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2005-06-29

The Outrage

Fighting eminent domain abuse.

Bob Dole used to ask "Where's the outrage?" Well, it's here: Americans across the political spectrum are outraged at the Supreme Court's odious decision in the case of Kelo v. New London, allowing governments to take property from one person and give it to another for private use as long as "the public" (read: local governments) will benefit through increased tax revenues. I'm sure that your home or business could bring in much higher tax revenues if it were converted into a luxury high rise, a hotel, a big box retailer, or a fast food restaurant. Think it can't happen? Think again. The Supremes have given the green light to confiscation of private property anywhere in America, and unholy alliances of unprincipled politicians and greedy developers are already springing into action. But the people are fighting back. An enterprising soul in New Hampshire has proposed to confiscate the vacation home of Justice David Souter for the "Lost Liberty Hotel". Great idea! The people need to put some serious pressure on any politician or developer who attempts to cash in on the Kelo debacle, any judge who allows property confiscation to proceed, any business that tries to use eminent domain for their own benefit. The Castle Coalition is leading the fight by organizing local citizens across the country, encouraging governors to sign the "Hands Off My Home" pledge, providing materials and legal support for those threatened with eminent domain abuse, and much more. It's time to get busy. Kelo is only the start. We have not yet begun to fight!

Posted on 2005-06-29 at 20:31. File under politics.

~ link ~

Signing

CAcert + Tbird.

I never did solve the problem I was having with Mutt and S/MIME, so I've switched to Thunderbird (gasp, a GUI email client!), which is now happily signing my outbound email and reading the signatures on inbound mail (at least signatures of other folks who've received certificates from CAcert). A step in the right direction.

Posted on 2005-06-29 at 11:05. File under technology.

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Closed Shut

The importance of openness for security.

Over at Financial Cryptography, Ian Grigg outs Mozilla for the closed nature of its security discussions. Not happy reading.

Posted on 2005-06-29 at 10:27. File under technology.

~ link ~

The Freeze

Protecting your identity.

With the worries about identity theft out there, you'd think more people would put a freeze on their credit reports to prevent unauthorized access (see the last paragraph of this article from Wired). Unfortunately, not all U.S. states make that easy. Happily, Colorado is one of them. Something to investigate further...

Posted on 2005-06-29 at 10:11. File under society.

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2005-06-28

Noetics

The value of logic.

Uche reacts to my previous post on Alexander Baumgarten's definition of aesthetics, specifically my questioning of the contributions of logic to human knowledge:

... I think a large proportion of scientific pursuits are not agonistic, and isn't theoretical science as important as experimental science? Applying logic, mathematical induction and yes, even philosophy to abstract models from the comfort of the armchair or bicycle, is, I think essential to efficient construction of experimentation.

In part I was reacting against Baumgarten, who (as Uche points out) is a bit too pat about the superiority of logic over aesthetic, things known conceptually over things known perceptually, philosophy over art, and so on. I yield to no one in a deep appreciation for the power of concepts -- they are what make us human, whether clothed in language, mathematics, music, visual art, or code. Yet Baumgarten (an arch-rationalist) claims that conceptual knowledge is purely the object of (deductive) logic, and gives short shrift to induction from perceptual experience and abstraction from particulars. By no means do I claim that logic has no place in the clarification of human experience -- but it is only part of the mix, not the "superior faculty" of rationalist myth. (And yes, perhaps I react too strongly to rationalist myth because I was once a rationalist myself.)

As to the agonistic nature of science, I do think that good scientists restlessly explore the frontiers of knowledge, recklessly slay the dragons of the unknown, and greedily stake their claims to intellectual gold. Those "animal spirits" are what move humankind forward. Cold deduction of the kind displayed by the likes of Alexander Baumgarten can be edifying, but when you come right down to it reality is messy and the pursuit of truth is a hot, passionate, even agonistic quest.

Posted on 2005-06-28 at 21:51. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Broken Records

Habits of music listening and buying.

In pondering the deeper meaning of the music market, Tyler Cowen observes:

It is a mystery why fans spend almost all of their music money on product of very recent vintage. Until we untangle this puzzle, and we have not yet, we will not understand how Internet music is likely to affect consumer welfare.

Perhaps the deeper mystery is why people listen to the same music over and over. It's rare that someone reads the same novel or short story or poem more than five or ten times, yet people will happily listen to the same piece of music dozens (or, for their favorites, even hundreds) of times. Music also is full of repetition and indeed is quite repetitious: songs usually consist of multiple verses and choruses with the same melodies, and even so-called art music is rife with codas, repeated sections, theme and variations, etc. Boring! But it's not boring to the human ear.

Yet people do eventually tire of hearing the same old music, which is why (despite the presence of long-term favorites) they hunger for newness. Further, music co-evolves with society: it changes in time with human experience, the mixing of peoples, an ever faster pace of life, opportunities for travel, technological change, and so on. Fundamentally, I think music is a human expression like language or clothing or food, in which the desire for fashion and novelty riffs against certain stable basics (melody, rhythm, harmony) within a churning expressive marketplace whose order (such as it is) emerges organically through the multifarious choices and recommendations of countless individuals. To expect habits of music listening and buying to remain steady or predictable or controllable (as, perhaps, big music company executives would like) is pure folly.

