Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

Babylon 5, and watching a show years after it aired

Saturday, May 4, 2013

JoDee and I are making our way through Babylon 5 for the first time. Well, I’m watching it, but JoDee is falling asleep through most of it. But what is really hard to manage is not getting spoilers for the show. Look up an actor on the net, and their entire character story and back story are laid out as plain as day. Makes me wonder about newer shows like House of Cards on Netflix where the entire show is released at once. Makesit difficult when someone has an advantage of seeing it before you had a chance.

Not complaining about “hey, spoilers” for a show that has been out for over ten years; just finding I can’t do my normal show research beforehand.

Posted in A day in the life, Rants | No Comments »

Just because you’re grinding the organ doesn’t mean I have to dance

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Q: How do you know when the next Ubuntu is close to release?

A: When the Canonical vs. the community posts hit Planet Ubuntu.

I’ve joked in the past that every single release of Ubuntu has to have some tempest-in-a-teapot event occur that causes people to get upset over the current direction of Ubuntu.  And sure enough this latest release of Ubuntu and post-UDS discussions have delivered: Unity changing to QT, Ubuntu moving to rolling releases, Mir taking over the role of X server, cats sleeping with dogs, mass hysteria. It never fails; there’s always some design decision that comes out of some meeting that causes people to go irate in the community.

But it’s not that they are necessarily bad decisions. You could make a pretty good case for each of those decisions. They all have technical merit at some level.

No, what generally causes the most amount of anguish is that the community isn’t consulted.

There’s a phrase I’d like to think I’ve coined: “Just because you’re grinding the organ doesn’t mean I have to dance”. I think it’s pretty apropos of how Canonical seems to treat the community. They grind the organ, and the community puts on a show, and those who dance the best and brightest get the goodies and gratitude. And every decision that comes down changes the tune a little bit, and the good little community dances away.

Now, if it’s a particularly good tune, I don’t mind dancing. Hell, I might even involuntarily dance along to a great tune every now and again.

But when the expectation is that the community will dance no matter what, then we have a problem.

Greg, the most even-keeled person I’ve met, quit the community in a blog post today over similar reasons. He’s no longer willing to dance.

A lot of what was built up for Ubuntu was built on the idea of a community where ideas with merit were implemented. With the last few releases it feels more like  the community is just there to take direction from Canonical, and act accordingly. The organ grinds, and we dance away.

I’ve noticed in our own loco that there’s not a lot of joy in the dance. We dance because that’s what’s expected of us, not because we’re excited. We know that if we stop we no longer get CDs or stickers or recognition. Our Pavlovian response is to keep dancing because that is what the organ grinder expects of us.

We’re told to trust the organ grinders, yet we are not trusted to know the purpose of the grinding. That will come later. Keep dancing.

Always in motion. Keep dancing.

Do your Global Jams. Have Release Parties. Keep dancing.

Keep the community strong, fix bugs, help with documentation, package applications and keep them up to date. Keep dancing.

Keep dancing.

Should you wear out, there’s always more who will keep dancing. Keep dancing.

And so the community dances and dances away to the sounds of the organ grinder. Is it a good song? Who cares, just keep dancing away. That’s what the community is there for; keep dancing.

Just because you’re grinding the organ doesn’t mean I have to dance.

To quote the great bard “Men Without Hats”: We can dance if we want to.

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Posted in Deep Thoughts, Rants, Ubuntu | 1 Comment »

Leasing phones and the Twitter API

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

I don’t know if most of you were around in the early days of phones, but there was a time when phone companies actually leased you the phone you were using. Every month as part of your bill you would send them something extra for each of the phones that you had connected in your house. This was all fine and good if you used the phone service in the traditional manner; namely making voice calls while connected via cord to a device connected to the wall. The phone company routinely discouraged people from plugging in other devices into their phone system, claiming it might cause disruptions and otherwise compromise that beloved phone system you use. And you wouldn’t want to do that now would you?

And when the phone company monopoly was broken up, we suddenly were free to plug whatever we chose into the phone system. Modems, fax machines, cordless phones, and answering machines.

