one small voice

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

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2006-06-29

Favicon

Getting visual.

Well I added a picture of me to my blog template the other day, and today I created a favicon. What is that little image in your browser's location bar? Why, the keys of stpeter, naturally! :-)

Posted on 2006-06-29 at 21:49. File under personal.

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Federating

Catching up on Jabber servers.

I just added about 15 servers to the XMPP Federation. Unfortunately, I got behind on servicing federation requests there for a while (in part because we got rid of phpmyadmin for security reasons), so I've got some catching up to do. Still another 20+ to go! (If your server hasn't been added yet, please be patient -- I'll add it soon.)

Posted on 2006-06-29 at 21:23. File under jabber.

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IMbox

More news from the Jabber/XMPP front.

As seen on the Internet...

Recent new Jabber servers on the network include SixApart (creators of LiveJournal), Interactive Gaming Systems, and jabber.se -- yes, the XMPP Federation continues to grow!
Magnus Henoch is coding up support for personal eventing as a patch to the ejabberd codebase
The FreeSwitch guys continue to work on fun Jingle stuff
There's a WordPress plugin for showing Jabber presence on your WordPress blog
XMPP pubsub is powering the World Cup Live Ticker thanks to ejabberd and Process-one

Posted on 2006-06-29 at 10:41. File under jabber.

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2006-06-28

Boarding

The mashup of SVG and XMPP.

I just posted a summary of the groupchat meeting we held a few days ago about SVG whiteboarding over Jabber/XMPP. We've still got quite a bit of work to do, but I think we're making progress.

Posted on 2006-06-28 at 17:11. File under jabber.

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OpenRecord

Putting code into the public domain.

Today I've exchanged a few emails with Brian Skinner of the OpenRecord project, which puts all its code into the public domain. Good for them! I promised Brian that I would finish my essay-in-progress entitled "Who's Afraid of the Public Domain?" so I really must get to work on that...

Posted on 2006-06-28 at 17:05. File under publicdomain.

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Edglings

The people formerly known as the audience.

In commenting on an essay entitled The People Formerly Known as the Audience, Stowe Boyd coins a new word for those of us out on the edge who are both consumers and producers of information: edglings. I like it! And as Stowe says (paraphrasing Dave Winer), "Once power migrates to the edge, the edglings are unlikely to give it back."

Posted on 2006-06-28 at 15:11. File under society.

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2006-06-27

A Real Event

Pubsub standardization update.

Woot! Today the Jabber Council agreed to publish the revised version of JEP-0060: Publish-Subscribe. This is a major revision based on implementation experience, and I've been working on it since last December. As a result, the Jabber Council has also issued a Last Call regarding JEP-0163, a simplified profile for personal eventing via pubsub to be used in applications like extended presence. (We also issued a Last Call on JEP-0059: Result Set Manipulation.) Progress feels good.

Posted on 2006-06-27 at 15:09. File under jabber.

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ClaimID

Claiming what's yours.

Thanks to a blog entry from Fred Stutzman, I just discovered ClaimID, "a service that lets you manage your online identity". The cool thing is that it uses the MicroID technology that Jeremie announced a few months back (this blog was probably the first website in the world to use MicroIDs). So naturally I had to sign up for a ClaimID page. Not only is this a cool service, but the website is simple, intuitive, and beautiful. Well done! But I wonder if ClaimID will mind that this blog now has two MicroIDs in the meta tags...

Posted on 2006-06-27 at 14:44. File under technology.

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2006-06-26

On Randian Style

My latest published essay.

I forgot to mention recently that an essay of mine entitled "Image and Integration in Ayn Rand's Descriptive Style" was published in the Spring 2006 issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Expect me to post it online in three months or so.

Posted on 2006-06-26 at 20:55. File under literature.

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Using XMPP URIs

A how-to page.

I've created a stub page on the Jabber wiki about how to use XMPP URIs. Feel free to expand on the information provided so far. :-)

Posted on 2006-06-26 at 12:49. File under jabber.

