June 30, 2004
Metaphors as constraint
danah boyd says blogging is trapped in a metaphor. That made me think the following. (97E)
I've started thinking of metaphors as limiting rather than freeing structures in the use, design and development of new technologies. (97F)
They can provide useful points of entry for understanding, but unless shrugged off after the initial entry they can be constraining because consciously and subconsciously we try to match our behaviors with the metaphor. (97G)
This causes constraints which are present in the "real world" from which the metaphor was taken to be represented in the "artifact world" even when there's no particular limit in place causing the constraint. (97H)
In some situations, etiquette for example, that's a good thing, but in other cases it's not: for example having "stuff" (including people) in multiple locations breaks many metaphors but there's nothing preventing it and it is certainly advantageous. (97I)
June 24, 2004
Any Port in a Storm
For a long time this blog, the wiki, and miscellaneous, other files have been accessible through a lovely bit of complication: (936)
- Incoming HTTP requests came in on port 8000 to an old rickety Linux box that was due to be removed ages ago and was so rusty and weird that I dare not touch it. As in ip forwarding was not an option and changing the apache config seemed more than I could bear. And doing special magic for a variety of special friends. (937)
- In inetd, netcat proxied port 8000 at that old machine to port 80 on a newer machine. That machine was configured so that any URLs it generated appeared to be for port 8000 on the other machine. (938)
It was one of those I'll get to that any day now situations that started more than a year and a half ago. (939)
Last night was finally that day. The newer machine is now out on the boundary, listening on both ports 80 and 8000. If you prefer your urls 5 characters shorter feel free to remove the :8000, things will still work. (93A)
Things will probably be a bit faster, and now there will actually be useful information in the logs. (93B)
June 22, 2004
Olympics in June
Oops, I went to Seattle in early June to visit the lovely poupou, took some pictures, and did not post the pics. Here there are now: SeattleJuneThumb. (90O)
Some highlights and commentary (this is but 12 of over 50 pictures): (90P)
I had a stop in Detroit for the way out. The airport there has recently been redone with all the usual fanciness (multiple terminals, trains connecting things, etc.) plus this fountain: (90Q)
This view doesn't really do it justice. Each little jet of water can be controlled for duration of spurt. A computer somewhere does some magic that causes members of my demographic (somewhat geeky men between 25 and 35) to stand around and stare at the fountain. There was a small herd of us, scrupulously ignoring one another while trying to determine if there was a pattern to what we were seeing. (90S)
SB and I had arranged to take a rental car across the sound and peninsula to the Pacific coast. Seagulls graced the lovely blue skies on our first day: (90T)
We camped on the beach (second beach, near La Push, in the coastal are of the Olympic National Park). After our first night, we woke to a beautiful morning. The tide was out, the seabirds were swarming around their nests on the sea stacks (90V)
and the tide pools were luxury accommodations (90Y)
Our accommodations were less luxurious, but they kept us dry. Note the bear proof food container. (910)
In the night something had come up on the beach, done something and crawled away. (912)
Do sea turtles visit the pacific northwest? (914)
I was visiting with an international movie star. She was slumming with me. (915)
The weather turned a bit sour and we got a lot of wet. (917)
Slugs like the wet: (919)
After a second night in the rain we departed for the mountainous portion of the park. A drive up hurricane ridge led to some lovely scenery (91B)
and lovely flowers (91D)
I plan to move to that part of the world by the end of the summer. It's nice there. (91F)
June 21, 2004
In Today's Reading
Two somewhat related (think oil as that which motivates) things I read today that I wanted to remember: (8TC)
From World Changing, Planting the Future: (8TD)
Reuters reports that a group of British scientists is recommending an aggressive shift towards the planting of crops not for food, but for a wholesale replacement of petrochemicals. The combination of declining supplies of petroleum (used for much more than fuel) and a still-growing global population means that replacements will be needed soon -- and it's better to start planning now for that event than to wait until oil (effectively) runs out. (8TE)
Something has to be done, but out context this blurb has me imagining a future where the world is paved in corn and soy bean and any last shred of raw nature has fallen to the need for organic chemicals. Less babies please, that should help some. (8TF)
From The Christian Science Monitor, Lessons of another Reconstruction, an opinion piece by Kenneth Mayer, of Howards University: (8TG)
Most pundits and officials have compared the situation in Iraq to Germany, Japan, or even France after World War II. However, a better analogy lies closer to home. Reconstruction of the Confederate states in the South was America's largest and longest such operation, and its most spectacular failure. (8TH)
Reading the article (very well written) is an enlightening experience. Comparison reveals. (8TI)
June 09, 2004
A Web for Augmentation, not Automation
Earl Mardle comments on Russell Beale's How the Web is Changing: (8QZ)
It fits with my contention that the net is a tool, not a medium. The whole net is an information tool that does a whole lot of interesting things, most importantly, distributing information power; that is the power to produce and disseminate your own information and access, critique and publicise the critique of other people's information, but it also acts as a validator of information and perspective by community, however small or isolated. ps (8R0)