This morning Seesmic turned off Twitter Proxies in their client application. I’m sure the reasoning was because Twitter didn’t use them, nobody else should use them. Unfortunately I was using them in order to communicate with identi.ca, so with one update I lost access to my identi.ca account from my phone.

Needless to say I’m not particularly pleased with this decision.

I understand Twitter is trying to move everyone over to their new API. I get that times change. But what is becoming more clear is Twitter is trying to get into the “leasing handset” business, where you only have one way to access their services – via their client.

And my rebellious nature is screaming at me to just delete my Twitter account and be done with it altogether. “Fine. If they want to close out third-party apps, I don’t need to use the service anymore”.

But cooler heads prevail for now. As soon as Twitter breaks every one of the apps that I currently use, I’ll stop posting to Twitter. One month afterward I’m deleting my account.

Will Twitter care? Probably not. I’m no longer their target audience.

Honestly I’m starting to find myself more over on Google+, which has no preconceived notions of openness. There’s only one mobile client, and damned if you can’t access it any other way.

Hypocritical? Probably. But I’ve only used Google+ one way. I don’t know any other way. Twitter is busily taking patterns that I used and turning them off.

Wouldn’t you be more pissed off if the phone company suddenly made your phone obsolete than if they never provided choice?

Now to find a new mobile client for identi.ca.

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Posted in Computers, Rants | 4 Comments »

Daft Punk is my favorite band of all time – why context matters

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Like most people who listen to music I have a Last.fm page which busily “scrobbles” all of my listening habits. It’s not that I’m particularly interested in giving CBS (the parent company of Last.fm) my listening habits; it’s just easy to send them along via my Squeezebox, and it paints an interesting profile of me as someone who loves to listen to music.

What’s really interesting is the artists that show up as my most listened artists.

I’m a huge Rush fan. I’ve been a Rush fan ever since high school. Any time Rush is in town, expect JoDee and I to either be in the audience, or having an existential crisis over why we can’t go.

Yet if you look at my Last.fm profile, you’ll notice something peculiar.

Rush is the 9th most listened band in my list, after Daft Punk, Risha, Obituary, Testament, and so on. Heck, even Claude Debussy ranks higher in total listens than Rush.

So, does this mean that Rush is not my number one band of all time? Should I instead be putting my efforts into seeing Daft Punk in concert?

Perhaps, but there’s something more to that data than just number of songs played might show you.

I spend most of my working hours listening to music via the Squeezebox. And my work involves programming, which is usually best done with either extremely angry music, or with very nondescript, almost sound-track-like music.

Daft Punk released what I consider to be the penultimate developer album, namely the Tron: Legacy soundtrack.

Chances are I’ll probably put this album on at least once a week, if not more.

Why not listen to Rush? Well, on occasion I do, but Neil Peart is my favorite drummer of all time, and there’s a reason I keep drumsticks near my desk. (Note to current boss: the sticks in my cubicle are merely for show. Honest. :) )

But without context, and without knowing where and when I listen to this music, you might think I was full of it, and Daft Punk and Risha are my favorite artists. And while that may be true in an office context, I have far more Rush memorabilia than any of the bands in the top 20 combined. (Sorry, Claude.)

There’s an old saying “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”, but you also can’t measure what you can’t put into context. My musical tastes vary depending on location,and I’m sure yours do too. I’m sure you can come up with examples where context would give you a completely different answer outside of numerical counting.

(This is why I get cranky when people talk about radio ratings for an entire market. No wonder Detroit only has one under-served classical radio station, but 10 decades stations. But that’s another rant for another time.)

What measurements are you taking right now that could be improved by figuring out the context?

 

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Posted in Deep Thoughts, Music, Productivity, Rants | 2 Comments »

Cheat to Win

Friday, January 18, 2013

Yesterday, Lance Armstrong felt it was time to fess up to something that we pretty much already knew: Lance Armstrong was using performance enhancing drugs in order to help him win all of those cycling achievements. The outrage that followed was predictable: people believed in Lance’s abilities to push the sport of cycling a little further, and by using foreign substances the myth of Lance Armstrong as superhuman athlete shattered with one little admission.