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2006-06-23

America and Australia

Anglospheric friendship.

Charles Krauthammer explains why he loves Australia. More fodder for strengthening friendship between America and Australia (or vice-versa).

Posted on 2006-06-23 at 21:44. File under society.

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Org Docs

Some JSF housekeeping.

Today I also scanned in and posted a bunch of official documents related to the Jabber Software Foundation (articles of incorporation and the like) -- check them out here.

Posted on 2006-06-23 at 21:07. File under jabber.

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Drafty

XMPP at the IETF.

Today I submitted updated versions of two XMPP-related Internet-Drafts:

One of these days I'll update the Jabber-ID email header spec, too. (I'm not sure whether it's worth moving forward with draft-saintandre-xmpp-pidf...)

Posted on 2006-06-23 at 20:46. File under jabber.

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2006-06-22

Got Nouns?

Further insights into Anglospheric thinking.

Sometimes you can glean a lot of folk philosophy from language. Here are the 25 most common nouns in English, which I think reveal quite a bit about the Anglosphere sense of life:

time
person
year
way
day
thing
man
world
life
hand
part
child
eye
woman
place
work
week
case
point
government
company
number
group
problem
fact

I'd like to see this list compared to lists from other languages...

Posted on 2006-06-22 at 09:53. File under language.

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2006-06-21

Leading Indicators

Economic growth and the status of women.

In an interview posted at african-geopolitics.org, economic historian David Landes (author of The Wealth and Povery of Nations) states:

The best indicator of the potential of growth and development of a nation is the status and role of women. Their exclusion means depriving the country of an important volume of workforce and talent. Moreover, their exclusion also undermines the desire of men to achieve success; spoiled from their childhood and treated as princes, men don't feel the need to prove themselves.

There is, I think, much truth in that statement. But then again I'm a female chauvinist.

Posted on 2006-06-21 at 21:51. File under society.

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Interworking

From XMPP to SIMPLE and back again.

As the joke goes among protocol geeks, the great thing about technology standards is that there are so many choose from. That's true in the instant messaging and presence space, where we have both SIMPLE and XMPP. For the last 18 months or so, I've been working here and there on an Internet-Draft that defines how to enable basic interoperability between these two technologies. The document (which has perhaps the longest title in IETF history) can be found here (HTML) and here (TXT). Two weeks ago I issued an unofficial last call for feedback regarding this spec on the SIMPLE and XMPP discussion lists. After IETF 66 I plan to request a standards action regarding this spec, so send in your feedback soon!

Posted on 2006-06-21 at 16:03. File under jabber.

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XMPP URIs Again

The state of standardization.

Over at Educause, Stuart Yeates from the University of Oxford wonders about the state of standardization regarding XMPP URIs:

In an ideal world, of course, the Jabber/XMPP community would get their act into gear and finish standardising already so we could make direct reference to the xmpp: URI scheme.

Well, Stuart, the IESG approved of draft-saintandre-xmpp-iri-04 back on May 8th. However, the IETF wheels can move slowly sometimes -- especially since that Internet-Draft is an individual submission, so there's no guarantee that the RFC Editor will formally publish it as an RFC any time soon (working group submissions take priority). But the document is in the RFC Editor queue so it's only a matter of time at this point, and IMHO it's quite safe to start using XMPP URIs. If you have any questions, feel free to ping me via Jabber. :-)

Posted on 2006-06-21 at 10:42. File under jabber.

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University Park, Denver

Website updates.

Last night I met with new UPCC president Bill Winn, communications chair Rosemary Stoffel, and my partner in crime Henry Ammons about the website for Denver's University Park neighborhood (where I moved last September). We're using MediaWiki as the content engine so it's easy to update, though the software has its quirks (e.g., modifying the templates is a bit of a pain). But at least I figured out how to link to the RSS feed. Now if only Google would learn that www.upcc.us deserves to be the highest ranking page for searches on University Park Denver... :-)

Posted on 2006-06-21 at 10:29. File under personal.

