one small voice

stpeter.im

2007-05-31T23:59:00-07:00

This 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!

Be Open

2007-05-30T15:53:00-07:00

Is interoperability enough?

Principle Six of the Mozilla Manifesto reads as follows:

The effectiveness of the Internet as a public resource depends upon interoperability (protocols, data formats, content), innovation and decentralized participation worldwide.

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.)

Pressing?

2007-05-30T15:23:00-07:00

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!

GSoC Update

2007-05-29T11:59:00-07:00

First 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:

Mentors will work individually with students on milestones and project issues as they arise.
Both mentors and students will blog weekly about results and challenges so we stay on course.

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!

By the Way

2007-05-28T20:59:00-07:00

That 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:

The burrito that I had this morning was the best I ever tasted.

vs.

The burrito that I had this morning, which (by the way) cost only two dollars, was the best I ever tasted.

A "that" phrase can also naturally set up a comparison to another such phrase, such as:

The burrito that I had this morning was the best I ever tasted, but the burrito that I had yesteday was awful.

In spoken English we often remove the "that" as unnecessary:

The burrito I had this morning was the best I ever tasted, but the burrito I had yesteday was awful.

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):

~~The burrito which I had this morning was the best I ever tasted, but the burrito which I had yesteday was awful.~~

Ish

2007-05-28T17:17:00-07:00

Yet 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:

Well I just used one, meaning "of a certain nation" -- as in English, Swedish, and Netherlandish.
Another is "having the qualities of" -- as in childish, foolish, and sheepish.
We also have "preoccupied with" -- as in bookish and selfish.
The meaning in largish is "somewhat" or "to some degree" -- often used with color words such as greenish and reddish, but also with size words such as largish, smallish, and tallish.
With adjectives of time, "-ish" means "approximately" -- as in fortyish and noonish.

English is fun.

Breaking News?

2007-05-27T21:13:00-07:00

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.

The Wisdom of the Brick

2007-05-27T20:33:00-07:00

A 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):

Brick is a superlative building material, the product of 8,000 years of experience in firing clay into modular units that can be mortared together and stacked by hand into unreinforced structures as high as sixteen stories. [insert reference to the Monadnock Building here] .... 'Bricks are heavenly,' says contractor Matisse Enzer, 'because they require relatively little technology to create, build with, and modify. Bricks allow a wonderful variety of patterns and degrees of softness-hardness, permanence-temporariness. Most of all, they are intuitively obvious.' Bricks, more than any other material, look like they were made to fit the human hand. With dimensions of 8 inches by 4 inches by 2-2/3 inches, one brick long equals two bricks wide or three bricks wide (including mortar joints), so a wide variety of bond or decorative patterns is possible....

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.)

SoC Blogs

2007-05-24T12:01:00-07:00

Tracking summer progress...

If you're interested in following the progress of the Jabber-related Summer of Code projects, check out the following student blogs:

badlop is working on extended stanza addressing and other features in the ejabberd server.
Armando Diaz-Jagucki is adding support for personal eventing to the Openfire server.
Tobias Markmann is building a tool for designing XMPP data forms.
Tomasz Melcer is making the Gajim client more media-friendly by coding support for Jingle audio and Jingle video.
Brendan Taylor is developing an implemenation of our Encrypted Sessions protocol.
Matthew Wild is adding support for the HTTP binding (now called BOSH) to the gloox library.

Maybe these will end up on Planet SoC and Planet Jabber sometime... ;-)

Revolutionary America

2007-05-22T21:33:00-07:00

Radical equality in action...

This post by Victor Davis Hanson seems right on to me, especially his observations about the radical nature of American society:

Globalization is mostly driven by the United States, whether defined by the spread of the English language, crass advertising, the Internet, American pop culture of rap, jeans and I-pods or worldwide businesses like Starbucks and MacDonald's. A global sameness seems to trample traditional cultures and appeal to the masses worldwide despite lectures from their elites about the dangers of such American-induced contamination.

This influence of the United States is not attributable to strategic location like that enjoyed by a Germany or Iran. We don't have vast oil reserves like a Saudi Arabia, or an enormous population such as India or China.

Instead, it's what we do rather than what we have that attracts others. Our radical Democratic culture of informality and inclusiveness results in an unusually tolerant and secure society, in which participation is open to all. Being an American can be like playing at a cut-throat, madcap poker table, but it invites any to play who are willing to ante up and risk their all.

We can see this dynamism not just by the flood of immigrants -- America takes more of them than all industrialized countries combined -- but by the nature of some of them. Those who are sometimes most publicly critical of the United States, privately seem to like us a great deal. Why else would the dictator of Pakistan, an Amal militia leader in Lebanon, or a Turkish Islamist Prime Minister entrust their families either to live in the United States or to go to school here? Only in America can a Palestinian criticize the Hamas leadership, a Turkish woman wear a scarf, or a female Saudi student date.

In terms of foreign policy, many of our troubles result not, as charged, from imperialism, but from this very democratic fervor. Of all the critiques of our experience in Iraq, few have pinpointed our chief challenge: we extended one-man, one-vote and thereby empowered the traditionally downtrodden, and denigrated Shiite population, to the chagrin of Sunni elites in and outside of Iraq. It mattered little that few of the Shiia were educated, or had any experience in governance: in the naïve American sense, as free people born into the world as equal as any others, they had a right to run or ruin their own country.