Imagine what would have happened had he said he wasn’t doping, and could back it up with proof?

I can’t think of a sport that hasn’t had some performance-drug scandal. Baseball even had the US Congress get involved with investigating their doping scandal (which still boggles my mind why Congress would get involved in the first place, but apparently they have a nose for spending time on irrelevant issues).  Doping has become so commonplace, it’s the remarkable athlete who can say they haven’t taken any performance-enhancing drugs, and can back it up.

What does that say about the competitive culture we put these athletes through?

I think they should just make these performance enhancing drugs legal. Why not? Athletes are always looking for that competitive edge: the extra millisecond shaved off a race time, the extra force applied to a ball. Make them part of the training regime. If you want to compete with your God-given abilities, that’s your prerogative  but the real competitors are using drugs, baby.  It’s all about the end result, so why not give it to them in spades?

I  suspect one of the reasons competitive sports have rules against this sort of free-doping is pretty simple: kids idolize these athletes.

Imagine you’re 12 years old, and your hero is freely admitting his performance is because of performance-enhancing drugs. What’s your 12 year old logic going to do with that information? “Well, if it’s good enough for Lance Armstrong, then it must be good enough for me” which you then equate the drug as necessary to achieve the performance. It’s the same reason young bands think partying will make them rock stars (note: it won’t).

Or, kids will think even more damaging thoughts: “well, Lance Armstrong achieved his performance using drugs, so I guess I won’t even try: the bar is set too high”. Eventually, discouraged kids and aspiring athletes hang it up, because the only way to achieve these results are with performance-enhancing drugs, and those who believe natural ability should trump any score are shut out.

The world of sport (as if that were a thing) needs to accept that they’ve created a culture where doping is considered part of the training regiment. At the moment it’s considered cheating. I’m reminded of Timothy Ferriss’ book “The Four Hour Work Week” where he claims he won martial arts contests by exercising one of the rules, and pushed his opponents out of the ring rather than face them directly in a contest he couldn’t win. He alleges because he was so successful, now everybody does it. Whether that’s true or not, for those who are more interested in competition vs. others rather than competition vs. self, it seems an obvious tactic. Competition breeds people looking for some advantage, and doping is a now part of those competitive advantages.

And as long as we idolize and encourage this sort of competitive behavior, and reward it with monetary and lifestyle rewards, we’re only going to see more confessions, more preventative measures, and more people getting discouraged their natural performance isn’t good enough for the big leagues.

Until we either accept the culture of doping, or change the cultural mindset that personal competition is more important than external competition, we’re getting exactly the lying, cheating athletes (and human beings) we deserve.

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Deep thoughts on unity and the copyright divide

Sunday, December 2, 2012

Just listened again to Jono Bacon’s awesome song “Unite“, which features a clip of Charlie Chaplin’s speech from “The Great Dictator”. Jono notes that the song uses this clip from The Great Dictator, which was released in 1940, and likely very much under the wiles of those who would like to ensure it never reaches the public domain.

This got me thinking:

Movie Studios and Record Companies are scared of letting their work go into the public domain because they’re afraid their golden years are long behind them.

Fear is a great motivator to do the wrong thing. Maybe by removing the fear we can move back to doing what’s right.

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Why Disney buying LucasFilm freaked me out

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Like most geeks of my era, I have a fascination with the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films and “mythologies”. They’re an integral part of who I was as a child, and without them I could honestly say some of my interests would be much different than they are now (I still watch the “making of” sections of DVDs because Star Wars showed me how awesome models and blue-screens could be).