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2006-06-19

Either-Or?

Markets, governments, and voluntary interaction.

Seth Wagoner (whose blog I've found via Stowe Boyd) quotes an interview with George Soros as follows:

We need to maintain law and order. We need to maintain peace in the world. We need to protect the environment. We need to have some degree of social justice, equality of opportunity. The markets are not designed to take care of those needs. That's a political process. And the market fundamentalists have managed to reduce providing those public goods.

So we have a distinction between market fundamentalism and, presumably, government enlightenment (those wonderfully reality-based bureaucrats).

Since I'm essentially a market anarchist, I tend to think that many more human needs can be met through the market than people like Soros might imagine -- yes, even needs for law, order, peace, justice, and environmental protection. But the choice is not only between profit-oriented companies and government force. There is a wide range of voluntary solutions that do not require the exchange of money -- mediation, arbitration, charitable giving, neighborhood organizations, international networks, educational institutions, student exchanges, boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, public protests, and much more. These endeavors share with market exchanges an essentially voluntary nature (which government force distinctly lacks). So call me a volutarist rather than a market fundamentalist, but no matter the nomenclature I encourage people like Soros to keep their political processes to themselves -- or, at the least, to an absolute minimum.

Posted on 2006-06-19 at 21:27. File under politics.

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2006-06-18

Uncharted Waters

More interesting times.

A week or so ago I linked to an essay by Robin Hanson on the causes of economic growth. As I've noted before, Hanson has enunciated a provocative model for thinking about economic growth over the next 40 to 60 years: he argues, based on previous phases of growth in economic production, that we may be on the cusp of a phase transition comparable to that from hunting and gathering to farming, or from farming to industry. But every such phase shift requires a mechanism -- in particular, new modes of production and societal organization that overcome the limitations inherent in the prior phase. For the possible next stage, Hanson (in an essay entitled "The Economics of Brain Simulations") proposes brain simulation as the technology that is most likely to have the required impact on economic growth.

Now, I am not deeply versed in the science and technology of artificial intelligence so I don't pretend to know whether brain simulation will be developed at some point in the next 50 years. But to my mind, Hanson doesn't help his case with some reasoning that seems highly suspect, especially coming from someone who is a professor of economics. Consider:

The suggestion that the world economy will soon double every week or two, after a transition lasting only a few years, seems so far from ordinary experience as to be, well, "crazy." Of course similar predictions made before the previous transitions would have seemed similarly crazy. Nevertheless, it seems hard to take this scenario seriously without at least some account of how it could be possible.

Now we cannot expect to get a very detailed account about a new growth mode. After all, most economics has been designed to explain the actual social worlds that we have seen so far, and not all the possible social worlds that might exist. And we are still pretty ignorant about the fundamental drivers of the previous modes. But we do want at least a sketchy account. Of the many future technologies that technologists have forecast, which could plausibly have anywhere near this impact on the economy?

One helpful hint is that innovations in larger economic sectors can produce larger social impacts. In the United States we spend about 1.5% of income on farming, 1.5% on mining, 2% on gas and electricity, 2.5% on communications, 3% on transportation, and 3.5% on construction. These small fractions make it hard to see how innovations in these sectors could induce much faster growth. For such drama, we must look beyond the usual technology favorites, such space colonization, fusion energy, air cars, sea cities, or picture phones. We probably must even look beyond radical nanotechnology; nanotech might dramatically reduce the cost of capital for manufacturing, but we only spend about 5% of income there.

A more promising fraction is the 70% of income we now pay for human labor. Greatly lower[ing] this cost could have a huge impact. And robotics or artificial intelligence good enough to substitute wholesale for most human labor might just greatly lower such costs.