By the same token, radical American egalitarianism is what terrifies our Islamist enemies. Bin Laden -- many of the terrorist's family were living in the United States on September 11 -- knows the insidious dangers of Americanization, both from his own wealthy youth spent enjoying the high life, and the failure of his Sharia law to compete with Spiderman for the attention of most of his flock.

Other superpowers like India and China pose as third-world revolutionary powers. But both are plagued by caste and rigid political or class obstacles to full participation in their societies. A Chinese can become a fully-accepted American citizen. A non-Chinese American black, white, or Hispanic would never fully be accepted as Chinese -- even with mastery of the language and the formal acquisition of Chinese citizenship.

Abroad China does not care from whom it buys or to whom it sells, and hardly cares about promoting democracy abroad. In short, it is still America that is the most radical, revolutionary, and destabilizing nation of all -- and thereby disliked for precisely the opposite reasons that the Left proclaims.

Anything But a Right

2007-05-22T20:41:00-07:00

Language 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...)

Backlog Empty

2007-05-16T19:43:00-07:00

More 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:

The Jabber::Lite Perl library.
A slick new client for Windows: xeus messenger.
OctroTalk, a client for PocketPC and Smartphone.
The Beep library for J2ME-enabled devices.

Consensus

2007-05-16T10:53:00-07:00

Science and politics...

Here's an interesting quote from Michael Crichton about the "consensus" on global warming (HT: Samizdata):

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus.

Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Interactive

2007-05-16T09:03:00-07:00

Social 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:

We won't have room for it all -- how do you prioritize last.fm tunes over Plazes locations etc.?
We'll be sending presence updates every minute or so, which will consume huge amounts of bandwidth.

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. :)

Apriorism

2007-05-16T08:13:00-07:00

Is all experience personal?

Overnight I received the following note about the definition of apriorism to be found in my philosophical dictionary:

I think the content of the square brackets below make the definition of apriorism more truthful.

apriorism ... The view (opposed to empiricism) that some or all knowledge can be gained without reference to [personal] experience.

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.

Measure This

2007-05-15T21:57:00-07:00

A confusing genitive...

In my last post I used the phrase "a few months' hiatus". Here are some more examples of this construction:

A day's work
The Hundred Years' War
A few minutes' wait
A week's vacation

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?

Songbird

2007-05-15T20:53:00-07:00

Open-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.

Software Updates

2007-05-15T20:39:00-07:00

Playing 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:

The xmpp4moz library -- a very active project with lots of code built on top (including the SamePlace web client).
Claros Chat, an open-source web client produced by the Claros Project.
The Wokjab client for Linux.

More to follow in the coming days.

Jabber auf Deutsch

2007-05-15T09:41:00-07:00

A 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.

Immersion

2007-05-14T15:45:00-07:00

Living 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...

Living in the Presence

2007-05-14T15:39:00-07:00

The 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.

Got Libel?

2007-05-13T22:09:00-07:00

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.)

Ineke

2007-05-13T20:07:00-07:00

Perfumes 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.

Friendship in Atlas Shrugged

2007-05-13T14:19:00-07:00

Yet 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! ;-)

A Sculpture Walk

2007-05-13T14:07:00-07:00

Public 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:

Carl Schurz by Karl Bitter (Morningside Avenue at 116th Street)
One of 8 original recastings by Auguste Rodin of The Thinker (appropriately enough, in front of Philosophy Hall)
Scholar's Lion by Greg Wyatt (near Havemeyer Hall)
The Great God Pan by George Grey Barnard (near Lewisohn Hall)
Alma Mater by D.C. French (on College Walk)
Alexander Hamilton by William Ordway Partridge (in front of Hamilton Hall)
Thomas Jefferson by William Ordway Partridge (in front of Journalism Hall)
Art and Science by Charles Keck (at the main entrance to the Columbia University campus, Broadway at 116th Street)
On the campus of Barnard College, an unnamed statue by Charles Beach celebrating the Barnard Greek Games
Lajos Kossuth (sculptor unknown, further research required) (Riverside at 113th Street)
Samuel Tilden by William Ordway Partridge (Riverside at 112th Street)
The Straus Memorial by Augustus Lukeman (West End Avenue at 106th Street)
Frank Sigel by Karl Bitter (Riverside at 106th Street)
The Firemen's Memorial by Attilio Piccirilli (Riverside at 100th Street)
Joan of Arc by Anna Hyatt Huntington (Riverside at 93rd Street)

American Royalty

2007-05-13T13:51:00-07:00

Hypocrisy 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?

By Any Other Name

2007-05-10T12:00:00-07:00

Jabber, 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:

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

The long version is here.

The Pulse

2007-05-09T14:41:00-07:00

XMPP 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:

Common data formats and transports to represent and share all this information.
A forum for builders of such services to collaborate about how to make this happen.

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.

Open Discussion Day

2007-05-09T09:13:00-07:00

Using 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.

Upcoming Conferences

2007-05-08T13:33:00-07:00

See you in Atlanta, San Diego, Chicago, Portland...

BTW, here are the conferences I'll be attending in the near to medium term:

Asterisk Developers Conference (May 22-25, Atlanta, GA)
Joint Systems Chat Conference (June 6-7, San Diego, CA)
ClueCon (June 26-28, Chicago, IL)
XMPP DevCon (July 23-24, Portland, OR)
OSCON 2007 (July 25-27, Portland, OR), speaking about Secure Communications With Jabber on Thursday the 26th

See you there!