Posted on 2005-06-28 at 21:03. File under music.

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Sapphics

Poems old and new.

Over on the New-Poetry list we've been discussing Sappho in response to the news (previously wished for here) that the good folks at Oxford have deciphered a "new" poem by Sappho. In the ensuing thread I sent along not one but two of the poems I've written in Sapphic meter. "She is like a god to me..."

Posted on 2005-06-28 at 20:07. File under literature.

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MIT Weblog Survey

Helping to advance the science of blogs.

(Hat tip: Stowe Boyd)

Posted on 2005-06-28 at 15:13. File under technology.

~ link ~

2005-06-24

Swimmingly

A Friday evening ritual.

I've started going for a swim on the way home from work on Friday evenings whenever possible. The Denver Department of Parks and Recreation maintains a number of swimming pools, one of which is located downtown not far from the offices of Jabber Inc. Not many folks seem to use the pool around 5 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, but I've found it's a great way to unwind at the end of the week.

Posted on 2005-06-24 at 21:47. File under personal.

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Anglican Catholics

More obscure Christians.

Earlier this month I noticed the existence of Byzantine Catholics. Recently I found another relatively obscure Christian sect: Anglican Catholics. There's an Anglican Catholic church not far from my house in Denver, so naturally I decided to investigate. According to this page, the Anglican Catholics were originally conservative or orthodox American Anglicans who split off from the Episcopal Church over changes in policy such as admittance of women to holy orders, abandonment of the Book of Common Prayer, and acceptance of abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality. (In fact, the rector of Saint Mary's in Denver was the first bishop of the Anglican Catholics.) So many Christian churches, so little time. ;-)

Posted on 2005-06-24 at 21:27. File under society.

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Find What You Love

Jobs on life.

Thanks to my friend Leif over at pattern.com, I finally read the commencement address that Steve Jobs presented at Stanford University recently. It seems that Jobs was something of an unschooler. And it's fascinating that both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were college dropouts, is it not?

Posted on 2005-06-24 at 21:05. File under philosophy.

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Hegemonists

IBM, Microsoft, Google...

I've been saying privately for a while that Google is going to be the next Microsoft -- or, at least, that they're going to be perceived that way. Adam Penenberg certainly thinks so. Personally I have my doubts, but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. ;-)

(Penenberg says that Google's name derives from "googol", but I still think it's a contraction of go ogle. ;-)

Posted on 2005-06-24 at 20:51. File under technology.

~ link ~

What's The Problem?

Extending XMPP

I've been meaning to post about an entry by Johannes Ernst on some supposed failings of the Jabber community in taking XMPP into non-IM areas, but Justin Kirby beat me to it. Granted there's more that could be done in:

• pushing publish-subscribe in general and as a transport for syndicated content -- though see PubSub.com and draft-saintandre-atompub-notify-02, plus I'm working on a JEP for ICE over pubsub
• using XMPP to push XML/XHTML snippets from server to client for Ajax-style web page updates
• transporting SOAP over XMPP as defined in JEP-0072 (speaking of which, I need to address some comments we received from the W3C)
• using XMPP IRIs as common identifiers for people and applications

Yes we have specs for all these, but, as Justin points out, implementations are coming on line, too. Granted, there's always more work to do. But that's why the Jabber/XMPP community is not going to disappear anytime soon...

Posted on 2005-06-24 at 20:45. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Soc VII

Some lessons learned.

Julian Missig wonders why I didn't mention in my last Summer of Code post that Thomas Muldowney did not get a chance to vote on the Jabber-related applications. I didn't mention it because I intended to write a post about some lessons learned from the SoC process. So here they are:

1. The whole process was pretty rushed, authentication was based on your Gmail account, temas didn't have one until the last day, I was offline much of this week at a conference, some last-minute emails went unanswered, I thought the admin interface would be open until today but found out late in the process that it was scheduled to close at midnight last night, etc. A bit of a comedy of errors. But temas did get a few votes in right before the admin interface went away just now.
2. The "voting" proceeded in an admin interface wherein you could increase or decrease the ranking of each application, comment on them, etc. I went through the applications a few times -- once to remove duplicates and utterly incomplete applications (as previously mentioned), a second time to cull the remaining applications into "worthy of further consideration" (45 apps) or "not worthy of further consideration" (55 apps), a third time to get the 45 down to a shorter list of about 20 for the other Council members to look at in detail, and a fourth time to further distill the 20 apps down to about 10 that I liked best. Then the other Council members did their thing with incrementing and decrementing the apps and the order changed a bit among the short list towards the end. This was intentional so that the final selection of around 10 preferred projects would reflect the insights and perspectives of all five Jabber Council members.
3. It took a long time! Going through the applications 4+ times took me many hours. I feel sorry for big projects like Apache, FreeBSD, and Gaim, which had many more applications than we did.
4. It was (as I've already mentioned) really hard to choose between some of the applications. In fact I think having each mentoring organization list some suggested projects confused things, because then we received multiple applications to work on those projects and I could not honestly choose among them because they were not different enough to warrant selecting one over the others. This was the case (at least for me) with regard to the several applications for a console-based Jabber client.
5. Despite the rush and confusion, I have no complaints, because overall Chris DiBona and Greg Stein of Google did a great job on short notice and in a big hurry. Hats off to them!