It strikes me as plain silly to say that Americans spend a cumulative ~20% of national income on farming, mining, gas, electricity, communications, transportation, construction, and manufacturing, but 70% on labor (it's not clear what the other 10% is, since Hanson's figures don't add up to 100%). What, I ask, is this "labor"? Isn't there labor involved in farming, mining, gas and electricity production and distribution, communications, transportation, construction, and manufacturing? Sure there is. Furthermore, "labor" is not an undifferentiated entity. The 70% of the economy that does not fall into Hanson's other categories consists of such a wide range of jobs as to be incommensurable: nurses, doctors, dentists, psychologists, pharmacists, chiropractors, veterinarians, gardeners, cooks, waiters, florists, teachers, salespeople, marketers, research scientists, chemists, computer programmers, mechanical engineers, architects, actors, singers, dancers, athletes, journalists, shop owners, entrepreneurs, accountants, lawyers, plumbers, car repairmen, customer service representatives, security guards, policemen, and hundreds of other kinds of workers all provide "labor", it seems. But to lump all their efforts into "labor" ignores the particular circumstances of the knowledge, skills, and abilities involved. I suppose the Singularitarians would argue that once brain simulation has been invented, we'll simply copy the brain patterns of people working in the relevant job and upload those copies to the relevant machine, then off we go. The result, we are led to expect, will be florist robots, chiropractor robots, gardener robots, waiter robots, actor robots (perhaps one and the same as waiter robots), car repair robots, sales robots, lawyer robots, psychologist robots, nurse robots, architect robots, programming robots, teacher robots, police robots, cook robots, plumber robots, customer service robots, journalist robots, entrepreneur robots, and all the rest.

We have an intuitive sense that some of these robots are likelier than others. Some of this "labor" involves specialized eye-hand coordination of the kind that would be hard to build into machines as far as we know right now. Some of this "labor" is tied to the human form, to human senses, to human feeling, to human empathy, to human presence, to human reactions in the context of other humans and their unpredictable actions, even to human irrationality (e.g., entrepreneurs are hopelessly optimistic and unrealistic). I suppose the AI folks would argue that once brain simulation has been invented, we'll simply build ever better simulations -- including human foibles as well as human strengths, human feelings as well as human reason, and all the rest.

Me, I tend to think that AI will not simulate us idiosyncratic humans, any more than printing presses simulate handwriting, tractors simulate oxen, airplanes simulate birds, cars simulate horses, boats simulate fish, or light bulbs simulate candles. If we ever develop strong artificial intelligence, it will by definition be artificial, alien, other -- not human.

That leaves open the question: what will the next economic phase shift look like? The shift from hunting and gathering to farming did not change what was produced (still mostly food) but did change how it was produced (and as a result introduced new professions and specializations even if on a small scale, new power relations in the form of hierarchical organization, new economic and social phenomena). Eventually those new things became in some sense characteristic of society even though the bulk of the economy was still dominated by farming. The shift from farming to industry resulted eventually in great automation of food production and a wholesale movement of people from farm and cottage workshop to factory, from country to city, from agriculture to manufacturing; more recently (over the last 80+ years) from factory to office, from city to suburb, from manufacturing to services.

It's not clear to me what the next phase shift will bring. The replacement of manufacturing by nanotechnological fabrication? Of myriad services by intelligent, human-focused (though not human-like) robots and machines? Will the service economy be replaced by the experience economy, just as the manufacturing economy was replaced by the service economy? Will the smart machines develop their own markets (why would they want to be involved in ours)? Will, as Hanson predicts, human labor prices drop precipitously as most "labor" is performed by machines? Or will we wily humans find new niches and create new kinds of jobs? I tend to be optimistic that humans will adapt and adjust quickly, as we tend to do when we have the freedom to try.

