Orcmid's Lair |
||||
|
|
2004-04-10Collaborative and Social ComputingThe Social MilieuxBackchannels: Is that a dagger I feel behind me?Many-to-Many: Technology, Agency, and the Back-channel. I am uncomfortable with Clay Shirky's observations about the back-channel, and I thought they were one-sided and a little defensive, not something I was expecting. AnderBill and I have been discussing this, since he attended a conference [several weeks ago] where it seemed like bad behavior.It looks to me that control issues do come into it. Looking deeper, I think the key is that the back channel can undermine the space, and there is, for some of us, an integrity issue as well. Clay makes the observation that "The problem wasn't that people wanted to opt out of the back-channel for various reasons, but that even when they did, they were affected by it. On top of the obvious annoyances like out-of-synch laughter or distracting typing sounds, a room with a back-channel feels different, because many of the attendees are simply less present. It also raises the stakes for presenters, who have to be more expert at holding an audience's attention, because the grace period before you lose people collapses to 30 seconds or so." He goes on to say that "The critical conversation is whether and in what circumstances the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and, relatedly, how those disadvantages might be mitigated." I disagree. It might be important to see how to remove a barrier, but I think the first thing to deal with is that the back-channel can be seen and experienced as fundamentally a hostile act, and how it undermines the social space of a meeting. My analogy is to all of those meetings that people in industry complain about that never achieve their agenda and no one deals with the fact that people did not come there to arrive at an actionable conclusion. I am not comparing the subject matter, I am comparing the integrity of the space in which a meeting occurs (arises, if you like). Years ago, I often went to meetings, sat in a corner of the room, and did something else, like worry about some program or software problem I was obsessed about. Other people doodled, I thought about code. After a while, I started taking notes -- I make a great meeting scribe -- as a way to focus my attention and also be patient with the conversation. I do that with my laptop in meetings now. I have recently been at presentations where I was writing my notes about something else and giving periodic attention to the topic at hand. What I noticed, in the recent case, was that I left with an experience of having not been at the meeting and not gotten any value. An experience that I set myself up for. And, I realize, my inattentiveness impacted the space and the experience of others and the speakers. I indulged myself, and undermined the space. Because my body was there, and I feigned some marginal level of attention, I was committing silent sabotage. It would have been better to set up in the hall or lounge area and wait for the session that I was more interested in. It seems to me that having a group of people colluding in such an indulgence is far more overt and hostile than the participants are willing to take responsibility for (of course). I want to challenge the disavowing of responsibility for any impact of that conduct. We have no idea what it takes for another to be in the front of the room speaking to us or engaging with us in some topic. And I think we have no idea how much our attentive listening and engagement matters for all of us gaining value from the occasion. I think we need to look more carefully at that. If the problem is the design or structure of meetings, or perceived inequities and power situations, deal with that. It is not a problem that technology will fix. Ross Anderson's Web Log. More material, especially on the IP wars. It is not syndicated -- I suspect it is a fully-manual log -- though it seems to be a worthwhile resource that can only improve. Campaign for Cambridge Freedoms - Home Page. There have been some peculiar changes in the relationship of universities to intellectual properties in recent times. The universities are moving to claim ownership of all intellectual property produced by the faculty (with various subdivision arrangements for externally-sponsored research projects). Meanwhile, there are moves to open up the research literature, and promote open repository systems and the like. There is a collision course here as well as in the broader world of intellectual property. The situation at Cambridge University is timely and interesting, although I am not so inclined toward this harsh interpretation of prospective risks. I am also not so keen about IP remaining in academic hands either, although I can see how (from a US perspective) that might be consistent with the constitutional promotion of the useful arts, even though I am not so sure that the private holding of the RSA patent, for example, was such a hot situation. I have this silly idea that advances through public support of scholarship and research might become a public good, and flow to society at large. Ross Anderson's