one small voice

stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, et alia

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2005-04-28

Kudos

Singularly wrong.

This morning over breakfast, I glanced at the cover of the Central Denver Dispatch & Cherry Creek News and was horrified to see the following headline:

Transit Solutions Gains Kudo

Forgive me for shouting, but there is no such thing as a kudo!

The English word "kudos" comes directly from the Greek κυδος, a singular noun meaning "glory" (pronounced "koo-doss", not "koo-doze"). To "gain kudos" means to win praise or glory. You don't win a single praise or a single glory for a single good deed, and then win multiple "praises" or multiple "glories" for multiple good deeds. You either win praise or you don't. I suppose I shouldn't expect much from a local monthly paper, but I get rather particular about words borrowed from Greek...

Posted on 2005-04-28 at 07:19. File under language.

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2005-04-27

They Call Me Saint Peter

How I got my nick.

Several people have asked me recently how I got the nickname "stpeter", so I figured I'd record the story here for all time.

My nick has nothing to do with Simon Peter, the "rock" on whom Jesus said he would build his church (and the first Pope), nor is it meant in any kind of anti-Catholic or anti-Christian sense (although I am post-Catholic and a quasi-Gnostic non-believer, I'm not a militant atheist or crusading anti-Christian by any means). No, its origins are a bit more prosaic. When I worked at IBM's Watson Research Center in my last year of high school and first year of college, the head of the materials science lab in which I worked was Jerry Woodall. Because there was already another guy named Peter working in the same lab, Jerry took to calling me "saint peter" -- a fairly natural combination of "Saint-Andre" (my last name) and "Peter" (my first name). A few years later I wrote a somewhat racy blues song using that idea, entitled Gatekeeper Blues (one of these days I'll record it, but it's something of a cross between "Steamroller" by James Taylor and "Doctor Professor Longhair" by New Orleans piano guru Professor Longhair). When I first got involved with the Jabber community back in late 1999, we held daily discussions using IRC (no groupchat back then!) and of course the first thing you have to do when firing up an IRC client is to choose a nick, so I fatefully typed in "stpeter". Little did I know that years later most people I work with would call me stpeter (or, sometimes, psa). Certainly the nick was never intended to confer any special status on me (as in "the patron saint of Jabber") or make me out to be some kind of pope-like figure in the Jabber community, it was a just a fun thing that Jerry came up with so that he could differentiate me from that other Peter in the lab.

Now you know!

Posted on 2005-04-27 at 21:12. File under personal.

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Earth Day

Rachel Carson, meet Adam Smith.

In honor of the recent celebration of Earth Day (though it seems that Earth Day is actually supposed to be celebrated on the vernal equinox), the Economist is running an article and an editorial about environmental economics, a.k.a. market-oriented environmentalism. I'm surprised that neither article mentions PERC, the premier resource for information about improving environmental quality through markets.

Posted on 2005-04-27 at 20:35. File under society.

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Assurance #2

More CAcerting.

Today I assured my second "assuree" for the CAcert project -- George Hill of Cardboard Networks, who is based in lovely Crestone, Colorado but who was up in the big city of Denver today, so he stopped in. As I've said before, CAcert is a fun way to meet people (people who care about security, anyway), so try it out!

Posted on 2005-04-27 at 20:01. File under technology.

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XTech Redux

Streaming XML, oh my!

Back in November, I submitted a proposal to speak at XTech 2005 on the topic of streaming XML, and in February my proposal was accepted. Unfortunately, I won't be able to travel to Amsterdam to give the talk, but the estimable Ralph Meijer will present at the conference instead. On Monday I wrote up a paper for the conference, which after help from Ralph I've just submitted. Unfortunately we missed the deadline for paper submissions to be posted to the website, so I've decided to post the paper here in the interim. Enjoy!

Posted on 2005-04-27 at 11:13. File under jabber.

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2005-04-26

Layers

Thinking about time.

Over the weekend I read The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand. Much of it is still gestating in my brain (I can feel the neurons firing), but one idea that continues to intrigue me even after having been exposed to it for 3+ years is that human life has different layers, each of which changes at a different rate. The most rapid changes take place in the realm of "fashion" -- not just clothing, but all those things that flutter in and out of popularity and existence every week or month or year (TV shows, celebrities, fads, news, even short-lived ideas). One level below fashion is commerce, which harnesses and filters some of the creative energy that drives fashion into workable products and services. Below commerce we find infrastructure -- roads, bridges, buildings, communications systems, and the like. The next level down is governance -- not necessarily government, but the rules and structures that frame human endeavor at the faster-paced levels of existence. Even slower is culture -- language, ethics, religion, and the like. And the foundational layer is nature -- the slow changes of geology, evolution, and so on.

Brand argues that successful civilizations somehow learn to balance these levels, and to do justice to each (it's an intriguing suggestion, and one that could bear researching -- paraphrasing the title of one of Brand's books, one might call the resulting essay or book "How Civilizations Learn"). But the main point of the book is to challenge its readers to begin thinking long-term. And by the long term he doesn't mean 2 or 5 or 10 years from now, but 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years from now. The number 10,000 is especially interesting, since it was just about 10,000 years ago that humans adopted agriculture and, soon after, everything that is wrapped up with civilization: cities, law, writing, and all the rest. What will life be like 10,000 years from now? Given how fast things change now, it's often hard to look even 15 years ahead (the world wide web was invented only 15 years ago, and do we have any idea where Internet technologies will lead in the next 15 years?). Heck, lots of smart people think that the Singularity will arrive right on schedule in 2035 or so, which is only 30 years from now. What comes after that? It's anybody's guess.