Naturally, not all societies have an equal freedom to try. And not all societies are at nearly the same level of development. (The evidence shows that freedom and development are not unrelated.) Today, the world still contains some few societies of hunter-gatherers, many societies that are primarily agricultural, a number of societies that are industrial (though it is doubtful whether they could have initiated the "exit" to industrialism), and a few societies that are post-industrial (mainly service-oriented). What happens when some of the post-industrial societies (most likely in the Anglosphere) initiate yet another exit, this time from 5% or 10% a year economic growth to 50% or 100% or 500% or 1000% a year growth? What will be the internal power relations in such a Singularity society, or the power relations between such a society and all other societies? What new professions will arise (and which familiar jobs will disappear)? Will an experience economy emerge in the midst of tremendous abundance? What new economic and social phenomena will the world witness?

I don't have the answers. But I do know we're heading into uncharted waters.

May you live in interesting times...

Posted on 2006-06-18 at 20:11. File under society.

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2006-06-16

IMbox

More Jabber/XMPP news.

I really need to publish another issue of the Jabber Journal one of these days. Until then, here's some news I've noted lately...

Qunu -- a Jabber-based service for finding and asking questions of experts over the Internet -- is getting rave reviews from people inside and outside the Jabber community, so Digg it
Jazz, an Eclipse-based framework for collaborative software development, seems to be using XMPP for some of its communications functionality
Mugshot, a new kind of social networking site, uses XMPP (specifically the Wildfire server) for real-time messaging
Oracle JDeveloper now includes Jabber IM support
I suppose it's old news by now, but WengoPhone 2.0 now does Jabber/XMPP for IM
Olivier Goffart is talking about how to integrate presence and messaging more deeply into the KDE4 desktop
Bill de HÓra is talking about using XMPP for grid computing (a sentiment echoed by Sam Buchanan)
Longtime Jabberite Piers Harding has a nice article about SAP and XMPP over at the SAP Developer Network
There's a new PHP library over at Blitzaffe
I've seen updated releases from Chatopus, Gajim, Linq, Agile Messenger, Spark (which recently went open-source), Tkabber, and others
SimpLite Jabber is a tool for end-to-end encryption of Jabber IM (their approach seems to be similar to JEP-0116: Encrypted Sessions)

Posted on 2006-06-16 at 10:45. File under jabber.

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2006-06-15

Islam Revisited

Asharites vs. Mutazilites yet again.

J.R. Dunn has a fine post about how the Anglosphere can help the Islamic world join the modern age. Something to do with fighting the Kharajist roots of modern-day jihadism with a renaissance of Mutazilism. It seems I posted something similar back in November 2001. I really do need to read up on Islamic intellectual history sometime...

Posted on 2006-06-15 at 19:17. File under society.

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SF

Catalyzing by the Bay.

I'm in San Francisco for the Burton Group Catalyst Conference 2006 -- I'm scheduled to participate tomorrow morning in a panel discussion on Instant Messaging & Presence: Real Progress Or Dueling Agendas? with David Marshak of IBM and Paul Haverstock of Microsoft, moderated by Mike Gotta of Burton. It should be fun!

Posted on 2006-06-15 at 18:37. File under jabber.

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2006-06-08

The Causes of Growth

Creativity: big or small?

Robin Hanson writes:

The truth is that the artistic creations or intellectual insights we most admire for their striking "creativity" matter little for economic growth. Instead, most of the innovations that matter are the tiny changes we constantly make to the millions of procedures and methods we use. And changing these procedures does not require free-spirited self-expression. Instead, it is quite natural for people to constantly think about tiny changes to their procedures as they follow those procedures. In fact, we imagine far more such changes than we can afford to pursue.

What we lack is not more suggestions for change, but better ways to identify the most promising suggestions, and ways to encourage people to pass suggestions on to those who can best act on them. If the world has become more "creative" it is mostly because our social institutions do better at these tasks; bohemian self-expression has little to do with it.

Posted on 2006-06-08 at 21:13. File under society.

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DCLXVI

666 revisited.