So when Disney announced they were purchasing LucasFilm, I got a little freaked out. Why, might you ask, would I care? It’s not like I’m going to be a child again anytime soon. Disney can’t rip that part away from me, no matter how hard they try. It’s true that my Star Wars memories and trinkets won’t disappear any time soon, but what I fear will disappear soon is the sense that I could play in this universe if I wanted to. Ars Technica had a great article about the relationship between LucasFilm and the fan-film community, and it really struck a nerve with me. Where LucasFilm may have been more permissive (albeit, only slightly), what will the new LucasFilm do under the new Disney overlords? Disney has a track record of being relentless in their trademark and brand management, to the point of tossing out fair use and the public domain in favor of ownership and fealty. And that’s the part that I fear is going to suffer the most. Disney already owns The Jim Henson company, as well as the Marvel universe, and many more. Will I ever be able to think of these characters in the same way again? Or will I be unable to look past the prior history of Disney taking what once was a shared myth and locking it up in the Disney vaults, only to be trotted out whenever there’s a transaction to be made.

Lord knows LucasFilm could be quite diligent about their own characters and universes. And I’m not sure about the history of Marvel, but I suspect they too were quick to ensure their characters and universe was licensed accordingly, under penalty of lawyers. But the depressing part to me is I know Disney’s track record, and while I’m excited that George Lucas can be a creator again, my inner child wonders if he’ll be allowed to play too.

Man it sucks to grow up.

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Twitter and the Bitchwagon

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Yesterday Greg Grossmeier posted a link to the Twitter Independence Github repository. It’s written in the style of another famous redress of grievances (a document made famous by my fourth grade teacher, assigning it to be transcribed should we aggrieve her during class). Unlike the more famous document, the Twitter Independence is not a declaration of independence, rather it’s a set of demands for Twitter to set back their API to the way things were before Twitter changed it to one more suitable to an audience participation model, and not a developer participation model.

Perhaps these developers need to read what the definition of independence really means.

Twitter is making it quite clear they want to control everything about their ecosystem. They have an audience to protect, and that audience couldn’t care less about API access. The hubris of developers in thinking they can change Twitter’s mind with some github petition is ludicrous: you are no longer their target audience. In order to truly be independent, developers (myself included) need to make a break from Twitter and align ourselves with technologies that don’t require ourselves to be beholden as digital sharecroppers to some corporate entity.

Services like identi.ca and App.net exist because of a desire for more freedom on the part of developers (identi.ca exists because of concerns over source freedom and federation, and App.net exists to provide API freedom). What they don’t have, though, is Twitter’s access to an audience. A constant refrain from those using these services is “how do I get my Twitter friends to start using this (obviously superior in every single way) service”. Unfortunately users are not developers, so discussions over API freedom, or source code freedom fall flat, while the main concern rings through: “how do  communicate with people on Twitter”. The biggest asset in this whole discussion is Twitter’s audience. After a particularly poignant discussion on This Week In Google, I posted to Jeff Jarvis and Leo Laporte: “Screaming at This Week In Google because Status net handles all their complaints about Twitter /cc @leolaporte @jeffjarvis“. Jeff responded “Yes, but users?” And that’s the kicker. Performance without an audience is masturbation, and conversations without an audience is a crazy person talking to themselves. The Twitter Independence is asking to have access to Twitter’s audience under their terms. And Twitter has made it abundantly clear they aren’t willing to accept that.

Until we are willing to create new audiences on different networks our complaints are moot. Either grab your digital ploughs, or unshackle yourselves. The time for reconciliation is long past.

Posted in A day in the life, Computers, Rants | 5 Comments »

Apple vs. Samsung and the No Derivatives clause

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Much Internet ink has already been shed / spilled over the Apple vs. Samsung case already, but I need to get some thoughts out of my head and down into a blog post before they drive me insane. So, bear with me, dear reader, as I add more fuel to fire, or take another swing at decayed corpse of the horse (take your pick).

In 1982, Apple released their Lisa computer. Lisa isn’t nearly as well recognized as the later version of Apple’s GUI-based computer (the Macintosh). Development on this project started around 1978, and in 1979, Apple negotiated two tech demos at Xerox’s PARC to demonstrate the Star project (the fore-father of today’s modern graphical interface). Those demos lead to significant improvements to both the Lisa and Macintosh projects (which were roughly a year apart in development). Had Xerox filed suit around this time for blatant copying, the computer as we know it would be a markedly different beast. But, Apple had a significant amount of time with which to grow it’s market-share and mind-share in the graphical user interface space. Few would argue that Apple didn’t blatantly rip off Xerox’s designs, and profited greatly from them.