I'm sure that other mentoring organizations will have their own feedback (the mentors' mailing list has been quite busy the whole time!) and that if Google decides to do this again in the future, the process will be much smoother.

Posted on 2005-06-24 at 16:17. File under jabber.

~ link ~

JJ #23

The latest Jabber Journal.

After a hiatus of over two months, I've finally gotten around to publishing Jabber Journal #23. Special thanks to Justin Kirby for the image to which I link at the end. :-)

Posted on 2005-06-24 at 15:21. File under jabber.

~ link ~

SoC VI

Decisions made.

In the wee hours last night (in fact while I was asleep, since Ralph Meijer cast the final votes from Europe this morning), the Jabber Council finished its selection of the top Jabber-related projects for Google's Summer of Code. Google will do some final adjustment of applicants approved per mentoring organization, so I don't know exactly which Jabber projects will be approved, but word has it that Google will announce the final results late today, so stay tuned. I must say that it was really hard to choose between the applications, and it became harder and harder as we tried to narrow things down to a "short list". So if your application was not accepted, don't take it personally!

Posted on 2005-06-24 at 09:59. File under jabber.

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2005-06-23

Takings

Supreme Court v. American Homeowners.

I try not to pay much attention to political matters, but today's Supreme Court decision in the case of Kelo v. New London is tremendously depressing. As Justice Sandra Day O'Connor observed in her dissent, "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory."

The Constitution is dead! Long live the Constitution!

Posted on 2005-06-23 at 14:37. File under politics.

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Robustness

On protocol liberalism.

One of the Gajim developers pinged me this morning about a bug report in which Gajim is choking on an XMPP presence stanza that includes the child element <show>available</show>. Granted, "available" is not permitted XML character data for the <show/> element (per Section 2.2.2.1 of RFC 3921), but that's no reason for the client to choke. The Robustness Principle formulated by Jon Postel (see Section 1.2.2 of RFC 1122) states: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." That applies to XMPP just as much to any other part of the Internet ecosystem. So ignore that <show/> value and file a bug report with the offending client project!

Posted on 2005-06-23 at 14:19. File under jabber.

~ link ~

Puh-leeze

Drinking the MS Kool-Aid.

In one of the sessions at the CTC 2005 conference, Eugene Kim asked folks if they thought their company was especially good at collaboration. One person raised his hand -- a guy from Microsoft who said they were really focused on getting applications and people to work well together. What's hilarious is that this guy was an MBA intern who'd been with Microsoft for all of four days! How much Kool-Aid can you drink in four days? Or did they drop him in a vat of the stuff? Sheesh!

Also overheard at CTC: someone who said their company is so conservative, it puts the "no" in innovation! :-)

Posted on 2005-06-23 at 12:19. File under technology.

~ link ~

2005-06-22

Patterns

How to collaborate without really trying.

In a good session yesterday, Eugene Eric Kim discussed some of the features of what I'd call peak collaborative experiences, in which we can discern several several patterns:

• They are natural. Eugene calls this "permission to laugh", but I generalize it to include any tool or experience that allows for informality. Any technology that is highly structured (even something as simple as the layout of a room) will discourage the kind of informality that makes positive collaboration possible.
• They are participative. This is closely related to naturality. A classic example is a circle layout rather than rows of seats with talking heads in front of the room. Another is the "Edit This Page" link on a wiki page.
• They enable shared display. Everyone who is collaborating needs to see the same thing. Physical whiteboards and pair programming are good examples. But even instant messaging chats enable the two (or more) parties to basically share the same collaboriative context.
• They have a visible pulse. A conversation has a rhythm, whether it be the flow of an IM chat, the calendric quality of a blog, or the regularity of RSS updates.

Language note: Eugene used "emerge" as a transitive verb, as in "Smart organizations emerge best practices" (or whatever), which I'd never heard before.

Posted on 2005-06-22 at 07:51. File under technology.

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Presence

The catalyst for communication.

Gordon Quinn, Anoop Gupta, and Melanie Turek are chatting about presence right now. Melanie points out that both application vendors and telephony vendors are coming at presence from different directions, but I tend to disagree with the vendor focus. If presence is truly going to be infrastructure, it needs to be based on open standards so that organizations who deploy presence-based applications are not locked into one provider.

Melanie also says that SIP/SIMPLE is the clear winner in the standards battle. I strongly question that assumption, as you might imagine.