Heh. 666 in Roman numerals is DCLXVI. And wouldn't you know, DCLXVI.com is for sale. The price? $666.00. :-)

Posted on 2006-06-08 at 20:31. File under technology.

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2006-06-05

Soccer, American Style

An analogy of interest.

Speaking of soccer, over at Samizdata Scott Wickstein points to a New York Times article about the American national team. Although I don't pretend that the Americans will even get to the round of 16 in the upcoming World Cup, more interesting to me than the team's prospects is the team's philosophy, which commenter OrneryWP at Samizdata labels "flexibility and dogged determination". Jere Longman of the New York Times describes the American approach as "applying defensive pressure, counterattacking and playing aggressively ... relying on speed, fitness, athleticism, competitiveness, teamwork and intelligence". Alex Ferguson, the coach of Manchester United, calls it "that American thing". German soccer great Jürgen Klinsman says this optimism and confidence suffuse American attitudes of "how to deal with people, how to look at things, how to believe in yourself, how to focus on things and also to take risks, to say, 'Let's go for it.'"

American forward Landon Donovan explains:

What we're good at and why we've been successful is that we know what we are. A lot of countries pretend to be something they're not. A lot of teams like to pretend they're like the Brazilians. Well, you don't have the athletes the Brazilians do. You don't have the soccer knowledge and skill they do. We understand that. We're not the most talented team in the world, by far. But we are one of the most competitive, with the best spirit, the fittest, and with some of the best athletes. And we use that to our advantage.

Longman writes:

The American style, as Arena sees it, is defined by an ability to adapt, to shape strategies and formations according to various factors: the players available on a particular day, the opponent, the weather. Style depends on the qualities his players possess, not on predetermined notions about how they should play. In the 2002 World Cup, the Americans sat back and counterattacked in the wilting heat against Mexico, using three backs to cope with players' injuries and suspensions, and then charged hell-bent at Germany in the next game, certain that the Germans were not the better team.

American coach Bruce Arena (tellingly, he prefers the term "manager") says "We don't have the best players in the world."

I think that's part of the American approach to sports, business, technology, international relations, and a lot more. Despite worldwide perceptions of American jingoism, we don't always think we're the best. But as we have shown in everything from world wars to retail merchandising, Americans tend to apply flexibility, intelligence, speed, teamwork, communication, and determination to continually get better and better. That doesn't mean American success is guaranteed in any particular field of endeavor, whether that be automobile production, pre-university education, or soccer. But once Americans turn their attention to something, it would be foolish to count them out.

Posted on 2006-06-05 at 21:26. File under society.

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Racism: The Real Thing

The myth of European moral superiority.

Although yesterday I joked about the spurious definition of cultural racism put forward by the Seattle Public School district, racism is not a thing of the past (it was especially sad that those educational bureaucrats in Seattle said that individualism is a form of racism, since it is precisely collectivism that underlies racism). Last night, while waiting to watch the Yankee highlights on ESPN, I was shocked to see a piece on overt racism among soccer (ok, football) fans in Spain, France, Italy, and even traditionally tolerant Holland -- monkey chants directed against black players, fascist flags being waved in Italy, the Spanish national coach calling France's Thierry Henry a black shit, all punished by fines that count as a mere slap on the wrist. Now, Americans don't live in a glass house by any means -- racist epithets were routinely hurled against Jackie Robinson when he "broke the color barrier" of American professional sports, but that was in 1946, people! Since then, black American players have become heroes to Americans of all colors -- from Willie Mays and Hank Aaron to Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal. The kind of behavior that has been and is being tolerated in soccer stadiums across many countries in Europe would simply not be allowed in modern America. The next time someone blathers on about the moral superiority of Europe over America, think about how a significant minority of Europeans treat their most prominent immigrants, then weep about how they treat their least prominent.

Posted on 2006-06-05 at 20:37. File under society.

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Link-Local Messaging

How to chat when you don't have a Jabber server.

