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

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2007-02-28

IMbox

Further Jabber tidbits...

As I posted over at Extended Conversation, our sessions at FOSDEM and afterward were a smashing success. Here are some other Jabber-related happenings I've noticed recently:

The mabber service for mobile IM has been relaunched, including support for Atom over XMPP (which reminds me, I need to submit an updated version of that spec).
The folks who run jabbim.cz have released as open-source software a Jabber server component that enables you to upload files to a WebDAV data store via Jabber file transfer. Cool stuff.
George Hotelling is tapping into the wisdom of crowds by using the power of prediction markets to figure out which of the big consumer IM services will support XMPP by August 26, 2007. Read the background, register with inkling, and then play the market.

Posted on 2007-02-28 at 20:01. File under jabber.

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σκεψις

More on the value of looking carefully...

As discussed yesterday, I am of a skeptical frame of mind, in the sense that I think it is important to carefully consider alternatives, hesitate in accepting theories, and question self-appointed intellectual authorities (the word skepticism derives from the Greek σκεψις, meaning "looking around, considering, or inquiring into, especially in a careful manner"). Coincidentally, on the flight back from Brussels yesterday I found the following passage about the value of skepticism in the essay "Landscape with a Deer in the Background" by José Ortega y Gasset (translated by Tony Talbot):

The skeptic is the man with the fullest, richest, most complete life. Some foolish idea leads us to suppose that the skeptic does not believe in anything. Quite the contrary! The skeptic differs from the dogmatic in that the latter believes in only one thing and the former in many, in almost everything. And this multitude of beliefs, acting as mutual restraints, make the mind flexible and prolific.

Posted on 2007-02-28 at 19:23. File under philosophy.

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FOSDEM Slides

440 and counting...

I've posted slides from my FOSDEM 2007 talks on Jabber 101 (194 slides) and secure communications (246 slides). And as mentioned, the good folks at FOSDEM have posted video of my security talk. Enjoy!

Posted on 2007-02-28 at 15:23. File under jabber.

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2007-02-27

Got Science?

Why I am a global warming skeptic.

It seems that I shocked a few people over in Brussels with my opinions about global warming. Since in large measure I was being deliberately provocative (épater la bourgeoisie!), it would be helpful for me to clarify my stance.

Throughout history, sciences have emerged from the realm of pure speculation. Physics and astronomy from metaphysics, chemistry from alchemy, psychology from philosophical anthropology, etc. A young science is an inexact science, especially when the domain of study is complex. As far as I can see, climatology (and no, I am not a climatologist) is a young science in a complex domain. It is too early for climatology to have gained anything approaching certainty with regard to the nature of the earth's climate.

Yet humans crave certainty. They want a consistent worldview that will explain all the phenomena about which they are so confused. They want such a worldview so strongly that they will sacrifice scientific accuracy and coherence with the facts in order to get it. This is called the will to believe. In young sciences (or young, complex parts of old sciences), the results of succumbing to the will to believe are theories that sound convincing but don't track reality -- Ptolemaic cosmology, Freudian psychology, Marxist economics, superstring theory, nutritionism, and, it seems to me, the global warming theory.

Such theories can be widely believed. They can become scientific -- or, to be precise, pseudo-scientific -- orthodoxies. Just about everyone in a young science can adhere to them (e.g., my father received his training as a psychiatrist during the days of Freudian orthodoxy). So it comes as no surprise to me that, say, nearly every paper published in some peer-reviewed climatology journals would support the global warming theory, just as nearly every paper published in American public health journals might at one point have supported nutritionism, low-fat / high-carb diets, and the like.

Truth is not a matter of counting noses. It is a matter of tracking reality. When the reality is complex, it is harder to track reality. Predictions are not as certain as they will one day become. Models are just that: models. The scientists involved want certainty and may claim more certainty than their young science can yet provide, especially when their grant money depends on supporting the orthodoxy. The journalists clamor for provocative quotes so they can sell more ad space. The public gets progressively more fearful about the future, and they ask their political representatives to do something, anything, to solve the problem. The politicians and bureaucrats are only too happy to oblige, since a good crisis gives them a reason to pontificate and grab more power.

It's not pretty, and it's not science. I realize all too well that people want to know what's happening with the earth's climate. Given that we can't even forecast the weather 3 days from now, I see no reason to be confident that we can forecast what the climate will be like 30 or 50 years from now. The phenomena are too complex, climatology is too young, we don't have enough hard data going back far enough to draw meaningful comparisons, there is too much of which we are simply ignorant (e.g., how clouds form), it's unclear what the relevant factors are, the models involve a great deal of guesswork, the plain fact of political influence looms too large, the ratio of real science to sensationalism and grandstanding is frighteningly low, and the people want to believe in a consistent story even if it is more myth than reality. I'm sorry, but there are just too many mitigating factors here for me to be confident in the forecasts being propagated (I hesitate to call them predictions, let alone results, and I deliberately use the term "propagated" for its connection to the word "propaganda").

So yes I am a skeptic. As far as I can see, science thrives on skepticism and withers in an atmosphere of belief (a word whose root meaning is "to make dear or pleasant"). It is with good reason that we speak of unpleasant truths. Just-so stories about how things might be (but are not) attract those who need a coherent worldview in order to function. But scientists have an ethical and professional responsibility to understand the facts and track reality. Until they do in the field of climatology, I will consider the jury to be out.

If this be heresy, make the most of it.

Posted on 2007-02-27 at 17:37. File under society.

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2007-02-24

Radioactive

Danger: hackable XML!

Mike Gotta makes an interesting observation:

Communication vendors have held rank for the most part and have focused almost exclusively on SIP and SIMPLE. XMPP and Jingle have been viewed as "radioactive" by some vendors. Same goes for Microsoft.

I like it! Yes, XMPP is dangerous if you're trying to control what kind of apps developers can deploy. But if you want to encourage creative mashups and innovation at the edges, then the deeply hackable real-time XML streaming technology we've been building out for the last 8 years is just the thing you've been looking for.

The choice is yours.

Posted on 2007-02-24 at 06:09. File under jabber.

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2007-02-21

Parting Shot

Deconstructive parody...

This is hilarious and simply brilliant.

Posted on 2007-02-21 at 21:03. File under society.

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✈ Brussels Bound ✈

Flying across the pond...

Tomorrow will be a travel day for me as I fly from Denver to Brussels for FOSDEM. I should be online again from Brussels sometime on Friday. TTFN. :-)

Posted on 2007-02-21 at 20:19. File under personal.

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Joost Boost

IPTV + XMPP...

A little bird just told me that the hot Internet TV service Joost is heavily using XMPP for all sorts of top-secret interactive features. Well, not so top-secret, since they don't obfuscate their beautiful JavaScript code. Or so I've been told -- I haven't had time to investigate further since I need to be writing my FOSDEM talk right about now. ;-)

(And speaking of XMPP integration with cool projects, check out this new Jabber notifications plugin for Drupal.)

Posted on 2007-02-21 at 13:29. File under jabber.

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2007-02-20

Alt History

More production, less politics...

Stephen Davies provides some notes toward an alternative history that focuses less on politics and more on peaceful interaction and technological innovation. There are so many dates one could include: the invention of eyeglasses around 1214, of the horseshoe, of three-field rotation, of double-entry bookkeeping, of the water mill, the wind mill, the steam engine, the automobile, the integrated circuit, the Internet, and much else besides...

Posted on 2007-02-20 at 22:00. File under society.

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Jabbering in Portuguese

A few technology tidbits...

Here are two bits of Jabber news in Portuguese: the big SAPO IM service in Portugal has migrated to ejabberd, and the Jabber-BR group is calling for participating in the FISL 8.0 conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil in mid-April.

Posted on 2007-02-20 at 14:23. File under jabber.

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2007-02-19

The Same River

What did Heraclitus really think?

Heraclitus of Ephesus (flourished circa 500 BCE) is commonly known only for having said that "you cannot step into the same river twice" or even that "you cannot step into the same river even once". The latter statement was uttered not by Heraclitus but by the sophist Cratylus; as quoted in Aristotle's Metaphysics (Book 4, Chapter 5, 1010a13), "Cratylus ... criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is not possible to step into the same river twice -- for he thought not even once". The quote about stepping into the same river twice is from Plato's dialogue Cratylus (echoed in Aristotle) and Plato may have been quoting only Cratylus, who may or may not have been properly characterizing Heraclitus himself. The existing fragments of Heraclitus state only that "different and different waters flow upon those who step into the same rivers" (Fr. 12). (According to my copy of The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk and Raven, the original Greek is: ποταμοισι τοισιν αυτοισιν εμβαινουσιν ετερα και ετερα υδατα επιρρει -- quite different, I might note, from what you find at the Wikipedia page.)

