tychoish: tycho garen's notes and essays

Things I'm Wiking On

2010-03-12T00:00:00-05:00

The Contra Purity Test: A couple friends and thought it might be cool to work on a “purity test” for contra dancing/dancers. Mostly for jokes, I said ”I’ll make a wiki page,” and then I did. It is, I’d say 70% done.
Some writing and thinking about TumbleManager, tumblelog engine in response to this post. I’m writing this as a design document/spec sheet because I’m a writer and my brain works like this.
The Lessons from System Administration is the beginning of an archive of posts that I’ve written recently drawing lessons learned in system administration into other more generally useful contexts.
Sygn Networking - I’ve done some editing recently on this older project with an attempt to move it forward. Reorganization, cleaning up of text, adding new points in where they make sense. Of particular interest is, I think the data examples of what sygn profiles might look like. I hope this all helps illuminate the project a bit.
Although this only barely counts: I did some very wiki-like editing to the tubmlelog post, which I think cleaned up the text a bit. I’m, as you’re aware, not a very polished sort of writer. But I think I’m pretty good at cleaning things up after a fashion, and once I have the right distance. Or something. It’s a bit clearer now, at any rate.
Also not wiki related specifically, but I’ve been doing some rolling revisions on the Cyborg Institute website recently. I don’t want the CI project to die, but I want it to be more realistic, and useful to other people as a platform for some really awesome projects. I think by focusing the site, and pulling out some cruft we’re getting in that direction.

In addition to the above, I wanted to explore the possibility of doing more posts like this occasionally as a way of saying “Hey! I’m working on cool things like the stuff I write about here, but the stuff isn’t getting posted here. Check them out” is that a valuable use of this space? Or would this tedious?

Onward and Upward!

Input in the Next Wave

2010-03-10T00:00:00-05:00

In response mostly to my own comentary of the iPad I’d like to lead a collective brainstorming of input and computer interact modalities in “the next wave.”

What’s the next wave? That thing that’s always coming “soon,” but isn’t quite here yet, the thing that we are starting to see glimpses of, but don’t really know. Accepting for a moment that things like Blackberries, netbooks, Kindles, iPads, iPhones and the like are these “harbingers” of the next wave.

The “make or break” feature of all these new and shiny things is the input method: how we get stuff from our heads into a format that a computer can do something with. While I’m a particularly… textual sort of guy, the “input question,” is something everyone who uses technology will eventually come to care about. Blackberry’s sell because they speak “messaging,” and because most of them have hardware keyboards. The iPad, with its bigger onscreen keyboard and external keyboard dock, is–to my mind–an admission that the little onscreen keyboard of the iPhone doesn’t work if you want enter more than 50 or 60 characters at any given time.

I love a good hardware keyboard. A lot, and I’m not just talking about the kind on the blackberry, but a real keyboard. The truth is I can’t even quite bring myself to justify one of the little “netbooks” on the principal that everything I do involves massive amounts of typing. And fundamentally, at the moment there doesn’t seem to be a good replacement for getting data into a computer system, that doesn’t involve a keyboard. Clearly this can’t hold out forever, and so I’d like to pose two questions:

What kind of computer interfaces will replace the command line?

So in 2010 most people interact with their computers by way of the mouse and a lot of pretty pictures. Even mobile environments like the iPhone/iPad/etc. and the Blackberry have some sort of a pointer that the user has to manipulate.

But the truth is that this kind of modality has always been inefficient: switching between the mouse and the keyboard is the greatest time sink in current user interfaces. Graphical environments require increasingly sophisticated graphics hardware, they require users to memorize interfaces in a visual way that may not be intuitive (even if we’re accustomed,) and they have incredibly high development costs relative to other kinds of software. Furthermore, most of us use a lot of text-based interfaces weather we know it or not. Google is a command line interface, as are most web browser’s address bars. And although my coworkers and I are hardly typical, we all have a handful of terminals open at any given time.

Clearly shells, (e.g. bash, zsh, and the like) are not going to be around forever, but I think they’re going to be around until we find some sort of solution that can viably replace the traditional shell. We need computer interfaces that are largely textual, keyboard driven, powerful, modern, lightweight, fast, and designed to be used interactively. I’m not sure what it looks like, but I know that it needs to exist.
What kind of interfaces will replace the keyboard for data entry?

When I was writing the iPad reflection, I thought it might be cool to have an input device that was mostly on the back of the device, so that you hold the device in both hands, your fingers make contact with some sort of sensors on the back, with your thumbs touching something on the front, and there’s some sort of on-screen interface that provides feedback to make up for the fact that you can’t see “the keys.”

I’d be inclined to think that this would be QWERTY derived, but that’s as much a habit as it is anything. I’m a pretty good touch typist, not perfect, and not the fastest, but I don’t have to think at all about typing it just happens. But I don’t know or think that the QWERTY keyboard is going to be the interface modality of the future. While I do want to learn DVORAK typing–but haven’t managed to really feel inspired enough to do that–I think its more productive to think about replacements for the keyboard itself rather than alternate layouts.

Thoughts?

If Open Source is Big Business Then Whither the Community?

2010-03-09T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve been thinking recently about the relationship and dynamic between the corporations and “enterprises” which participate in and reap benefits from open source/free software and the quasi-mythic “communities” that are responsible for the creation and maintenance of the software. Additionally this post may be considered part of my ongoing series on cooperative economics.

When people, ranging from business types, to IT professionals, to programmers, and beyond, talk about open source software we talk about a community: often small to medium sized groups of people who all contribute small amounts of time to creating software. And we’re not just talking about dinky little scripts that make publishing blogs easier (or some such), we’re talking about a massive amount of software: entire operating systems, widely used implementations of nearly all relevant programing languages, and so forth. On some level the core of this question is who are these people, and how do they produce software?

On the surface the answer to these questions is straightforward. The people who work on open source software are professional programmers, students, geeks, and hacker/tinkerer-types who need their computers to do something novel, and then they write software. This works as model for thinking about who participates in open source, if we assume that the reason why people contribute to open source projects is because their individual works/contributions are too small to develop business models around. This might explain some portion of open source contributions, but it feels incomplete to me.

There are a number of software projects that use open source/free software licenses, with accessible source code, supported by “communities,” which are nonetheless developed almost entirely by single companies. MySQL, Alfresco, and Resin among others serve as examples these kinds of projects which are open source by many any definitions and yet don’t particularly strike me as “community,” projects. Is the fact that this software provides source code meaningful or important?

Conceptualizing Scale

2010-03-08T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve been thinking about how ideas, projects, and ideas scale a bit in the past few weeks, and as usual, I wanted to collect a few of these thoughts. This post is generally in my series of posts of “Extrapolations from Systems Administration.” Inspirations and origins of these ideas come from, in part:

My Tumblr Killed the Tumblelog Star post.
My Google reader unread count.
Savage Minds Post on Social Enterpernurship and Anthropology post.
All the television I don’t watch.
The nginx HTTP Proxy module.
Seeing the Forest for the Brand

The internet is a big place, you don’t need me to tell you this, but I think that it’s really incomprehensibly big. Even the small corners of the internet that we (well, I at least,) inhabit contain vast amounts of information and it’s very difficult to keep your head above water, to feel like you’re in touch with what’s happening. Strategies for managing this information successfully are as concerned with “figuring out what to ignore,” as they are about figuring out how to absorb information successfully.

Scaling an idea or a concept (like a blog, or a piece of software or a web server) to be able to address problem sets (like an audience, or a given set of data, or both) of different sizes is just as difficult. It’s tough to get a web server to be able to host really large loads, its difficult to be able to write a blog that appeals to a huge audience: the this nexuses of related problems are quite large.

I think, however, we can begin to draw some conclusions. I do hope that you’ll be able to help me add to this list. Perhaps in a wikish page.

Be the biggest fish in the smallest possible pond.

The core strategy here is to avoid having to figure out how to scale up to “full speed,” by reframing the problem set. You don’t have to become the most popular or widely consumed blogger/novelist: you just have to become the most popular blogger about cyborg philosophy, or the political economics and philosophy of the open source world. You have to become the most popular post-colonial historiography space opera novelist.
Don’t participate in the proliferation of crap: only build/use what you need to.

I see lots of people say something along the lines of “I want to make a websites for all of the people interested in what I’m interested in, and we’ll need a wiki and some discussion forums, and some sort of blogs, maybe a lot of blogs, and…” This inevitably leads to a bunch of organization and building of things for their websites, and then everything is built and… no one is interested in using the crap.

This is a classic premature optimization problem. Don’t build things that you think you might need later. Build things that you need now. Or things that you really needed last week. Focus on the thing you do, and build the infrastructure as you need it, when you need it.
Work in a scalable and sustainable manner, and assume that other people will need to pick up on your projects.

While you shouldn’t expend the effort to scale before you need to, because that could end in failure, it’s common sense to approach your projects with the assumption that other people might have to finish them for you, if things take off and you need to delegate later you’ll be ready for them. Consider the possibility that you might need to scale a project when you’re in the initial planning stages and avoid getting backed into a corner by a decision.
Ignore everything you can possibly stand to.

There are so many things that you could be doing with your time. There are so many distractions. Email lists, RSS feeds, the work of other people in your field. Charity projects of one sort or another. All of these things are important and you should participate fully in the communities that surround your work, but be fully aware that humans as individuals don’t scale well, and succeeding at your project is dependent upon your ability to ignore everything that you can stand to.
Consume information on your terms, in the formats that make the most sense to you.

As a corollary to the above, the way to successfully engage and manage everything that you can’t possibly stand to ignore is to as much as possible engage on your terms. Figure out what your terms are first, and then work to consume content in these terms.
Use technology and media to build relationships rather than accumulate information.

Too often, I think, the geekier among us (and I count myself among this number) are interested in technology because it’s cool, and we’re tempted to solve technological problems and learn about the inner workings of stuff because they interest us. And that’s okay, as a hobby: in the pursuit of doing work, technology is only useful insofar as it allows you to get things done. And in most cases, the core function that technology provides is to enable relationships. So focus on that, and fiddle with the technical underpinnings, only when you must.

Onward and Upward!

Distance from the Divine

2010-03-05T00:00:00-05:00

When I talk about Sacred Harp singing with my friends from college, they all look at me like I’m crazy. “Right, I go sing 18th century hymns set to music in the 19th century (and later,) with my hippie and queer friends in quasi-archaic harmonies. It’s a blast!” This isn’t my tradition, both in the sense that I don’t come from a sacred harp singing family, and in the sense that I come from a particularly unobservant Jewish family.

