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2002-06-30

oAo

Really signing off this time.

OK, now I'm saying goodbye for a week -- we're hitting the highway tomorrow morning, bound for Wyoming. I'll be heavily engaged in my usual blogging (and Jabbering) again soon enough, but until then I won't be touching a computer. Instead I'll be savoring some good books, tramping around in the wilderness somewhere in the vicinity of Yellowstone National Park, and enjoying some extreme peace and quiet. Over and out!

Posted on 2002-06-30 at 22:46. File under personal.

~ link ~

With a Little Help From My Friends

Some thoughts on friendship.

A few years ago I wrote an essay on friendship, which I just remembered since I'm listening to Joe Cocker's incredible cover of the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" (a performance I'm constitutionally unable to listen to at anything less than full volume). To me, friendship is one of the great values of life. My Randian friends may shy away from saying so, but since I'm a (nearly) recovered Randian, I'm comfortable saying that other people (my friends and family) are of fundamental importance to me. Perhaps it's because I come from a large and supportive family (yes, I have 72 first cousins!). Perhaps it's because I realize that life is incredibly short, and that very few people achieve or create anything that will truly last (I'm not arrogant enough to think that my music or poems or essays fall into that category). So what do we have? People. Relationships. Interactions. Someone to love. Yes, I'm a stubborn Dutchie, an introspective self-starter, a borderline geek, and pretty much of a loner. But even I get by with a little help from my friends. And I try to reciprocate by helping and supporting them whenever I'm able. Or at least I try not to sing out of key. ;-)

Posted on 2002-06-30 at 22:21. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

White Gold

The latest gambit from Redmond.

Robert Cringeley does such a good job explaining the true purpose of Microsoft's new Palladium initiative (hint: it's all about increasing software lock-in for Microsoft, not the security or productivity of your computing experience) that I really don't have much to add, except to link to Dave Winer's point that this is probably the quid pro quo behind the dropping of the antitrust suit against Microsoft. Linux has never looked better. Given the continued iomprovement in Open Office, AbiWord, and numerous other open-source applications (not to mention Linux itself and the KDE and GNOME desktops), I foresee the day when there won't be any reason other than inertia to run software from Bill Gates, even for non-geeks. I've been happily MS-free for 3+ years. As one of my Linux Journal T-shirts says: "In a World Without Fences, Who Needs Gates?" :)

Posted on 2002-06-30 at 21:59. File under technology.

~ link ~

The Word

Some thoughts on the theory of language.

I've started participating in a small philosophy-oriented discussion with some friends of mine. The first book we're reading is Language, Thought, and Logic by John M. Ellis. Here are some notes I posted to our discussion list about Chapter 2 of Ellis's book:

In Chapter 2 of Logic, Thought, and Language, John Ellis delineates what he sees as three fundamental errors in the theory of language (15-16). These three wrong turns consist of the following assumptions:

1. The purpose of language is communication.
2. Descriptive words are central to a theory of language because scientific explanation proceeds from simple cases to difficult cases.
3. Verbal categories group like things together.

It appears that Ellis would oppose these three assumptions by making the following three claims:

1. The purpose of language is first and foremost conceptualization.
2. Evaluative words are central to a theory of language because science must attack the hard cases head-on.
3. Verbal categories group unlike things together.

In the paragraphs below I review each of these claims and contrast it with the assumption to which it is opposed.

Ellis draws a distinction between a code and language (16-18). Some theorists hold that a language is a code (specifically, a code of communication), but Ellis notes that the concept of a code presupposes the existence of information that is to be encoded. Far from encoding information that exists in some other form, a language is the way that human beings create or structure information; i.e., a language is the end result and expression of a long process of analyzing, evaluating, and organizing human experience, and thus of determining what will even count as information.

This is connected with his third claim, for the categories inherent in a language are the key way in which it determines what counts as information. For Ellis, such categories integrate and organize the infinite variation and diversity of experience into a more manageable number of concepts. The things or experiences that a concept treats as like are in fact distinct and unidentical; however, for the purpose of linguistic and conceptual economy a language groups such things into one "bucket" and treats them all the same.