Next topic: real-time communication "dashboards"; do we really think that people are going to use one front-end for voice, IM, web conferencing, calendaring, and all other presence-based applications? Over time I think people have found that special-purpose applications are more productive. IM has traditionally been the entry point for presence, but embedding presence in other applications will probably make more sense than accessing all presence-enabled applications in one interface.

Anoop says that presence is an XML document that aggregates information from multiple entities. Gordon points out that presence is really one aspect of one's real-time identity, which changes moment-to-moment. I prefer to look at presence as a stream rather than a document, but I suppose that's the Jabber way.

Posted on 2005-06-22 at 09:12. File under jabber.

~ link ~

CTC in NYC

Chatting about collaboration.

I'm at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in New York City right now. Looks like a good group. Blogging may be light or heavy depending on how good the wifi access is.

James Surowiecki just used the word "typative" to describe people who produce a lot of words on mailing lists, wikis, chat rooms, etc. I like that one!

Posted on 2005-06-22 at 07:53. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2005-06-20

SoC V

Further advice for Summer of Code applicants.

If you applied for Google's Summer of Code program and you are savvy enough to read this blog (or Planet Jabber), here is some advice: if you did not provide detailed information (full project description, task list, deadlines, milestones, your coding background, etc.), then your project probably won't get approved, because otherwise it's really hard to figure out if your project is worthy. There were 121 Jabber-related applications. I've deleted or rejected 21 of those because they were utterly lame ("I want to work on Jabber, it's cool") or duplicates. That leaves 100, and of those 55 were not really worth looking at further (IMHO) because they simply did not provide enough information. If that was true of your application and you can still update it, do so; if not, send me updated information and I can add it to your application. Otherwise, I'll focus on the 45 applications that were informative enough to evaluate further, and the other four Jabber Council members will probably do the same. Just so you know. ;-)

Posted on 2005-06-20 at 14:45. File under jabber.

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2005-06-19

Of Course

Eradicating lazy phrases.

In the passage from Alexander Baumgarten that I quoted earlier today, the author asserted "it is entirely evident that...." In my youth I accepted such statements, but over time I've found them more and more irksome, since I think they are merely a substitute for reasoned argument. The lazy thinker (and writer) says that "of course", "certainly", "obviously", "evidently", "indubitably" his position is correct and that of his opponent is wrongheaded; the clear thinker and writer never uses such lazy phrases. (I must admit that I sometimes use the word "naturally"; but I think that some things are indeed natural, whereas nothing is obvious.)

Posted on 2005-06-19 at 19:57. File under language.

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English

Language and liberty.

Thanks to a recommendation from Claire Wolfe, I've just read a delightful and insightful history of the English language: Our Marvelous Native Tongue by Robert Claiborne. I found several aspects of Claiborne's treatment especially interesting. First, he is not shy about celebrating the English language as the greatest vehicle for communication in the history of humankind. That's not jingoism: Claiborne points out that English has three times as many words as its nearest "competitor" (French) and continues to borrow and create words at a faster pace than other tongues, thus making possible a range and subtlety of expression that no other language can match. Second, he connects the incredible flexibility of English with the flexibilty of Anglospheric customs and institutions: for Claiborne, language and liberty go hand-in-hand. More than any other major culture, the Anglosphere has been open to emergent orders rather than imposed orders; not for the British or Americans the centralized linguistic planning of the Académie Française. No, folks in the Anglosphere are pretty darn libertarian about language, which is not unconnected with the fact that they tend to be more libertarian about society as well. Not surprisingly, Claiborne comes down closer to the linguistic descriptivists than he does to the linguistic prescriptivists. After all, our language has always been changing -- from Indo-European to proto-Germanic to the Old English of the Angles and Jutes and Saxons to the Middle English of Chaucer to the Modern English we know today. Common sense, good taste, and clear expression are always in style, but prescriptivism is mere muddleheadedness. An English settled and prescribed for all time would not be our free, living, ever-changing English.

A free folk need a living language. May we English-speakers always have our language and our liberty.

Posted on 2005-06-19 at 15:57. File under language.

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Common Markets

Anglosphere vs. Eurosphere.

A recent article in The Economist discussed some intriguing differences between the European Union and the American Union (i.e., the USA). One of the reasons the American Union has been so successful is that it has the kind of common market that Europeans still can only dream about. America had a common currency hundreds of years before the Europeans, but America also has a common language (which Europe never will have, despite the use of English as a language of commerce) and (for the most part) a common culture, which makes it quite easy for Americans to move from one part of the country to another in search of economic oppotunity. If times are bad in Massachusetts or Minnesota, folks who live there simply move to Colorado or California; if times are bad in Germany or Greece, folks who live there are unlikely to move to Sweden or Spain. Political economists like to say that if goods are not allowed to cross borders, people will. But they have paid less attention to what happens when people can and will move with alacrity from one location to another. I think part of what we are witnessing in Europe is that it's not possible to create a true common market with only a common currency; one needs also a common language and culture. If that's true, then there are brighter prospects for cooperation and closeness between Anglosphere countries like America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, and Ireland than there are between European nations as disparate as Portugal and Poland, France and Finland, Germany and Greece. I wish the Europeanists good luck; but they have a tough row to hoe.