Home Page. I am going to be taking a course on Security Engineering this summer. We will use Ross Anderson's text book. I didn't know that he had looked at various aspects of P2P that matter to me in developing a distributed-object system that requires authentication in the exchange of scripts and establishing trusted connections for remotely-operating objects. There's even more on Anderson's home page, which just came up in a link from the Smart Mobs blog. I am going to enjoy all of this, I can tell. 2004-04-08Michael Crichton: Travels. I just finished reading this autobiographical book about Crichton's journeys of self-discovery. I found it moving and very touching, and I am grateful that I was led to read it. ACM: Ubiquity - Changing Lives Through Technology. This interview with David Nagel, currently CEO of PalmSource, provides great background on his childhood, early education, and becoming a mechanical engineer that moved into psychology and human factors work. The comparison of engineering and psychology classes at his time in UCLA is remarkable. The Bjarne Stroustrup joke about cell phones and ensuing conversation about usability, Don Norman, and how many remotes you have to program to get your home video to work is priceless. There is a key observation right here: "The fundamental problem is that if the underlying system model incorporates abstractions that are difficult for normal human beings to understand, it's always, always going to behave in unpredictable and non-understandable ways to them. In general, it's harder to make such systems easy to use, and that's why good human factors must be reflected in every aspect of a design, from the fundamental architecture of the system through to the implementation of the exact way you draw the graphics on the screen and the exact way you support interaction with the screen via tapping and talking and anything else you might do." It just gets better from there to the end. Collaborative and Cooperative ComputingThe Social MilieuxFrom the bottom upRoss Mayfield's Weblog: IFTF on Social Networks. There is a theme around light-weightness and especially read-to-hand that is showing up at the moment. First, Clay Shirky's essay on Situated Computing and applications for small, um, ad hoc communities resonates with me, even though I am a design-first kinda guy. David Weinberger talks about Artificial Social Networks (ASNs) and how artificial they are. Here's more in terms of small items loosely-connected where integration is a matter of situation and use. Ross doesn't exactly say that, it is what I read into it (and another Weinberger meme). And in particular, the creation of activation in response to particular need strikes me as appropriate.I am now putting NewsGator through its paces and, having mastered the basics, I am interested in seeing what more is available. It is appealing that the product integrates in Microsoft Outlook and does not reinvent mail folders and all the rest of it. There are a couple of items that nag at me, but there is no question that there is a nice fit for me. So, although this might seem more center-controlled, the entire organization of feeds is mine and I am learning more things I can do with the folder tree (including using them from mail to/from the people whose blogs or newsgroups they represent). Back to ready-to-hand and loosely-coupled (one of those your-mileage-may-vary conditions), there are some interesting links here to places and events where this topic is explored further. [Trackback is beyond my technological grasp at the moment. That is beginning to bother me. Maybe it gets fixed in May.] 2004-04-07Open Source as Inclusion for Microsofties?Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset has released as Open Source on SourceForge.net. Yes indeed. This is a blog (yes, a blog) page on MSDN which has an RSS feed (via .aspx) and other goodies. There is also a wiki being used with Channel9, built on FlexWiki, which is going to make itself over to SourceForge too, we are told. I think this is going to be very interesting.2004-04-06More on Small is Smarter and Experience Trumps Design(?)Shirky: Permanet, Nearlynet, and Wireless Data. There are some gems in here about the good enough driving out the good and also on starting from barely working and improving. I hear an echo but I can't tell where it is coming from ...Joel on Software - Rub a dub dub. Another Spolsky keeper on scrubbing code rather than doing it over, with real numbers and a lot of entertaining commentary. Blogs as Pull-beats-PushJoel on Software - Building Communities with Software. I always like Joel on Software. I think I read this once, but it lands differently today while I am catching up on Clay Shirky essays. I have to look at these principles some more.Do not attempt to adjust your set. While attempting to make this a keeper (there is a very nice Vincula about the feeds and about what you give away if you e-mail the folk) and snag the Caveat Lector feed in my news reader, I have to deal with the fact that the handy "Subscribe in NewsGator" addition to my right-click menu causes violent interruption by one of those Norton