Here we find a connection to Ellis's second claim: for he holds that, historically, human concepts did not first differentiate logically simple categories such as cat or square, but rather more complex categories such as food vs. poison (most of which have evaluative overtones -- food is good, poison is bad). Ellis argues that human artifacts (e.g., table) and scientific concepts (e.g., triangle) make poor fodder for linguistic theory, since they are too simple and have resulted relatively recently from processes of scientific or technological endeavor. By contrast, concepts like poison are both more complex and more ancient, having emerged in an almost evolutionary fashion to treat many unlike things (mushrooms, berries, leaves, etc.) as if they were the same, again for the purpose of evaluation (and survival) rather than pure description.

It strikes me that Ellis is making a few assumptions of his own here. One is that the simplicity of a concept can be directly correlated with the degree to which it isolates one kid of thing (e.g., cats or squares) rather than many things (e.g., things inimical to health). Yet there are, legitimately, many different kinds of dimensions along which things can be measured, and measuring along some of those dimensions (e.g., life vs. death in the case of food vs. poison) may result in a perfectly legitimate concept that isolates many different kinds of things (e.g, certain kinds of mushrooms and berries and leaves) from all others.

Another assumption made by Ellis seems to be that the most ancient human concepts were in the main evaluative rather than descriptive, and that purely descriptive concepts are an overlay of human intellectual progress (what we can call science in the broad sense). Yet there is no real evidence for this notion. It may well be that certain human evaluations started out as merely "good" vs. "bad" and that over time as human knowledge became more sophisticated these evaluations became more nuanced and more grounded in facts (e.g., "he is a good husband" morphed into "he is supportive, understanding, a good communicator, etc." with the growth of psychological knowledge). Perhaps I simply lack imagination, but I find it hard to see how purely "descriptive" concepts (man, woman, stone, dog, etc.) could not have been part of human language from the beginning, since it was absolutely necessary to conceptualize such things, given that they were central features of human experience.

Thus while I think that Ellis has cleared much of the underbrush within the theory of language, he has unfortunately left some of his own assumptions unquestioned. How damaging these assumptions are to his own positive theory remains to be seen.

Posted on 2002-06-30 at 21:38. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Global Warming on Ice

Must reading.

Thanks to Paul Hsieh of GeekPress, I just found a great article in The Spectator about global warming (or the lack thereof -- indeed, the author argues that it's just as likely we're on the cusp of a global ice age). Since my blog scripts are still ampersand-challenged, you'll need to visit GeekPress for the link, but it's well worth two clicks to read this one. I kept shaking my head in amazement that a cover article in a mainstream publication wasn't pulling punches, beating around the bush, or otherwise engaging in mealy-mouthed doubletalk, let alone abject fealty to the enviro-radicals who make up the watermelon set (Green on the outside, Red on the inside). Check it out!

Posted on 2002-06-30 at 21:29. File under society.

~ link ~

Blogger Bash

A report from the Front Range.

So I schlepped into LoDo last night to hang out with some fellow webbloggers at the first-ever Rocky Mountain Blogger's Bash (actually, people don't really schlepp in Denver, but I like the word...). Half the folks there seemed to be libertarians of one kind or another -- I guess that the once-ballyhooed libertarian bias of people on the Internet is alive and well. Among the new blogs I discovered is Walter in Denver, who promises coverage of Colorado politics from a libertarian perspective in his new weblog. BTW, you might see a picture of me over at the World Wide Rant sometime in the next few days, since Andy O'Reilly was snapping pictures with his digital camera, as was Stewart Vardaman.

Posted on 2002-06-30 at 21:11. File under personal.

~ link ~

2002-06-28

Wyoming Bound

Another forced vacation.

I still have too much unused vacation time at work, so once again I need to take some time off. And once again I'm heading off to wild, wonderful Wyoming. So if you miss your friendly neighborhood list admin or JEP editor (or blogger) over the next 10 days, rest assured that even though he'll be far from an Internet connection somewhere near the Wyoming-Montana border, he shall return! Be good, okay?

Posted on 2002-06-28 at 22:00. File under personal.

~ link ~

Educational Freedom

School choice declared constitutional.

Most of my libertarian and Randian friends tend to get depressed about politics. I used to, too, until I stopped paying attention to the scandal of the day. They bemoaned the Clinton years. I tuned them out, figuring that a President who screws interns is a lot safer than a President who screws the country.

