iPod progress

I got an new iPod nano for my birthday yesterday. I considered the iPhone and iPod Touch, but their poor keyboard won't replace my Sidekick, and they omitted the most important features.
Specifically, iPhone lacks instant messaging, and both iPhone and iPod touch have Wifi, yet unaccountably don't support iTunes song sharing.

A bit of context here — back when we were pitching Wifi and Zeroconf to Steve Jobs at Apple, the killer demo was the iTunes + QuickTime sharing of music and videos — Macs in the same room finding each other and making their music libraries and videos mutually available, whether you have a router or not. The underlying protocol here is called DAAP, which is just some conventions for using HTTP 1.1 to play remotely and update the song list.

However, the edition of iTunes this went out in was unfortunately the same one that added the iTunes Store. From our developer point of view, the fact that there were 4 separate open source interoperating implementations of DAAP within a week was a big burst of validation for our efforts, but this caused huge confusion among the Record Labels that Jobs had invested so much time in schmoozing to set the store up. Eventually, after too many arguments with Label execs where he tried to explain "but the songs bought from iTunes Store won't be playable remotely, just the CD-ripped ones", he insisted the protocol be changed, which it was, several times.

The social sharing of music via iTunes is still a new and lovely feature of offices, campuses and coffee shops everywhere. But the iPhone users are left out in the cold. They can't see iTunes libraries, they can't share their own songs. Watching the launch of the "buy the song playing in Starbucks" feature, my immediate thought was "Steve, do you want to change the world, or do you just want to sell sugared coffee to kids?"

That said, I am a big fan of the 206 dpi screen on the new iPod nano. I did the maths, and that implies a full HD screen (1920x1200 with room for a controller bar) that is about 9.5 inches by 6 inches - sounds like a nice new Apple subnotebook for MacWorld January. Three and a half years ago, I pointed out the very rapid growth of storage per buck. I now have an iPod that is half the price, a tenth the weight and volume, and that plays video as predicted.

Bubbles and Facebook

A few days back, danah asked:

I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There's no doubt that Facebook's F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer's wet dream. (Never mind that I don't know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don't understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why is the tech crowd so entranced with Facebook?

This made me think of my sure-fire bubble indicator:

When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble.

[...}The trouble with this indicator is that if you aren't looking for it it seem like the natural order of things - of course having personable young things hanging on your every word is to be expected - finally you're getting the recognition you deserve!

In practice, however, the finely-tuned herd instincts that get selected for in the Ivy League or the posher UK universities make them flock to the latest bubble

By this measure, we are well into a bubble in the Valley, (Google being the top company of choice for MBA's is one example), but Facebook has a perfect conjunction here - growing out of Harvard and the Ivy League, it started out with the very crowd of high-achieving conformists that danah called hegemonic teens, who make up my leading indicator, so when they connected with the tech crowd the mentos hit the coke.

Journalists slumming online

I've realised why I got quote so cross with Andrew Keen and the way he portrays the net as 'corrupting'. Pagan Kennedy's essay on MySpace reminded me, and Tom's passionate defence of his blog against PR slummers who want to use him as a mouthpiece confirmed this thought. There is a temptation online, and that is to go slumming - to pretend that you can abuse people's trust and emotions without fear of personal consequences, that people online are somehow not real and so you can toy with them and remain above it. A while back at Making Light, Lucy Kemnitzer explained this well:

Slumming isn't going to a seedy place. Slumming is taking your superior attitude and your certainty that the world is your Disneyland in with you. It's looking at the people who work there as performing monkeys putting on a show for you. It's being cushioned by your privilege. It's thinking that if the place is raided, surely you will be passed over because you're not one of those people. It's running a narration in your head where you are the normal observer, and those guys are the freaks.

You can do it almost everywhere. I've seen people do it on an ordinary residential street in a city, going into a corner restaurant or working man's bar as if it were the Exotic And Dangerous Gangsta Exhibit at a Los Vegas theme hotel. I've seen people do it at a flea market in an ordinary rural town. Or at the weekly get-together of a community, where they danced and sang and gave each other presents (a pow-wow). I saw people doing it at my college, thanks to a former Governor and President calling it a cross between a hippie pad and a bordello.

Here's a clue about how not to go slumming when you enter a place: shed your privilege and your pretensions to superiority. If they play music that isn't to your taste, maybe it's because they hear something in it that you don't, so listen. If they're presenting an image you find disturbing, maybe you're not looking at it right. If you can't get out of your own skull while you're there, maybe you belong somewhere else.