Posted on 2005-06-19 at 15:25. File under society.

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Aestheticae

The logic of perception.

Although philosophers and critics are happy to use the term "aesthetics", few have read the short treatise in which that term was coined. The book is Alexander Baumgarten's Reflections on Poetry -- actually Meditationes Philosophicae de Nonnulis ad Poema Pertinentibus, written in modern Latin and first published in 1735 (Baumgarten expanded upon the topic in his Aesthetica of 1750-8, which as far as I know has not yet been translated into any modern vernacular). In this book, Baumgarten, one of the later rationalists, asserted in quasi-Euclidean fashion a cumulative series of definitions and derivations about what he called "philosophical poetry". His definition of aesthetics comes in the antepenultimate and penultimate sections of the Reflections on Poetry, rendered as follows in the 1954 translation by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (University of California Press, pp. 77-78):

§115. Philosophical poetics is (by §9) the science guiding sensate discourse to perfection; and since in speaking we have those representations which we communicate, philosophical poetics presupposes in the poet a lower cognitive faculty. It would now be the task of logic in its broader sense to guide this faculty in the sensate cognition of things, but he who knows the state of our logic will not be unaware how uncultivated this field is. What then? If logic by its very definition should be restricted to the rather narrow limits to which it is as a matter of fact confined, would it not count as the science of knowing things philosophically, that is, as the science for the direction for the higher cognitive faculty in apprehending the truth? Well, then. Philosophers might still find occasion, not without ample reward, to inquire also into those devices by which they might improve the lower faculties of knowing, and sharpen them, and apply them more happily for the benefit of the whole world. Since psychology affords sound principles, we have no doubt that there could be available a science which might direct the lower cognitive faculty in knowing things sensately.

§116. As our definition is at hand, a precise designation can easily be devised. The Greek philosophers and the Church fathers have already carefully distinguished between things perceived [ αισθητα ] and things known [ νοητα ]. It is entirely evident that they did not equate things known with things of sense, since they honored with this name things also removed from sense (therefore, images). Therefore, things known are to be known by the superior faculty as the object of logic; things perceived are to be known by the inferior faculty, as the object of the science of perception, or aesthetic [ aestheticae ].

Baumgarten held that aesthetics is not primarily the philosophy of art, of the beautiful, or of the sublime; rather, it is a psychological science that would do as much to clarify perceptual knowledge as logic had done to clarify conceptual knowledge. Granted, it is arguable how much logic has truly contributed to the clarification of human concepts (personally I think we are more indebted to the agonistic pursuits of scientists than to the armchair theorizing of philosophers and logicians); but I find it interesting that Baumgarten strongly associated aesthetic with the task of "knowing things sensately" and thus granted it an epistemological stature and importance that is too often missing from analyses of the arts.

Posted on 2005-06-19 at 15:03. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

2005-06-13

Premature

IM, blogs, and social networking.

In the latest installment of his critique of social networking applications, Stowe Boyd argues again for their integration into ways that people really work and communicate over the Internet, especially instant messaging and weblogs. He further observes:

MSN and AOL have fiddled around with integration of the most obvious social tools -- instant messaging and blogs -- but I am waiting expectantly to see something huge come out of Google and Yahoo in this area. Google is going to launch its own Firefox-based browser, and integrating instant messaging (from Picasa?), blogging, and son-of-Orkut friend of a friend stuff should follow. Ditto with Yahoo's integration of Flickr (which was an instant messaging tool before it was a social networking photo world), including it's blogging capablities, into the Yahoo Messenger and Groups world.

Well, that's all fine and I expect it to happen, but there are plenty of folks who don't necessarily want to get into bed with MSN, AOL, Yahoo, or Google. For them, decentralized solutions are needed -- and for that, we need integration of decentralized IM, blogging, and social networking technologies. My conclusion: we need a conversation between Jabber folks and WordPress folks (among others) to explore this space and build tools that are under the individual's control. I was chatting about this stuff the other day with one of the Google Summer of Code applicants and I think there are exciting possibilities here. Stay tuned...

Posted on 2005-06-13 at 10:55. File under technology.

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Internet Epistemology

Wikipedia and the centralized construction of knowledge.

To me, Jon Udell's post on Wikipedia and the social construction of knowledge points up some problems with the centralized construction of knowledge. Yes, Wikipedia is cool, but attempting to build one true centralized repository of knowledge makes that repository a more desirable target for those who would manipulate your understanding of the world. Better, I think, to pursue a more decentralized approach -- not one community of knowledge, but many communities of knowledge. After all, decentralization is the Internet way, no?

Posted on 2005-06-13 at 10:49. File under technology.

~ link ~

2005-06-08

Revision-Ism

Dictionary fixes.

