Visualizing Django Models

crschmidt — 2008-06-25T21:47:38+00:00

Earlier today, a coworker was trying to work out a diagram for the models in the Django app that I’ve been working on internally, to visualize the relationships between them. I did a quick Google, and found a reference to DjangoGraphviz, a super-handy little chunk of code.

DjangoGraphviz did exactly what I needed it to, with no problems at all. (My only complaint is that it requires the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to be defined in order to get the –help output, somewhat unintuitive.) The software quickly generated a .dot file which I was able to turn into a lovely PDF, and print. I’ve now got a copy on the desk of each of the developers using the codebase, and I think it’ll prove a lovely piece of reference.

So, if you want a quick visualization of your Django models, and you can install graphviz, I highly recommend DjangoGraphviz to do it.

(Note that the wiki page itself recommends a couple other things more ‘built in’ to Django, which are new to me: I didn’t try these, I just stuck with DjangoGraphviz, which did what I wanted.)

The Mocking Eye: Teaching

mikek — 2008-06-23T20:23:59+00:00

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize ‘inconvenient’ facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than a mere intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts. I would be so immodest as even to apply the expression ‘moral achievement’, though perhaps that may sound too grandiose for something that should go without saying.

–Max Weber
[via marginalrevolution]

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Morbus Iff: Code shui, NeoVictorian Computing, and Beauty

Morbus Iff — 2008-06-21T16:07:01+00:00

Friend Mark Bernstein promotes "software as craft" with the phrase NeoVictorian Computing. Jeremy recalls that "Part of his argument is that software creators have something to learn from the ideals of the arts and crafts movement: the software world is full of soulless bits and bytes, and maybe we would all be a little happier if we embraced handcraft ... During the talk, I remember Bernstein proposed that software creators should sign their work as a painter signs a painting, which is a lovely visual metaphor that I hope to keep around." And Greg Wilson has a book called Beautiful Code.

Happily, I already agree - they're all echoes of my own belief in "code shui", be it XML (a Morbus Rant from 2002 on "why beauty is important in computer file formats") or in code from 2004 ("His style is quite unique. [Morbus' AmphetaDesk] source reads almost like a paper, instead of terse code. He documents his code well and I've thus far found nothing that was very hard to understand. Best of all, its so un-Perl. He doesn't seem to use really clever tricks to do simple things, so the code has been very easy to understand").

The Mocking Eye: An svnwiki in Python

mikek — 2008-06-20T14:34:10+00:00

On a whim, I wrote a little wiki type thing in Python that sits on top of an SVN repo. It’s incredibly basic, and basically lets you browse a repo and edit files. Natively, it supports markdown as its default display mechanism, but it would be trivial to teach it the meaning of file extensions and have other view templates.

The intended use was for a personal notebook type thing, which I decided to abandon. Basically, it’s a lot like Jottit, except you actually have all your data, and can replicate it between locations. Yes, it also sounds like git-wiki,but I only found out about that after I’ve finished coding this version.

Although I decided not to use it, someone else my find it useful, at least the codebase. I am offering it here with absolutely no warranty, and you can use it however you like, you can attribute or not, whatever. Since this was built for private use, i.e. no public access, I was going to integrate grep into it, and other such utils, leveraging unix text processing for search, mass editing, etc. So one may be interested in continuing that. I did not implement a facility for adding pages easily, though that’s a trivial piece of coding.

Code: svnwiki.tar.gz Change the base variable to reflect the location of your repo.
Requirements:

web.py
pysvn (on debian this is the python-svn package rather than python-subversion)
markdown

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Kevin Reid: Apple's Sampler file format, and SBCL SB-SPROF report generation

2008-06-19T14:09:03+00:00

Apple's Sampler is a profiler based on the principle of periodically collecting the entire call stack of the executing threads, then summarizing these stacks to show what occurs frequently; primarily, as a tree, rooted at the bottom of the stack, where each node shows the number of times that call sequence was found on the stack.

SBCL's sb-sprof is a profiler which also collects call stacks, but its summary report is much less useful to me as it does not provide the per-branch counting; just top-of-stack frequencies and a caller/callee graph.

Therefore, I examined Sampler's file format and wrote code to generate it from sb-sprof's record.