I just updated JEP-0174: Link-Local Messaging. This specification describes how to communicate in an XMPP-like fashion on local area networks, at WiFi hotspots, etc. -- all in a way that is interoperable with Apple's iChat. It's a cool feature since it enables you to chat with other people even if you don't have access to a public or private Jabber server, plus it's being added to more Jabber clients now that we have documentation for it. So go forth and implement! :-)

Posted on 2006-06-05 at 17:11. File under jabber.

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Mnenhy

You got your Jabber in my Email!

I'm now using the Mnenhy extension to Thunderbird in order to display Jabber-ID headers in the mail that I receive (such as a message I just got from Robert Quattlebaum). Nice! Now if only it showed presence, too...

Posted on 2006-06-05 at 15:33. File under jabber.

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User Nickname

Yet another XMPP extension.

Today the Jabber Software Foundation advanced to Draft status an XMPP protocol extension for user nicknames. This standardizes and extends the existing usage of nicknames in Jabber and enables users to publicize their nicknames more easily. Check it out in JEP-0172 (and special thanks to Matt Miller -- it was during a conversation with him last week that I came up with the idea for the fictional examples).

Posted on 2006-06-05 at 15:17. File under jabber.

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Jabber vs. XMPP

A terminological distinction.

Over in the jdev chatroom just now, someone asked about the distinction between the terms "Jabber" and "XMPP". I knew I had posted a message about it once on one of the jabber.org mailing lists, but it took me a while to track down the message, so I figured I'd repeat the gist here for easier future reference:

The term "Jabber" is, unfortunately, ambiguous. In 1998, Jeremie Miller invented something he called Jabber, and he released it as an open-source project on January 4, 1999. Pretty soon there were many Jabber-related open-source projects, in March 2000 a company called Jabber.com was formed, etc. Over time we have striven to disambiguate the term, thus Jeremie's server was renamed "jabberd" instead of "the Jabber server", we came up with the term "XMPP" instead of "the Jabber protocol", we formed the Jabber Software Foundation to manage the protocols, etc. I think that if "Jabber" means anything as a standalone noun, it refers to the whole ecosystem of protocols, open-source projects, products, companies, server deployments (etc.) that use the underlying XML streams technology invented by Jeremie. However, I never use "Jabber" as a standalone noun, only as an adjective -- see the third section of the usage guidelines -- thus "Jabber community", "Jabber technologies", etc. (but not "Jabber" on its own).

Ther term "XMPP" refers to the core XML streaming protocols contributed by the Jabber Software Foundation to the Internet Standards Process and subsequently published as RFCs 3920 and 3921.

Most XMPP extensions are defined in documents still called (for historical reasons) "Jabber Enhancement Proposals" or JEPs, but in my opinion it is inaccurate to say that "Jabber" = XMPP + JEPs, since there really is no one thing called "Jabber".

Posted on 2006-06-05 at 15:06. File under jabber.

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Pubsubbing

More updates to the XMPP eventing protocol.

My updates to JEP-0060 (the XMPP publish-subcribe extension) continue to move along. Half an hour ago I released 1.8pre18, which incorporates and addresses various feedback received on the Standards-JIG mailing list. Stay tuned for finalization of these modifications soon.

Posted on 2006-06-05 at 13:15. File under jabber.

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In Jabber We Trust

A proposal.

Last Friday I made public the first draft of a proposal to strengthen trust in Jabber/XMPP technologies through work on channel encryption (TLS+SASL) with ubiquitous server certificates, improved per-hop reliability, distributed monitoring of the XMPP Federation, end-to-end encryption using encrypted sessions, messaging signing using end-user certificates, and perhaps a user reputation system. Feedback and additional suggestions are welcome, so drop me a line or write about it on your own blog.

Posted on 2006-06-05 at 09:49. File under jabber.

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2006-06-04

Kotkin Rocks

Understanding America through economic geography.