One salient characteristic of modern life is that it gets faster and faster all the time, at least in those aspects of civilization that are driven or affected by science and technology (which is just about everything). How fast can we go? Two hundred years ago most folks were farmers even in the Western world, and you didn't have to worry much about training for a career since you pretty much knew what your lot would be. Nowadays, new careers and fields of endeavor appear with startling regularity. What happens when new careers appear (and old ones disappear) not every decade but every year, when you're out of date if you use last month's programming language, etc. At that point, does everything become fashion? Will we try to make the lower strata like governance, culture, and nature move faster somehow? I don't know, but it's interesting to contemplate. :-)

Posted on 2005-04-26 at 21:29. File under society.

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Schooling

Choices, choices.

Last week I had an interesting Jabber chat with Eliot Landrum about homeschooling, triggered by this article in Reason magazine. Eliot told me that many longtime homeschoolers are becoming disillusioned with the whole movement because lots of folks are no longer actively teaching their kids at home but instead driving their kids around from one tutorial to another. While I have nothing against that model, it does seem quite a stretch to call it homeschooling, so I coined the word "marketschooling" during our conversation (less charitable folks might call it "shuttleschooling"). Eliot's mom tended more toward unschooling, which appeals to me as well. Why teach your kids at home or shuttle them from place to place if you're just going to test them, grade them, and otherwise prepare them for standardized tests just like the public schools do?

Posted on 2005-04-26 at 21:09. File under society.

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Quick Takes

A mish-mash of links.

Usually I prefer to comment on things I read, but sometimes I use my blog merely to note the existence of interesting sites and stories, so here's a list of some things I've glanced at and shall return to when I have more time:

Posted on 2005-04-26 at 21:01. File under personal.

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Desert Island Discs

What I actually listen to.

Last July I speculated that the combination of my new PowerBook and iPod would enable me to make a short list of music that I couldn't do without. The results surprised me a bit:

  1. Mellow Candle -- Swaddling Songs
  2. J.S. Bach -- Goldberg Variations
  3. Chuck Mangione -- Children of Sanchez Overture
  4. J.S. Bach -- The Well-Tempered Clavier
  5. J.S. Bach -- Keyboard Partitas
  6. J.S. Bach -- Two- and Three-Part Inventions
  7. John Bayless -- Bach Meets the Beatles
  8. Yes -- Fragile
  9. Yes -- Close to the Edge
  10. Dougie Maclean -- Craigie Dhu
  11. Eric Clapton -- Me and Mr. Johnson
  12. John Bayless -- Bach on Abbey Road
  13. Jacques Loussier -- Plays Bach
  14. Mark Knopfler -- Golden Heart
  15. Yes -- Time and a Word
  16. J.S. Bach -- English Suites
  17. James P. Johnson -- Snowy Morning Blues
  18. Renaissance -- Tales of 1001 Nights
  19. Abbey Lincoln -- You Gotta Pay the Band
  20. Yes -- Yes

The preponderance of Bach is no big shock, but I would've expected more Yes and at least some Ellington. But the foregoing list reflects only what I've been listening to most in the last eight months or so -- I got a bit burnt out on Yes there for a while, listened to Mellow Candle's Swaddling Songs a few times a week last fall (!), went on a similar John Bayless kick, and often listen to some recordings via CD at home so they don't get counted (I'm thinking especially of Joe Pass, Ella Fitzgerald, Mollie O'Brien, Paul Desmond, and Marian McPartland). It'll be interesting to observe the long-term trends (say, over three or five years).

Posted on 2005-04-26 at 20:41. File under music.

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2005-04-20

Assurance #1

CAcerting.

Today I assured my very first person for the CAcert project -- Mark Stuemky of High Plains Technologies. Not only is CAcert a cool project, but it's a fun way to meet people, so get involved today!

Posted on 2005-04-20 at 19:53. File under technology.

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Email Delenda Est?

Can email be destroyed?

A few months back I made a concerted effort to wean myself off email. Unfortunately, I have admitted defeat. I don't think this beast can be killed -- or, at least, someone in my position can't avoid the necessity of email (after all, I'm no Donald Knuth). These days I get more email than ever, I struggle to keep my inbox at less than 400 messages, I have to delete 100+ spams a day even after SpamAssassin culls out at least 200 more, and I spend more time than I'd like to admit exchanging email messages (mostly with folks in the Jabber community). Call me a grumpy old-timer, but I fondly remember those days in 1992 or whatever when email was a new and fun way to explore the noosphere with like-minded others. Now it's just a chore that every day feels more and more like the punishment of Sisyphus.

Posted on 2005-04-20 at 16:01. File under technology.

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The Server Club

Building trust in the Jabber network.

I've been thinking about the desirability of building something like web of trust among admins of servers on the open Jabber/XMPP network.

Let's think about the goal. To me, the goal is to strengthen trust in the network of open Jabber servers. One part of that is SSL/TLS for server-to-server connections. I really don't care if people use self-signed certificates for TLS, as long as there is a way to check with other servers on the network the first time. For example, let's says that a new server jabber.belnet.be connects to amessage.info; it would be nice if Matthias (admin of amessage.info) could check with jabber.org to see if we think that is a good server or not.