The file is mixed text/binary, LF line endings. The grammar, as far as I've determined it, is:

  "@supersamplerV1.0" LF
  "@symboltableV1.1" LF
  (TAB int32<id> TAB int32<unknown> 
   TAB text<symbol> 
   TAB text<library-path> TAB text<library-path> LF)*
  "@end" LF
  (
    "@threadV1.0" TAB int16Hex<thread-id> LF
    (
      TAB int32<1> int32<0> int32<1> int32<count of stack-frame> (int32<stack-frame>)* LF
    )*
  )*
  "@end" LF

where by "int32" I mean a big-endian 32-bit (unsigned?) integer (i.e. four not-necessarily-ASCII bytes), and by "int16Hex" I mean a 16-bit integer in hexadecimal (i.e. four ASCII bytes).

"id" is an arbitrary identifier for this symbol. "unknown" is occasionally nonzero, but I don't know what it means. "symbol" is the name of a function/method found on the stack. "library-path" is the pathname to the object file it was loaded from (relative in the case of a standard framework, e.g. "Carbon.framework/HIToolbox.framework/HIToolbox").

"thread-id" is an identifier for the thread, which should occur as an "id" in the symbol table; the upper 16 bits evidently must be 0. Thread symbol table entries have a name and library path which is the string ("Thread_" int16<thread-id>); I have not confirmed whether this is necessary.

Each entry in a @thread block is one sampling of the whole stack of that thread. I do not know what the 1, 0, and 1 mean, but the fourth integer is the number of frames on the stack; immediately after are that many integers, each of which is an id from the symbol table.

Files generated from this structure are accepted by Sampler, but not always by Shark; I don't know why, and my attempt at tracking it down made it seem to depend on the size of the trace file.

Here is code to generate such a file from sb-sprof data; it should be loaded in the SB-SPROF package:

  (defun write-32 (index stream)
    (write-byte (ldb (byte 8 24) index) stream)
    (write-byte (ldb (byte 8 16) index) stream)
    (write-byte (ldb (byte 8 8) index) stream)
    (write-byte (ldb (byte 8 0) index) stream))

  (defun write-sampler-data (stream)
    (format stream "~&@supersamplerV1.0~%")
    (format stream "~&@symboltableV1.1~%")
    (let ((symbols (make-hash-table :test 'equal))
          (buffer))
      (loop with gen = #x00002121
            for i below (- (samples-index *samples*) 2) by 2
            for debug-info = (aref (samples-vector *samples*) i)
            do (unless (or (member debug-info '(trace-start))
                           (gethash debug-info symbols))
                 (let ((index (incf gen)))
                   (setf (gethash debug-info symbols) index)
                   (write-char #\Tab stream)
                   (write-32 index stream)
                   (write-char #\Tab stream)
                   (write-32 0 stream)
                   (let* ((*print-right-margin* nil)
                          (*print-miser-width* nil)
                          (name (princ-to-string 
                                  (if debug-info
                                    (node-name (make-node debug-info))
                                    (format nil "Thread"))))
                          (real-info
                           (when (typep debug-info 'sb-di::compiled-debug-fun)
                             (sb-di::compiled-debug-fun-debug-info debug-info)))
                          (source
                           (when real-info
                             (sb-c::debug-info-source real-info)))
                          (pathname
                            (when (and source
                                       (eql (sb-c::debug-source-from source) :file))
                              (sb-c::debug-source-name source))))
                     (nsubstitute #\/ #\Newline name)
                     (format stream "~C~A~C~A~C~A~%"
                             #\Tab name
                             #\Tab pathname
                             #\Tab pathname)))))
      (format stream "~&@threadV1.0~C~4,'0X~%" #\Tab (gethash nil symbols))
      (flet ((out ()
               (when buffer
                 (write-char #\Tab stream)
                 (write-32 1 stream)
                 (write-32 0 stream)
                 (write-32 1 stream)
                 (write-32 (length buffer) stream)
                 (dolist (sym buffer)
                   (write-32 sym stream))
                 (terpri stream)
                 (setf buffer nil))))
        (loop for i downfrom (- (samples-index *samples*) 2) to 0 by 2
              for debug-info = (aref (samples-vector *samples*) i)
              do (cond
                   ((eql debug-info 'trace-start)
                    (out))
                   (t
                    (push (or (gethash debug-info symbols)
                              (error "No symbol assigned to ~S" debug-info))
                          buffer))))
        (out)))
    (format stream "~&@end~%"))

Usage:

(with-open-file (s "sampler.trace" :direction :output 
                                   :element-type :default
                                   :if-exists :supersede)
  (sb-sprof::write-sampler-data s))

This code generates a noninteractive Sampler-style tree report from SB-SPROF data.