Another reason I'm more optimistic than my news-obsessed friends is that I focus on long-term trends. And to me the most important long-term trend is education. I suppose I agree with Victor Hugo: "The progress of man by the education of minds -- there is no safety but in that." (William Shakespare, II.5.vii) To be more precise, it is learning and knowledge that matter, not "education" (since I think much that passes for education is at best socialization and at worst brainwashing). We have had the unfortunate experience in the U.S.A. of relinquishing the crucial activities of teaching and learning to schools that are run by governments. Since he who pays the piper calls the tune, the results have been less than salutary.

But that's changing. Slowly but surely, cracks are forming in our socialistic education monopoly. One such fissure, ever-widending, is caused by the increasing number of parents who are teaching their own children or contracting out (individually and in groups) for such teaching. This is called "homeschooling" and it is the most radical challenge to traditional (not just government-run) schooling.

Another challenge comes in the form of the school choice movement. And that movement just won a huge victory: the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that the school choice program in Cleveland does not violate the Constitution's prohibition on the establishment of religion. The Institute for Justice, one of only two "think tanks" that I support, played a key role in defending the Cleveland program and has every reason to celebrate. Another nail in the coffin of monopolistic, government-controlled schooling. Another strike in favor of educational freedom and thus the freedom of thought.

I'm optimistic.

Posted on 2002-06-28 at 21:36. File under politics.

~ link ~

Pledge Redux

More on the Pledge of Allegiance.

Thanks to an article in Reason magazine (typically wishy-washy, if you ask me), I found this history of the Pledge on the ACLU website. All that stuff about liberty and justice seems rather hypocritical coming out of the mouths of those congresscritters who recently gathered on the Capitol steps to recite the Pledge ("under God" inclusive) -- half of them wouldn't know the Constitution if it hit them in the face.

Posted on 2002-06-28 at 21:23. File under politics.

~ link ~

2002-06-27

Indivisible

Divided we stand?

Longtime readers of this blog know that I don't pay much attention to the news. Nevertheless, sometimes a big story will intrude on my consciousness. One such story is the recent court decision to declare the (American) Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because it mentions God: "one nation, under God, indivisible". (Presumably that's the Christian god, not Allah or Shiva or Zeus or Mithras or Isis or whomever.) I must say that the reference to God made me uncomfortable when we recited the Pledge back in elementary school (at least, after I stopped believing in God at age 9 or so). It seems that the Pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist. In 1954, after two years of lobbying by the Knights of Columbus (a Catholic organization), the U.S. Congress voted to add the words "under God" to the Pledge, probably under the influence of McCarthy-era fears of "godless Communists" infiltrating American society. Now we stand divided over those two words, with conservatives outraged that an official oath of allegiance might be stripped of its religious trappings. Personally I find the very concept of such an official oath to be suspect in the first place, but if we must have one, reference in it to the god of a particular religion is bound to introduce not unity but division. I suppose believers see it quite differently, though.

Posted on 2002-06-27 at 21:12. File under politics.

~ link ~

Werds4Nerds

Words of the Week, Volume II.

I wrote some more "words of the week" on my whiteboard at work this week (wow, I wonder how many "w" words I can fit in a sentence!). This week's words were animadversion, otiose, prolix, preternatural, and pusillanimous. I was tempted to add susurrus but I think I'll save that for next time. :)

Posted on 2002-06-27 at 17:56. File under language.

~ link ~

Czech Again

More Prague recollections.

I forgot to mention that the most enchanting experience I had in the enchanted city of Prague was a visit to Krizik's Fountain, a huge fountain (actually a set of fountains) where the water jets and lights are "choreographed" to move in time and sympathy with the music. I saw something like this once in Seattle with my friend Scott, but this fountain was much bigger and quite impressive, indeed mesmerizing. Plus the music was Dvorak's New World Symphony, which is one of my favorites! The fountain was originally built by František Křižík, a prolific engineer and inventor who provided the first electrification in Prague, among other things. (I hope you're using a well-behaved web browser that can render those cool Czech characters. I found them here. You're not expected to be able to pronounce them, though!)

Posted on 2002-06-27 at 17:26. File under personal.