There’s something about Sacred Harp, that I think is hard to describe. Everyone comes to it for different worlds, and there are a lot of people who grew up with it and/or identify as Christian in the community. While I think most people who sing Sacred Harp find it a deeply fulfilling experience, for many its as much about the shared experience, the guttural experience of the chords, and the “sacred/special space” as it is about the texts. This is something that I think is pretty difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t felt a singing.

I mentioned a while ago my interest in writing hymns in the tradition of the sacred harp, and I don’t have anything to present to you yet, or even some example of what I’m playing with, as I haven’t actually constructed anything. I do have the following observation.

The texts and aesthetics of the Sacred Harp is encapsulated with what I think is probably a not very contemporary view of the divine. In my reading, the texts display a relationship to the divine that is distant and detached. I might even say reserved and tentative. The speakers in the text are not individuals but more collectively constituted persons–this fits well with the way the music is sung–and the speakers generally do not interact with or speak to the divinity directly, except possibly to give thanks or appreciation. Like the harmonies themselves, the texts are spare and stark; indeed I suspect their simplicity makes the tunes easier to sing (words are almost always easier to sing than shapes,) while being very careful to not distract from the tunes.

As I said, this isn’t my tradition, at all, in addition to the structural constraints of the form (common meter, for the most part,) I think the stylistic constraints present the larger challenge. I’m trying to figure out how to write text that isn’t cloyingly spiritual, and that fits my own worldview (such as it is,) but that also respects this kind of spiritual aesthetic, for lack of a better term. I’ve been reading up on various religious phenomena, contemplative orders, and the Religious Society of Friends. Because it seems appropriate.

As is, I think always the case, minimalism is always a lot harder than it looks. I’ll keep you all posted!

Software as app Store

2010-03-03T00:00:00-05:00

This post represents two major ideas, first of ”app stores,” and second of “Sass” or “software as a service,” which seems to be the prevailing business model for contemporary technology companies that aren’t stuck in the 80s. With reflection on free software, open source, and the technology industry as a whole. Because that’s sort of my thing.

On the one hand the emergence of these tightly controlled software distribution methods represent a fairly serious threat to free software, as does SaaS particular insofar as SaaS exploits a GPL loophole. On the other hand these models, potentially, represent something fundamentally awesome for the technology and software world, because it represents a commonly accepted paradigm where users of software recognize the value of software, and the creators of software can get compensated for their work. It’s not without its flaws, but I think it opens interesting possibilities.

Free and Freedom

Obviously app stores present a quandary for those of us involved in the free software world. On the one hand app stores are not free, which is a trivial complaint. It’s not the cost, around which “free software” is truly centered, the true failing here is that creators of software cannot choose to participate in an app store system and distribute source code: the interaction and relationship between developers and users is very scripted and detached. These issues all grow out of the reality that app stores–by design–are they’re controlled by a single institution or organization.

Which isn’t itself a bad thing–there are contexts where centralized organization means things get done more effectively, but centralized authority is not without risk. So while this question isn’t resolved, it’s also the kind of question that requires ongoing attention and reflection.

Paying for Software

At the same time, I think it’s very true that the “app store model” and indeed the more successful “Web 2.0” business models (e.g. new businesses on the web, post-2003/2004) have posited that:

Software is a thing of value that users should expect to pay for.

And that’s not, at least to my mind, a bad thing for the software world. Free or otherwise. Or not always a bad thing, particularly for end-user software. For larger pieces of software (in the “Enterprise”) money is largely exchanged for support contracts and for services related to the software: custom features, IT infrastructure, etc. For end user software, support contracts and custom features don’t tend to make a lot of sense in context: so perhaps moving back to the exchange of money for software isn’t a bad thing.

The connection between “value” (which software almost certainly creates), and currency in the context of software is fraught. Software isn’t scarce, and will never be (by nature.) At the same time it does have value and I think it’s worth considering how to arrange economies that involve exchanging money for software. There are a lot of factors that can effect the way that app stores might work, and I think given the possibility for causing interesting things to happen we shouldn’t dismiss them out of hand.

Coming of Age In The Science Fiction Community

2010-03-02T00:00:00-05:00

I said to a new writing friend ”I’m young, particularly given that anyone under the age of 40 in the science fiction community is considered ‘a young writer.’” Which is, more or less true (on both counts,) and brought on a couple of trains of thought that I’d like to explore in a bit more depth:

The “youth” of a writer is long, indeed much longer than one would expect.
I’ve found a community of science fiction writers. Admittedly I’m new and very much on the outside, but I find it delightful that all of the “things I do,” are part of communities one sort or another: Sacred Harp singing, Morris Dancing (in the Midwest, particularly,) Contra Dancing (on the East Cost, particularly,) Free/Open Source software, blogging, and apparently Science Fiction writing.¹

The Portrait of the Author During Youth

I’ve written here before about the challenges and inherent problems of “being a writer:” the work we do is potentially hard to understand, good writing is more than the sum of its parts, and because writing is a sign of education for most people, sometimes it’s difficult to figure out (even those of us who “are writers”) to figure out what’s “writing,” and what’s just throwing words together.

Now to be fair, I’m not complaining that the period of “youth” as a writer is so long. This standard seems wrapped up in the idea that a large component of being a “real writer,” is having lived long enough to have enjoyed a great deal of unique experiences (which can inform your work,) and also to have had enough time writing “crap” to be able to have the (learned) skill of being able to construct quality texts.