  (defun make-bucket ()
    (list 0 (make-hash-table :test 'equal)))

  (defun put (bucket name)
    (let ((h (second bucket)))
      (or (gethash name h)
          (setf (gethash name h) (make-bucket)))))

  (defun build-tree ()
    (loop with root = (make-bucket)
          with current = (list root)
          for i downfrom (- (samples-index *samples*) 2) to 0 by 2
          for debug-info = (aref (samples-vector *samples*) i)
          do (cond
               ((eql debug-info 'trace-start)
                (dolist (bucket current)
                  (incf (first bucket)))
                (setf current (list root)))
               (t
                (let ((name (node-name (make-node debug-info)) #|kludge|#))
                  (push (put (first current) name) current))))
          finally (return root)))

  (defun twiddle-tree (bucket)
    (let (entries)
      (maphash (lambda (k v) (push (list* :i k (twiddle-tree v)) entries))
               (second bucket))
      (list (first bucket) entries)))

(Usage for printing a report: (twiddle-tree (build-tree)).)

Aaron Swartz: Last Goodbyes

2008-06-19T11:50:55+00:00

It's minutes to midnight and I'm hurriedly packing. Early tomorrow morning I catch a flight to Boston and start my new life. I haven't really gotten much of a chance to pack until now, because I've spent the past few days in a rush of meetings, getting in my last goodbyes for everyone I know in San Francisco.

It's been great seeing everyone, but like most locals, they're all puzzled as to why I'm leaving. I've been struggling to explain why. When I say the weather, everyone just laughs. When I say San Francisco is too loud, they start arguing. When I say it's the people, they tell me to find a better group of friends.

And the thing is, they're right. It's none of these. I've been spectacularly unable to articulate it, but the real answer is simpler and more prosaic. And now, after great thought and struggle, I realize the answer is simply this: Cambridge is the only place that's ever felt like home. It's that simple. And when you put it that way, it's clear why I have to go.

So goodbye Stanford, goodbye Palo Alto; goodbye south bay, goodbye peninsula; goodbye Change Congress, goodbye Creative Commons; goodbye Mission, goodbye SOMA; goodbye friends, goodbye loved ones; goodbye San Francisco, home to everyone I've ever loved. You'll always have my heart.

Aaron Swartz: Scenes

2008-06-19T05:08:40+00:00

"God, I'm so sick of this stuff. Can't we just go home?" she wines. "Jesus," I say, "would it kill you to go one more place?" It's been a long hot day in strange, busy New York City, and we're not exactly at our best. In fact, the combination of heat and exhaustion has turned our love bitter, brought on the darkness and recriminations. Its at moments like these, the dark depths of a relationship, that you wonder how things could ever work. As we walk down the steps we hear a subway car approach. We accelerate, running to catch it. Its doors open. We're moving faster now, pushing our way through the bustle of Manhattanites to make it. The bell sounds and I jump inside and hear the doors whoosh closed behind me. I spin around only to see her trapped on the other side of the glass. I put my hand up to it, but the train accelerates and she's left standing there, just another face in the crowd.

"Hey, want to see the game? Want a ticket to the Giants game?" I do not, in fact, want to see the game -- this or any other game. I hate sports. Yet the scalpers, apparently unaware of this, insist on trying to sell me one. That's what I get for walking near the ballpark, I guess. As I curse my choice of scenery, a cop pulls up. He lowers his window and leans out toward the scalper. The scalper hands him a ticket and the cop speeds off. "But he didn't pay!" a man in a suit walking by complains. "Cops get a special deal," explain the scalper. The man in the suit laughs and marvels at the scene.