Another part of strengthening the network is improving communication among server admins. For example, I would like to run a special mailing list for people who administer open Jabber servers so that we can discuss issues, debug problems, etc.

I'd also like to make it a bit harder to get on the list of open servers, so that end users can have some confidence that if a server is on the list then the server is fairly trustworthy. Of course someone could run their own server or use a server that is not on the list, but the servers on the list are special -- like a club that you have to join or something. Then we can build trust within that club, without saying that other servers are bad.

There are many aspects to this trust. It is much more than having a stupid cert! For example, I trust Matthias because I have met him in person and I know him from conversations via email and IM over many years. So I transfer some of that trust to his amessage.* domains. But trust could also come from seeing the traffic that originates from a domain, whether that server is well-behaved, how often it is down, whether it has a server status page, how quickly the admin responds, etc.

I don't know yet whether it makes sense to form this kind of "server club". But we could try it out, could see how it works and then eventually try to formalize some of our processes by writing a web-of-trust protocol for XMPP servers. But I think the protocols can't be developed until after we have some social experience in this area.

Posted on 2005-04-20 at 15:39. File under jabber.

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2005-04-19

Oxyrhynchus

A papyrologist's dream.

A bunch of folks have pinged me about the astonishing news that a treasure trove of ancient texts will soon be readable again thanks to infrared scanning technologies. Yes, these texts were found in the two-thousand-year-old garbage dump of an obscure Egyptian town and have been essentially unreadable until now. My old professor Dirk Obbink is leading the team that is converting these texts. Personally I'm hoping for the discovery of some of the lost poems of Sappho (much more likely to show up in a garbage dump than some of the lost writings of Aristotle, which would be number two on my wish list).

Posted on 2005-04-19 at 21:41. File under literature.

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Play Ball!

Some American idioms.

The other day I was talking with someone about the funny idioms of American English, which can make it so hard for non-native speakers to understand what we're saying. Sometimes it's difficult to know which idioms are truly American and which were inherited from our English ancestors, but it's probably safe to say that our many baseball idioms originated in the New World. So as a public service I've decided to write about American idioms and phrases, starting with some baseball-related idioms.

There are so many baseball idioms (I count at least 40 of them) that it's hard to know where to start. However, in general, when you don't know where to start, it's best to start at the beginning. :-) So the first phrase we'll investigate is this:

Play ball!

Somewhere in America that phrase is probably being uttered in an official capacity right now, because they are the words that a baseball umpire shouts in order to start a game. When used on the baseball field, the words mean "The game begins now!" or "Start playing!" (you'll notice that the phrase is a command, not a request). But they are also used in normal speech in an extended sense, meaning something like "Let's get going" (or, in slang, "Let's get this show on the road" -- is that a baseball phrase, too?). However, "playing ball" is not always a competitive activity -- for example, two people can simply toss a ball back and forth. As a result, "to play ball" can mean "to cooperate, to work together". Thus one might hear a business person say something like "we tried to negotiate with that supplier, but they just wouldn't play ball". A similar phrase is "now we're playing ball" -- meaning "now things are moving, now we're making progress" (another idiom that means the same thing is "now we're cooking with gas", which comes from the days when gas stoves were a new technology, supplanting old wood-fired stoves).

See, ain't American English fun?

(BTW, with this entry I've inaugurated a new category for my musings on language.)

Posted on 2005-04-19 at 21:03. File under language.

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Concord Hymn

Happy Patriots Day.

In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the following poem for the dedication of a monument erected in Concord, Massachusetts to remember the first American revolutionaries, who died at the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Amen.

Posted on 2005-04-19 at 20:11. File under politics.

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2005-04-18

In a Flash

Adobe, Macromedia, and IM.

The full implications of Adobe's purchase of Marcomedia are a bit beyond my ken, but Stowe Boyd uses the merger as an occasion to stump for a killer IM client written in Flash. Hmmm, imagine the possibilities if Flash had native XMPP support. We've already seen from clients like Gush that Flash is a great medium for IM, but if Flash were smarter about XML streams then writing Flash-based Jabber applications would be much easier -- and not just IM, either, but content syndication interfaces and other pubsub-related applications. Hope springs eternal...

Posted on 2005-04-18 at 13:49. File under jabber.

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I Chat, You Chat

What's coming in Tiger from the Jabber perspective.

According to the Apple website, here's what's coming in the next version of iChat AV and the new iChat server:

Jabber Support

Access friends and colleagues in the Jabber IM network from iChat AV.

iChat Server

To ensure secure instant messaging in your organization, Tiger Server enables you to host a private iChat Server that integrates with your existing directory services for user accounts and authentication. iChat Server uses the XMPP protocol popularized by the open-source Jabber project and SSL/TLS encryption to protect internal communications. And because it's based on open standards, iChat Server works with Tiger's iChat AV and with popular Jabber clients on Windows, Linux and PDAs.

As Jeff Hester says, "If you're a Mac user, get ready to upgrade!" :-)

Sources: 200+ New Features, Mac OS X Server.

Posted on 2005-04-18 at 13:37. File under jabber.

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Very Assuring

Get your certs assured here.