It’s really hard to tell people, epically the young, that they need to “wait until they’re older.” But I think once we (I) get done with the pouting, there’s a pretty strong silver lining: the extended adolescence of the writer provides a longer window to read, to experiment, to apprentice to other writers, and to grow as a writer. Additionally, if the “youth” of a science fiction writer is longer than it is for writers in other fields (and I suspect it is, slightly,) the science fiction community has created a way to compensate for the exclusion of science fiction from most academic writing programs. These are all largely good things, to my mind.

Community Discourses

I think communities are fascinating, and I’m delighted to touch so many different and interesting communities. It seems to me that the formation of communities is very much not a project for youth. As young people, our communities are local, and based on where we go to school, where we live, even where we work. The communities I’m thinking about there are, in turn based on what we’re interested in and what we love to do. Although there’s a potential for insularity and self-selecting qualities, there’s also a great potential for diversity. There are a lot of different kinds of science fiction writers, sacred harp singers, folk dancers, open source hackers, and so forth.

There’s another interesting set of common factors for these communities: they’re all built around shared experiences and activities in the “real world” (as it is,) but the members of these communities tend to be scattered across a given geographic area. Though I don’t have much to compare this to, personally, but I think the ways that these communities are supported and connected through the Internet. As much as Facebook irritates me on a technological level, its done it’s job.

The principals under which communities function and adhere are not something I have a terribly firm grasp of, I must confess, but I know what I find myself in one, it’s a good thing indeed.

I have, it seems too many hobbies and avocations.
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The Things I'm Going To Do Today

2010-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Ok, so not really.

This post is mostly about playing a head game with yourself, in an effort to get more organized. But not “head games” in a bad way. On my to do list for the past few weeks I’ve had something like “write a blog post about todo list item titles,” because in light of this post about org-mode it seems like a topic in need of further definition. Basically my goal is to explore, the best way to think about what we have to do, to allow us to accomplish what we want to. The GTD system which so many people are enamored of present a few ideas on the topic, and while the GTD way is a good place to start thinking, it’s not a good place to stop thinking.

We’ve all done it. Made a todo list that we didn’t end up using for one reason or another. Todo lists, need to be useful: they should help us organize our day, and help us keep track of all the things wee need to accomplish. In a lot of ways, maintaining focus over our day and all of the tasks that nag at us are contradictory, so todo lists are failed by design.

The first, and frequent issue in my own organization are lists and plans that go too far and list too many “actionable items.” This divides your time and actions into too many little pieces, leading to a number of outcomes. The first risk is that you might start to ignore the list entirely because it’s too long and complicated, even if it’s an illusion caused by the size of the items on your list. Ergo, the total length of the list you “work off of,” needs to be manageable and comprehensible.

The second risk, is that, an overactive todo list is one where you over plan for yourself, such that your list–while accurate and comprehensible–isn’t useful. Beyond simply providing “outboard memory,” the best todo lists allow us to structure and make plans for our working time. When working (e.g. writing, at the computer, etc.), I like to have my projects chopped up into pieces that can conceivably get done in the time I have to work on them, but that give me the time and freedom to bury myself on a side project, or follow inspiration or a train of thought to its completion when needed. While effective todo lists help you structure your time, flexibility is still valuable.

There are issues on the other end of the spectrum as well: when lists are too short, and the “actionable items” on a list are too conceptually large, the effectiveness of lists is degraded as well. A reminder to “write a novel,” even a specific novel, is less than helpful for helping you accomplish something in the moment. Even a dozen items, on a list where you end up checking something off once every day or two doesn’t help you figure out “Ok, what do I need to work on now.” Besides the chances are, if the items are too large and the list is too small, that you probably have it memorized anyway.

Right? Other strategies?

Kindle and Paradise Regained

2010-02-25T00:00:00-05:00

As you all might have heard that Amazon (finally) released a Kindle Application for the Blackberry. When I heard this I thought that this would be a good thing, as I have (and quite enjoy) both my Blackberry and Kindle. Here’s the rundown:

The Kindle App for the blackberry is probably the most well designed blackberry application I’ve seen thus far. Having said that, the bar isn’t terribly high.

In a lot of ways, the way (before the Kindle app) to make a “successful” blackberry application is one that figures out how to make its data “fit” into an email or messaging context and then blend that data into the messaging/event feed in a useful sort of way.

This doesn’t do that, and I think learns a great deal from advancements made in iPhone app development. The resolution on the Blackberry Bold is amazing (same number of pixels as the iPhone, much greater density.) and the buttons/interface is really intuitive and well designed. The app itself gets as many thumbs up as I can manage.
I’ve been having phone angst recently. I don’t use it very much, I need to have better filtering of my email and reorganize how I do my voice mail, and while this is easy enough to say here it’s a much more substantial project than I’d
The Kindle App isn’t a replacement for the kindle, but it’s a great compliment, and it makes it much more possible to lighten the load in my back-bag, and it makes it easier for me to entertain myself with my phone. This might not seem like a bit deal, but I think it is.

There are also situations where the Kindle isn’t usable (in bed when the lights are off and various other low light situations) and that’s alright, but the Kindle app is. So that’s a good thing indeed.
I had hoped that the kindle would make it easier to read in the in between moments throughout the day when I might read but didn’t. That isn’t exactly true, as it turns out. Reading on the Kindle still requires a fair piece of directed attention, and it’s not the kind of thing you can idly whip out while you’re waiting in the grocery check out line.