It's weird being back at Stanford in the summer. Everything's so empty, nobody's around. Well, not nobody -- there seems to be some action near the main quad. There are drum kits spread around and golf carts and purple uniforms lying about. But most of all, there are people -- a bunch of students just standing around awkwardly. I'm about to ask one of them what's going on when a bell rings and a voice shouts "Background!" Suddenly all the students snap to attention, begin walking in perfect lines with bookbags slung over their shoulder, bicycles ridden in perfect formation. These aren't students at all, I realize with a lurch -- they're extras. It's disconcerting. A police guard is at the side, keeping kids from running over the camera crew. I ask her what they're filming. "Disney's High School Musical," she says quickly, trying to keep a student from cycling over the director's cart.

John Cowan: Dorian Sion Cowan

John Cowan — 2008-06-19T04:30:14+00:00

My grandson Dorian was born at 9:08 PM yesterday, June 17, 2008 (New York time). He weighed 9 lb 0.9 oz (4110 g) at birth, and was 22 inches (56 cm) long. And he is the Best Baby In The World. (Well, when I say that, I make a mental reservation in favor of Irene, Dorian's mommy, who is now almost 21 but was certainly the Best Baby in her day.) Baby and mother are doing wonderfully well -- Dorian is starting to breastfeed very nicely, and already knows a great many Proto-Indo-European roots. Irene's Caesarean incision is still very sore, and the IV is in her hand, not her arm, which makes handling him a little awkward for her. Her best friends have been hovering around the two of them, and so have Gale and I as far as we have been able. They will be coming home Friday morning. Anyhow, I sang him a lullaby the night he was born, not that he needed it -- he was pretty well drifting off anyhow. But even though my voice was cracking, I needed to sing it to him. It's by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Small">Fred Small</a>, and is called <a href="http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/e/everythingpossible.shtml">"Everything Possible"</a>. This is the slightly altered version of the chorus that Dorian actually got: You can be anybody you want to be, You can love whomever you will. You can travel any country where your heart leads, And know I will love you still. You can live by yourself, you can gather friends around, Or find one special one, And the only measure of your words and your deeds Is the love you leave behind you when you're gone. And this is the second song he heard from me, this morning when I stopped by to see him: Rockabye Dorian, on the tree-top When you are fed, your poop will go plop When you have plopped, your diaper we'll change And then you'll be cleaned up and happy again. Okay, it doesn't quite rhyme, but it's his. Dorian, if you are reading this, you already know your grandfather is a crazy old man who embarrasses the hell out of people. You'll live this one down too.</content>

Aaron Swartz: Moving On

2008-06-17T02:38:27+00:00

In November 2006, I moved to San Francisco because I had to: my company got acquired and us moving out was a condition of the agreement. It was the first time I'd ever actually lived in San Francisco, as opposed to just visiting, and I quickly realized that although it was a fun place to visit, I couldn't stand living here.

Even after all this time, I can't really put my finger on what it is I don't like -- in fact, I suspect it's probably harder for me now to explain it than it was when I first came here. The first thing that comes to mind is how loud the city is. I want a place where I can live quietly and focus on my work; but San Francisco is filled with distractions. There are always crews tearing up the street, trains that are delayed, buses that have broken down, homeless people begging, friends having parties, and so on. It's impossible to concentrate and without my concentration, I feel less like me.

The other big problem is that San Francisco is fairly shallow. When I go to coffee shops or restaurants I can't avoid people talking about load balancers or databases. The conversations are boring and obsessed with technical trivia, or worse, business antics. I don't see people reading books -- even at the library, all the people are in line for the computer terminals or the DVD rack -- and people at parties seem uninterested in intellectual conversation.

And so I'm moving back to Cambridge, Massachusetts -- Harvard Square in particular, the one place I've ever been to that brings a special delight to my eyes, that warms my heart just to see. Surrounded by Harvard and MIT and Tufts and BC and BU and on and on it's a city of thinking and of books, of quiet contemplation and peaceful concentration. And it has actual weather, with real snow and seasons and everything, not this time-stands-still sun that San Francisco insists upon.

I miss Boston; I'm excited to go back.

