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2007-05-31stpeter.imThis blog has moved... I've decided to upgrade to WordPress and at the same time move this blog to a shiny new domain. You'll find me now at stpeter.im. Please update your links and feeds accordingly! Posted on 2007-05-31 at 23:59. File under personal. ~ link ~ 2007-05-30Be OpenIs interoperability enough? Principle Six of the Mozilla Manifesto reads as follows:
That's great as far as it goes, but interoperability is not enough. AbiWord is interoperable with MS Word, email is interoperable with SMS through suitable gateways, Ghostscript is interoperable with Adobe Acrobat Reader, OpenOffice is interoperable with PowerPoint, Ogg Vorbis is interoperable with MP3 through various audio converters, and Pidgin is interoperable with AOL Instant Messenger. But the underlying protocols, data formats, and content are closed, proprietary, probably patent-encumbered, and under the control of large corporations and industry consortiums like Microsoft, Adobe, and AOL. The result? Text, music, video, and communications that are less free than they deserve to be, and an Internet that is less open than it needs to be for the continued viability of our open society. When we talk about protocols and data formats, we are talking about standards. Standards needs to be open. Sure, MS Word and PDF and PowerPoint and MP3 and AIM or MSN are de-facto "standards", but they are closed. By contrast, HTML and email and OpenData and Atom and Ogg Vorbis and Jabber are truly open technologies and open standards. The Mozilla Foundation can be a great force for good in the world by consistently adopting open standards in its projects, creating new Mozilla-based projects (or working with existing projects, such as Songbird and SamePlace) that use open standards, and working with groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the W3C, the IETF, XIPH, and the XMPP Standards Foundation to develop and extend the range of open standards. The long-term health of the Internet is at stake. (HT: Nÿco.) Posted on 2007-05-30 at 15:53. File under technology. ~ link ~ Pressing?Contemplating a blog upgrade... Joe Hildebrand has moved to WordPress now that it has support for Atom 1.0. Maybe it's time for me to switch from the homegrown XML format I use. But given that I've been blogging quite actively since September 13, 2001, this would be a big migration! Posted on 2007-05-30 at 15:23. File under technology. ~ link ~ 2007-05-29GSoC UpdateFirst meeting... We just finished our first meeting of Jabber GSoC students and mentors, with everyone in attendance but Tomasz Melcer (who is working on Jingle support in Gajim). A meeting log is here for the curious. Conclusions:
To help me keep track of the student and mentor blogs, I've added them all to my blogroll (and ralphm will add them to Planet Jabber). The second meeting will be held next Tuesday at 17:00 UTC in the jdev room. See you there! Posted on 2007-05-29 at 11:59. File under jabber. ~ link ~ 2007-05-28By the WayThat and which in English grammar... Recently someone IM'd me about the grammatical distinction between "that" and "which". While there are lots of nuances involved (language is fun but messy), to me the main difference is that you use "which" in phrases where you'd naturally say "by the way", whereas you use "that" in phrases that are directly descriptive of something. Consider a few sentences:
A "that" phrase can also naturally set up a comparison to another such phrase, such as:
In spoken English we often remove the "that" as unnecessary:
Sometimes people use "which" in such sentences, but only because they know that "which" is proper sometimes (but they don't know when to use it, so they use it all the time just to be sure):
Posted on 2007-05-28 at 20:59. File under language. ~ link ~ IshYet another suffix... In yesterday's post about bricks I said that my wife and I had moved a largish pile of them (today I counted and came up with 896 bricks, which I'd warrant is a largish pile!). What's up with this "-ish" suffix? As far as I can see, there are several meanings of "-ish" in English adjectives:
English is fun. Posted on 2007-05-28 at 17:17. File under language. ~ link ~ 2007-05-27Breaking News?The future of newspapers... In a recent article from the Columbia University alumni magazine, David Craig wonders: "Ten years from now, will people in Dallas or Cincinnati or Pittsburgh pick up a local newspaper every morning?" I wonder: Does it matter if the newspaper industry is dominated by businesses that are regionally owned, operated, or focused? Do people in Seattle or El Paso or Philadelphia drive regionally-designed cars to regionally-operated hardware stores while listening to regionally-recorded music? No, they drive a Toyota to the Home Depot while listening to music published by Warner Brothers or some other big conglomerate. Does anyone worry about the health of the republic because of the consolidation and centralization that has occurred in manufacturing and retail and a hundred other industries? Why is the newspaper industry any different? Interestingly, it strikes me that in some industries, companies that offer truly local products and services are able to differentiate themselves from the big (and often bland) centralized corporations, whereas regional companies are not different enough to survive. For instance, here in Denver I don't read the Denver Post or the Rocky Mountain News, but I do avidly read the Washington Park Profile, a high quality, truly local monthly paper. Do I think that the regional newspapers will survive? Not particularly. But I don't know that it particularly matters, either. Posted on 2007-05-27 at 21:13. File under society. ~ link ~ The Wisdom of the BrickA wonderful stability... While my wife and I were moving a largish pile of bricks today, I was reminded of some words from Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn (pp. 120-121):
There is a wonderful stability in long-lived technologies like bricks. Humans have been making and handling them for so long that they do indeed feel natural and intuitively obvious. (To me, books have that same kind of wonderful stability.) Posted on 2007-05-27 at 20:33. File under personal. ~ link ~ 2007-05-24SoC BlogsTracking summer progress... If you're interested in following the progress of the Jabber-related Summer of Code projects, check out the following student blogs:
Maybe these will end up on Planet SoC and Planet Jabber sometime... ;-) Posted on 2007-05-24 at 12:01. File under jabber. ~ link ~ 2007-05-22Revolutionary AmericaRadical equality in action... This post by Victor Davis Hanson seems right on to me, especially his observations about the radical nature of American society:
Posted on 2007-05-22 at 21:33. File under society. ~ link ~ Anything But a RightLanguage matters... Certain sectors of the Internet are all a-twitter about Mark Helprin's recent essay in favor of perpetual copyright. Much sound and fury has ensued, but a great proportion of it signifies nothing because it does not strike at the root of the argument that Helprin and his ilk make. And striking at the root means recognizing this: that copyright is not a right. There is no right to forcibly prevent others from making copies of texts, maps, music, photographs, movies, or any other creative product. There is a government-granted privilege to do so (enforced by the government's police power, which ultimately means the power of a gun), but there is no natural, human right to do so. It is important to be careful about the language we use. If we accept the terminology that copyright is a right, then most people are going to associate it with the Bill of Rights, with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, with the rights of man, with human rights, and with all manner of wonderful, positive, humanistic ideas about individual dignity and respectful interaction in a modern, civilized society. But copyright is about none of those things. Instead, it is at root a government-granted and government-enforced monopoly that was originally created to protect the market access of printers' guilds and publishing companies, and that has been continually extended to cover music, motion pictures, still photography, and just about everything else under the sun. It is an unnatural privilege that has been wrested from the powers that be. It is not now and never has been a natural, human right. We are up against a deep-seated, long-lived, deliberate twisting of moral and legal concepts -- a misuse and misdirection of our innate respect for individual rights, human dignity, and personal creativity -- a package deal of epic proportions claiming that a coercive monopoly and artificial privilege is a natural, human right. To grace this phenomenon with the noble word "right" was a stroke of genius by those who foisted it upon us in the first place. But I think that those of us who are concerned about perpetual copyright weaken our cause by continuing to grant that copyright is a right at all. Once we recognize that copyright is in fact a government-granted privilege restricting market access to a single publisher (typically not the creator but instead an agent of the creator who brings a creative product to market), we can have a civil discussion about whether it is good public policy to grant such privileges, and for how long. But as long as that privilege is wrapped in the timeless, universalistic, moral language of rights rather than the temporal, consensus-driven, political language of privileges, we will never make progress in reforming the laws that govern publication of creative products. (Such products are not "intellectual property", either. But that's a topic for another post...) Posted on 2007-05-22 at 20:41. File under publicdomain. ~ link ~ 2007-05-16Backlog EmptyMore software updates... Following up on yesterday's post, today I cleared out the backlog on my "idletasks" folder by adding some more projects to the jabber.org software pages:
Posted on 2007-05-16 at 19:43. File under jabber. ~ link ~ ConsensusScience and politics... Here's an interesting quote from Michael Crichton about the "consensus" on global warming (HT: Samizdata):