I’m not sure at this point, of course, but I do think that having access to the Kindle on the phone will improve this usability feature.
I’m sort of annoyed by the lack of subscriptions. While you can have multiple devices attached to your Kindle account, when you subscribe to a periodical, that content is only accessible to you on one of your devices. I don’t really like this, and it represents a huge loss of value for the Kindle store.

While I got the Blackberry shortly after the first iPhone 3g came out, the “app explosion” hadn’t really happened yet. I must confess some “app jealousy.” The Blackberry is awesome, and really it does the messaging quite better than anything else around (I’m convinced.) And I love the hardware keyboard. But when I think ”I’d like to do something with my phone,” the chance of getting a Blackberry app to do that is… unlikely. I don’t know if I want a lot of apps on my phone, in the end, but I know the hardware is capable, and it’s nice to take advantage of that from time to time. In any case…

Onward and Upward!

There's a Widget for That

2010-02-24T00:00:00-05:00

Perhaps part of the reason the iPad doesn’t make sense for me is that I’ve never really used an iPhone, and at the core iPad is basically iPhone++. I opted to get a Blackberry because I wanted a device that did email right and messaging, I had/have an iPod Touch that I don’t really use and the little isolated applications that don’t interact well with my existing work flow and lock data in didn’t really appeal to me.

People are always talking about “the apps,” as if there’s something revolutionary happening here, and I’ve always been a bit non plussed. At least for my personal use, more “applications,” or places where “things can be done,” doesn’t always equate into more productivity.

Running in parallel to this, of course is the whole Web 2.0/web-based application development thing. (Is Web2.0 coasting to a halt yet? In any case, it’s probably still a current phenomena worth noting.) Although iPhone applications and Web applications are constructed in very ways that are quite technically distinct, there’s an underlying commonality between the way that both function. These applications are very much not general purpose. The best iPhone (or web) applications take a specific kind of data or information (or a collection of such), and provide a way for you to interact with that information in a way that’s (hopefully) intuitive.

In contrast the old familiar applications typically are designed to be either: platforms that enable you to accomplish a whole range of tasks within a certain sphere (“Office tools,” email applications, emacs), or some sort of filter or pipe that allows you to access data in one format in an interface that’s easy to use (RSS readers, Content management systems, pdf readers, web brwosers, etc.) There are certainly web applications that are basically pipes, and I’m sure Google would love it if we all used their application stack.

So, then, what describes this new “widget,” class of applications for mobile devices and the web? On the one hand it’s a case of developers “making do with what there is:” the iPhone imposes a number of serious constraints: small screen, limited on board computing resources, and a potentially inconsistent data connection. Small structured apps that are all about allowing you to interact with a small set of data work best in this environment. Additional I suspect that technology has advanced to a point where making these kinds of applications is finally possible and worth the it takes to build them: MVC frameworks have finally matured perhaps.

The enduring questions in my mind:

Is the data that we’re throwing into databases by way of iPhone apps and web applications going to continue to be useful in the future? This gets at the “open data” question as much if not more than the “open source” aspect of applications. What’s the realistic utility of our data in the long form?
Does this shift mark a move away from a certain kind of “paper-based logic,” to a more digital way of organizing or data and digital experiences?
Is this just the process of bringing the kinds of “business applications,” that enterprises have developed and used for decades into the consumer sphere?
How do the concepts of software freedom and data ownership transfer to this mode of using technology. While it’s easy to say “data ought to be free,” and “source code still matter” (both of which are true,) I think practically it’s a bit more difficult.
What do these applications look like on the Desktop? Is the future JavaFX, Flex, Silverlight, and Apple Desktop Widgets? Is the desktop going to be stuck in the browser? Are there other options?

And while I think we’re definitely using and creating this kind of software with abandon, I don’t know if we’ve reached good answers to these (and other related) questions. I look forward to exploring these ideas, and hearing your thoughts!

Tumblr Killed the Tumblelog Star

2010-02-23T00:00:00-05:00

A few years ago, highly citational, link/youtube video blogs came back into style again. This time rather than calling them blogs, we called them “tumblelogs.” I never really got into it, though I tried, and even my original inspiration for starting tychoish.com was to do a more “tumblelog-esque” blog.It never quite worked out. Then I read this post by Michael Coté which inspired a few things:

First, it got the following title to stick in my head and refuse to get out. Second, it left me with the idea that, although successful, sites like tumblr and to a different extent posterous basically ruined the tumblelogging revival.

Here’s the thing about tumblelogs: they worked and worked so well because they were efficient, because the people creating tumblogs were doing something unique and had unique voices, because you could keep your pulse on most of a single discourse by watching only a few sites/rss feeds. And then it became, very suddenly, trivial to make a tumble log. And so everyone had a tumblelog, and it was like blogging was new again, except things “meme’d out” at an epic pace and it became difficult to track what anyone was saying. It was like a distributed denial of service attack on our attention spans.

And as the dust settled, tumblelogs, at least as far as I could see, became less about a sort of delightful amalgamation of interesting content and more about templates, about piping in a fire hose of content from delicious/twitter/etc. So not only were there too many tumblelogs, but the style had devolved somewhat into this weird unedited, awkwardly template-ed mass of “crap” that is (in my opinion) quite hard to read or derive value from.

What Made Tumblelogs Work Originally

The systems that powered them were kludgy but they made it very possible to post content easily. That’s a good thing.
They used a unique sort of web design where design elements (tables/grids/CSS magic,) reflected and accented the content type.
They were largely editorial functions. People followed tumblelogs because their authors were able to filter though content with exceptional speed and grace, and in the process of filtering provide real value.
They were multimedia, and incorporated many different kinds of content. Not just links, not just embedded youtube videos, but snippets of IM and IRC conversations, song lyrics, pictures from flickr, and so forth.
projectionist one of the first and best, was a group effort: when group blogs work, they really work. The tumblelog, seems like an ideal platform for group blogging.

How We Can Make Tumblelogs Work Again

We use publishing systems and tools that are unique and that stretch and bend the form. A tumblelog theme for Wordpress, will probably always wreak like wordpress. Same with other popular content management systems. Tumblelogs work because they’re not just blogs, they need to distinguish themselves both visually, and in terms of how their authors write the content.
We undertake tumblogs as a collaborative effort. Group projects complicate things, of course, but they also create great possibilities.
Vary content, intentionally, post quotes, chat excerpts, links, videos, lyrics, etc. Make sure that there’s a great deal of diversity of content. This is perhaps a problem to be solved in software, at least in port.
Emphasize and cultivate editorial voice, and create an interface that forces authors and editors to touch the data.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

ETA: I’ve started to work on this wiki page outlining a “tumble manager” tool. I also did a bit of textual refactoring on February 27, 2010

A Flurry of Contra Dance

2010-02-22T00:00:00-05:00

I went to a Dance festival a few weeks ago, and wanted to collect, as I am wont to do, some thoughts on the subject. No particular order or organization.

There was a sacred harp singing event at the festival, and then a group of us had a little ad hoc sacred harp session in a hallway (better acoustics) afterwords and the next day. The end result: I feel like I’m starting to really have a clue about Sacred Harp singing. I mean I’m not great or anything, but I don’t feel epically lost at a singing. Because I don’t come from a particularly background, and don’t have any real training with the singing thing, singing from the Sacred Harp has been an adventure. But now I sort of feel like I have the basics: I’m able to get the pitch most of the time. I feel like I have a good sense of myself as a leader and the kinds of songs I like. I’m beginning to become more familiar with a number of different songs in the book, and so forth. I don’t have the shapes memorized (or the middle verses to most songs!) but these things are coming.

It was also a very rewarding experience to be part of a group of singers who did that–for lack of a better term–jamming in the hallway. I don’t play an instrument, I don’t really lead songs in informal settings, so the whole “jamming in the hallway thing” is something I’ve never really been able to participate in. And getting the chance to do that was pretty cool.

But it was a dance festival. So how was the dancing? Pretty good. the space sucked (bad floor,) but the quality of the dance was wonderful. Contra-dancing in the Midwest, where I hail from, isn’t the hip musically experimental thing that it is out here. Part of that is due to the incredibly strong Old-time music community in St. Louis, which isn’t a good thing (even the less amazing contra bands in St. Louis are pretty damn good.) And there are a lot of factors that make contra dancing awesome out here: open/participatory bands as musical training grounds, more bands that travel (because things are closer together,) and more dancers that travel as well. That’s always nice.

Having said that, I’ve never really felt like a contra dancer. In high school, when I got into folk dance, I did a lot of international folk dance, and I think my defining folk-dance participation these days is Morris dancing, even though I probably do more contra than anything these days. When you’re a kid in the dance community, particularly one of the few kids in your local dance community you can pretty much glide through everything on enthusiasm and good intentions. While I think I’ve learned a few things about folk dance, I’m aware that I’m not the flashiest, or the most polished dancer around. This is particularly apparent at big dance festivals. But I got to dance with people who I think of as great dancers, and I had a lot of fun, so maybe it all works out. And then I went to a local dance and felt like a great dancer, particularly in terms of my ability to gracefully recover from flubs, and my sense of a dance’s relative complexity. So there you have it.

Things that are awesome about contra dance:

Gender swapping partners in a dance. Particularly when everyone can go with the flow.
Dips.
Long rooms where you don’t get to the other end of the set in a given dance.
Bands with awesome elements like foot percussion and woodwinds.
Changing lines when you get to the other end of the dance.
Rewriting a dance from the dance floor. Partner do si dos that become balance and swings. Shadow alamandes that become swings.
Spins with your neighbor’s partner in the middle of heys for four.
Conspiring with your partner to mess with neighbors.
Graceful recoveries from dance flubs.

Onward and Upward!

Simple Gifts

2010-02-17T00:00:00-05:00

I suppose I should apologize for the awful relationship between the title and what I’m about to write about. Titles, particularly for blog posts should be functional and descriptive: google won’t enjoy or take pleasure in your puns. Nevertheless…

I’ve been working on something of binge of blog posts to prevent this from happening again any time soon, and I’ve noticed something: my posts aren’t nearly as epic as they used to be. Nothing that I have in my drafts folder is longer than 750 words, and most of the posts are under 650.

This probably calls for some sort of celebration.

I’m notoriously long-winded, and although I’ve been a really bad practitioner of “keep your blog posts short, concise, and clear,” I really do think that there’s a sweet spot for website-based content around around 600 words that’s really easy to read and comprehend on a computer screen. Even if most of my posts are a bit over this mark.

So what gives? why have I finally been able to figure out how to say what I want to say in fewer words? Here are the current theories:

The writing I do for the day job is teaching me (slowly) to be a bit more concise.
My self imposed schedule is forcing me to be a bit more granular in the topics I choose to attack in a single blog post.
I’m getting to the point quicker. I don’t feel like I’m spending as much time running around my arguments attempting to explain the premise.
I’ve become more of a textual stylist than I ever used to be before. While I don’t think I’m a stunning prose stylist, I’m much more aware of how my paragraphs come together these days, and I think that leads to more clear prose.
I’m getting better at using unordered lists to organize information rather than as a rhetorical crutch. (Most reflexive bullet point ever.)

I’ve written about this before. I had a class in college, where the professor assigned these short (250 words,) “journal” entries that were due on a weekly basis. They didn’t have a topic, and most people reflected on the readings. I reflected on my other classes and how they related to the topic of the class I was taking. Half way through my roomate (who was also in the class,) commented that I hadn’t actually written about the readings for the class.

“The journal entries don’t have topics. And I’m writing about the core material of the class,” I said.

“You have to admit that it’s a bit absurd,” she said.¹ She was right.

I wrote the professor who was apparently fine with my eclectic interpretation of the assignment. The pieces were mostly technical exercises in being clear and concise, and she thought my entries were fine, if a bit esoteric. (I think the exact words were something along the lines of “delightful and widely synthetic.”) And so I kept writing those kinds of pieces.

A year later I started really getting into blogging. The rest is history. When I first started at this, I enjoyed the freedom being able to write about whatever I wanted. Now I cherish the structure more than anything.

Its funny how things change, sometimes.

Apologies to H.S. for the liberties I’ve taken with her words.
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Managing Management Costs

2010-02-16T00:00:00-05:00

Every system that requires your attention and responsibility comes with some sort of “management cost,” this includes servers that run websites and email, as well as the notes you take and–in my case–the novels you avoid writing.

This post, and really the last one as well, grows out of my interest and desire to stay organized, to work effectively without spending too much time and energy thinking about organization. Except of course that I write a bunch about this sort of thing on the blog, so maybe I’m a bad example of success. At the end of the day we’re all just folk’, I guess.

The argument at the present moment revolves around consolidation rather than an approach to design or organization. And the basic premise is: ”no matter how complex your organizational problem is, you can probably accomplish what you need to by doing less.”

Feel like you spend too much time reading email, or have too many email inboxes to check (personal email, work email, special project email, listserv email, facebook email, etc.)? Forward your email into one box and filter the hell out of it so that you only read what you really have to and it’s manageable.
Feel like you have too many todo lists? Compile them into a single list and use some sort of tag system to organize it.
Feel like your notes and documents are scared in too many places? Combine them and use some sort of search tool to find things when you need them.

And so forth. In the analog information world (i.e. with papers, notebooks, and books) we often take the approach of sorting things into distinct piles of similar sorts of things, and arranging things physically in our worlds to reflect this basic sorting. For instance, ”the science fiction books will be on the first three shelves, the 20Th century philosophy on the next three, college textbooks on the next, and …” These habits, combined with unfortunate conventions like referring to hierarchical organizational units of a file system (e.g. directories) “folders,” encourages us to translate these real-world conventions to our digital existences. This is undoubtedly a bad idea.

The more data you pile together in one place, even dissimilar data, the more powerful it becomes. Say you have a PDF collection of articles on the anthropology of death and dying, post-colonial literature, and linguistics hanging out in different directories of your file system, and you begin to do research for a story you want to write set in the 1930s in India, where do you look? What if there are relevant articles in all three folders. What if you have a dozen or two dozen folders? What if you have a number of hierarchical organizational trees, and you store your notes, the actual text of what you’re working on, and your reference materials separately with parallel hierarchies?¹ Quite suddenly you’re over-organized and disorganized all at the same time,

The more “system” you have the more difficult it is to manage. The key to success, or part of it at any rate, is being minimalist about your organization. Recognize that adding responsibilities, projects, directories, lists, email accounts, and so forth all come with a cost. And sometimes, being a little less organized means that you’re able to get more done, if that makes sense.

If your experiences reflect this (or run contrary to this logic,) I’d be very interested in hearing about how you have solved, and have continued to solve the issue.

This kind of system actually makes a lot of sense in the paper world, but is borderline absurd in the digital systems.
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System Design and Organization

2010-02-15T00:00:00-05:00

By day I write documentation for systems administrators, and as a result I spend a lot (perhaps too much?) time thinking about how we organize computer systems so that they can be both useful and easy to manage in the long run. ”Right, so…” you say? Well indeed. Recently it’s become clear to me that there are some generalizable lessons to be learned from sys-admining that might be helpful to those of us who are less organized than they’d like to be.

Which is pretty much everyone, right?

Right. In brief:

Automate everything that can be automated.
Closely followed by don’t automate something that doesn’t need automation.
Prefer simplicity over complexity, and prefer systems that require you to remember fewer things.
Design systems to make it possible for others to easily understand what you’ve done.

To elaborate:

Automation

Computers are really good at doing what you tell them to do, and although we often like to finddle with them to make them work better, ideally the more we let systems take care of themselves. Also tasks that are automated, if the automation is designed and tested properly don’t make silly mistakes. If you’ve written systems to automate your tasks, you can understand and predict how your system is going to handle the kind of data that you throw at it.

The admonishment to “not automate” until you need something, is basically a variant on age old recommendation to “avoid premature optimization.” While automation is a good thing indeed, and if the thing you’re automating is really something that can be delegated to the machine without intervention on your part, then that may be worth your while to automate that task. By the same token, it’s easy to think “we’re going to need to do this thing a lot, I might as well automate it before hand.” Which is a reasonable thought to hand, but this puts the cart before the horse, and leads to two undesirable and possible outcomes: first the task doesn’t need to be automated because it isn’t needed very often; you misunderstand what needs to be done and automate the wrong part of the task, or your automation doesn’t cover the edge cases and will need to be rewritten later.

Conventionally, automation tends to cover “coding” or scripting of some sort of task. Outside of programming and systems development, “automating” a task could be as simple as creating some sort of editor macro, or developing some new structure in your data store (database, files, etc.) to hold or manage a particular kind of data.

Simplicity and Complexity

The basic reasoning here is that while complex solutions are often elegant and attractive, and make a lot of sense when you’re setting something up, they always make you scratch your head six months or a year later when you need to go back and find something that you did back then or make a change to the system. Be wary of solutions to any problem that require too much consistency on the part of the user. If a system only works if you must remember to follow more than a few steps in a precise order, chances are things are too complex, and you’ll end up screwing yourself over later.

Ergo: Err on the side of simplicity, you’ll thank yourself later.

The more components and connections there are in a website application or deployment server the more potential for breakage is. The more complexity there is the better chance that FurtureYou or someone working in your footsteps will be totally confused by what you have set up. The same thing holds for whatever your trying to organize and manage.

Generalizable Organizational Methods

Chances are you’re the only one who will be taking notes/organizing your work/storing information in your system. Nevertheless, I think it always helps to assume that other people are going to need to be able to make sense of your system. Be it your notes, and research or in your web-servers. Other people are sometimes our future selves.

I tend to use the word system, in a way that most people would use the word “method.” I hope that’s not too confusing or distracting. I think I’ll probably elaborate on these topics a bit more before in a later post. In a lot of ways this is part of the core of Cyborg Institute, and if you feel interested or inspired by this kind of stuff, I’d love to hear more from you. Be in touch!

Some Future in your Science Fiction

2010-02-12T00:00:00-05:00

I finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Martians, on my Kindle the other day (the short review: It was great, I don’t know how I felt about the poetry at the end, but I liked the collection.) and promptly began reading this month’s Asimov’s. The first story is an alternate history/fantastic history/I-think-there’s-science-fiction-coming-but-it’s-not-here-yet, piece and I can’t bring myself to really read get into it. It’s well written, and I even find myself delighting at the text (in a technical sense.) I think the issue that I’m running into is that I don’t really get the alternate history thing.

Which is, you know, weird. I should break out and say that my fiction tends to be very historically concerned. I’m fascinated by history and there are a lot of historiographical themes and ideas in the stories I write. But they’re all set in the future, and try as I might, I don’t really have much interest in writing stories set in the past of our world. Alternate or otherwise.

Maybe it has something to do with my view of history. I tend to take a big picture approach to history and I tend to think that single events and single individuals rarely really affect history. If you called me a determinist I’d probably gnash my teeth for a few moments and then agree. Which makes constructing alternate histories sort of difficult. Add to that the fact that quasi-deterministic big pictures, though probably accurate and helpful, don’t lend themselves to good stories. When you don’t feel like your characters–any of them–have agency, it doesn’t make for terribly interesting story telling.

At least for me. I think other people can pull it off.

This whole “I want my science fiction to be set in the future,” thing isn’t something I can rationalize or support very well. Clearly I don’t find the past to be a very good “escape.” The future is fun, vast, and full of possibilities and enables the sorts of things that I enjoy most in science fiction: the ability to engage in a critique of the present, high energy stories with adventure, and for lack of a better term, stories that impart a “sense of wonder.” There’s more out there, I just can’t seem to muster the interest.

This isn’t to say that I don’t sometimes find myself enchanted by non-futuristic stories, it’s just not a terribly frequent or predictable sort of experience. I should also be clear, I’m not of the opinion that when science fiction stories talk about the future and are set in a future, that they are about anything except the present at all.

And I’m not terribly proud of this. I suppose we all have our things.

I worry that my tastes aren’t sophisticated enough, that I enjoy stories for the wrong reasons, or that I get too caught up in the scenery and forget to pay attention to what really matters. Despite this whole “writer thing,” that I have going on these days I don’t have very much formal training in literature. It’s sort of awkward to say “I feel like I’m not a very good reader,” that’s definitely something that I battle with.

For those of you who are part of the larger community of science fiction/fantasy/genre fiction readers (which I think necessarily includes writers,) I’d be very interested to learn your thoughts on this subject: how do you relate to the future in the stories that you write and read? The past? Alternate histories? Is there some connection that I’ve mostly failed to see? Am I not alone in this?

Thank you (preemptively) for your feedback.

tychoish: tycho garen's notes and essays

Things I'm Wiking On

Input in the Next Wave

If Open Source is Big Business Then Whither the Community?

Conceptualizing Scale

Distance from the Divine

Software as app Store

Free and Freedom

Paying for Software

Related Reading

Coming of Age In The Science Fiction Community

The Portrait of the Author During Youth

Community Discourses

The Things I'm Going To Do Today

Kindle and Paradise Regained

There's a Widget for That

Tumblr Killed the Tumblelog Star

What Made Tumblelogs Work Originally

How We Can Make Tumblelogs Work Again

A Flurry of Contra Dance

Simple Gifts

Managing Management Costs

System Design and Organization

Automation

Simplicity and Complexity

Generalizable Organizational Methods

Some Future in your Science Fiction