When Keen (p76) cites Michael Hiltzik and Lee Siegel (both journalists who got caught in sock-puppetry online - posting hagiographic comments about themselves through pseudonyms), it is not their perfidy he condemns, but the Internet as enabler. In fact, it is their slumming and condescension that is the problem - their longing for freedom from consequences of their actions that led them astray. Keen himself is a knowing troll, trying to be the Simon Cowell of Web 2.0, and behaving like a pantomime villain to get web conferences to boo him. The ultimate example of this kind of slumming was Michael Skube's polemic against blogs, profoundly rebutted by Jay Rosen. Pagan Kennedy's tone is dancing around the edges of slumming - she starts out with "OMG drunk teenagers", but the article comes to realise that people online are human too, and makes fun of her own original attitudes.

abi sums it up:

The girls in question would not have been slumming if they had been going to drink the drinks, chat to the patrons, or see the dancers. They weren't. They were going to watch themselves drink the drinks, chat to the patrons, and see the dancers. It's like Kundera's definition of kitsch - the last layer of self-observation determines the definition.

Will botnets compete with Amazon S3?

Reading about the Storm Worm's botnet being bigger than supercomputers I was reminded of a prediction I've been making for a while. Spamming and phishing and other bad behaviour relies on overwhelming miniscule conversion rates through huge volume, so it has to free-ride on others' resources to actually make money. However, large distributed computing is being commoditised, by Amazon's S3 and E3C and others. At some point the botnets will realise that they can make more money by competing with Amazon or Akamai to store data in their stochastic cloud of compromised computers. A variant of memcached with a redundant hashing algorithm, or maybe an adaptation of Freenet would be obvious places to start; for all I know this already exists.

Best advice on scandals ever from TNH

In the Making Light thread on the SFWA's debacle where Andrew Burt used a bot searching for 'Asimov' to issue DMCA takedown notices willy-nilly, sideswiping Cory, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden gave the clearest, most compact advice on handling net PR disasters ever:

1. Get out there and say something, fast.
2. Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.
3. Explain what you're doing to help fix the problem. Be telling the truth when you do it.
4. Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You've screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every one of those pairs of eyes is a person who knows how to Google.
5. Corporate-speak will do you more harm than good. Instead, speak frankly about what's going on. React like a human being. Talk like one, too.

Also, James D. MacDonald said:

While one should not attribute to malice anything that is adequately explained by stupidity, any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

Update: Teresa made it a post, so now it has it's own intelligent comments.

Lunar eclipse tonight

As I was up anyway, working on some code, I stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse and took some photos.

Update: A lovely composite photo taken by Matt Onheiber.

Actually, in-video linked ads date back to the 80s

Mike Arrington has been stirring it about YouTube's new in-frame ads but this idea is something that dates back years, way back to the late 80s. In 1989 my colleagues Max Whitby, Nikki Barton and Chris Prior made a documentary with Douglas Adams called "Hyperland" looking at hypertext and the interlinked video future. Here's a snip where they explain 'micons':

What they went through back then to make all those overlaid animated video loops doesn't bear thinking about. I remember it involving Macromind Director and early 8-bit video capture cards and writing out to framestores one frame at a time...

Bacn and mushrooms

The term bacn for

email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

is a handy word for a new phenomenon, but it looks like it should be an acronym. Boring Automated Computer Notifications, perhaps?

Also, we need another word for the kind of bacn that doens't tell you the notificiation, but is just a way to get you to click on a link and generate a pageview for someone like Evite or Facebook. I suggest we call these 'mushrooms', as they keep you in the dark and feed you dirt. Also, because that gives me an excuse to link to Andrew's Bacon movie again.

De Vermis, by Mike Ford

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days —
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

from Making Light

Stardust - best movie of the year

Before I go into details, let me say that you should go and see Stardust tomorrow. Take friends and loved ones; you'll thank me for it later.

We watched Edward Scissorhands in San Jose's St James Park on Friday night, which has a magic realism of it's own, what with the light rail passing either side of the park, the planes and nightclub searchlights in the sky, and the audience mixing the homeless who sleep in the park with a throng of our friends picnicking. I called Edward Scissorhands a geek parable before, but its screenwriter Caroline Thompson describes it as a fable - a story you know isn't true but care about anyway. It takes a fantastic character and brings him into the mundane world to try to cope.

Stardust is in some ways the opposite of this - Tristan escapes from his conforming world to a fantastic one, a world of danger that tests him. That he can't resist returning to show himself off is a pivotal moment in the plot; the world of Stronghold has a very sharply drawn medieval conflict over succession, that echoes and parodies many we have seen. Tristan's lovestruck quest is pithily skewered by Yvaine, the star who is its object. It is a picaresque story, but Vaughn brings some of the English subcultural texture from Snatch and Layer Cake to it too, with archetypically English small time crooks and fences represented.