Posted on 2007-05-16 at 10:53. File under society. ~ link ~ InteractiveSocial presence again... As mentioned I've been thinking a lot about social presence lately. Most recently I've been chatting with Steve Krulewitz, a Songbird developer who created the Audioscrobbler plugin and who is interested in how XMPP can play well with Songbird. IMHO, one thing that would be cool in Songbird is the ability to find live chatrooms where people who are listening to the same artist right now can find each other and talk. That might make the music listening experience more social, but in a way that doesn't interrupt the music (since most people can listen to music and do text chat at the same time). Probably this could be done with xmpp4moz but I suck at programming so I don't have recommendations about how to make it happen at the code level. Right now it's possible to push tune information into XMPP presence, but that's an evil hack for several reasons, because if everyone puts their favored bits in the presence status then:
Our preferred solution is a more granular approach called personal eventing, which is starting to be rolled out now and which can be used to push out things like user tunes. But the presence hack leads to further thoughts about integrating music more deeply into the buddy list. Why not have special groups in your buddy list for people who like the same music (perhaps people you find in those chatrooms)? Or do a form of buddy list tagging? Make the whole experience more social. As I've complained before, the problem I have with things like last.fm and Orkut and the social networking stuff in general is that it's all so static. With XMPP we could make it much more dynamic and much more, well, social! After all, it's not very social to post a message on a group forum at last.fm and then go back and visit that page again in 2 weeks and maybe someone has replied. True sociality is a lot more interactive than that, and Jabber technologies can add much of the interactive glue that makes the experience more social and sticky. Or so it seems to me. :) Posted on 2007-05-16 at 09:03. File under jabber. ~ link ~ ApriorismIs all experience personal? Overnight I received the following note about the definition of apriorism to be found in my philosophical dictionary:
Well there are deep philosophical questions wrapped up in that one little word, aren't there? :) Such as: is there any experience outside the experience of individuals? I have long tended to methodological or epistemological individualism, so in the past I have doubted that there is such a thing as societal experience. But my immersion in the study of history and science makes me doubt my doubts. In a sense, science (in the broadest sense) is accumulated knowledge and a kind of societal experience. Yet in the end, it is an individual mind that must come to grasp any given piece of knowledge (there is no societal mind). And in any case I don't think we use the term "apriorism" to refer to science as accumulated knowledge, but to that individual grasp of something before one has had experience of the realities from which the relevant knowledge has been abstracted (yes, I also tend to epistemological abstractionism). So while perhaps the definition is made clearer by adding the word "personal", I also happen to think it's redundant. Posted on 2007-05-16 at 08:13. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ 2007-05-15Measure ThisA confusing genitive... In my last post I used the phrase "a few months' hiatus". Here are some more examples of this construction:
What's going on here? What's with the apostrophes? Welcome to the genitive case. The grammarian Charles Fries would say that these phrases are examples of the genitive of measure, but it seems to me that we use this genitive mostly with regard to duration. For instance, we don't say that baseball is "an inches' game", but we do say that home runs were "all in a day's work" for Babe Ruth. You can think of it as "the work of a day" (or "the war of a hundred years" or "a wait of a few minutes" or "a vacation of one week" or "a hiatus of a few months"). Just remove that "of", modify the word order, and add the apostrophe. English is fun, eh? Posted on 2007-05-15 at 21:57. File under language. ~ link ~ SongbirdOpen-source media player in action... After a few months' hiatus, I've started using Songbird again to play music on my Mac. It's still a memory hog and a bit on the slow side, but I assume the 'birders are working on that. Plus the Audioscrobbler plugin does a mostly reliable job of uploading my listens to last.fm. Hey it's not perfect, but neither was Firefox (in fact the old Mozilla browser starting around the M8 release) or Thunderbird or OpenOffice when I began using them. Better, methinks, to support open-source projects early on, when they need it most. Posted on 2007-05-15 at 20:53. File under technology. ~ link ~ Software UpdatesPlaying catch-up... I have an email folder called "idletasks", where I place messages I receive to do things like add projects to the software pages at www.jabber.org. Unfortunately, I don't process these tasks very quickly, but I did just add the following projects:
More to follow in the coming days. Posted on 2007-05-15 at 20:39. File under jabber. ~ link ~ Jabber auf DeutschA friendly intro... The folks at Hitflip have published a nice little article (in German) about Jabber technologies here, which they've added to their lexicon pages. Posted on 2007-05-15 at 09:41. File under jabber. ~ link ~ 2007-05-14ImmersionLiving social presence... Oh and speaking of living in the presence, my recent post about XMPP and social networking has gotten me interested again in a wide range of "social presence" applications, so I've refreshed my accounts at last.fm (got iscrobbler working again) and Plazes as well as the aforementioned Jaiku and Twitter. Experimentation continues... Posted on 2007-05-14 at 15:45. File under jabber. ~ link ~ Living in the PresenceThe importance of network availability... VON Magazine is running an interesting article by Ross O'Brien entitled Living in the Presence -- read it to grok more deeply why information about network availability matters so much. Posted on 2007-05-14 at 15:39. File under jabber. ~ link ~ 2007-05-13Got Libel?The benefits of non-commercial blogging... Here's another good reason to keep your blog free of advertising and tipjars: non-commercial websites may protect you from libel lawsuits. (IANAL, YMMV.) Posted on 2007-05-13 at 22:09. File under personal. ~ link ~ InekePerfumes in the family... My cousin Ineke has launched her own line of perfumes and it's been getting quite a bit of attention -- check it out at ineke.com. Posted on 2007-05-13 at 20:07. File under personal. ~ link ~ Friendship in Atlas ShruggedYet another essay in circulation... The other day I received my complimentary copy of Atlas Shrugged: A Philosophical and Literary Companion from Ashgate Press, containing my essay "Friendship in Atlas Shrugged" and a large collection of papers by a wide range of scholars in philosophy, economics, politics, and literature. Order your copy today! ;-) Posted on 2007-05-13 at 14:19. File under philosophy. ~ link ~ A Sculpture WalkPublic statues on the Upper West Side... The last time I was in New York City, I stole a few hours to walk around Morningside Heights and Riverside Park (in the pouring rain!) in search of the many fine public statues I remember from my days at Columbia University. At some point I'll write up a detailed walking tour, but before I forget here are some of the pieces I enjoyed most, in rough walking order from north to south:
Posted on 2007-05-13 at 14:07. File under personal. ~ link ~ American RoyaltyHypocrisy on the highways... Radley Balko does a fine job of exposing how many members of America's would-be royalty -- elected politicians -- like to lord it over us commoners on the public thoroughfares. As Bob Dole used to say in a different context: where's the outrage? Posted on 2007-05-13 at 13:51. File under politics. ~ link ~ 2007-05-10By Any Other NameJabber, XMPP, Talk, oh my! We've had yet another long email discussion thread in the last few days about what we call our technology. Is it Jabber? Is it XMPP? Is it Talk? The short version of my philosophy in the matter was best expressed by Shakespeare in Act II, Scene II of Romeo and Juliet:
The long version is here. Posted on 2007-05-10 at 12:00. File under jabber. ~ link ~ 2007-05-09The PulseXMPP and social networking. Britt Selvitelle and I had a good chat just now about Twitter, Jabber, personal eventing, and the concept of lifestreams. Both Twitterers and Jabberites share a vision of making the Internet a more dynamic, alive, pulsating kind of place, focused less on pages and more on people and their endlessly fascinating activities. Services like Twitter and Jaiku have their finger on the pulse of what people are doing -- a kind of collective unconscious. So in their own specialized ways do services like last.fm and Pandora for music, Joost and presumably YouTube for video, Plazes for location, and much more. I see the need for two things to bring these many streams together into a mighty, pulsing river of real-time interaction:
Hint: I think the Jabber/XMPP community has a great deal to add to this conversation because it's the people in your buddy list who care about what you're doing, presence information provides a way to know where the information needs to go, and if every Jabber ID is a real-time eventing service then we have a way to funnel all this data through your online identity off to the people in your buddy list. Oh and BTW my Twitter and Jaiku feeds are here and here. Posted on 2007-05-09 at 14:41. File under jabber. ~ link ~ Open Discussion DayUsing open standards. Ploum reminds us that it's only ten days until Open Discussion Day, when those of us who care about open standards encourage those who don't to use open protocols and formats like Jabber, SIP, and Ogg Vorbis. Check out the ODD site for information about how you can help. Posted on 2007-05-09 at 09:13. File under jabber. ~ link ~ 2007-05-08Upcoming ConferencesSee you in Atlanta, San Diego, Chicago, Portland... BTW, here are the conferences I'll be attending in the near to medium term:
See you there! Posted on 2007-05-08 at 13:33. File under jabber. ~ link ~ |
identity... my back pages me my group blogs albion's seedlings jabberites adam nemeth techies barry leiba wonks cafe hayek i use... i support... i listen to... fighting censorship... current threat level... flying the flag...
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