~ link ~

2002-06-26

Zamyatin

My latest researches.

I'm finishing up my research into Yevgeny Zamyatin for a paper I've written exploring his (possible) influence on Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand. I think that the influence is there and I provide evidence for thinking so in the paper, which is slated to be published next year in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Zamyatin is a fascinating writer (best-known for his novel We, which was the original dystopia -- move over 1984!), and I find his deep individualism quite congenial to my way of thinking.

One possible source for ideas expressed by Zamyatin in We and Rand in Anthem is the short story "The New Utopia" by Jerome K. Jerome (PDF), published in 1891 and widely read in Russia (in Jerome's tale, people have numbers rather than names, the family has been outlawed in favor of government-controlled breeding, etc.). Another possible influence is Dostoevsky. In separate essays published in Gary Kern's anthology Zamyatin's We: Essays, Richard Gregg argues that We owes much to both Notes From Underground and The Possessed, and Susan Layton argues that Zamyatin's "Synthetism" is a descendent of Dostoevsky's "Romantic Realism". Interestingly, Rand described her own literary aesthetics as "Romantic Realism", although she meant something different by the term (I think the most accurate term for her aesthetics is "Heroic Symbolism", though the art created by her followers even shades over into Objectivist Realism if you ask me). Much to chew on here. And I simply must read more Dostoevsky!

Posted on 2002-06-26 at 21:17. File under literature.

~ link ~

Augury

Shane McChesney reads the tea leaves.

Although he doesn't post every day like some webloggers, Shane McChesney of Skipping Dot Net is always well worth reading. In his latest post he provides some valuable insights into medium-term trends within the technology industry. Favorite quote:

Whenever you see one of those semi-annual articles on how Moore's Law is slowing down, you should laugh knowingly and repeat this mantra: "There's more to life than optical lithography."

Check it out.

Posted on 2002-06-26 at 21:09. File under technology.

~ link ~

Quizzical

The political compass.

Looks like Eric Raymond has rediscovered what is billed as "The World's Smallest Political Quiz". Naturally you can take the quiz online. And naturally I score way up in the corner of the top quadrant. The quiz has only 8 questions, though, which is why it's a bit simplistic.

Posted on 2002-06-26 at 20:56. File under politics.

~ link ~

Propinquity

Thinking locally.

Colorado blogger Glenn McGaha Miller points off to MEETUP, a website founded on the premise that all sociality is local: forget all those Internet-based, long-distance, text-only conversations and relationships; let IRL triumph over URL; F2F beats P2P any day of the week; well, you get the picture. MEETUP is an Internet service for meeting people with common interests in your own backyard. Interesting concept. Of course, that's what various reading groups, clubs, associations, societies, and political parties have been doing all along. But a way to find like-minded people whom you can converse with in the flesh can't be a bad thing.

Posted on 2002-06-26 at 20:28. File under technology.

~ link ~

2002-06-25

Getting Progressive

What I'm listening to.

I've been listening to a lot of music by Spock's Beard lately. Never heard of 'em? Most people haven't, but they are (IMHO) the best progressive rock band of the last ten years. I do have a few nits: sometimes they stray too far over onto the metal side of the world for my taste, a few of their pieces are positively malevolent (e.g., "The Gypsy"), and they have a theatrical side that sounds a bit too much like Queen once in a while. But you can't argue with The Kindness of Strangers, Day for Night, and V -- these are three excellent recordings (Day for Night is my favorite). So check out "the Beard" if you like music from those old progressive bands like Yes, Pink Floyd, and ELP.

Posted on 2002-06-25 at 12:46. File under music.

~ link ~

Radical Stuff

Some intellectual soap.

I like reading these people on the libertarian left -- they help to keep my mental pathways clear of authoritarian obstructions. I don't say I agree with them, but they certainly provide food for thought. Here are a few recent examples:

• Why Not Reclaim the Left?
• A Dismal Era We Live In
• The Neocons and the Nazis
• The Revolution Will Be All Business

Not that I've fully read all of the above -- I usually skim any content on the web, given my lack of time.

Posted on 2002-06-25 at 12:25. File under politics.

~ link ~

Email Overload

And a possible solution...

I get way too much email. I'm not sure exactly how much, but it's probably close to 200 messages a day. Part of the problem is that I'm on every Jabber list under the sun, plus I'm the list admin for all of them. Add to that lists for various IETF protocols, Linux news, and some libertarian stuff, and we're talking email overload. The solution? Everyone recommends procmail, but it's taken me a while for the pain of email overload to become so strong that I would want to endure the pain of procmail. However, last night I finally took the plunge, thanks to help from pgmillard. It seems that I lost a bunch of email overnight after my initial setup, but this morning I did some tweaking and all seems well. I still need to adjust some of the procmail rules (and I sure wish procmail had some nice XPath matching), but so far so good....

Posted on 2002-06-25 at 09:29. File under technology.

~ link ~

2002-06-24

jabber.cz

Jabbering in Prague.

While staying in the beautiful and cultured city of Prague last week, I visited with some folks there who are interested in Jabber -- specifically, Petr Ferschmann (who came all the way from Plzen!), Michal Leinweber, Tomas Mrkvicka, and Jakub Safar. Over a few glasses of Budvar at the Quasimodo restaurant, we enjoyed some good conversations about Jabber, technology, and the Czech soul. Special thanks to Tomas for organizing such a pleasant evening. Dejuki!

Posted on 2002-06-24 at 14:05. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Catching Up

Paying the price for being out of town.

Yikes, I'm way behind! Essentially I've been out of pocket for the last two weeks, and next week I'm going on vacation. I think I'll need to get a lot done this week in order to catch up. I've got several JEPs to process and numerous other tasks to finish. Step 1: update my .plan file....

Posted on 2002-06-24 at 13:35. File under personal.

~ link ~

Blogger Bash

Webloggers gather in Denver.

Need I say more? :)

Posted on 2002-06-24 at 13:29. File under personal.

~ link ~

2002-06-23

Teaser

I'm back.

I have returned, but there's so much to blog about that I don't know where to start. So I guess I'll start tomorrow.

Don't do today what you can put off until tomorrow!

Posted on 2002-06-23 at 22:38. File under personal.

~ link ~

2002-06-14

On to Prague

Winding down in Munich.

We're just finishing up here at JabberConf. Wish I had more time to blog but there are protocol documents to write for our IETF submissions. Check out Doc's blog for further bloggage about the conference. He even blogged the talk by Jer which I missed because I overslept this morning. Plus he mentions this new term I came up with over lunch: "blurker" (someone who reads your blogs but never contacts you). As I said, Doc rocks. :)

Posted on 2002-06-14 at 17:28. File under jabber.

~ link ~

JabberConf-erring

More bloggage from Munich.

Yow, woke up late this morning and missed Jeremie's talk. Joe Hildebrand is giving a talk right now entitled "A Day in the Life of a Jabber Developer" with a fun Beatles thread (woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head...). At the end of my talk this morning about the Jabber Software Foundation I asked who has a weblog (not enough!) and Doc followed up by asking who is blogging the conference live. He is, so I figured I'd do so as well. :)

Some aha moments for me at the conference so far:

1. We need to make greater use of jabber:x:data -- there is a lot of potential here to extend Jabber in the same way that HTML forms greatly extended the World Wide Web.
2. Dale Malik of BellSouth pointed out that 95% of people prefer real-time chat with customer service representatives as opposed to telephone interactions. We need better website integration!
3. The Jabber network is key. There are thousands of Jabber servers but it's not easy to find them all. How do we encourage people to "come out of the closet" and improve service discovery and directories on the Jabber network?
4. Web services right now consists of synchronous request-response interactions over HTTP. Sure they're structured with XML-RPC and SOAP, but Jabber's asynchronous nature and live presence capabilities make possible new kinds of web services (or "Jabber services"), such as transactional "conversations" like workflow processing or trading systems.
5. Our discussions about publish/subscribe protocols were fruitful (I'll post more about it soon to standards-jig@jabber.org). Once we get the protocols worked out, we'll see cool services like better notification services (e.g., auction updates), transporting NNTP traffic over Jabber, and so on.
6. We might want to modify the JEP process (i.e., JEP-0001) so that a JEP doesn't pass unless a majority of Jabber Council members vote +1.
7. \We need to learn more about the Wireless Village spec and get involved in those conversations. Philip Littlejohn of WV was here at JabberConf and gave us a good introduction to their initiative.
8. I chatted with Kent Sandoe of Cal State University as well as Martin and Jiri from the Knowledge Media Institute about interest in Jabber within academia. I promised them we'd set up a dedicated mailing list at jabber.org to discuss these topics, since Jabber can help build learning environments and also provides a great technology that students can use for research purposes.

Posted on 2002-06-14 at 11:28. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Doc Rocks

A quick report from JabberConf.

Sorry about the blogging outage, been travelling and then busy here in Munich at JabberConf. Lots of good Jabbering going on, which I'll attempt to report on as time allows. My favorite so far was the keynote address by Doc Searls, entitled "Anarchy and Infrastructure". Here's my short summary:

Doc rocks.

He says there's a battle going on to define the Net. The Net is world unto itself, and we've only begun to terraform it. Think about this world as an empty globe. One virtue of this world is the emptiness in the middle. This means that the people and resources on the surface of the sphere can communicate with each other directly without an intermediary. So (1) no one owns its (2) everybody can use it (3) anybody can improve it. The founding fathers of the internet built it to support civilization. (Among them were Douglas Engelbart, I need to follow up on his work on hypertext.) The internet is infrastructure, like geology. No one owns or could own the core of the earth. Same with Internet protocols. Building things on top of that platform is like construction. We're architects and designers and builders. And we're building things that are open. Open meands ubiquitous. Ubiquity creates infrastructure. It's a virtuous circle.

So what do we need to do? Cause anarchy, then take advantage of it. :) Doc saith:

Markets = conversations

Conversation = fire

Marketing = arson

So which conversations are combustible? Figure that out, then start the conversations and watch them spread like wildfire. (Yes, that's a painful metaphor for people in Denver right now....)

Some combustible stuff right now, other than the forests of Colorado:

1. Weblogs. If you don't have one, get one!
2. Conferences. Present papers, get the word out!

Here are some others Doc and I talked about after his presentation:

1. Wifi. Wireless authentication using Jabber, even if you're hitting a remote server. Build community at the same time.
2. Identity. Gotta get talking to the PingID folks.

That's it's, must sleep, been up since 4:45 here and it's 1:15 the next day!

P.S. And yes, Doc is linking to me today (well, that's yesterday now). Thanks, Doc!

Posted on 2002-06-14 at 01:18. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2002-06-09

Blogging Outage

A trip to Europe.

I probably won't do much blogging over the next 10 days -- I'll be travelling to, in, and from Europe, first to participate in JabberConf Europe 2002 and then to visit some of my old English students in the Czech Republic. I might do some real-time blogging from JabberConf, but no promises....

Posted on 2002-06-09 at 20:57. File under personal.

~ link ~

2002-06-04

Slow But Steady

The new economy, volume two.

Thanks to Adam Curry, I just found John Robb's latest thoughts on the new economy. Continuing an earlier thread, Robb argues that economic growth will be slow but steady over the next 10+ years, which will benefit individuals over corporations. Sounds plausible to me.

Posted on 2002-06-04 at 22:02. File under society.

~ link ~

party.moz

Celebrating an open-source success story.

You will be participating in your nearest Mozilla Release Party, won't you? Incredibly, 129 parties are scheduled all over the world to celebrate the release of version 1.0.0 of the Mozilla web browser. I'll be in Munich at the time for JabberConf Europe, which is why I'm planning to attend Mozilla eins-null-null, hopefully with some of the other Jabber folks. I've been using Mozilla since Milestone 8 back in the summer of 1999 (yes, even before I'd heard of Jabber!), so if you ask me it's definitely time to celebrate. Go Mozilla!

Posted on 2002-06-04 at 21:07. File under technology.

~ link ~

Incremental Processing

A protocol nit.

Marshall Rose has pointed me to a really good document that is intended to define "Best Current Practice" (BCP) within the IETF regarding the use of XML (you can find the doc here). However, I noticed one section of the document (section 4.10) that implicitly criticizes the Jabber protocol, or at least protocols very much like Jabber:

In some situations, it is possible to incrementally process an XML document as each tag is received; this is analogous to the process by which browsers incrementally render HTML pages as they are received. Note that incremental processing is difficult to implement if interspersed across multiple interactions. In other words, if a protocol requires incremental processing across both directions of a bidirectional stream, then it may place significant burden on protocol implementers.