About fifteen years ago I wrote the first version of The Ism Book for a friend of mine. In 1996 I placed it online (it was tailor-made for hypertext) but I have not revised it since. Amazingly, people still use it as a reference, which scares me a bit because I now find the definitions embarrassingly biased in places. So I've decided to bite the bullet by updating the whole thing. In the last five days or so I've worked my way through the definitions under letters A and B, and I'm now up to "cognitivism". I hope to maintain the momentum and finish these changes in the next few months, but I won't post any of the changed definitions until I'm done since I've modified the XML format and there are numerous cross-references in the text. Stay tuned for updates!

Posted on 2005-06-08 at 21:04. File under philosophy.

~ link ~

Byzantine Catholics

A lesser-known Christian sect.

Three blocks from my house can be found the Holy Protection of the Mother of God Byzantine Catholic Church. Since I often walk by this church, I naturally became interested in the exact nature of these Byzantine Catholics. It turns out that Byzantine Catholics (also called Eastern Catholics) derive from the Christian community of Constantinople, from which missionaries were sent to many parts of eastern Europe. Unlike the Eastern Orthodox and Russian Orthodox branches of Christianity, Eastern Catholics recognize the Pope in Rome as the head of the Catholic Church but differ from Roman Catholics in their rites and customs (e.g., their celebration of the Liturgy). The Eastern Catholics seem to be subdivided along ethnic lines, thus the existence of separate Ruthenian, Belarussian, Romanian, Russian, and Ukrainian jurisdictions. The church in my neighborhood is of the Ruthenian jurisdiction. (Ruthenia or Subcarpathia is a small area formerly comprising the far eastern tip of Czechoslovakia to the east of the Carpathian Mountains, now known as the Transcarpathian province of Ukraine, whose primary towns are Uzhgorod and Mukachevo. During the time when I was teaching English in Czechoslovakia, a loony politician of the far right named Miroslav Sládek loudly agitated for the return of this region -- in Czech "Podkarpatská Rus" -- to Czechoslovakia, but his irredentist claims didn't score many points with the voters.)

Posted on 2005-06-08 at 20:53. File under society.

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Slip-Sliding Away

DocBook to Keynote to PowerPoint?

As mentioned, I'm participating in two panels at the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference. Unfortunately, it seems that the CTC folks will accept slides only in PowerPoint format (is PowerPoint the only recognized collaborative technology for presentations?). That poses a bit of a problem for someone like me, who uses only OS X and once in a while Debian GNU/Linux. Rumor has it that you can export Keynote files to PowerPoint format, and I have a trial version of Keynote that I haven't opened yet, so I think I'll compose my slides in DocBook Slides, transform them into Keynote's XML format using the stylesheet developed by Zveno, then export the Keynote slides to PowerPoint format. Wish me luck! ;-)

Posted on 2005-06-08 at 15:57. File under technology.

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SoC IV

Summer of Code discussions continue.

I neglected to post here about the fact that the JSF now has a page up about our involvement with Google's Summer of Code program. I've been having some good discussions with potential applicants, advising them about the program, bouncing around project ideas, etc. Ping me via Jabber if you're interested in participating -- the application deadline is June 14!

Posted on 2005-06-08 at 14:47. File under jabber.

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IRIs

Identifying XMPP entities.

Well, I finally decided to pull the trigger by submitting an Internet-Draft defining An Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) Scheme for XMPP. This document supersedes the old draft defining a URI scheme for XMPP. What's the difference, you ask? Well, XMPP allows fully internationalized addresses (you're not limited to US-ASCII characters), so it makes sense to use IRIs rather than URIs. If people really need to convert an XMPP IRI into US-ASCII characters, they can use the conversion rules in RFC 3987. An IRI still conforms to the anyURI datatype, so no schemas need to change. All in all it seems like the right thing to do. Hopefully I've defined the IRI scheme correctly in that I-D, but I'm sure I'll hear about it if I haven't. ;-) Once again (cf. our use of stringprep), XMPP seems to be blazing a trail with regard to re-use of IETF internationalization technologies.

Posted on 2005-06-08 at 14:29. File under jabber.

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Disobey Authority

An eloquent example of emergent order.

This article on the evacuation of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 provides an eloquent example of how order emerges from the actions of people who possess what Hayek called knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. In other words, disobey authority!

Posted on 2005-06-08 at 10:53. File under society.

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2005-06-02

Reconsidering Ajax?

XMPP vs. XMLHttpRequest.

In reconsidering Ajax, Adam Bosworth, seems to be considering XMPP:

The browser isn't a good listener to external events. If you want to build an application, for example, to show you instantly when someone bids or a price changes, it is hard. You can poll, but poll too frequently and the application starts to feel sluggish and it isn't easy to do this. What you really want is an event driven model where in addition to the events like typing the page can describe events like an XMPP message or a VOIP request or a data-changed post for an ATOM feed.

Polling bad. Sure, you can use XMLHttpRequest to your heart's content, but isn't it better to push events to the browser than to continually check to see if something interesting has happened? The core XMPP protocol might solve some of the difficulties with listening for events in Ajax, as might the XMPP publish-subscribe extension.

Just a thought. ;-)

Posted on 2005-06-02 at 21:19. File under jabber.

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SoC III

Googling along.