Did Heraclitus extend that insight to "all things" (as Plato, or Plato quoting Cratylus, would have you believe)? I have my doubts, since if Heraclitus said something so pithy as "you can't step into the same river twice" and applied that analogy to all things, then I figure someone would have quoted the exact text. Furthermore, Heraclitus said "I prefer things of which there is seeing and hearing and perception" (fragment 61). This indicates to me that he valued the evidence of the senses and would not violate that evidence in order to expound a doctrine that flies in the face of the fact that certain things are more stable than others (indeed his statement about rivers can be understood as merely an observation about things that can be seen, in this case the flowing of waters down a channel to the sea). Perhaps he held that seemingly stable things are imperceptibly changing as well (the fragments of his writings yield no evidence one way or the other), but that does not imply that he thought that everything is in constant flux and that there are no stable or semi-stable identities (a position sometimes described as a "Heraclitean view of the universe"). At least, that's how I read the Greek.

As to psychology and ethics, here are fragments 119 and 101 from Heraclitus, which are quite in line with the Greek tradition:

ηθος ανθρωπω δαιμων ("A person's character is their daemon / genius / animating spirit." -- or however you prefer to translate the untranslatable term "daimon".)

εδιζησαμην εμεωυτον ("I sought out myself" or "I sought the meaning of myself" or "I inquired into myself" -- a kind of restatement of the Delphic saying γνωθι σεαυτον or "know thyself".)

Posted on 2007-02-19 at 21:47. File under philosophy.

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2007-02-18

Self-Experimentation

The power of one...

Tyler Cowen extols the work of Seth Roberts on self-experimentation -- methodically studying the effect on one's own life of changes in diet, exercise, and other habits. As a result of his studies, Roberts does some unusual things, such as stand at least 8 hours a day (which he claims greatly improves his sleep). Although I like the idea of self-experimentation, I think Roberts is too quick to extrapolate from his own experience to principles that might apply to others. While I don't want to sleep poorly, either, I've found that the best way for me to sleep soundly is to stay up later (e.g., last night I went to sleep too early and was awake between 3 and 4 AM or so). Roberts claims that eating breakfast is highly overrated, but I find that for myself it is absolutely essential to optimal functioning both physically and mentally. Etc. So as far as I can see, the key to self-experimentation is to take your own experience seriously. Just because something works for someone else, doesn't mean it will work for you. That's methodological individualism in action!

Posted on 2007-02-18 at 21:43. File under personal.

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More Sapphics

Further poetical investigations...

As mentioned I've started to collect poems in sapphic meter. Among other things, it turns out that the two poems that I've written in sapphic meter are all wrong. As explained by Timothy Steele in All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing and Miller Williams in Patterns of Poetry, the meter of a sapphic stanza in an accentual-syllabic language such as English scans as follows (where "/" is a strong beat, "x" is a weak beat, and "|" divides one foot from another):

/ x | / x | / x x | / x | / x | / x
/ x | / x | / x x | / x | / x | / x
/ x | / x | / x x | / x | / x | / x
/ x x | / x

Here is ann example from Swinburne's poem "Sapphics":

Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.

That scans quite nicely as follows (accented syllables in bold):

Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.

Contrast that with, say, the first stanza of my poem Ancient Fire:

Sing me, Muse, of your bright sister -- small and dark,
they say she was, though I shall never know her.
Her song is lost, yet even her merest shards
are a vibrant spark.

Ouch. And the other stanzas are no better. No wonder the poem doesn't sing the way a sapphic is supposed to. Sigh.

Despite the disappointment of learning that my own poems are merely pseudo-sapphic, I've collected a number of properly-scanning sapphics by Sappho herself, Thomas Campion, William Cowper, Horace, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Andrew Marvell, August von Platen, Philip Sidney, A.E. Stallings, Timothy Steele, Algernon Swinburne, Lewis Turco, and Rachel Wetzsteon. And my sapphics-hunting continues, so expect more reports in the near future...

Posted on 2007-02-18 at 20:01. File under literature.

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2007-02-16

Size Matters

Dealing with a big contact list...

The other day I mentioned that I have around 1400 people in my Jabber roster (that's a Buddy List [tm] for you non-Jabberites, but I prefer not to use that term since it's been trademarked by AOL). So one of those many people IM'd me overnight, asking how I (and the jabber.org IM server, and the Jabber clients I use) manage all those contacts.

First the server. Well, no problems there. Since I am one of the server admins, I can tell you that our trusty ejabberd deployment does experience a CPU usage spike when I log in, i.e., while my Jabber client slurps down my roster. But other than that ejabberd simply chugs along happily, processing all the inbound presence information I receive.

But not all Jabber clients are quite so happy. The "stpeter roster test" is somewhat legendary as a hurdle to pass in optimizing roster processing and presentation. I've tested clients that took three or four minutes to render my roster (and that's not counting presence information)! But after some optimization, most of those clients have gotten the time down under one minute.

As to my personal IM habits, I use a lot of roster groups. One group in particular is a kind of catch-all, and it contains probably 600 people (but folks that I don't contact often, if ever). Typically I wait for people to IM me (hey, I'm interrupt-driven). But when I need to IM someone and they're not in one of my smaller roster groups, then I need to find that person fast (i.e., before I get interrupted!); thankfully, some clients (e.g., Spark) make that task easy by enabling me to essentially search my roster via Ctrl-F or somesuch keystroke. In a client like Adium or iChat I'll disable the groups view and scroll through the entire roster, but that's not necessarily very efficient.

Managing multiple simultaneous chats (both one-to-one and multi-user) can also be difficult. I'm somewhat agnostic about tabbed chats in one window vs. multiple windows. Adium uses tabs and iChat uses multiple windows, and I can handle either approach. It's all about proper placement of the window or windows on my desktop -- I typically have quite a few applications open at once (Firefox with 10+ tabs, Thunderbird with my (still empty!) inbox and one or two draft emails, four or five terminal windows, calendar, a PDF viewer, etc.) and my chat and groupchat windows go toward the bottom left of the screen, where I can keep an eye on them for new messages. Seems to work for me.

Another challenge is reading through the flood of offline messages and presence subscription requests that I typically receive when I log in after 8 or 10 or 12 hours offline (don't even think about what happens when I return from vacation -- I try not to take those ;-). Some clients present one window for each chat or subscription request, which is sub-optimal if you have received 20 offline messages and three or four subscription requests, let me tell you. I have not found a client that handles this with aplomb (perhaps because until recently the major IM services have not supported offline messages).

I don't claim that my IM profile is typical. Few people have more than 100 people in their rosters, and vanishingly few have more than 500; 1400 is almost unheard of (let alone the ~3200 I used to have!). And I doubt that such heavy IM use will ever become typical (though I do think that people will tend to have more contacts as IM becomes more popular). So you client developers might not want to read too much into my feature requests. :-) But do feel free to ping me if you'd like me to subject your client to the "stpeter roster test"...

Posted on 2007-02-16 at 20:19. File under jabber.

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Got Spim?

Searching for the dog in the night...

I'm thinking about submitting a paper for the fourth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam about instant messaging spam (a.k.a. "spim") on the Jabber network -- or, to be precise, the lack thereof. If you have experience with receiving (or even sending ;-) Jabber spam, I'd love to hear from you.

Posted on 2007-02-16 at 14:11. File under jabber.

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2007-02-15

IMiFoiled

Beyond the bot...

The good folks at IMified are having some trouble with MSN (HT: GigaOM):

After a week of back and forth emails with Microsoft trying to get our screen name to appear online to more than 1000 users at a time, we've been told no. The limit with MSN occurs when over 1000 screen names request presence for our screen name at any given time, meaning that if your not one of the lucky 1000, our screen name will appear offline to existing users and new users cannot be added to our buddy list.

Well, I have 1400 or so people in my Jabber roster and all is well (I used to have around 3200 but I pared it back). That said, running a service like this as a bot may not be ideal. It's probably better to run your own server and write a nice server-side component to handle the flood of traffic. Oh, that's right, you can't do that with closed silos like MSN and AIM. Maybe it's better to use open technologies that you can control and extend on your own, eh? :-)

Posted on 2007-02-15 at 10:31. File under jabber.

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In Denial?

More hot air...

I have little time for blogging these days, but I must note this quote from one Ellen Goodman:

Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

The best rebuttals I've read so far are by Arnold Kling and Mark Steyn. If it weren't for the fact that you can't deny something that hasn't happened yet, I'd say consider me a climate holocaust denier.

Posted on 2007-02-15 at 10:19. File under society.

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2007-02-08

Getting IMified

Jabber bots for fun and productivity...

IMified is a fun new service that enables you to keep to-do items and reminders, interact with Google Calendar, and so on -- all from the comfort of your Jabber client. It's well explained here with pretty screenshots. Just add imified@gmail.com to your roster and off you go. (I'm not sure how their bot will scale, but I suppose they'll figure it out ;-)

Posted on 2007-02-08 at 13:13. File under jabber.

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FOSDEM Interview

Jabbering in Brussels...

The generous volunteers who put on FOSDEM have published an interview with yours truly, since I'll be a speaker at the conference (my topic is Secure Communications with Jabber, be there on Sunday at 15:00 :-).

Posted on 2007-02-08 at 09:44. File under jabber.

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2007-02-05

Sapphics

Collecting poems...

Here's an intriguing idea for a book: a collection of poems in Sapphic meter. Sapphics are my favorite form (see Ancient Fire and Cobalt), and they've been wielded so deftly over the years -- by Sappho herself and her contemporary Alkaios in the original Greek, by Catullus and Horace in Latin, by the likes of Cowpers and Swinburne in English, by a number of German poets (Klopstock, Platen, Hamerling, Geibel, etc.), and by recent Anglo-American poets like John Hollander, Timothy Steele, A.E. Stallings, Rachel Hadas, James Merrill, Marilyn Hacker, and Rachel Wetzsteon. I feel like a poetic lepidopterist -- I think I'll start hunting sapphics today!

Posted on 2007-02-05 at 21:21. File under literature.

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Simply Wrong

Real-time protocol wars, part 17...

There are so many errors in this article about SIMPLE in the enterprise that it would take me quite a while to correct them all. Maybe later this week I'll find the time...

Posted on 2007-02-05 at 16:25. File under jabber.

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OSCON Proposal

See you in Portland?

I just submitted a proposal to speak at OSCON 2007, the brief version is:

Jabber/XMPP technologies not only provide an open platform for real-time communication, they do so in a high-security fashion. This talk will delve into Jabber security, including behind-the-firewall servers, reverse DNS lookups, channel encryption, strong authentication, end-to-end encryption, spam prevention, interdomain federation, and the Jabber network's intermediate certification authority.

And here's the longer version:

Although Jabber/XMPP technologies are known as the open alternative for real-time communication, their security characteristics are less familiar. Yes Jabber provides high security for organizations and individuals alike. Companies can run their own Jabber servers behind the firewall, federate with select partners and suppliers, or open communication to the entire Jabber network (including Google Talk, Live Journal Talk, and many other public services). In addition, channel encryption and strong authentication can be required for all connections. The XMPP Standards Foundation provides cost-free digital certificates to Jabber server administrators through its own intermediate certification authority. The Jabber network is so far free of spam, viruses, and other malware. And there is an active effort underway to build robust end-to-end encryption features into popular Jabber clients and code libraries. Why use insecure technologies like the consumer instant messaging services when you can use open, secure technologies like Jabber?

Posted on 2007-02-05 at 15:51. File under jabber.

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2007-02-03

IATF RFC

A task force for societal understanding...

In a recent essay, Arnold Kling draws inspiration from the Internet Engineering Task Force as a model for developing the ideals of freedom (or, as he puts it, the ideology of libertarian conservatives). So he calls for an "Ideological Affirmation Task Force" that will publish Requests for Comment (RFCs) among libertarian conservatives, as the IETF does among Internet engineers.

As someone who has written a few IETF RFCs (if you're keeping track, 3920, 3921, 3922, 3923, and 4622), I like the impetus behind the idea. But if anything, I don't think Kling is ambitious enough.

The task before us is not to affirm a certain ideology in a kind of mutual admiration society. The IETF provides engineering for the Internet -- it is building something new in the world, not affirming an existing ideology. What could a similar task force provide in the realm of society, culture, politics, and economics? In large measure, such a task force would try to deeply understand why certain societies are more successful than others (can you say the Anglosphere?). But unlike the IETF, it would attempt to first and foremost understand and clarify rather than engineer solutions -- because we know that rampant social engineering has almost invariably led to disaster.

So we need something larger than "ideological affirmation" -- we need to understand nothing less than the cultural, social, political, and economic basis for healthy, successful, productive, voluntary interaction among human beings. Call it the "interpersonal interaction task force" (IITF) if you will. Achieving that kind of deep understanding is the work of lifetimes. And many lifetimes have already been devoted to it, by world-class scholars such as F.W. Maitland and Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek and Alan MacFarlane.

But it's not merely a task for scholars. It's also a task for the societal equivalent of those Internet engineers -- the entrepreneurs in all fields of endeavor who would judiciously improve aspects of what already works by offering new and better ways to solve problems in voluntary, non-coercive ways.

So Mr. Kling, if you're serious about this task force, let me know -- I have a bit of IETF experience that might just apply to the IITF as well...

(Cross-posted at Albion's Seedlings.)

Posted on 2007-02-03 at 22:35. File under politics.

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identity...