Antivirus eBiohazard, death by microwave, head to the bombshelter deathsquad warnings. I need to figure out how many hit points it will cost me to somehow enable this particular script to run and not have to drop my guard on other goblins and wraiths that attempt to run Windows Scripting Host. I'll give it one try, or simply keep pasting URLs into NewsGator the way I first learned how. [later: I allowed the script permission to run just-this-once, after it promised to respect me in the morning, and it bombed anyhow, quite prematurely, so I did end up doing the copy-and-paste-the-feed-URL thing.] Caveat Lector: Reader Beware!. Always ask a librarian? This is a wonderful site. I like the paisley (what is the latin for paisley? [later: "chintz," evidently] but more than that, I value the perspective of someone who has lived and breathed metadata before it was called that and before outrageous conceits about "ontologies" came on the scene (when "categories" or "classification" would have been not only handier, but less deceptive). It is interesting to see recognition of how much violence geek culture does to literacy. How funny, and what a relief to realize that makes it self-limiting. I enjoy what Dorothea writes. This is a keeper. 2004-04-05Cloaking Strikes Again. Another defect of URL cloaking is that fragment identifiers don't seem to be passed through when I enter via orcmid.com. This is a problem for bookmarking blog archive items and also for links to entries in my annotated bibliographies. I just discovered that another place fragment references show up is in my site feed. I have changed from orcmid.com, as much as I want that to be the address, to nfocentrale.net/orcmid wherever references to fragment identifiers are going to happen. It is working fine that way now, but older feeds may not have it. The feed will download again, because this change caused the entries to be updated. The difference is in the URLs to the corresponding, archived bloglet. NODAL: A Network-Oriented Document Abstraction Language. This came up on Tools-Yak. I haven't seen Lee Iverson since I went to Vancouver for a symposium at the UBC library. There is lots of CVS activity, but not much visible outside. This is a marker for finding out more. Computing MilieuxConfirmable ExperienceSubscribing to Orcmid's Lair: Making it painfulSite Feeds 'R' Us. Confirmable Experience Department or, as we would say these days, CategoryConfirmableExperience: I screwed up. I created a feed and fixed it so that no one could use it. But it was already on fire when I lay down on it.The folks at Blogger offered us automated atom-feed creation so that our sites could be syndicated and subscribed to. Sounded good to me (and I had no idea what that would provide, but I knew there would be RDF and RSS and stuff that others could use to find my goldern [interesting Spoonerism there, since I meant golden, and I'm going to keep goldern] words). AnderBill has started using a news reader (I am not sure why they are called news readers, because that says NNTP to me, but danged if they don't do that too). So I looked around (you saw me do it here), and then I started a trial with NewsGator for MS Outlook so I could see the integration and also use their plug-in for posting to Blogger. Naturally, the first feed that I would subscribe to would be my own, right? So I can confirm operation of my feed and also get things working where I can see both ends of the process. I did get it to work, but I had to tweak some things to make it operate. Then I promptly forgot that I had to perform a work-around. [dh:2004-04-05-17:54 and I just had to do some more.] After getting things going, I sink into news-feed overload (something I anticipated and I did it anyhow), busily subscribing to every blog I know about and the ones that are referenced from ones I know about, if I like them too. This is leading me into conversations that I don't usually follow so closely, and I am beginning to wonder whether this is smart. But I am pleased with myself for this little technical adventure. Meanwhile, AnderBill and I have our regular weekly call and are talking about the state of the world, the WTF conference he was at, back channels, Situated Software, relationships, Continuous ADD as an intentional activity, and so on. Out of this I tell him how to subscribe to my link and he does it and it doesn't work for him. I figure, because in 24 hours of futzing with a news reader I am now an old hand, it is an Atom incompatibility. And, I didn't know that it might be important to use the file-name atom.xml, so my feed-file is named lair-atom.xml because, well, there might be another blog in that place some day and that's how I do things. Who knew that I was making things harder than necessary to find. While wondering what the difficulty is, I go to my link (just above the tiny blogger icon on my left-side skyscraper) and notice that it opens as nicely formatted, and I can't see the XML. So it either really isn't XML or it has an XSLT processing instruction and is coming up formatted in my browser. I do a "Save Target As ..." on the link, and am a little mystified that it comes up with assumed data type of HTML (so my web site may be doing that). But I save the XML and then I open it with jEdit, my programmer editor that does a nice job editing XML too. What is this stuff? Oh, well first, it is HTML. And secondly, it has things added by my firewall to protect me from scripting, pop ups, and whatnot. Oh. And the feed isn't in here. Of course. I forgot. I am looking at a _top frame of a frame set that includes the feed file by reference from within a subordinate frame. So here we are: confirmable experience meets system incoherence. Well, that is usually how it happens. It's just not supposed to happen to me. The Lesson 1. It would have been nice to use an expected name for the file. Then it would be easer to tell people over the phone, or to type from memory into an e-mail. After today's experience, though, I am not likely to forget the proper name any time soon. 2. I forgot that people using Firewall software to protect themselves from the blue meanies might have trouble taking the link because of paternal stream-rewriting done by the ad blocking provisions of the Firewall. That is not a serious problem, unless you open the feed to read it in a browser. 3. The most-important forgotten fact is that "orcmid.com" is not a real place. It is a real domain name, but it has no fixed address. orcmid.com is forwarded to a section of another site, what I call the "anchor site" for Orcmid's Lair, nfocentrale.net/orcmid. That's not too bad except I wanted to hide that fact so that I could move the site and have people's bookmarks and whatnot, including search results, be to where orcmid.com is at the moment. I use what is called URL cloaking. This is a kind of call-forwarding that is mostly invisible and probably more annoying than it is worth, but cheaper than setting up an independent site for hosting orcmid.com. It also doesn't really work, and the way it doesn't work showed up here. I set the URL of the feed to be "http://orcmid.com/blog/lair-atom.xml" and that doesn't work at all. It doesn't work because URL cloaking is accomplished by introducing frames so that the served pages appear to be from orcmid. com when they really aren't. Orcmid.com pages are being delivered from the anchor site into a framed page at orcmid.com, a site that is only big enough to do that much. That URL sucks as a feed location because what the subscriber gets is the framed HTML page, not the XML file. The cloaking also sucks, generally, because navigation doesn't change the location of the top frame, so my dream about book-marking is frustrated anyhow. 5. When I couldn't get the URL to work in NewsGator, I changed it manually to the correct one, and forgot why I had to do that and that I had published the incorrect URL on my blog page. I corrected the URL here on blog pages too, which should now be working much better. I have to use the "true" location, "http://nfocentrale.net/orcmid/blog/lair-atom.xml". It pains me to do that. I don't want to give up cloaking. But it is a source of incoherence, here and in other ways. I can't stand that. That's a different struggle, and I haven't taken the inevitable step just yet. Meanwhile, I have repaired the link and told AnderBill how to really find my feed. [dh:2004-04-05-17:59 I don't know what to say. Blogger allows old postings to be edited, and I am a compulsive rewriter. And Blogger won't show the fact of revision or change the original timestamp, and I don't want to obsolete the permalink to this bloglet, so here we are with me being a revisionist.] Letting them know what is going onIt is a feature of confirmable experience that people have some way of knowing what they are looking at and what it is good for. This is the first time I have found a blog that has a description of its feeds and how to use them.Fast Company Now. Here's a nice addition to a semi-formal blog site. A page for feeds that explains what's going on and what to do with the feeds other than look at "raw" XML in your browser. It is a great little resource page. AnderBill and I were separately looking at this page today while musing about software that comes with extensive installation instructions but nothing about use for its intended purpose. Computing MilieuxThe New LiteracyBloggingRoss Mayfield's Weblog - Social Capital of Blogspace. I am gleaning other blogs from the blogs of people whose writing or ideas interest me. That led to this article on what a Network Age could be like where communities form themselves out of individuals establishing the conversations they participate in. That's my crude encapsulation. After typing it I had this lightning bolt crash through my head: self as community. Oh, I forgot. It is late and I'm not going to go there just now.[dh:2004-04-05-13:23] Later, AnderBill and I are talking about why back channels strike some people as highly offensive. That is worthy of expanding on elsewhere, but it has an anti-community pattern. And it can be thought of as self-indulgent too. Well, I am not tired now (the next day), but I am still not going to go there just now. [dh:2004-04-05-15:30] And, although the archive page that I linked to at the top of this bloglet is correct, it is no longer where Ross Mayfield's Weblog is. That is here. And I discovered that immediately on subscribing to the old site, because the last posting there told me about the new one. Well, maybe I worry too much about hiding the "anchor site." 2004-04-04The Rise of ``Worse is Better''. This Richard Gabriel piece has some important things to say about simplicity over correctness and completeness. I have seen this before and I am not sure I had the good sense (or the opportunity) to blog it, so I will do so now. Clay Shirky mentions this in his article on Situated Software. [dh:2004-04-05-18:01] I think there is something else about "Worse is Better." Some of the most expansive phases of digital computing have occured when the situation was the most uproarious and exciting. We have gone through several cycles where there were chaotic, energetic, unruly expansions of energy, enjoyment, discovery, and contribution in computing. It can be associated with generations of technology, and also the entry level. The entry level is important. I am going to identify where I experienced this. It is associated with particular vendors, and others will have seen this with different products. It isn't about the vendors (except in the most important way, in allowing for it and getting out of the way). The progression for me was (1) the IBM 650 era (but I knew about the IBM 704 and SHARE experience too), (2) the IBM 1401 era, which was really explosive and innovative and entry-level, (3) the IBM System/360 at the low end, the 360/20 and 360/30, with 360/40 as on the borderline, (4) the mini-computer era and, more than that, (5) the micro-computer era, especially CP/M (for me, Apple IIe and other products for others) and mostly free-ware, (6) the IBM PC-DOS era and early Microsoft cultivation of the tools community, (7) the Windows era, and (8) the Web. Every one of these was marked by intense, contagious expansion at the entry level and major alterations to the aficionado community. We are now close to computing for everyone, and this is what it looks like -- not computing. More like writing and drawing and talking and ... . At the same time, I think there is some sort of order under all of this and we should "get it." Intentionally creating emergent behavior of autonomous entities having very rapid behavior, without finally "getting it" weirds me out. I think this tension between the hurly burly and a striving for order and, yes, control, may be Apollonian versus Dionysian after all. But however one takes sides about this, the flurries of expansion followed by contract seem to be part of cultural learning. Even when some of it is not something I really want to learn, as an individual. I don't think Continuous Partial Attention is a good thing if that's what we mean by being on your cell phone while making a free-right-turn into pedestrians while ferrying kids to school. [dh:2004-04-05-18:07 and as I was saying to Anderbill, I don't think attention is subdividable. There's more to attention than that.] Shirky: Situated Software. I may have blogged this earlier, but I am sure it wasn't the full article. Here is a lot more about situated software, and I think Clay relates it to another idea, one of small components, loosely held together (attributed to David Weinberger, I think). I like what is said here, though I can't say that I am working in that direction. So I need to see why not? Collaborative and Cooperative SystemsThe Wiki MilieuxOh yeah, Literate ProgrammingWell, well, here I am thinking and fussing, analyzing and paralyzing about wiki, interwiki, blob, interblog, and then what leaps up before me is CWeb and Literate Programming. Drat! More to pay attention to.Literate Programming. I did a web search for comp.programming.literate (linked below) and found this. The long scroll of quotes is worth the price of admission. I favor the very last one, from David Parnas. But they are all amazing. It is all about preserving the essential and making it clear. Some of this material is very moving to scan through all in one place like this. I am reminded that the objective of science is not truth (that is more for religion), it is beauty. I do want to find a way to preserve this in the world of reference works and development works using wiki-like organizations and authoring capabilities. comp.programming.literate. I don't have a URL for that. Oh sure I do. It is on google somewhere (so there you have it, but it is a lot like using an amazon.com URL to talk about a book). The point is that literate programming is yet-another view at hyperstructures for providing perspectives and narratives that explicate software designs and implementations. So, there is a Wikifinity here, although I am not clear on how this can be mapped. But, but, since I want to deal with toolcraft in nfoWare, I don't want to ignore the prospective connection. So here is one more aspect to toss into the mix. Parsing Webs (or is it Tangles?): I also notice that there might be room for a better class of parsers than lex and yacc too. Maybe it is ANTLER or something. And then, of course, there is the idea that we might use XML as a carrier, although it is a little like asking if anyone has an XML Schema for TeX. Uh, yes, so? Newsgroups as SyndicationExcentrics World. I am here to get an NNTP poster that I can use in MS Outlook with NewsGator, and now I may be checking newsgroups far too often also! I am a little nervous about this, but the confluence of newsgroups and mailing lists and blogs and wikis and ... is rather fascinating. It makes sense to have my Microsoft Outlook provide an integrated view of all of them, and so I am ramping up NewsGator to see how well that works. (One limitation is that thread structuring doesn't seem to happen.)Lining up the key-holes some more. Well, I am learning some things. There are some ads that are benign, such as the Blogger link or a SourceForge link. To allow those on most sites, I set my default Ad Blocker to allow basic banner and skyscraper ads. I can always change that for individual ads. I am also learning that, to download software, such as from this site, I need to not "Block MIME Type integrated objects." That's pretty safe because I do get antivirus and threat checking of downloads, and so I made that a general setting. Finally, the "Remove Private Header Information" is apparently a protection about what goes in my headers in GET requests. I am dropping that to keep the amount of Privacy Advisor popping-up down (so I won't go blind to it) and also because I don't think that is anything I need to worry about (e.g., referrer address and such). NewsGator Tutorial - Step 1. The on-line tutorial is pretty nice. One of the things I noticed is that my tightened firewall wouldn't let me download and I was getting 403 errors. Odd, but when I allowed objects it worked. More to figure out. NewsGator - Downloads. Well, maybe I won't be able to try out NewsGator 2.0 for MS Outlook after all. Perhaps because of my blocking of privacy settings, or something else, I get 403 reports on wanting to download anything. It tells me I am not authorized to access the site with the credentials supplied. Since I am in the process of tuning my firewall to make my browsing safer, this might - or might not - be it. I wonder if ZAPro is deleting referer addresses as part of its ad blocking treatment. I will see what happens if I tune that. Product Tour: Pricing - NewsGator Online Services. OK, I think I found the/a business model of Newsgator. OK, on-line services, launched this year. Well, I still want to try the Microsoft Outlook version, assuming it has all of the functionality of other Newsgator 2.0 releases. Computing MilieuxLiteratureThere are many essayists on the Internet, even though the style is not so clearly identified. I realize that many of the blogs and articles that I admire are created as essays and self-published using the latest technologies: web pages, blogs, wikis, and other on-line forms. Although this topic could involve a critical perspective, another way, for now at least, is by presenting exemplary materials "in the wild."David WeinbergJOHO - March 26, 2004 - Bogus Contest. This is a fascinating topic. I need to see if my struggle with some of this about information and metadata is of any use to David Weinberger. Meanwhile, this whole page is a great read, from my perspective. There needs to be some way for it to be integrated into the more-dynamic that it is tied to. JOHO - March 26, 2004. I went here for some stuff on Bogus Contests, from the TWP site, and ended up reading about Artifical Social Networks, and then seeing that I resonate with practically everything else here. And certainly the civility of it. So another reason to get an RSS feed working and see if there is one here. Personal ComputingKeeping Browsing SafeWondering about all of those URLs I never heard ofAs I tune my firewall for pages that I regularly visit, I notiice a number of surprises. For one thing, my firewall shows visits to pages that I never heard of. For example, http://static.cognitivearchitects.com was used for something. There is no home page there, so it had to be the result of some sort of framing or image access or something. Odd host name, like something I might visit on purpose, but maybe that isn't it at all. There are more like that showing up.Adjusting page settingsI am still running Internet Explorer with fairly high settings (it still asks permission for ActiveX sometimes) and I am slowly adjusting my firewall for finer-tuning of commonly-visited sites so that I don't have to intervene so much. One thiing I notice is that I may be seeing lag because of browser cached pages (ahah!). Also, the most-common intervention by the firewall is the removal of "private headers" as part of Adware suppression. I am not so clear why that is important and what is being handled this way. The first pages that I worked through are below.It seems that if a page already has a persistent cookie for me, it still works now that the firewall has a default about session-cookies only. That's all right, I set the permanent cookies permission on sites that have my identity and that I want to keep it that way. I tried it with SourceForge and with Slashdot, and both seem to work. I will revisit today to be sure.
|
|||