But I'm also sad to leave my responsibilities in San Francisco. One of which I'd particularly like your help with. I've been honored and overjoyed to help Lawrence Lessig get his Change Congress project off the ground. If you haven't heard, he's trying to build a national movement to get the corruption out of Congress; to pass public financing of public elections, earmark reform, and other pressing concerns.

But they need a full-time day-to-day tech organizer. Someone who knows how to blog and who the bloggers are and can keep them in touch with the community. Someone who knows enough about technology to know the tools that can be built and should be. And someone with enough drive and talent to make sure those things get built. It's a dreamy job and I hope there's someone out there who will take it from me. A more formal write-up is on the Change Congress blog.

Thanks for everything.

Christopher Schmidt: GeoJSON 1.0 Release

crschmidt — 2008-06-16T18:01:30+00:00

From the GeoJSON mailing list:

The GeoJSON Authors are proud to announce the finalization of the GeoJSON 1.0 Specification.

Representing more than a year’s worth of community discussion and development, the GeoJSON specification describes an easy to use, extensible format for transferring geographic data over the web. With support in more than 20 different applications, GeoJSON is already quickly becoming a de facto standard for transferring geographic data in a JSON format. The finalization of the spec represents the final step in formalizing the GeoJSON format for encoding this data.

More information on GeoJSON can be found at http://geojson.org/ , or from the GeoJSON mailing list at http://lists.geojson.org/listinfo.cgi/geojson-geojson.org .

The Mocking Eye: DIYBio

mikek — 2008-06-13T19:18:11+00:00

Yesterday I partook in the 2nd ever meeting of the diybio group in Cambridge, MA.

The meeting was hosted at BetaHouse this time rather than the less experiment friendly Asgard “irish” pub. I got there early, but soon enough other diybionauts — there is no consensus yet around nomenclature, though biohacker seems to hold most sway — began to filter in. We started by chatting and discussing the proposed activity: the good old party trick of extracting DNA from various things (I posted a very similar protocol in this blog before).

The demographics seems skewed pretty much exclusively towards tech professionals and young academics in their 20’s. The majority don’t have degrees in biology, but obviously, everyone is very much interested in the subject or they wouldn’t be involved. A small transhumanist contingent was also to be found.

When everyone had arrived, we proceeded with the experiment. We used oatmeal, apples, and humans as sources for DNA samples. I was one of the brave few who volunteered their precious genetic data, and I daresay our DNA ended up vastly superior. Either way, it was lots of fun, and in mere minutes we had actually done some biology in a kitchen. Modest beginning foretelling future greatness, perhaps? After we were finished we quickly covered the biological processes involved in our experiment, and sat down to considering the future of the organization.

DIYBio aims to be a beacon of responsible and safe amateur involvement in biotech. A major part of its mission is to provide education and guidance on techniques and procedures. But while pursuing these lofty, and slightly nebulous goals, we will do lots of fun biological stuff, too!

When a $100 Transformation was suggested (i.e. modifying an organism for $100) I replied that it may come closer to $200 in the end, One Transformation Per Child someone quipped in response. A lofty goal, but a worthy one! Another idea floated was to field an iGEM team not backed by an academic institution.

A sort of “minutes” of the meeting can be found on this thread of the diybio google group.

The picture on the left? That’s me with the test tube of human DNA. The DNA is the milky white substance visible between the two layers of liquid in the tube. There is also some DNA attached to the toothpick I am intently examining

Don’t phage me, bro!

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Aaron Swartz: Is Undercover Over?

2008-06-13T02:57:31+00:00

My latest piece for Extra! is now up:

Is Undercover Over?: Disguise seen as deceit by timid journalists

It's about the rise and fall of undercover journalism. Here's an excerpt:

Undercover reporting has a storied history. Nellie Bly, famous for traveling around the world in 80 days, also did a famed investigation of the conditions in insane asylums for the New York World. Bly feigned insanity for a series of physicians before being committed to a lunatic asylum. There she documented rotten and spoiled food, freezing living conditions, frigid bathwater, abusive nurses and relatively sane fellow residents. "What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?" she wondered. The series, later published as the book Ten Days in a Mad-House, created a sensation, and Bly was asked to join a government investigation of asylum conditions.