To clear up any potential confusion, I just sent the following email to the ietf-xml-use mailing list:

I'm curious to learn the motivation and rationale behind this statement. What kind of applications did you have in mind? The reason I ask is that in the Jabber world we use bidirectional XML streams to transmit XML fragments. These fragments or "chunks" (note: these are not XML Fragments as defined by http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-fragment) are incrementally processed for the purpose of presenting presence information, text messages, and request/response interfaces in the context of Instant Messaging (IM) and other near-real-time messaging applications. However, we don't find that such incremental processing places an especially heavy burden on protocol implementers. In fact, there are numerous server and client implementations of the Jabber protocol in existence today, for platforms as diverse as various Unices, Windows, MacOS, BeOS, Java, and wireless devices. I'd appreciate it if you could explain your thinking here so that someone from the Jabber project can provide evidence to the contrary. :)

(Part of the issue here may be that Jabber implementations do not incrementally render an XML document as implied by the analogy of a web browser incrementally rendering an HTML document. Rather, the "document" in Jabber is a complete session of a client on a server, and each XML "chunk" is one snippet of the communication between the client and the server, for example a message or presence update received from another Jabber user. Perhaps this stream-centric or session-centric viewpoint is sufficiently different from the document-centric viewpoint prevalent in the XML world to cause confusion regarding the relative difficulty of implementation.)

Thanks for your time -- overall I think your document will make a great BCP.

Posted on 2002-06-04 at 16:54. File under jabber.

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2002-06-03

Identity

It's not who you are, it's what you do.

My friend Michael Bauer has a good article on identity and roles over at Digital ID World (I'd link to the specific article but I still haven't figured out a solution to my ampersand problem). I posted a reply there, but I figured I'd post it here as well:

Well said, Michael. A further challenge is that defining roles can take a great deal of thought. I recently went through the exercise of defining the roles I play on the Jabber project, and the process took me several hours because I play so many roles and engage in so many disparate activities. Maybe I'm just less focused than the average Joe, but it strikes me that, to choose but one example, "influencer" and "decision-maker" don't get to the heart of the complex dynamics behind the sales process. It seems to me that the development of what you're calling a role identification system (RIS) will require the work not only of astute workplace psychologists but also of fairly self-aware individuals who are able to define their own roles. As your Shakespeare analogy indicates, there's a great deal of subtlety involved here -- and computers are not known for their appreciation of nuance. So creating a true RIS could be a somewhat RIS-ky venture. :-)

(Can you cross-post to your own weblog? I guess that's fair game -- there are no rules when it comes to blogging....)

Posted on 2002-06-03 at 21:35. File under technology.

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Outrageous Fortuyn

Reasonable thoughts on Pim Fortuyn.

Reason Magazine is running a reasonable essay on Pim Fortuyn by Charles Freund. Although written before the Dutch elections a few weeks ago, the essay provides a balanced assessment of Fortuyn's views and takes journalists to task for their simplistic representation of Fortuyn. Good reading.

Posted on 2002-06-03 at 20:38. File under society.

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Words of the Week

More etymological entertainment.

My whiteboard at the office has a new use: the repository of some obscure words of the day. Today's word, for no good reason, is eleemosynary: of, giving, or receiving alms; having to do with charity. I think tomorrow's word will be pleroma: fullness, plenitude (esp., in Gnostic theology, the spiritual world as the abode of God and of the totality of divine powers and emanations). Not sure how long I'll keep this up, but it's fun while it lasts....

Posted on 2002-06-03 at 20:25. File under language.

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2002-06-02

Czech it Out

My upcoming visit to Prague.

Over the weekend following JabberConf Europe in Muenchen (i.e., June 15-17), I will be visiting some old friends in Prague. While there I hope to meet with some Czech people who are interested in Jabber, such as the folks at jabber.cz. Even though it's rather late notice, perhaps I can give a talk at the local LUG or just have an informal get-together at a pub over knedlo, vepro, zelo (a pivo!). :-) I've started contacting Jabber folks in the Czech Republic, but if you fit that description, by all means contact me.

