Apt Quotation

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Nick Pilon
on September 5, 2008
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Tim O’Reilly, in Microsoft Missing the Boat on Mobile:

The future is not like the past, and any strategy that is designed to protect the past will eventually fail.

Anyone looking at delivering electronic media should think very carefully about what this means. If your business plan relies on delivering your electronic media in an environment that duplicates the limitations of your old physical media as closely as possible, you’re doomed. The same goes, come to think of it, for network providers. If your business plan relies around taking new network technology and making it work exactly the same as your old network… You’re doing it wrong.

r0ml at OSCON 2008

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Nick Pilon
on July 30, 2008
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Everyone who develops software should watch this talk of r0ml’s keynote from Tuesday night at OSCON ‘08. While it’s presented in a comedic fashion, he makes a lot of really excellent points about the absurdity and impracticality of the software development methodologies we try to shoehorn our work into. The Exceptional process he proposes sounds like it makes a hell of a lot more sense.

Next up: there was a guy with a video camera at his “Open Source as Liberal Art” talk. I really must track down a recording of it, because it was even better.

Random Cool Stuff From FOO Camp

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Nick Pilon
on July 29, 2008
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NYC Resistor is a group in NYC that created a “hackerspace”, a dedicated hang-out where hackers can get together and work on projects. From their lightning talk, it includes both hardware and software hacking, and results in all kinds of crazy projects. It looked cool and fun, and more things like this could go a long way towards re-establishing non-commercial third places in the modern world.

GigaPan, as described to me by Jason Campbell, is a method for very cheaply taking very high-resolution panoramic images. The basic idea is to have a commodity digital camera in a computerized servo-mount on a tripod. The servo-mount pans the camera over the desired areas, taking pictures at appropriate intervals as it goes. The gigapan web service then stitches the entire set of images together and provides a convenient interface for viewing.

Bonus nifty #1: no special interface is needed to the camera. It just uses another servo and a stick to manually depress the shutter switch!

Bonus nifty #2: Because the entire panorama isn’t taken at once, but over the course of several minutes (for potentially large values of several) as the camera pans over the scene, it doesn’t capture a point in time but a distribution. This occasionally creates strange artifacts when images are stitched together, but potentially has some very cool implications. Imagine if you had enough storage to keep one of these running throughout the course of an entire event of some kind, or even a significant span of time. Would it be possible to present an interface to the resulting time-distributed panorama that reflects the wealth of information gathered?

Martin Wattenberg is just plain awesome. I’d seen Name Voyager before (it’s great fun to play with), but his presentation on Many Eyes was really cool. It’s apparently being used extensively by a lot of linguistics and literary researchers, including Bible scholars. One of the more interesting observations from his talk: the key to Many Eyes was “stop words”, garbage connecting words that most software types would be inclined to throw away. However, the presence and usage of these words can offer more information about a piece of text than “significant” words!

And Evil Mad Scientist still has the best company name ever.

Telling Stories

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Nick Pilon
on July 27, 2008
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A lot of the other things I saw at FOO Camp were interesting products that spawned interesting ideas in my head. For example, there’s We Tell Stories. A venture by, of all publishers, stodgy old Penguin Books, We Tell Stories experiments with using a variety of digital media to… Tell stories. Slice and Your Place and Mine were experiments in serial fiction, and thus their experimental quality doesn’t really come across well in archive form. The others are more interesting.

Fairy Tales is a fairy tale that lets the reader “fill in the blanks” as they navigate through the story. It’s a simple use of digital technology, minimally interactive, but still interesting, since it shows just how mutable formerly-fixed things can be on the web. And, now that I think about it, it welcomes user remixing and makes it an inherent part of reading the story. Nifty!

The (Former) General is a Choose Your Own Adventure story… That’s designed to be read the way everyone actually reads Choose Your Own Adventure stories: with a thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky, and nose firmly planted several pages back so you can explore alternate branches if you don’t like the one you’re on. In order to do this, it keeps a map showing you what you’ve read, what you haven’t, and how they connect together. This lets them do all kinds of silly things that would be… Highly frustrating in a normal Choose Your Own Adventure story.

The most interesting of the six is The 21 Steps. This story’s told using Google Maps. The pop-up balloons are used to present the text describing events at a location pin, and an animated Indiana Jones Is Travelling line connects the location pins in chronological order. The structure here is fairly simple, but I think there’s a lot of more elaborate variations that can be built on top of this basic foundation. It’s probably not going to catch fire as a hot new media for telling stories, but I think it could do some cool things.

Ignoring Government

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Nick Pilon
on July 23, 2008
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This morning’s keynotes at OSCON weren’t nearly as good as last night’s. In particular, I’ve got a bone to pick with Christine Peterson. She talked about sensing systems, and coming government attempts to both mandate and regulate sensing – making sensing the sole provenance of the government, and using sensing to further escalate an authoritarian surveillance state. Reasonable enough so far. But her proposed solution to this was to ignore the government and completely privatize surveillance, under the justification that government is inherently predisposed towards centrism, inherently ignorant of the Benefits of Free, and inherently unchangeable. “DC is DC,” she seemed to be saying, “and the only way we’ll get anything done is to ignore them and privatize everything.”

Lessig provides an excellent explanation in Code 2.0 of why this is a horrible idea. Ignoring government and forging boldly forwards on your own doesn’t create an system that cannot be regulated by government. Instead, it cedes the government space to the authoritarians, allowing them to operate and expand its influence uncontested. We’re seeing the end result of that in politics now. Across pretty much all of the western world, the notion that “government is inherently harmful” or “government can do no good” or dozens of different variations on the theme have taken hold. As a result, those that would support a progressive agenda have largely abandoned government, and authoritarianism has grown unchecked.

Further, the history of privatization in the 20th century has been an unchecked series of disasters. Private entities are motivated wholly by profit, and thus incredibly susceptible to authoritarian influence. They make more money from it, after all. Public entities are, at least theoretically, answerable primarily to the public good which, in a democratic system, is determined in a distributed manner.

I believe that government can be made to understand the Benefits of Free and work in a distributed, free model. In fact, I believe it is inherent to a properly functioning democratic system. But we won’t have a properly functioning democratic system unless we believe that government can do good; that free and public are complementary, not opposed; and that “being political” is something desirable, rather than something repugnant.

Unlikely Connections: Beekeeping, Old Houses, and Everything Else

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on July 19, 2008
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Possibly the best session I attended at FOO Camp was given by Brian Fitzpatrick. Fitz talked about The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping, and tied it together with his experiences with his old house in Chicago and software development.

I’m not going to talk about the talk itself except in the most general terms above (as per FOO Camp policy, I shall only be blogging about publicly-available stuff) but I will talk about my reaction to it, since the whole thing hit very close to home for me.

I’m hasty. I tend to jump into things without thinking or looking. I make rushed decisions, I jump into things, and I tend to constantly strive for better without appreciating what’s there. This is most obvious in my thesis, when I decided not to use NS2 and wrote my own network simulator instead. I learned a hell of a lot, and it honestly probably didn’t take longer, but… Was it the right decision? I’m not sure. I thought at the time that I’d considered all my options carefully, but in retrospect, I think I might’ve jumped at the opportunity to demonstrate my ego. Honestly, I think a lot of software folks are this way – it’s why we’re so bad at code re-use.

The Art and Adventure of Beekeeping is all about the value of observation, contemplation and patience. I’ve been suggesting for a while that our culture needs to learn the value of being slow again – for example, we need to realize that not being able to travel halfway around the world in less than twelve hours is not necessarily bad. But listening to Fitz talk (and joining in the discussion), I realized that I need to learn that I don’t need to do everything at 100% speed. There’s a lot of value to sitting and watching beehives, listening to the bees and learning their behaviors. Before you jump in and start clearing out honey and replacing bits of the hive, you’ve got to learn the feel of what’s already there and what that feel means.

Another interesting thought was that cleanliness isn’t necessarily the highest virtue – things that are messy can still have value. Cleaning them up without pausing to observe them and consider them from different perspectives can inadvertently destroy that value. Yes, working with them in the interim can be annoying, but it’s better than wading in and wrecking things before you grasp the full picture.

I could probably write a small book about the stuff in that session, but I think I’m going to stick to two more little bits. First off, unless you’re writing an RFC, don’t say “should”. Should usually means that you’re coming to a situation with a pre-conceived notion of how it “should” be, making snap value judgments without actually taking the time to observe.

Secondly, “failure scales.” It may sound like a quip, but it’s surprisingly accurate. It’s hard to replicate success, it’s much easier to replicate failures or borderline marginal.

Sage Advice

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Nick Pilon
on July 14, 2008
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Sally Forth on Powerpoint And this is one of many reasons why Francesco Marciuliano is an underappreciated genius.

The others mostly have to do with his ability to slip Internet pop culture references into a mainstream newspaper comic strip. It’s really a shame he stopped doing Medium Large.


FOO Camp ‘08

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Nick Pilon
on July 14, 2008
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This weekend was FOO Camp ‘08 which I, as an employee of O’Reilly Media, was privileged to attend. And, frankly, wow. Now I understand what all the fuss was about. I missed the sessions on Friday and a couple of the Saturday sessions, but everything I managed to attend was, without exception, astonishing. Over the next week or two, while the experience is still fresh in my mind, I’m going to try to turn my hastily-scribbled notes about the sessions that really stood out for me into coherent blog posts.

First, though, I’d like to mention something I noticed over and over throughout the weekend:

Innovation Isn’t Isolation

I was going to title this section “Developers Don’t Drive Development”, but after thinking about a couple of the sessions that really jumped out at me, I concluded it just wasn’t true. A more accurate statement is that just developers don’t drive development. What I think of as the “old model”, of giving someone a technical education, sitting them down to think really hard, and then turning them loose and getting all kinds of awesome products is gone, and I’m not sure it ever existed. A lot of the coolest things I saw this weekend were things that were created for very non-technical disciplines, and by very non-technical people. It might just have been the sessions I picked – honestly, I did steer away from anything that smelled like it’d fit in at a tech conference – but a lot of the motivators and big new ideas seemed to be coming from humanities and artistic folks. People with non-technical educations, who were taking technology and bending it to their own ends.

I’ve suspected this for a while now, but I was kind of nice to see that I’m not totally out to lunch. How far out to lunch I am remains to be seen. Other opinions along the same lines included:

  • Robert, one of my co-workers, who was utterly floored by a cello performance on Friday night. I’m really sorry I missed it.
  • Lenore Edman of Evil Mad Scientist (seriously, guys, best name ever) was most impressed by what I’m going to call “sewing origami”, for lack of a better term. I can’t remember what Windell Oskay (also of Evil Mad Scientist) was most impressed by – sorry, Windell.
  • Lane Becker was most impressed by a game designer who ran a session I’m really sorry to have missed on Saturday and, on Sunday, had a bunch of people collaboratively build a game in chalk on the concrete between the session-tents.

Next Up: Bees. My god.

Playing Games

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Nick Pilon
on June 28, 2008
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Clay Shirky’s post about Gin, Television, and Social Surplus triggered some interesting thoughts about game-playing based on my reading of Rules of Play.

In his discussion of how we’re starting to make use of our cognitive surplus, rather than wasting it on “gin” like TV, Shirky mentions video games. He seems to view video games as a kind of intermediate ground between productive uses of the cognitive surplus, like Wikipedia, and unproductive uses, like watching sit-coms. I disagree; I think video games are an important part of why we’re able to make use of the cognitive surplus, rather than continuing to waste it on gin. In the past, our economy was based almost wholly on physical labour. Games were correspondingly physical, either helping children build up the physical traits they’d need to do their work, like strength and reflexes, or helping them learn rough analogs of the skills they’d be using as adults. For adults, games served a similar role, keeping them in form and practice while letting them relax without the pressures of work.

I think video games serve the same purpose for today’s more intellectually-oriented economy. As Danc is fond of pointing out, one of the more compelling incentives to play video games is the opportunity to explore and understand a dynamic system. In a well-designed game, the player encounters successively more complicated layers of mechanics and interactions between mechanics. One of the challenges posed by the game is untangling these mechanics and building an understanding of how the game works. I view this as a fundamental intellectual skill, one that’s necessary for understanding and working with complex systems. Video games often layer other traits on top of this – situational awareness, teamwork, memorization, quick reactions to rapidly changing circumstances, large- or small-scale organization…

It’s true that not every game player learns to generalize these skills beyond video games, or even between video games. But those that do are better prepared for the requirements of our modern intellectually-focused economy.

The World of Warcraft and the Third Place

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Nick Pilon
on April 27, 2008
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There’s been a lot of effort and thought put into working out why World of Warcraft has been so much more popular than other MMOs. Most numbers put them at ten times the active subscriptions of their closest competitor, though I don’t know of any that break it down by region. (From my memory of launch dates, I suspect there’s some interesting information buried in the regional break-down) In North America alone, WoW has a reported 2 million subscribers, more than any other MMO since the Lineage games at their peak.

The focus in these analyses of popularity usually tends to emphasize the game mechanics. There is, of course, the psychologically addictive behaviour created by epic loot drops and other intermittent rewards. There’s the sense of progress and development as your character levels or advances through raids. There’s the raid encounters themselves and the extreme commitment required to learn them. But really, none of this stuff is particularly original. It’s not even more smoothly-executed than other contemporary MMOs. Yes, the graphics are friendlier. The interface is slicker. Some of the high-level stuff is more casual-friendly. To some degree, “network externalities” (thank you, Bradford C. Walker) mean that WoW’s popular because WoW’s popular. But based on my experience playing WoW and watching others play WoW, I think this stuff is all a fancy side-show to the real deal.

WoW’s more popular because scattered across all these things, in bits and pieces that add up to a significant whole, is a game that’s much, much better at doing the thing MMOs do best than any of its competitors. It’s better at being a Third Place, an informal venue for socialization.

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