Aaron Swartz: How to Promote Startups

2008-06-09T20:25:23+00:00

When people talk about how government can promote startups, there seems to be a fairly standard consensus: we need more economic inequality. Lower income and capital gains taxes provide more incentive to work, looser labor laws make it easier to fire non-performers, and large private wealth funds provide investment capital.

But having been through a startup myself, I think there's much more you can do in the other direction: decreasing economic inequality. People love starting companies. You get to be your own boss, work on something you love, do something new and exciting, and get lots of attention. As Daniel Brook points out in The Trap, 28% of Americans have considered starting their own business. And yet only 7% actually do.

What holds them back? The lack of a social safety net. A friend of mine, a brilliant young technologist who's been featured everywhere from PBS to Salon, stayed in academia and the corporate world while all of her friends were starting companies and getting rich. Why? Because she couldn't afford to lose her health insurance. Between skyrocketing prices and preexisting condition exclusions, it's almost impossible for anyone who isn't in perfect health to quit their job. (I only managed because I was on a government plan.)

Anyone with children is also straight out. Startup founders tend to be quite young, in no small part because no one can afford to support a family on a startup founder's salary. But if we had universal child care, that would be much less of an issue. Parents would be free to pursue their dreams, knowing that their children were taken care of. And universal higher education could let parents spend their savings on getting a business started, instead of their children's tuition. Plus, it'd give many more kids the training and confidence they needed to start a company.

And those large private wealth funds that result from growing inequality? A real problem for startup founders is that they're too large. It used to be that you could borrow a couple thousand dollars from friends and neighbors to get your business off the ground. Nowadays, they're too busy trying to make ends meet to be able to afford anything like that. Meanwhile, those large wealth funds I mentioned are now so big they can only afford to invest in multi-million dollar chunks -- much more than the average founder needs, or can even justify. And the large investments come with large amounts of scrutiny, further narrowing the recipient pool.

But imagine if the government provided a basic minimum income, like Richard Nixon once proposed. Instead of having to save up (increasingly difficult in a world in which the only way to survive is on credit card debt) or borrow money to stay afloat, you could live off the government-provided income as you got things started. Suddenly having to quit your job would no longer be such a huge leap -- there'd be a real social safety net to catch you. (Not to mention if those labor laws some people want to loosen required your old job to take you back if things didn't work out.)

Of course, there is some truth to the standard proposals. Some startup founders are encouraged by dreams of financial security, and high taxes can make that dream more elusive. And complex labor regulations can make it difficult to get new companies off the ground. But it's not an issue of whether we should have taxes or labor laws -- it's an issue of how they're targeted.

Estate taxes on inherited fortunes would have basically no impact on startup founders, but could go a long way to funding a social safety net. And since most startups are acquired as stock, income taxes are basically irrelevant -- it's really capital gains tax that gets applied. There's no reason the government couldn't apply a lower capital gains tax to startups that get acquired than they do to the shares of publicly-traded companies that large investors trade.

The same is true for labor laws: preventing large companies from firing people at random can provide some much-needed stability to their lives, especially if they're saving up money in the hopes of going into business themselves. But there's no reason such laws also have to be applied to small startups, where the company is more likely to go out of business than to fire you.

Look at social democratic Europe, where these policy prescriptions have been tried. While there's much less of a culture of entrepreneurship and only 15% of Europeans think about starting their own company, nearly all (14.7%) of them actually go ahead and do it.

The fact is, if governments really want to promote startups and the economic innovation they bring, they shouldn't listen to the standard refrain of cut taxes and deregulate. They need to start rebuilding the social safety net, so that their citizens know that if they go out on a limb and try something risky, someone will be there to catch them if things don't work out.

Thanks to Daniel Brook's book The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America for suggesting this line of argument and providing the statistics.

Redmonk: Nano-Power

Steve Ivy — 2008-06-05T18:25:10+00:00

Ok, these may be really really stupid or really really practical ideas — so no comments starting with “Steve you’re an idiot!” — but I was thinking today about ways to generate power around the house.

What if electric power could be practically generated and distributed by micro or nano devices embedded in motion-generating fixtures around a house? Opening doors, drawers, running water from faucets - there’s a lot of energy that perhaps could be captured. I doubt it would be a lot of power, but enough, perhaps to charge small devices?

Crazy? Interesting? What do you think?