Today I received notice from CAcert that they have received and validated my "trusted third party" documents, so that I am now an assurer for CAcert. If you're in the vicinity of Denver, Colorado, let me know if you need your cert assured. :-)

Posted on 2005-04-18 at 12:13. File under technology.

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2005-04-16

Urbanization

Life in the big city.

One of the long-term secular trends in human society is urbanization. From the earliest proto-cities to today's megalopolises, people keep packing themselves into smaller and smaller areas, in larger and larger numbers. The implications -- on everything from ethics to the environment -- are profound, as Stewart Brand explains:

For 50 years, the demographers in charge of human population projections for the United Nations released hard numbers that substantiated environmentalists' greatest fears about indefinite exponential population increase. For a while, those projections proved fairly accurate. However, in the 1990s, the U.N. started taking a closer look at fertility patterns, and in 2002, it adopted a new theory that shocked many demographers: human population is leveling off rapidly, even precipitously, in developed countries, with the rest of the world soon to follow. Most environmentalists still haven't got the word. Worldwide, birthrates are in free fall. Around one-third of countries now have birthrates below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) and sinking. Nowhere does the downward trend show signs of leveling off. Nations already in a birth dearth crisis include Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Russia -- whose population is now in absolute decline and is expected to be 30 percent lower by 2050. On every part of every continent and in every culture (even Mormon), birthrates are headed down. They reach replacement level and keep on dropping. It turns out that population decrease accelerates downward just as fiercely as population increase accelerated upward, for the same reason. Any variation from the 2.1 rate compounds over time.

That's great news for environmentalists (or it will be when finally noticed), but they need to recognize what caused the turnaround. The world population growth rate actually peaked at 2 percent way back in 1968, the very year my old teacher Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. The world's women didn't suddenly have fewer kids because of his book, though. They had fewer kids because they moved to town.

Cities are population sinks -- always have been. Although more children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. A global tipping point in urbanization is what stopped the population explosion. As of this year, 50 percent of the world's population lives in cities, with 61 percent expected by 2030. In 1800 it was 3 percent; in 1900 it was 14 percent.

The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities. My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it.

Brand amplifies on that last point about "getting out in front" of urbanization as follows:

The best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it.

And he also argues that it's time for true environmentalists to get behind nuclear power and to get out in front of it as well by agitating for the use of modern nuclear technologies like pellet-bed reactors.

I really liked the way Stewart Brand questioned assumptions in How Buildings Learn, and that seems to be one of his signature traits. Perhaps it's time for me to finally read The Clock of the Long Now (I've just requested it from the Denver Public Library).

Posted on 2005-04-16 at 21:51. File under society.

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A Dog's Life

From man's best friend to men's greatest rival?

Dogs are smarter than you think (or, at the least, they are extremely good at reading human social cues -- 50,000 years of co-evolution will do that to a species). Perhaps it's no wonder that over half of women think their pets are more affectionate than the men in their lives. (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen.)

Posted on 2005-04-16 at 21:33. File under society.

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Juvenilia

Some early writings.

While cleaning out some old file folders last night, I found some early writings of mine. They're not really very good, but I've typed them into my computer and put them online anyway. I had not written much by that time in my life, and it shows. At least I've gotten to be a better writer through years of practice -- or so I hope!

The pieces are as follows:

  • A journal entry from 1992 that seems to have been an attempt to summarize my philosophy of life at that time. Things have changed since then.
  • An essay entitled Secular vs. Sacred: The Modern Dilemma, which won honorable mention in an essay contest run by The Humanist magazine in 1992. Similar in many ways to my blog entry from the other day on spirituality.
  • A very early essay entitled What I Love About Maine, which I wrote for my freshman English class at Columbia University. I was painfully afraid of writing back then and my teacher Victoria Redel helped me through that, for which I'm forever in her debt.

Not great writing, and best filed under the heading of juvenilia. But perhaps someone will find them interesting. :-)

Posted on 2005-04-16 at 17:53. File under personal.

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2005-04-14

IMbox Special Edition

Jabber clients galore.

I finally got phpMyAdmin working again for jabber.org today at a secure URL, which means I'm catching up on 3+ months of updating the databases (they have not been updated since the rootkit). Those databases drive the dynamic web pages on jabber.org, such as the list of public Jabber servers and the various software pages. Late today I added a slew of clients to the client list so it seems appropriate to recognize those projects here, since they have been so patiently waiting for me to add their clients to the database.

  • ekg2 -- a multi-protocol console client for Linux
  • elechat -- a j2me midlet for communicating in Jabber chatrooms
  • Gajim -- a Python client for GNU/Linux
  • IM+ -- a shareware mobile client from SHAPE Services
  • Jabberwocky -- a recently revived client for AmigaOS and MorphOS
  • M2 -- a combined SIP softphone and Jabber IM client (freeware version available at Myzetalk)
  • ngIM -- a payware web client from XMPPSolutions
  • SoapBox -- a freeware Windows client from Coversant
  • WhisperIM -- a multi-platform client for high-security messaging
  • WebJabber -- just what it says, a web-based Jabber client

And just for fun, here's a preview of iChatAV 3. ;-)

Posted on 2005-04-14 at 17:19. File under jabber.

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TCP DoS and XMPP

Something to investigate...

It seems that there is a vulnerability in a number of TCP implementations, which makes it possible to launch Denial of Service attacks using ICMP messages. Since most Jabber traffic is bound to TCP (as specified in RFC 3920), this is potentially worrisome. In his comments on the matter, Eric Rescorla makes the following observation:

This isn't something to panic about. As with last year's TCP attacks, the scope of this attack is fairly limited. There aren't many TCP-based protocols that simultaneously are high value and rely on long-lived TCP connections.

Emphasis added, because XMPP relies on long-lived TCP connections.

Posted on 2005-04-14 at 09:09. File under jabber.

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2005-04-13

Profiles: Serve 'em Up!

The next step in Jabber profiles.

Peter Millard has weighed in on the continuing discussion about what we affectionately call vCard++ (the ability to flexibly represent vCard data and a whole lot more in an XMPP-friendly format). The consensus that is emerging around my evolving proposal seems to be that data forms is the way to go, at least for data representation over the wire in XMPP. But that's only the beginning. I see three other issues:

  1. How do you edit and update your profile information?
  2. How is your profile information published?
  3. How do other people find you?

#3 is really what I am interested in, since many people over the years have told me that it's relatively easy to get on the Jabber network, but then it's hard to find people who are using Jabber. Now, we know that there are millions of people using Jabber, but it doesn't always feel that way, especially to new users. So I want to keep that end goal in mind as we work on vCard++.

Peter suggests that we need a wrapper element for profiles that would enable an application to bundle and provide context for multiple data forms simultaneously. I'm not sure that I fully grok his suggestion yet, but I do agree that we need a way to place the data fields I've been working to define in some kind of context. Here are my current thoughts on how things would work...

First of all, I think we need some kind of application server built on top of pubsub. The pubsub semantics provide the basic engine for updating your profile and letting other people get notified when your information changes. But I think that a barebones pubsub service may not be enough. In particular, I think we need some profile-specific interfaces for populating, editing, and subscribing to profiles. For the initial population of your profile, it would be awfully nice to complete some kind of wizard interface that would walk you through different aspects of your information profile (personal data, address, work, home, hobbies and interests, etc.). I think we have the technology for defining a workflow process for initial population: it's called Ad-Hoc Commands.

After you complete your initial profile, you need to figure out who can see what. As a first pass, you could make all of your profile information world-readable. Obviously that's not a very sophisticated, and we'd prefer to build some access control lists so that you can publish your home address or full birthday to people you trust, etc. Now, if you're a new user you may not know people on the Jabber network, so you won't have JabberIDs to associate with people (on the basis of which we'd set access control lists and such). But what if someone built a personal profile and information management system on top of XMPP + pubsub, which could reuse existing JIDs if available but which could also invite new users into the network and/or create profile IDs for them on the fly (which are really just XMPP addresses, but who needs to know?)... Move over, Plaxo and all the rest!

In any case, you might run what looks like a dedicated profile and contact management application on your desktop (or access it via a website) when in fact it's just an XMPP + pubsub application. Now when you update your email address or whatever, it will be pushed out to everyone who cares about how to find you, via the magic of pubsub. No need to tell people that they need to head off to Plaxo or whatever in order to update the information you have on file about them, which is just obnoxious. Instead, updates go out automatically. Push vs. pull, and in this case push wins.

I don't think the profile server needs to provide much above and beyond a bare pubsub service, but it would need to support all the right commands (yet to be defined, but at the least initial population, editing, and ACLs).

Next we need some more sophisticated search capabilities. Here again the profile server needs to support not just JEP-0055 but also the x:data extensions to jabber:iq:search specified in that JEP. Now we begin to see some patterns, because our profile data representation is already in x:data. So the profile server can, presumably, support searching on the very same profile data fields we've defined. "Show me everyone who has a hobby of playing guitar, who lists Yes among their favorite musical groups, who lives in Colorado." Boom! And since chatrooms and servers and everything else on the network can have profiles (not just people), one could search on things like "Are there any chatrooms devoted to discussion of needlepoint?" (why not?).

Naturally, much of this remains to be defined. The profile data representation is really just the first step. But this is one of the priorities I mentioned in Jabber Journal #22 and it's definitely something I am actively thinking about these days.

Posted on 2005-04-13 at 17:17. File under jabber.

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2005-04-11

Spirituality

Untimely meditations.

According to this article, philosopher-mathematician Frank Ramsey once expressed the following thought about the scale of the universe (quoted in Our Final Hour by Martin Rees):

I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does... My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model drawn to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.

I find Ramsey's thought congenial (Ramsey was a teacher of Jacob Bronowski, another thinker whose insights I appreciate). Coincidentally, today I received an email message from one Soren Sorenson, proprietor of a website called Spiritual Atheism (who presumably contacted me because on one of my web pages I call myself a spiritual atheist). Soren's site defines spiritual atheism as follows:

Spiritual Atheists reject the presentation of God as the LITERAL creator and ruler of the universe and, instead, recognize and understand God as the physical, psychological, and spiritual PERSONIFICATION of the eternal and infinite universe itself.

Well, I'm not that kind of spiritual atheist! To put it prosaically, I'm simply a nonbeliever who happens to appreciate the spiritual aspects of life.

It is difficult to talk about such matters (perhaps religion is an area in which I self-censor), but I'm going to try anyway. (My apologies to readers if these thoughts seem too poetic, flighty, or just plain crazy. I write this stuff for myself, not for you. ;-)

I agree with Ramsey that the universe is vast, but not divine. I think that if there is divinity, it is a spark that shines outward from within human beings, and does not come into human beings from outside (whether from the universe or from God as the creator of the universe or as a personification of the universe). Indeed, I tend more toward some thinkers in the gnostic tradition, who held that human beings created god in their own image.

I am a nonbeliever. (I don't usually call myself an atheist, since most atheists are quite militant, whereas I am not militant about my lack of belief.) I don't believe in a god, in any "person" (however defined) who in some sense created or represents the universe. I think there is a sense in which human beings -- the entities that most deeply instantiate the psychological, intellectual, mental, and spiritual potentiality of life, especially of conscious, sentient life -- are divine, can be divine, or at least have divine aspects. I think that early human beings were uncomfortable with this divine spark within themselves -- it is quite presumptuous to think that you are divine! -- and so they externalized the sense of their own divinity outward onto other entities (trees, rocks, mountains, etc. in the early form of theism called animism), then eventually focused that concept into monotheism and the personal god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Yet I don't believe in any such God. To me, the great challenge is talking about divinity and spirituality in a purely secular way. We have no experience with a secular language of divinity. When we use terms like "divine" and "worship" and "spiritual" and "godlike", we are familiar with them only in relation to something higher than humanity, even something higher than nature or reality. But I think there is nothing higher than reality, and that human beings are the highest things in reality. But as we say in English, "it's lonely at the top" so we created these things called gods (in more recent thought, a single God) to sit above us. Yet this "god" is an abstraction from the essence of what is divine in human beings, not something other than or apart from human beings.

There is nothing divine about the physical extent of the universe. Awesome, yes. Divine, no.

There is no psychological aspect to the physical universe itself -- it is not a conscious entity in any sense. There is a psychological aspect to many living things, and that is to be valued deeply as one of the precious aspects of life.

There is no spiritual aspect to the physical universe, and there is no spiritual aspect to lower life forms. Spirituality comes with language, concepts, communication, self-reflection. Human beings are spiritual beings. Spirituality can be seen as precisely the highest potential of the psychological aspect of living things. It is here that I would locate the divine. Not in gods, but in human beings.

So, radical as it may seem, I assert the exact inverse of the Christian idea that "God created man in His image" -- for I think that human beings created the idea of god in the image of their highest potential.

Untimely meditations, indeed.

Posted on 2005-04-11 at 21:59. File under philosophy.

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PoD

Printing on demand.

Amazon.com bought print-on-demand company BookSurge today. Makes sense. BookSurge's Competitors include AuthorHouse, iUniverse, XLibris, and Lightning Source.

(This is just a note to myself in case I ever decide to self-publish The Ism Book, Ancient Fire, A Philosophy for Living on Earth, or some future book through one of the print-on-demand companies....)

Posted on 2005-04-11 at 21:12. File under personal.

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2005-04-10

Consilience

Overcoming philosophy, again.

I've started reading Edward O. Wilson's book Consilience. Wilson cites William Whewell as the thinker who coined the term "consilience", which literally means a "jumping together" of facts or inductions from different disciplines (according to J.S. Mill in his Utilitarianism, each result thus assists in "corroborating and verifying the other"). The OED quotes Whewell as follows (The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), II 230):

Accordingly the cases in which inductions from classes of facts altogether different have thus jumped together, belong only to the best established theories which the history of science contains. And, as I shall have occasion to refer to this particular feature in their evidence, I will take the liberty of describing it by a particular phrase; and I will term it the Consilience of Inductions.

Wilson further quotes Whewell as follows:

The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.

Wilson proposes an updated Enlightenment project of intellectual synthesis that would build the consilience of knowledge across disciplines (and not just the hard sciences, but the social sciences and humanities as well), along the lines of Francis Bacon's Instauratio Magna. And he writes as follows regarding the relationship between this project and the tradition of philosophical investigation:

Philosophy plays a vital role in intellectual synthesis, and it keeps us alive to the power and continuity of thought through the centuries. It also peers into the future to give shape to the unknown -- and that has always been its vocation of choice. One of its most distinguished practitioners, Alexander Rosenberg, has recently argued that philosophy in fact addresses just two issues: the questions that the sciences -- physical, biological, and social -- cannot answer, and the reasons for that incapacity. "Now of course," he concludes, "there may not be any questions that the sciences cannot answer eventually, in the long run, when all the facts are in, but certainly there are questions that the sciences cannot answer yet." This assessment is admirably clear and honest and convincing. It neglects, however, the obvious fact that scientists are equally qualified to judge what remains to be discovered, and why. There has never been a better time for collaboration between scientists and philosophers, especially where they meet in the borderlands between biology, the social sciences, and the humanities. We are approaching a new age of synthesis, when the testing of consilience is the greatest of all intellectual challenges. Philosophy, the contemplation of the unknown, is a shrinking dominion. We have the common goal of turning as much philosophy as possible into science.

To which I say: Hear, Hear! I've been thinking along similar lines since 1998 (when Wilson's book was published -- I'm not sure why I haven't read it until now) and probably much earlier given that I was reading Hao Wang's work on phenography in 1987 or so. In all likelihood, the new way to philosophize will mean overcoming philosophy rather than extending its life.

Posted on 2005-04-10 at 13:49. File under philosophy.

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2005-04-08

JJ #22

The latest Jabber Journal.

Although I'm now publishing Jabber news more frequently here at my blog, I have not abandoned the Jabber Journal -- in fact, issue #22 is now available. Enjoy!

Posted on 2005-04-08 at 11:57. File under jabber.

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2005-04-07

Feeding a Cold

An idiosyncrasy.

One of my idiosyncrasies is that when I'm starting to catch a cold, I get ravenously hungry. I'm legendary for eating all the time, but when I begin to feel sick my usually fast metabolism seems to go into overdrive. For instance, today I was not feeling very well and ate a tremendous amount of food:

  • 06:00: A handful of dried figs and half a cup of yogurt.
  • 06:15: A fried egg on whole-grain toast, plus half a grapefruit.
  • 06:30: Another fried egg on toast.
  • 08:00: A huge bowl of oatmeal with raisins and walnuts.
  • 09:30: An apple.
  • 10:30: Another half cup of yogurt.
  • 11:15: A whole bunch of almonds and some dried apricots.
  • 12:15: A chicken fajita and a large bowl of beef chili.
  • 14:00: Another half cup of yogurt.
  • 16:00: Another fried egg on toast.
  • 19:00: A large plate of sausage lasagna.
  • 19:45: Two pieces of baklava and two cups of Turkish coffee.
  • 21:15: More almonds and dried apricots.

Now excuse me while I rummage around in the kitchen for a snack... ;-)

Posted on 2005-04-07 at 21:57. File under personal.

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Profiles Again

Diving into the wave.

The more I think about it, the less important I feel the FORM_TYPE is as we define personal profile fields in terms of x:data. I mean, the whole point of a FORM_TYPE is to scope data fields, and the very use of the word "type" indicates that you can have multiple forms (instances) of the same type. So I'm proceeding with the definition of lots of profile fields and worrying less about the FORM_TYPE(s) right now, although I think we'll end up with just one in the end: "http://jabber.org/protocol/profile". An updated version of the proto-JEP for "profile data representation" is here.

Posted on 2005-04-07 at 21:49. File under jabber.

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2005-04-06

Wave

More on data forms and profile data.

Both Joe Hildebrand and Ralph Meijer have followed up on my post about using x:data for personal profiles. I also talked about it (IRL) with Matt Miller a bit today. Matt pointed out that nothing says we need to force all profile data into one form (and thus one FORM_TYPE). In fact, personal profile data will probably be gathered when a new user registers an account, most likely in some interface wizard: please fill out your name and click OK, then fill out your work contact info and click OK, then fill out your home contact info and click OK, then fill out your personal information (hobbies, quotes, favorite movies, etc.) and click OK, etc. So I don't feel a strong need to make sure that all profile data will fit into one form or (therefore) one FORM_TYPE. This frees up the possibility of multiple FORM_TYPEs (one for each sort of data being collected), which now feels more natural to me. As Joe suggests at the end of his post, if we really want to we could use data forms validation to specify that, say, your mobile number, home number, work number, and fax number are all instances of the "telephone number" datatype. I'm not sure that's necessary, but it's worth considering.

(Of course, there's always the possibility that we could encode personal profile data in RDF, which would presumably make people like Bill de Hóra happy. But somehow I don't see most Jabber developers getting excited about the prospect of including yet another parser in their clients.)

Posted on 2005-04-06 at 20:43. File under jabber.

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IMbox

Jabber/XMPP roundup.

The big XMPP news recently was Sun's release of an XMPP server, called Java[tm] System Instant Messaging (see the press release as well as coverage by InternetNews and ServerWatch).

In addition, here are some other project releases I've noticed lately:

In other news:

And of course discussions are always happening on the mailing lists and at Planet Jabber.

Posted on 2005-04-06 at 13:19. File under jabber.

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Apply Now!

JSF membership applications now being accepted!

It's true! For a limited time only, the Jabber Software Foundation is accepting applications from prospective and renewing members! The application period ends April 15, so apply now! The sooner you apply, the sooner I can stop ending every sentence with an exclamation point!

;-)

Posted on 2005-04-06 at 10:11. File under jabber.

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Every JID a What?

Read what I mean, not what I say.

Ralph is right: I misspoke when I said that every JID could be a pubsub node -- in fact I meant what Ralph says, that every bare JID (user@host) in XMPP could have its own virtual pubsub service. And I still think it's a neat idea. :-)

Posted on 2005-04-06 at 10:07. File under jabber.

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2005-04-05

Particle vs. Wave?

An ambiguity in Jabber field standardization.

I've been working on a proposal to supersede the vcard-temp protocol that we've used in the Jabber community since 1999. My proposal uses data forms to represent profile data and further constrains the data by enforcing the form type using the concept of field standardization. In doing so, I've run into an interesting ambiguity in JEP-0068, I think (and in the standards world, ambiguity is not usually a good thing). In vCard, one is able to specify that an address, say, is either a home address or a work address. How would we do this in a data form? Consider a field like "locality", and imagine that you live in one locality and commute to work in a different locality (oh, let's say Highlands Ranch and Denver). One approach would be to define two different fields ("home_locality" and "work_locality") scoped by the same FORM_TYPE ("http://jabber.org/protocol/profile"); another approach would be to define one field ("locality") but two different FORM_TYPEs ("http://jabber.org/protocol/profile#home" and "http://jabber.org/protocol/profile#work"). In fact, neither of these feels right to me, in part because we've had this ambiguity in field standardization: does it standardize forms or fields? The title of JEP-0068 would seem to imply that it standardizes fields, but it does so by specifying a special FORM_TYPE variable. Even granting that there might be some kind of particle vs. wave phenomenon going on here, I admit to being a bit befuddled (and I co-wrote the spec!). However, if push came to shove, I think I would probably go with two fields and one form type, rather than one field and two form types (the example of telephone numbers may be helpful: your home phone is different from your work phone is different from your mobile phone).

