one small voice

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

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2007-03-30

JabberWorky #2

My week in review.

Some weeks are more productive than others. This week was less productive than I would have liked, or at least it seemed that way.

The big issue this week has been personal eventing via pubsub, specifically whether to add an atomic publish+configure action to the spec. The XMPP Council chatted about it at length in our meeting on Wednesday, and we have had long and so far inconclusive discussions on our standards list this week. Earlier today I attempted to break the logjam with a middle way. We'll see what people think. But this I know: we must gain consensus, no matter how rough. And I think we will, because all the parties are working in good faith, even though they are getting a bit frustrated right now. :)

As a result of this week's Council meeting we also advanced XEP-0202 (Entity Time) and XEP-0203 (Delayed Delivery) as modern replacements for XEP-0090 and XEP-0091. The older specs used non-standard datetime formats, which we decided to finally deprecate so that developers don't need to have two different pieces of code for datetime handling. It's a minor cleanup in the grand scheme of things, but it feels good to clean out some cruft once in a while.

On a more practical note, we also made good progress on choosing our Google Summer of Code projects. This year the process of reviewing applications has gone more smoothly, in part because we have had more time (thanks, Google!) and in part because we have had more potential mentors reviewing the apps. I still need to go through them myself, but I hope to carve out time to do that in the next few days.

One thing I did not accomplish this week was to finish the migration to Drupal 5 on our webserver so that we can start on the new jabber.org website in earnest. I must do that next week. (I also need to finish our application for tax exempt status with the IRS. Fun.)

Oh, but one bright spot: by the end of the day today I got my email inbox back down to 0 messages. There's always a certain comfort in that...

Posted on 2007-03-30 at 21:43. File under jabber.

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P4P

A new market for music.

Doc Searls has posted some powerful thoughts about building a truly open and voluntary marketplace for music here. RTWT.

Posted on 2007-03-30 at 20:37. File under music.

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2007-03-24

Become What You Are

Ortega on ethics...

Yes, today seems to be José Ortega y Gasset day at one small voice. Here's another passage I found in Phenomenology and Art, from his essay "Esthetics on the Streetcar", in which Ortega updates and sublimates Nietzsche's dictum "become what you are":

It is love that makes me speak... love for the multiplicity of life, which even the best of us, against our will, have helped to belittle. Because, just as the Greeks held that all Being is One and reduced beauty to a norm or general model, so Kant found Goodness and Moral Perfection in a generic, abstract imperative.

No, no; duty is not the same for all. Each of us carries within his own exclusive and inalienable duty. To guide my conduct Kant offers me a criterion: that I wish always for what another might wish for. But this empties the ideal. It makes it a judicial mask, a mask with the features of no one. I can only fully want what I want with my whole individual being....

We saw earlier that the individual face is as once a design for itself as well as a more of less complete realization. And so it is with morals, for I imagine I see how each person who goes by is contained in a moral outline of himself: this profile shows how this individual would be at his most perfect. Some people completely fill the contours of their possibilities with their actions; more often we fall short of this fullness through some defect, some lack, some excess....

Therefore, let us measure people in terms of themselves: what each is in reality against what he potentially is. "Become what you are." Here is a just imperative. But what usually happens is what Mallarmé suggests so marvelously, so mysteriously, when he calls Hamlet "the latent gentleman who cannot manage to be."

This idea of finding the sublime matrix of ideals, norms, and perfection in reality's unlimited capacity for innovation can be fruitful everywhere.

A fine expression of a sophisticated individualism.

Posted on 2007-03-24 at 21:09. File under philosophy.

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Crossroads

A poem after José Ortega y Gasset...

In his first book (Meditations on Quixote), José Ortega y Gasset writes as follows (as quoted in his essay "Preface for Germans"):

Woe to the race that does not halt at the crossroads before continuing on its way, that does not make a question of its own selfhood: that does not feel the heroic need to explain its destiny, to inundate its historic mission with light!

It strikes me that the same applies to individuals (yes, I tend to individualize everything). So just I transformed the idea into a short (though, I think, not very good) poem:

Crossroads

(after José Ortega y Gasset)

When you finally arrive at
   The crossroads of your life
Do not plunge blindly on through, but
   Stop: inquire deeply
Into yourself, come to know the
   Meaning of your ideal,
Shine great light on your potential,
   And only then move on.

Posted on 2007-03-24 at 20:59. File under literature.

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A Certain Seriousness

An alternate view of beauty...

Recently I discussed the views of Alexander Nehamas on beauty. I decided to look around more broadly and picked up a book of essays entitled Phenomenology and Art by José Ortega y Gasset (translated from the Spanish by Philip W. Silver in 1975). I like the following passage from the first section of "An Essay in Esthetics":

Reading poetry is not something I do very often. Generally speaking, I cannot conceive that reading poetry could be anyone's regular occupation. Just as we demand a certain seriousness for creating poetry, we should also demand a certain seriousness for reading it. Not a seriousness that is all show, but rather that feeling of inner awe that invades our hearts at very special times. Contemporary pedagogy is beginning to have a deplorable influence in the cultural realm of esthetics by making art a usual, normal, regulated thing. This way we lose the feeling of distance; we lose our respect for and our fear of art; we approach it at any time in the dress and mood we happen to be in, and grow accustomed to not understanding it. The real emotion to which we refer when we speak of esthetic pleasuure these days is -- if we truly wish to own up to it -- a pale delight, lacking in vigor and depth, produced in us by the merest brush with the work of art.

One of the men who has most dismally affected our view of beauty is probably Ruskin.... Ruskin manages to give an interpretation of art that takes from art only what can easily be converted to everyday experience. His gospel is art as usefulness and convenience. Naturally, such a view can only recommend to the intellect those arts that, to be exact, are not really art: the industrial or decorative arts.... I am not saying that the decorative or industrial arts are entirely without beauty; I am only saying that their beauty is not solely beauty -- it is utility varnished with beauty, touched with beauty: water with a touch of Dionysian flavoring in it. As it happens, contemporary man has grown accustomed to not asking of art deeper emotions than those born of the decorative arts. If he were sincere he would admit that his esthetic pleasure is no different from the pleasure that derives from things when they are well tended and put in their proper order.

It would be wisdom to free the sword of beauty from that decorative sheath in which it has been kept for so long and let it flash dangerously again in the sunlight.

To me, Ortega captures more of the essence of aesthetic experience than does a self-confessed aestheticist like Nehamas, because he realizes its sharp edge of dangerous passion, the inner awe that is evoked within one's heart when encountering a work or act or person of great beauty. (And no I don't refer to mere surface beauty, to things or acts or people that merely appear beautiful in the conventional or popular sense of the term.)

Posted on 2007-03-24 at 20:49. File under philosophy.

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2007-03-23

JabberWorky #1

My week in review, first installment.

Heh. I started to type the title for this blog entry as "JabberWocky" but I mistyped it as "JabberWorky" -- which is totally appropriate! So herewith I inaugurate a new tradition: a weekly status report of my work on Jabber/XMPP technologies, delivered via blog straight from vi to you. (The idea was inspired by a conversation I had with Matt Tucker at VON yesterday. Thanks, Matt!)

So let's see. This week I travelled to San Jose for VON Spring 2007. I attend conferences only when I'm invited to speak -- that keeps me busy enough, let me tell you. This time, as previously mentioned, I was on a panel discussion entitled "My Mother Uses Skype -- Why Bother With Standards?". Jonathan Christensen of Skype (formerly of FaceTime, Microsoft, and most recently Camino Networks) was brave enough to show up for the panel discussion. I did my best to question assumptions and play Devil's Advocate (maybe the good folks at Pulver will post video sometime?). My two main points were:

People don't want choice. A journalist in attendance questioned me about that statement afterwards because he didn't know whether to quote me on it, but I stand by what I said. If the dominant option is clearly superior -- think Skype or iPod -- then the vast majority of people, by their actions in choosing that option, vote with their dollars or attention that they are perfectly happy using what's offered and that they don't particularly care about choice or more options. They want stuff that just works, and Skype or Apple or whoever deliver. The market is working. It's up to other providers to offer something better. And so far they haven't. Whose fault is that?
Open standards are important, especially in the long term, because we need to enable innovation at the edges (think Internet ecosystem, not telco silo). The problem is, the traditional standards organizations have fallen down on the job. In particular, they have gotten away from the modus operandi that built the Internet in the first place: rough consensus and running code. Design by committee, IP ambushes, and analysis paralysis have led to de-jure "standards" that nobody can implement. The solution? Leaner, meaner standards organizations that are driven by delivering features and enabling ease of development. We've tried to do that at the XMPP Standards Foundation and I think we've done a pretty good job so far (but if you disagree, I want to hear about it!).

So I tried to shake it up a bit. The A/V guys (I always thank the A/V guys, don't you?) said I succeeded, so I take that as a vote of confidence.

Aside from travelling to VON, I made quite a bit of progress on the Jingle specs, as reported a few hours ago on the standards@xmpp.org list. I'm excited about these changes because (1) they represent a serious simplification of the signalling protocol and (2) they are based on feedback from implementors, in particular Rob McQueen's team (which works on Telepathy, One Laptop Per Child, and the Nokia 770 and 800). More feedback is welcome as always, so keep those cards and letters coming! (Join the standards@xmpp.org list, which naturally is totally open, or ping me directly.)

On Wednesday we held a meeting about end-to-end encryption ("e2e") over the Jabber network. At the least, we knocked four potential technologies out of contention: OpenPGP, S/MIME, XML encryption (no one has ever gotten serious enough about it to propose an approach for XMPP), and Off-the-Record Communication -- read the log to find out why (basically they don't meet our requirements). That leaves two approaches: encrypted sessions (see XEP-0116) and some form of Transport Layer Security over XMPP (hints about what that might look like here, here, here -- follow the threads for details). I chatted some more about e2e today with Ian Paterson and we realized that we need to clarify the requirements (probably by posting them as a separate specification) and then perform a "gap analysis" to figure out how "ESessions" and "XTLS" meet our requirements. So Ian and I will be working on that over the next few weeks (Ian will concentrate on the requirements and I will focus on writing an initial spec for XTLS).

On the Boring Business Side of Things, I filed an official "Certificate of Amendment" with the State of Delaware modifying the Certificate of Incorporation of the XMPP Standards Foundation to incorporate the proposal that the Corporation's Membership recently approved for Clarifying the Purposes of the XSF. This will (we hope) help us achieve Tax-Exempt Status with the IRS via Section 501(3)(c) of the Internal Revenue Code (though I have yet to fill out and submit the rest of Form 1023). [Tangent: why is it that everything legalistic has Initial Caps? Is that to make it seem More Official? Whatever the reason, I must say I find it Rather Annoying. ;-) ]

Naturally we continued the usual conversations about standards, implementation, certification, infrastructure, and the like, but I won't bore you with the gory details since this blog entry is already way too long. So until next week I say: Jabber On!

Posted on 2007-03-23 at 20:23. File under jabber.

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2007-03-21

✈ San Jose Bound ✈

Going to VON...

I'm flying to San Jose in a few hours for VON, where I will be participating in a panel discussion entitled "My Mother Uses Skype -- Why Bother With Standards?"

It should be a lot of fun. :)

Posted on 2007-03-21 at 12:37. File under personal.

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2007-03-20

SoC

XMPP, the Summer of Code, and you.

Over at the official blog of the XMPP Standards Foundation, I just posted an update about the Jabber/XMPP community's involvement in the Google Summer of Code for 2007. Follow the links for detailed information. Oh, and pay no attention if the web interface prompts you to fill out the application template -- there is no such thing. :)

Posted on 2007-03-20 at 20:23. File under jabber.

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2007-03-19

Only a Promise?

Plato, Nehamas, and the philosophy of beauty...

In my copious spare time recently I've been reading some works by Alexander Nehamas, professor of philosophy at Princeton, expert on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche, and author of several books on aesthetics and the good life. His most recent book is Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. A good summary of his thesis can be found in an essay he wrote in 2000 for The Threepenny Review. To my mind, the key paragraph is this:

I want to turn our common picture around. The judgment of beauty is not the result of a mysterious inference on the basis of features of a work which we already know. It is a guess, a suspicion, a dim awareness that there is more in the work that it would be valuable to learn. To find something beautiful is to believe that making it a larger part of our life is worthwhile, that our life will be better if we spend part of it with that work. But a guess is just that: unlike a conclusion, it obeys no principles; it is not governed by concepts. It goes beyond all the evidence, which cannot therefore justify it, and points to the future. Beauty, just as Stendhal said, is a promise of happiness. We love, as Plato saw, what we do not possess. Aesthetic pleasure is the pleasure of anticipation, and therefore of imagination, not of accomplishment. The judgment of taste is prospective, not retrospective; the beginning, the middle, but never the end of criticism. If you really feel you have exhausted a work, you are bound to be disappointed. A piece that has no more surprises left -- a piece you really feel you know "inside and out" -- has no more claim on you. You may still call it beautiful because it once gave you the pleasure of its promise or because you think that it may have something to give to someone else. But it will have lost its hold on you. Beauty beckons.

Even though I like some of the specific things Nehamas says on the topic of beauty, I disagree with his central claim: that beauty is only a promise of happiness.

First, I distrust any claim that X is only Y. Are you sure? Where is your proof? Is there no remainder? Can your thesis account for all the phenomena?

Second, it seems that Nehamas removes any basis in reality for saying that a work of art is beautiful, since the judgment of beauty is not based on the features of a work. He phrases it more carefully than that -- "features of a work which we already know" -- but as far as I can see the import is the same: there are no beautiful things or beautiful features thereof, only judgments of beauty. (Elsewhere he says that you can't argue for your judgment of beauty based on a specific feature, instead the judgment is based on a holistic appreciation for the individuality of the work and the way that all its features combine and work together and are integrated for the sake of the whole, which makes more sense; but as far as I can see, that's not what he's arguing for here.)

Third, I detect a strong whiff of Plato's old error that pleasure is driven by a lack and that pleasure disappears once a desire has been satisfied. The desires Nehamas talks about are more ethereal, but pleasures nonetheless. Yet he says the pleasure is the result only of anticipation and imagination, and that the pleasure is gone once you have come to know in fullness that which inspired your aesthetic pleasure -- just as, for Plato, the pleasure of eating is caused by the elimination of hunger: there are no positive pleasures, all pleasure is in some way negative (the removal of pain).

Fourth, Nehamas concentrates overly much on objects of art and gives short shrift to beautiful persons and experiences and activities. These are connected with the creation of beauty, not just the appreciation of beauty. And in my experience creation -- whether individual creation of art or co-creation of beautiful experiences in a personal relationship -- matters more than mere appreciation of something that has been created by someone else, because what's important is living rather than observing or making judgments.

But all I have done here is make judgments about what Nehamas has written. So one of these days I'll have to write something more positive, eh?

Posted on 2007-03-19 at 20:53. File under philosophy.

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2007-03-06

✈ Orlando Bound ✈

VoiceCon 2007...

I'm flying to Orlando tomorrow for VoiceCon, where I will be participating in a panel discussion (scroll down) on the role of open source software in converged networks. And no I will not be visiting Disney World! ;-)

Posted on 2007-03-06 at 22:17. File under personal.

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2007-03-05

Subject and Object

The meaning of the song...

While reading some essays by José Ortega y Gasset recently, I came across the following quote:

In Stendhal and in Baroja, philosophic conclusions descend to mere language, to a literary genre which serves as an instrument for literary outburst. They think in terms of "for" and "against" -- and this the thinker never does. In effect, they love and hate conceptually. Therefore, their theories are numerous. They swarm about like bacteria, disparate and antagonistic, each one engendered by the impression of the moment. In the manner of songs, they tell a truth, not about things, but about the singer.

As a songwriter, I think there's great wisdom in that last sentence.

Posted on 2007-03-05 at 20:51. File under music.

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Remembering Samantha

Other saints on the net...

It seems that I'm not the only family member publishing things on the web. My sister Yvette has written a remembrance of Samantha Smith as part of the celebration of 200 years of diplomatic relations between America and Russia.

Posted on 2007-03-05 at 20:37. File under personal.

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2007-03-01

Tear Down This Wall

C-SPAN and the public domain...

Carl Malamud has eloquently challenged C-SPAN president Brian Lamb to put its footage of Congressional hearings back into the public domain. His open letter concludes as follows:

Mr. Lamb, C-SPAN has been a pioneer in promoting a more open government. You created a grand bargain with the Cable Industry and the U.S. Congress. When I created the first radio station on the Internet and was asked why I did so as a non-profit instead of going for the gold like many of my colleagues, my reply has always been that I was inspired by your example.

Your grand bargain has served the American people and the C-SPAN organization well. Holding congressional hearings hostage is not in keeping with your charter, and it is not in keeping with the spirit of that grand bargain you made with the American people. Please re-release this material back into the public domain where it came from so that it will continue to make our public civic life richer.

Why should American taxpayers be forced to pay twice in order to monitor what goes on in the halls of Congress? By what right does C-SPAN put these archival materials behind a paywall? I join with Carl in saying: "Mr. Lamb, tear down this wall!"

Posted on 2007-03-01 at 12:35. File under publicdomain.

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identity...