Microsoft licensed parts of Apple’s GUI for Windows 1.0 (which was essentially a crappy GUI shell over DOS). When Windows 2.0 was released, Apple filed suit, and added additional claims when Windows 3.0 was released. Apple’s claims at the time were that the “look and feel” of the operating system could be protected under copyright. Xerox became indignant, and sued Apple, saying in effect: “Hey, you copied from us, so if you’re going to get bitchy about look and feel, we’re going to get bitchy right back”. Unfortunately, like most legal matters, the suit between Microsoft and Apple became more about the licensing agreements, not about the merits of the claims.

At the time, it was argued that look and feel was more of a trademark issue, and Apple was able to remove elements of Digital’s GEM interface (used on the Atari ST, and PC computers) because they looked similar enough to Apple’s own operating systems.

(Funny enough, I’m not able to find a similar case between Apple and IBM over OS/2. Something tells me Apple chose it’s battles carefully).

Fast forward to today, and the recent ruling over Samsung’s copying of Apple elements and the subsequent $1 billion dollar judgement against Samsung. Today user interface elements have patent protections not afforded to Xerox and Apple back when the Star, Lisa and Macintosh projects were developed. Had Xerox been able to patent their OS and GUI elements, we’d be looking at a completely different desktop today. But, because Xerox didn’t patent, and Apple was able to copy, we have a richer desktop environment. It’s only by Apple’s machinations to greedily declare they are now the sole proprietors over certain interface elements that we find ourselves in a sticky scenario where one company can declare a certain mindset as their own.

This is the same nonsense that can allow someone like Walt Disney  to take a story from the Public Domain, re-work it a bit, and then claim that nobody else can release a movie / book/ whatever using that story. And we, the people who should vigorously defend the Public Domain from people who would otherwise lock up it’s vast content blithely sit by and allow companies to lock these ideas up because they did some non-trivial work to adapt it.

In the Creative Commons, there’s a clause called “No Derivatives”. In brief, it states the author of the work wishes their own work, to the extent copyright law allows, is not to be reused in a transformative way. When we make our culture, our gestures, and our way of thinking owned by companies that are more than eager to take from others, but not allow others to take from them, we devalue our ability to express ourselves creatively. And nobody should willingly give up their freedom to create.

As Pablo Picasso is credited: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. And, as Steve Jobs is quoted: “Good artists copy, great artists steal“.

Apple, please let us be great artists again.

articles referenced in this post:

 

 

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Cancel vs. Inactive

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Apparently there’s a certain pre-paid phone company that doesn’t quite understand the difference between an inactive phone vs. canceling an account:

How do I cancel my account? It is not one of the options on your phone menu. It is not apparent how to get to a live human being to ask this question. It is a continuation of the kind of service I’ve come to expect from PHONECO

Their response:

Upon further review of your account in PHONECO, it appears that your phone with the serial number [serial] is already deactivated in our system on [date].

Which I responded:

That’s correct, but I would like the entire account deactivated, removed, and purged from your system. I don’t want someone to accidentally manage to find my password and start doing things with my PHONECO account. In short, I want nothing to do with this company any more. I don’t want to call Customer Service; I want a clean break from ever having to worry about having the name PHONECO come into my peripheral or other vision. Please advise how to make this possible. Thanks!

And their latest response:

Our records show that you phone has been deactivated since [date].

It’s like I’m engaging with the customer-service version of Eliza:

* I'd like to remove my account from your system.
> Why are you concerned about my system? 
* Because I no longer want to be a part of it.
> You are being a bit negative. 
* Yes, I have had a bad experience with your company.
> What about your own company? 
* This isn't about me, is it?
> Can you elaborate on that? 
* That's not important. I still want to cancel my phone account.
> I'm not sure I understand you fully.

Etcetera, ad nauseum.

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Posted in A day in the life, Rants, Silly Stuff | Comments Off

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