You may have noticed that the Jabber Software Foundation is now listed as a mentoring organization at the Google Summer of Code page. Read the Participant FAQ for more details. Hopefully we'll have a more official list of possible project ideas up tomorrow (more official than some musings in my blog, that is).

Posted on 2005-06-02 at 21:09. File under jabber.

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Just Say No

European Constitution, R.I.P.

Since I am half French and half Dutch, I must say it warmed my heart that the French said "non" and the Dutch said "nee" to the European Constitution in the span of a few days. David Carr's obituary is classic:

Her all too brief life started out with glamour and hope and ended with controversy and acrimony. But, what she lacked in longevity she made up for in impact, holding an entire continent in her thrall. She was the "It" girl of Europe and there could scarce have been a single Prime Minister, President, King or Bishop who did not want to walk into a room with her draped across his arm.

But it was her qualities of impeccable breeding that gave rise to resentments as well as plaudits. For everyone that she seduced with her charms, she vexed with her arrogance. For all those that were willing to flirt with her, there were others that feared her embrace. In the end she was brought low by the little people she was born to rule over.

As much as any analysis of the Constitution is possible at all, then the final one must be that she was a puzzle draped in an enigma. Even those closest to her admitted that she was difficult to read and even harder to interpret. Despite all earnest attempts to present her as something coherent and friendly, she remained stubbornly opaque and inpenetrable; a capricious, whimsical, moody, temperamental, volatile, eccentric, arbitrary, erratic, fickle, inconstant coquette whose last act of defiance is to take her unfathomable mysteries with her to the grave.

Whither Europe? Heck if I know, but at least the people have spoken resoundingly against those elitist bureaucrats in Brussels.

Anglosphere, anyone?

Posted on 2005-06-02 at 20:57. File under politics.

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CC Meta

Automating copyright license discovery.

It'd be cool if smart search engines could automagically find web pages that are offered under one of the Creative Commons licenses (I prefer to place my works into the public domain, but CC makes that possible, too). For reasons unknown to mere mortals like me, CC recommends placing some RDF in an HTML comment as the proper way to "tag" a web page (Uche explains more here). Well, gosh, who thought that up? Are we not in possession of fine XHTML metadata technologies like the <meta/> tag? Some years ago, Simon Willison stated his preference for putting the following meta element in the HTML <head/> of your documents:

<link rel="copyright" href="some-license-url"/>

Makes eminent sense to me. I've added the relevant markup to all my blog pages, pointing (of course) to <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>.

Posted on 2005-06-02 at 20:37. File under technology.

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2005-06-01

Slow Time

Poetry and language.

The other day, Uche argued for the continued relevance -- indeed, the increased importance -- of poetry in today's fast-paced times, since the concentrated and often difficult nature of poetic language forces the reader to slow down. Yet (as Uche knows) it is more than just diction: it is also the meter (or, more broadly, the rhythm) that induces a kind of slow time when one reads a poem. Poetry is a temporal art in much the same way music is -- and in one respect, a poem enforces slow time even more viscerally than a piece of music does because usually you perform the poem (by reading it silently or aloud to yourself) rather than having it performed for you at a poetry reading or by means of a recording. The post-modernists would call this co-creating the work, and for once they would be right!

One likely theory about the emergence of the arts (advanced for example by Ellen Dissanayake) is that human life started to become more complex around 30,000 years ago -- population densities increased, human bands started to interact more often and in more challenging ways with other groups, long-distance trade began to emerge as a key human pursuit, technology (such as it was) improved faster, and so on (sound familiar?). In the face of that increased pace of change and before the emergence of writing, humans needed something to direct attention to important life lessons and improve coherence across larger groups of people. Dissanayake calls this "making special". Poetry, music, paintings (as in European caves), and other forms of patterned representation emerged as ways to structure information; some of the resulting art-forms also structured time in significant ways, slowing it down and making time, too, into something special. While there can be complexity in poetic language or musical formalism, I think the key to these art-forms is not that complexity per se but the fact that their linguistic or musical materials are different from what we normally experience -- and different in ways that set them apart from humdrum existence.

Does the slow time of poetic experience have special meaning today? As Uche observes and everyone knows first-hand, life is getting faster and faster. We live in a culture of immediate gratification, sounds bites, the latest news, instant messaging (because email just isn't fast enough -- mea culpa!), continuous partial attention, and what Stuart Brand calls fashion (not clothing styles, but the ever-churning monthly and weekly and daily and hourly changes in what's cool, hot, new, interesting, and different). In contrast to that culture, the slow time of poetic experience induces reflection and introspection -- slowing, pausing, stopping, puzzling, treading, absorbing, and eventually delighting in the meaning of difficult words, fresh metaphors, strange word orders, odd grammatical constructions, assonance, alliteration, rhyme, meter, and all the other tricks of the poetic trade.