Joel Kotkin is continually stimulating. In his own calm, factual way, he challenges numberless common assumptions about American society. He sees that the future of America lies not in the old-line cities but in suburbs, exurbs, and small, growing cities (especially in Florida, Texas, and the West). He values suburbia for its endless flexibility (although he recognizes that suburbs need to include more amenities and become the mini-cities they already are in many ways). He resists the siren song of the urban planners by valuing cars over trains (here's a question for the train lovers and anti-urban-sprawlists: would you still complain about the American love affair with the automobile if all cars were electrically-powered?). And his conclusions are driven not by ideology but by serious, on-the-ground economic and demographic research into why and how certain American cities are booming and others are not (in fact he extends his analysis to places like Australia and Japan, as well). Not for Kotkin the elitist jeremiads about urban sprawl, the suburb as cultural wasteland, and so on. Instead, he recognizes that America is continually reinventing itself through the relentless movement of its people in search of better jobs, improved quality of life, an enjoyable environment, scenic surroundings, cultural and educational opportunities, and a hundred other values. And because Americans so deeply value equality of opportunity, the towns and cities that thrive tend to be those that afford great space to the aspirations of the average American, also known as the middle class (I resist the latter term because I don't think America has much class consciousness in the first place). The average American doesn't care much about convenient public transportation, hip downtowns, avant-garde art galleries, or trendy restaurants, but does care a lot about good schools, low taxes, plentiful jobs, short commutes, a safe neighborhood, and a single-family home with a yard. The towns and cities that deliver those things are growing like crazy -- places like Yuma, Arizona; Reno, Nevada; and Coral City, Florida. The elites may not like it, but the facts speak for themselves. And Joel Kotkin deserves our gratitude for directing our attention to those inconvenient facts.

Posted on 2006-06-04 at 20:49. File under society.

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I Am A Cultural Racist

Government schools strike again.

Well, I don't think I'm a racist, but the administrators of the Seattle Public Schools would, since they define cultural racism as follows:

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as 'other,' different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

Well, I admit to having a future time orientation (i.e., working toward long-term goals), preferring individualism to collectivism, and upholding standards in English expression. Although I think Duke Ellington is the greatest composer in American history, I'm sure that on occasion I've identified Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as the greatest composers in the classical tradition. And no writer will ever surpass William Shakespeare as a master of English literature. So I suppose I'm guilty as charged.

Posted on 2006-06-04 at 20:13. File under society.

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Turning the Tide?

Mexico and America again.

Georgie Anne Geyer writes:

Mexico is so corrupt, so oligopolistic, so rotting inside with the privilege of the rich that it has to send its poor and its potential political activists to another country. And on top of that, it tries to blame the United States for its own failures....

But there are new voices of change, of reason, of self-awareness in Mexico, in place of the hoary anti-gringo rants: the beginnings of a transformation of the debate....

The same week of the Fox visit, for instance, The New York Times ran a stunning article headlined "Some in Mexico See Border Wall as Opportunity." It quotes men such as Jorge Santibanez, president of the College of the Northern Border, saying: "For too long, Mexico has boasted about immigrants leaving, calling them national heroes, instead of describing them as actors in a national tragedy; and it has boasted about the growth in remittances as an indicator of success, when it is really an indicator of failure"....

Surely the fact that America has awakened to the insult of its "neighbor" cynically exporting its problems, while doing nada at home, can only help Mexico and jar it to some modern sense. Ironically, the debate and the anger in the U.S. about this mammoth illegal immigration has already helped Mexico to begin to shed its dependency on America -- and to turn its energies toward its own real predators, all home-grown.

More about the corruption of the Mexican oligopoly here and here. Only through real, Anglosphere-like reform and resultant economic growth in Mexico will the immigration problem start to solve itself. (Though personally I think American could use some reform of its own, most particularly in this context reform of the horrendous Immigration and Naturalization Service.)

Posted on 2006-06-04 at 20:03. File under society.

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