And yes, Joe, this entry is for you. ;-)

Posted on 2005-04-05 at 22:17. File under jabber.

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2005-04-04

New West, Young Man!

Perspectives on mountain time.

At the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash on Saturday night, I talked a bit with Rick Martin, Boulder correspondent for New West, a stylish new online venue for discussion among folks in the Rocky Mountain region (I'll probably get around to contributing one of these days). One thing that disappointed me in perusing the New West site is that they have no representation from our friends north of the border. One of my dictionaries defines the Rocky Mountains as "a mountain system in western North America, extending from New Mexico to Alaska" (more here). Yet New West seems to be focused on the U.S. states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. Nothing about Alberta and British Columbia? No links to the Calgary Herald and Sun or the Edmonton Journal and Sun? Wolves and moose and bears aplenty go back and forth across the border at will. The Rocky Mountains extend far above the 49th parallel. Folks in Calgary or Kelowna probably have a lot more in common with those foreigners in Denver or Boise or Missoula than they do with their compatriots in Halifax or Quebec City (it's that whole frontier experience thing, right?). So it seems a bit arbitrary for New West's coverage to end at the U.S.-Canadian border. Let's think outside the box, people!

Posted on 2005-04-04 at 21:47. File under society.

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Life is Good

Words of wisdom.

My friend Chris Sciabarra saith:

Spring is here. Daylight Savings Time has returned. Baseball is back. Life is good.

Indeed.

Posted on 2005-04-04 at 21:31. File under personal.

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PC

Some post-Catholic reflections.

Although I was nominally brought up Catholic, I became a non-believer at the age of nine and never felt connected to the Church in any way (in my gentler moments, I tell people that I'm "post-Catholic"). Thus I am not really qualified to speak about the Catholic Church or the legacy of Karol Wojtyla (better known as John Paul II). However, Hans Kung -- one of the world's leading Catholic theologians -- is so qualified, and his thoughts make for fascinating reading (tip of the hat to Ken MacLeod). Even putting aside his more philosophical observations (such the place of women in the church, or more precisely their lack of a place), one has to wonder about the staying power of an organization that is simply not attracting enough workers (we call them priests). The demographics of Catholicism are extremely challenging, and it's no wonder that even in Catholic strongholds like Latin America the Church is losing ground to the more energetic Protestant and evangelical denominations. The cause, in large measure, is the forced celibacy of Catholic priests (another legacy of the anti-woman stance adopted during the Middle Ages, though not in the early centuries of Christianity).

Ideas have consequences.

Posted on 2005-04-04 at 21:12. File under society.

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More Justice

Alternatives to incarceration in Denver.

Last month I wrote the mayor of Denver challenging him to seek alternatives to incarceration for non-violent offenders such as prostitutes and drug users (most of whom probably need counseling and social assistance a lot more than they need time in the country jail). It turns out that the mayor had already formed an Alternatives to Sentencing Committee recently, but I had not heard about it. Let's hope the committee does good work.

Posted on 2005-04-04 at 19:54. File under politics.

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Every JID a Node

Integrating pubsub into Jabber servers.

Over the weekend, I had an interesting thought: what if every user's Jabber ID were a pubsub node? Right now, in order for a user (let's say, our old favorite Romeo) to publish his geolocation, mood, activity, or other forms of extended presence, he needs to find a service that implements JEP-0060, create a dedicated pubsub node for each data type he wants to publish, perform a disco-publish, and so on (this whole dance is described is JEP-0119). Plus, when someone (let's say, Juliet) receives an event notification from such a pubsub node, she needs to somehow correlate it with the publisher, either by keeping track of all the nodes to which she is subscribed (including its metadata) or the publisher needs to include an appropriate SHIM header. Is this really in keeping with the Tao of Jabber?

Now let's visualize what the world would be like if pubsub were more tightly integrated into Jabber server implementations. Romeo could simply publish information to his own JID, at nodes identified by the appropriate protocol namespace names (his geolocation data is at JID='romeo@shakespeare.lit' + node='http://jabber.org/protocol/geoloc' etc.). When Juliet receives data from these nodes, she doesn't have to guess who the data is about -- obviously, it's about Romeo. We could do the same for any information about Romeo -- his vCard, his avatar, syndication feeds for his weblog (can you say Atom-over-XMPP?), and so on (perhaps someday even including network availability, i.e., presence, though that might be overkill). Romeo will probably still need to complete a disco-publish so that each of his pubsub nodes is also a disco node, but the server implementation could also be written to handle that transparently (every pubsub node created at a user's JID is also a disco node).

I'm not saying that every Jabber server should or would do things this way -- that train has left the station. But it might be a neat way to implement things if one were writing a new server from scratch.

Posted on 2005-04-04 at 10:29. File under jabber.

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