In that pursuit of slow time, I find nothing as valuable as new poetry. While I love to read old and even ancient poetry (my favorites being Horace and Sappho), poems by authors from the last hundred years (my favorites include Langston Hughes, Walter Kaufmann, and Timothy Steele) often speak to me more deeply because their language and concerns are more naturally my own. Unfortunately, too many poets of the last hundred years thought it was perfectly acceptable to write poems without much form or difficulty -- what Robert Frost called the equivalent of tennis without a net. Yet it is precisely form (meter) and that sense of something familiar yet different and special that induces poetic "slow time". Thankfully, more and more poets are rediscovering their craft and the roots of their art, with the result that they are again making something special.

Here's to new poetry!

Posted on 2005-06-01 at 21:53. File under literature.

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Introspect

Meet the composer.

Recently I received a friendly note from Padraig O'Connor, composer of a wonderful piece for small orchestra entitled "Introspect" (I mention it on my music recommendations page). His message spurred me to break out some of my older recordings of 20th century music from the British Isles, in particular some fine Gerald Finzi such as the Eclogue and both the Prelude and the Romance for string orchestra. Truly, I think Introspect compares quite favorably with the Finzi (I'm more fond of "Introspect" myself). I can still visualize the stretch of road on which I first heard the piece -- Route 523 in scenic Sergeantsville, New Jersey ... it must have been the college radio station of Princeton University that played it. Mr. O'Connor reports that he has written a fair amount of other music, such as a "Reverie" for double bass and wind orchestra (scored for double pass and piano in a performance several years ago in New York City). As you can imagine, that piece in particular piqued my interest since I'm aiming to record some works for electric bass myself. It's a shame that composers of O'Connor's calibre and sensitivity are not more widely known (the recording on which I found "Introspect" is long out of print).

Posted on 2005-06-01 at 20:27. File under music.

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SoC II

Some project ideas.

OK, so Google's got this Summer of Code thing going on and I'm talking with the Google folks about setting up the JSF as a mentor. The question arises: what are some good Jabber-related projects to work on? Naturally there are lots of existing open-source projects that could use a helping hand -- clients, servers, components, libraries, and more. Or you could start a new project. Here's a first pass at some possibilities (by no means an exhaustive list!):

• Help one of the existing projects achieve full compliance with the XMPP RFCs, the Basic IM Protocol Suite, or the Intermediate IM Protocol Suite.
• If you're good with user interfaces, help make one of the existing clients more user-friendly.
• Write a plugin for one of the existing clients to support a major JEP (such as multi-user chat, file transfer, XHTML-IM, or publish-subscribe) or perhaps some new functionality like off-the-record messaging or inline MathML (use your imagination!).
• Help convert mu-conference into an external component.
• Write an external component that supports the HTTP binding protocol (JEP-0124) -- kind of boring but oh-so necessary (well, in fact, it's pretty cool for wireless devices).
• Write a compliance testing platform for testing clients and servers -- even more boring, but also necessary.
• Work on SVG over XMPP, e.g. by contributing to The Coccinella or to the Inkboard project.
• Write a dedicated publish-subscribe client for reading RSS feeds provided over a service like PubSub.com or Mimir.
• Add VoIP support to a Jabber client using TINS or some other protocol.

Posted on 2005-06-01 at 16:59. File under jabber.

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New Poetry

A discussion list.

Thanks to a fine entry in Uche Ogbuji's blog, I've just discovered and signed up for the New Poetry discussion list. It'll be fun to once again be on a mailing list devoted to something other than technology.

Posted on 2005-06-01 at 14:49. File under literature.

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Summer of Code

JSF as mentor.

Several folks have pinged me today about whether the Jabber Software Foundation could be a mentoring organization for those who want to participate in Google's Summer of Code program for university students. So far I don't see any reason why not (some further investigation is required on my part), so if you have an interest please ping me via Jabber.

Posted on 2005-06-01 at 14:03. File under jabber.

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Gotham Bound

Talking tech in NYC.

It looks like I'm going to be on two panel discussions at the upcoming Collaborative Technologies Conference in NYC:

• The Standards Debate, And Why It Matters to You (June 21 @ 14:15) -- a discussion (debate?) between me and Henning Schulzrinne of my alma mater Columbia University regarding standards for real-time communications, moderated by Irwin Lazar of the Burton Group.
• Open Source Collaboration Solutions (June 22 @ 11:00) -- a relatively free-form discussion between me, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, and Peter Theony of TWiki, moderated by Eugene Eric Kim of Blue Oxen.

It's a brief visit and I've already got a few other meetings scheduled, so if you want to get together let me know soon.

Posted on 2005-06-01 at 13:39. File under technology.

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Give Me Liberty

More presence work.

About six weeks ago, the Liberty Alliance Project released a presence specification, which I just happened to author (with much help from other Liberty participants). Its meaning will not be immediately obvious to those who are not familiar with Liberty protocols, but it provides a way to re-use IMPS (Wireless Village), PIDF (SIP/SIMPLE), and XMPP (Jabber) presence data within the context of Liberty Alliance deployments. (More here.) I still need to write the WSDL definition for the presence service, though...

Posted on 2005-06-01 at 11:47. File under jabber.

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