Posted on 2002-06-02 at 16:32. File under jabber.

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Google's Ad Policy

Google as a politics-free zone.

Google doesn't allow keyword advertisements related to political issues -- which is kinda silly, given that these days pretty much everything has a political aspect. I found out about this policy when the Free State Project tried to run a keyword ad using some text I suggested (I think it was something like "Liberty in your lifetime? We're making it happen!"). Google said no can do, that's political. Crazy. Now thanks to Dave Winer I've discovered that Anita Roddick (for whom I used to work, however indirectly, as an employee of The Body Shop) is speaking out against Google's policy. Naturally Google can do whatever it wants (no, Anita, it's not censorship when it's the policy of private company), but if you ask me this policy is awfully short-sighted. BTW, they also forbid any keyword advertising for companies that sell firearms or any products related to firearms. I betcha ESR would be interested to find out about that one. But Google does allow keyword ads that point to sites "containing adult themes" such as "gambling and explicit sexual content". Go figure.

Posted on 2002-06-02 at 15:53. File under politics.

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2002-06-01

Building Dismemberment

The Twin Towers as asbestos-free zones.

Thanks to James P. Hogan, I just found a maddening and saddening article from the September 2001 issue of Access to Energy about the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings. The steel columns of these magnificent buildings were designed to resist fire for at least four hours. So why did Tower One collapse after 1:40 and Tower Two after only 0:56? Because the New York City government, in its infinite wisdom, outlawed the use of asbestos to protect the steel columns (and anything else) at the time that construction had reached the 64 floor. When Herbert Levine, the inventor of asbestos, heard about this, he commented "If a fire breaks out above the 64th floor, that building will fall down."

Access to Energy editor Art Robinson comments:

Asbestos was an early victim of junk science and enviro fear propaganda. These enviros were joined by opportunistic lawyers and businessmen who reaped large profits from the anti-asbestos pogram. There was not a shred of evidence that insulating buildings with asbestos was harmful to human health. The American economy paid the price of this wasteful campaign and, on September 11, 2001, an additional 5,000 people in the World Trade Center paid with their lives.

Posted on 2002-06-01 at 21:29. File under society.

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Victim Disarmament

Terrorists and other criminals love gun-free zones.

Hmm, let's connect the dots. The most popular locations for mass murder are high schools and (with 9/11) airplanes. Both are officially off limits to firearms. Which means that the potential victims therein are officially disarmed and thus pose no threat to any would-be wrongdoer. Eric Raymond explores the implications for airplanes. His conclusion: allow not just pilots but especially passengers to be armed. Radical stuff.

Posted on 2002-06-01 at 20:56. File under society.

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More RSS Magic

Wherein I discover RSS auto-discovery.

Dave Winer has shown me the light -- a <link/> element pointing to my RSS feed now comes standard in my blog2html.xsl transformation. The idea originated with Matt Griffith and has spread like wildfire across the blogosphere. Rock on!

Posted on 2002-06-01 at 20:47. File under technology.

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Is the Party Over?

The withering away of the communists.

It seems that the Communist Party in China is steadily losing influence, at least economically. Fewer and fewer people work in state enterprises (which traditionally have contained party cells), and private companies as well as joint ventures with foreign companies are almost uniformly free of party influence. Pan Wei of Beijing University reports that "Party organisations at the grassroots have been decaying. Regular party activities have virtually stopped. It will be pretty much a bureaucratic party" in the future. Sounds familiar from the U.S. experience with parties on the left. I wonder when the Communists will start courting trial lawyers....

Posted on 2002-06-01 at 20:06. File under politics.

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The High-Tech Trough

Do what I say, not what I do?

Despite their often-libertarian rhetoric (Scott McNealy is the most famous example), tech companies are more than happy to cozy up to government when it suits them. Here's a good article on the topic from The Economist.

Posted on 2002-06-01 at 20:06. File under society.

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Nap Power

Finally, vindication!

Yes, the evidence is in: an hour's nap in the early afternoon improves performance. Nappers of the world, unite! (Unfortunately, naps make me groggy, so I won't be joining in.)

Posted on 2002-06-01 at 19:55. File under society.

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