What is different from those works, and which owes more to Gaiman than Vaughn, is the underlying morality of the story. I have been strongly impressed by this current within British fantasy work recently - the revived Doctor Who is exemplary this way, as is the Dangerous Book for Boys, and even Christopher Hitchens can see it in Harry Potter.

In each case there is an acknowledgment that there is evil in the world, but a consistent message that it is best fought through love, through integrity and through striving to transcend our recognised flaws. Though secular in tone and style they echo for me the sublimated Anglicanism of Lewis and Tolkein; doing the right thing for the sake of this world, not the next.

I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here

The other day I was joking about some abstruse aspect of XML and I said "I happen to have Tim Bray right here", in reference, of course, to Woody Allen's devastating cinema queue put-down in Annie Hall. Now I was only half joking - Tim Bray was on IRC with me working through the Atom Publishing Protocol interop at the time - but the deeper point is that through the web we do have access to people and their works in a way that was pure comedic fantasy in 1977. I can find copious examples of Tim Bray's or Marshall McLuhan's work, searching them for the citation I need, I can talk to Tim, or see how the authors of books I like feel about their movie adaptations.

It seemed as if the joke was on me, as the chap I was talking to had never seen Annie Hall. But I happen to have Mr Allen right here:

Heck, I even have the strange Dada website pitching direct debits I remember from the UK in 1996 here.

Andrew's Film Bee Aware - public screening

Andrew and Christopher have been making videos since they were 5, but this summer Andrew got the chance to go to Camp Cinequest, a summer camp for young filmmakers at San Jose University, organised by the Cinequest Film Festival. He told the local paper all about it (PDF version). Now there's a public showing under the Cinema St James festival - come along!

Bee Aware and Edward Scissorhands at Cinema St James

Friday, August 10, 2007 7:30 PM - 11:00 PM

St. James Park

First Street and St. James Street
San Jose, California

37.3404, -121.892

Unwind by taking off your shoes, kicking back in your favorite lawn chair with a cool glass of beer, and watching a great flick under the stars. Cinequest provides Maverick short films, tonight featuring "Bee Aware" and "The Seed" before the main fature, "Edward Scissorhands". Bring the rest of the family for a night out in the park! Seating available starting at 7:30 p.m. , pre-show begins at 8:00 p.m. and the films begin at dusk. All screenings are FREE.

Microformats in Blogger - hAtom support

Those of you who read my blog directly, rather than via a feed-reader, will notice that it is looking styled again, for the first time since CSS Naked Day in April.

I made an initial conversion to hAtom by hand in the meantime, but a few weeks back Michał Cierniak and I checked in a change to the underlying Blogger templates to make hAtom the default, which the Blogger team graciously accepted. This should enable much simpler client-side parsing of the blog pages. One thing we had to do to enable this was to add a new datatype to output a date in the W3C's ISO-8601 profile, as expected by hAtom. If you look in the templates now, you'll see markup like this:

<abbr class='published' expr:title='data:post.timestampISO8601'> <data:post.timestamp/></abbr>

If you want to make your own hAtom friendly templates, you can use the data:post.timestampISO8601 appropriately in the date-time design pattern; the data:post.timestamp will reflect your personal formatting preferences as before.

Caliban's Mirror, YouTube edition

The UK Professional Association of Teachers has called for YouTube to be banned because it has been used to show people being bullied. Meanwhile, Oxford police are pursuing a man who pinched a news reporters' bum on air:

I trust the PAT will call for Channel 4 to be banned too.

Perhaps the net can fulfill Bentham's dream of the panopticon, where prisoners are always watched. In the Philippines they are showing the way. With Bentham, Busby Berkeley and Michael Jackson as guiding spirits, 1500 prisoners perform "Radio Gaga", "Thriller", the Algorithm march, and, yes, "YMCA" for the camera. If they're taking requests, I nominate Pink Floyd's "In the Flesh".

YouTube, like the rest of the web is a mirror to life. If you don't like what you see, look for something else, like this elegy for Concorde:

Or remember Antonioni

Or Syd Barrett

Or make a video to tell your own story.

End Homographophobia now

There is a dangerous prejudice afoot in the technical world - Homographophobia. Those who suffer from it call for segregation, to avoid the miscegenation of meaning - they want to ensure that their Humpty-Dumpty definitions are not polluted by sharing with others. But they are wrong. We are all imperfectly multilingual, we all have our own internal associations for any given word, but we can only communicate through overlapping meanings with some degree of sharing of concepts.

So we should eschew namespaces and hierarchies as they are just solipsistic security blankets, and embrace the overlapping ambiguity of using words as tags, as Roschian prototypes and as puns. Homophonophobia is a similar affliction, yet homophones give rise to so much entertainment and jollity, as the "four candles" sketch shows: