Danah Boyd says good things.

January 21, 2010 under technical

Like this:

“People still care about privacy because they care about control. Sure, many teens repeatedly tell me “public by default, private when necessary” but this doesn’t suggest that privacy is declining; it suggests that publicity has value and, more importantly, that folks are very conscious about when something is private and want it to remain so. When the default is private, you have to think about making something public. When the default is public, you become very aware of privacy.”

Her full post is worthwhile.

It’s ironic that I moved from Facebook to a blog for privacy reasons. Whereas Facebook has privacy controls, a blog is fully public, and this keeps me on my toes.

The danger is not that we function in a private context or in a public context, but that we operate in one when we believe that we’re operating in the other. The danger of Facebook is that it feels private when it is really public.

This is not a new thing; we’ve always known the danger of disconnects. An open enemy is worse than a false friend, etc. etc.

But theologically, I’m forced to question the actual value of mass, shallow communication. I’m not sure what the real value of publicity is.

But then again, theologically, I’m forced to question most everything we humans hold dear.

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Moron alert

December 8, 2009 under technical, thehumancondition

Seth is brilliantly right today.

Ask any software developer, though, and they will tell you that Seth’s postulated 2 percent is invariably much greater.

2 percent is the minimum. The baseline. It only goes up from there.

Generally, however,  programmers don’t believe that they’re in the business of building relationships and connections and so the umpteen percent are told that if they don’t like it, they can walk.

Happy RTFMing, n00b!

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Yuck. Just Yuck.

November 9, 2009 under technical

If there’s English hidden in here, I don’t know where to find it.

Context

The presentation-tier request handling mechanism must control and coordinate processing of each user across multiple requests. Such control mechanisms may be managed in either a centralized or decentralized manner.

(from the Core J2EE Pattern Catalog)

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Game accounts being stolen

November 2, 2009 under technical

We, as people, have an extraordinary power – the ability to define what is valuable.

A lump of crystalline rock is precious for no greater reason than we care for it.

It’s so easy to look at something like online game accounts being stolen and to say, “That doesn’t matter at all, they’re just game accounts.”

Professional thieves aren’t stupid, however, and the good ones chase value wherever we assign it. A clever thief doesn’t care about a particular object beyond it’s value, and so he will steal whatever thing people put value on.

So I guess the interesting question is,

“Why do we value these game accounts so highly that virtual stuff is worth real money?”

In part it’s designed – game manufacturers work hard to make something people are willing to invest in.

Regardless, it’s important that our perception of what needs to be secure evolves along with our perception of what is important.

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Linear modelling

October 14, 2009 under technical

Is nice because it’s simple. But when it fails, it can fail big.

Yesterday I took the train at a different time than I usually take it. It just so happened that this was the rush hour train and so we were all tightly packed – squish, squish, squish.

Given the abnormally high level of solidarity on display, I took it upon myself to remark (aloud) about a peculiar non-linear phenomenon at work.

“Isn’t it interesting,” says I. “When the train is especially busy, the driver must stay longer at each stop for the loading and unloading of people. “[This is not a trivial difference; when the people are packed, the missus in the middle of the car has a lot of squeezing to do in order to get from her seat to the door, and finally out the train - Ed]

“What this means,” says I to my captive audience, ” is that the train arrives *later* at every subsequent stop. Giving those unfortunate souls who would have otherwise missed this particular train a chance to queue up on the platform. Meaning that early busyiness makes later busyiness busyier than it has business to be.”

Nobody said anything.

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I love this man

October 9, 2009 under technical

It’s too bad he’s evil. This hack is marvelous!

Explanation of the hack for the non-technical:

Have you ever noticed that after you visit a link, your web-browser displays it as a different colour? (The default colors are blue for unvisited and purple for visited.)

Well, the hack is to write a web page that programatically inserts a bunch of links, and then looks at the colours of the links to see if they’ve been visited.

Because the web-browser automatically sets the link colours for you according to your browser history, this hack essentially gives the webpage access to your browser history. Well, not quite. It can check a predefined list of sites against your browser history to see if you’ve been there.

Brilliant.

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Google OCR

October 2, 2009 under technical

OCR for the common man. Thank you Google.

There are free online OCR services; there are companies that sell the software. I don’t think it will be too long before it becomes bundled standard with an operating system and people will just expect it as part of something a computer does.

But having an open project is special, precisely because this is the kind of feature that is destined to become a basic, taken-for-granted part of a computing package. It’s infrastructure, and infrastructure should be free and open, part of the commons.

Infrastructure shouldn’t be able to disappear with the whim of a company.

It’s not a coincidence that the most successful, highest profile open source projects are an operating system,  a web browser, and an office suite. Niche programs like AutoCAD have very poor open source representation.

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User manuals

September 3, 2009 under technical, theology

People try and use software without learning how. It’s a fact. People expect to just be able to use a computer program. Just like that. If you can’t just use it, it’s rubbish.

There’s this idea that we should be able to sit down before any computer program and just use it, without any need for study or learning. Most computer programmers hate this; they say things like, “There’s no other domain (because programmers love to use words like ‘domain’) where people can expect to do stuff without knowing what they’re doing.”

Well, maybe gambling in the casino.

The problem is, sometimes we do things the wrong way and it costs us a lot of time. Sometimes there’s a feature that we could use, that we should use, and that we don’t use, because we’ve found a way that “works” even though it doesn’t really work.

This is why when you change a font on a Word document, it messes everything up, because you’ve used spaces and tabs for formatting (it just works, right) and now it doesn’t just work because your manual page break is now two lines off and by the time you fix that your picture has moved to the wrong page and now paragraph 3 is split in half.

So now when you write a Word document, you have to ask the question, “How big is my document?” because if you’re writing anything substantial, it’s probably worth knowing how to format things the way you’re supposed to.

I personally never format my Word documents correctly. At work, there are all these fancy templates with predefined styles and layouts. But I always end up just tab-tab-tabbing and saying “This text is HappyMoron justified because I like it thank you very much.”

(I’m not even using a word processor to write this post; I’m writing this blog post in a fancy web-based editing component. This means that I don’t need to know a darn thing about text layout. Just that ‘i’ comes before ‘e’, except after ‘c’.)

So the point is, if you write a user manual for your software, people won’t read it, because we believe (we really do, it’s insane) that we shouldn’t have to. Having a user manual written makes the programmer feel happy, but that’s about all it does.

Does God have a user manual?

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Multicore programming, anyone?

July 28, 2009 under technical

MIT lives to serve ;-)

I was blown away by the observation that C was designed as a common/portable machine language (true) for single processors. It’s quite correct – C works best as a portable assembly.

Simply put, processor design has changed radically changed in the last 40 years, but our portable machine language has not. Time for a new paradigm, perchance?

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Party On

July 22, 2009 under technical, thehumancondition

I didn’t know people were doing this stuff. I should have guessed.

To me, these stories illustrate something about the internet.

At work are basic, understandable human forces and fundamental human problems. Kids like to party.

On the one hand, the internet gives us a power that we’ve never had before. An individual can organize an event that draws 4000 people. Who could ever do that before? The cost of stamps alone would be prohibitive.

On the other hand, the internet is completely and utterly hamstrung by our own limitations.

“What do you wanna do?”

“I dunno. What do you wanna do?”

“Beach Party?”

At the same time that a community is faced with a problem that is genuinely new (How do you break up a beach party of 4000 people? We’ve never had that sort of problem before…), it is facing a problem that is really really old.

People in large crowds tend to misbehave – we’ve know about this for a long, long time. Kids like to party.

I know, let’s ban the internet!

Or is the real answer for 4000 parents to create an event – “Keep your young punk home tonight”. On the night, there will be 4000 arguments and 4000 upset teenagers running to their rooms. (Except the modern equivalent of sending a teenager to their room is to confiscate their cell phone – isolation has a new face)

But the arguments would have happened anyway. The good kids will obey and the bad kids will disobey and the police will beak up the fights and life will go on.

The question of “Can we get 4000 people together?” has been answered. Yes we can.

The question of “Can we stop 4000 people from getting together?” has yet to be answered, but it’s almost certainly, “Yes.” (Look kids! I’ve got brownies!)

The question of “How often should we allow 4000 people get together?” is the most interesting question of all. It’s a people question, and it’s difficult to answer, which is why it’s interesting.

The internet is a tool, don’t be one yourself ;-)

Yay! Morality wins :-P

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