I was going to write this as a comment on his blog and then decided to move it here. (8R1)
In his posting and some others from around the same time, Earl seems to be bouncing around the difference between tools that augment and tools that automate. (8R2)
Tools that augment extend a human's ability while still leaving the human in control. They are often small things (like purple number stuff) that provide a way to grab or manipulate stuff of all sorts. (8R3)
Tools that automate "do it for you", often operate in large swaths, and are based on performing tasks that can be formally described. (8R4)
There's an ethical or world view difference between the two. Some people prefer the latter, some people the former. I'm deep in the augmentation style, I hope. The Semantic Web, as imagined by the W3C, strikes me as in alignment with the latter. (8R5)
Being in one camp or the other doesn't make someone wrong, but it does make conversation across the boundaries of the camps a little confusing and disorienting. (8R6)
I first came upon the augmentation/automation split while writing my Computer as Tool paper: (8R7)
Landauer distinguishes between two phases of computer applications. Phase one applications automate tasks "replacing humans" for the performance of "almost any process that science, engineering, and statistics have captured in their theories". Phase two applications, on the other hand, are applications that assist humans in tasks for which there is no established theory of action. Phase two applications include the very large body of office productivity applications, web browsers, and desktop operating systems; anything where the human uses the computer throughout the process. They are the applications we use to process information in flexible and potentially undefined ways. T (8R8)
Landauer's book: (8R9)
is a good read. (8RB)
June 02, 2004
Transclusion v Blockquote
In a comment responding to Purple Placement Michael Day asks: (862)
Would you agree that for quoting across different web sites, transclusion cannot replace blockquote? T (863)
That link is to a blog entry that addresses his thoughts more completely. Read that first if you want this to make any sense. (864)
First, to correct a misconception in Michael's blog entry: PurpleNumbers were not originally created for assisting with TransClusion. That was something figured out later during the development of PurpleWiki 0.9. Their initial purpose was to provide an address for a paragraph or line. (865)
I keep harping on TransClusion in this recent flurry of PurpleNumbers excitement because it was an unexpected consequence of purple numbers that has proven to be extremely useful. It also reinforces some important constraints on the identifiers used by purple numbers. (866)
Michael has raised several points in his suggestion that blockquote be used instead of transclusion. I'll attempt to address each of them. Note that most of my comments speak both of the very limited implementation of TransClusion in PurpleWiki as well as the general notion (much more capable, in theory). (867)
Transclusion is inefficent (868)
A page doing transclusion of content from multiple servers will require multiple HTTP requests. This is certainly true. It's not unlike most web pages one visits today, where text is provided by one server, images by another, advertising from yet another. Michael's spartan site (which I like) is a notable exception. (869)
I can't argue with blockquote being more efficient than transclusion, but you have to pay a price to get what transclusion is providing: live content that is up to date, expires less quickly (or sometimes not at all), and has the possibility of reference tracking. (86A)
Transclusion is unreliable (86B)
The web in general is unreliable and yes it can be quite irritating but there is no reason that the same measures used to cache full web pages could not be used to cache transclusions. A transcluding processor could even have the option of turning a transclusion that persistently fails into a stamp of the cached content, with an appropriate reference back to the dead site. (86C)
The TransClusions in PurpleWiki are not this robust, but they are very much a prototype. A sort of demonstration to get people thinking, "oh this, is neat, let's learn from this and figure out how to do it right." (86D)
Transclusion is dangerous (86E)
I can't deny that there is a possibility that content loaded into a web page may not be the desired content. This happens with images now (which are a type of transclusion) and transclusions do, perhaps, enhance the possibility of trouble. (86F)
There is also a danger when an entity publishes a link to offsite content: the content on the other side of that link may not be what is expected by the clicking user. (86G)
But we're surviving. Coping. Well even. (86H)
Transclusion is not expresive (86I)
Can't dispute this one. It's true, if you transclude a chunk of something, it is the case that you can't change it. This is both bad and good. Bad because you can't emphasize or edit the content. Good because you can't edit the conent. There's a political juggling of who gets to control the content with Transclusion. It goes both ways with the winner not being clear at all. (86J)
Transclusion belongs behind the scenes (86S)
Here Michael argues that Transclusion should be kept in CMS, technical documents, knowledge-bases, wikis, whiteboards and other groupware. It's true that this is where I use it most, but that is only because those are the only place where I can use it. I would love to be able to transclude between blogs and wikis anywhere on the planet[1]. Why should closed-world systems have all the fun? (86L)
If transclusions encourage productive collaboration in closed world systems, the benefits expand in open-worlds where the level of commentary and distribution of ideas vastly increases. That's the overarching goal: expanding commentary and distribution. (86M)
Can the current architecture of the web support such things in a highly efficient, robust and secure way? Maybe not, but tools and people can evolve. (86N)
(I feel to some degree that I've been provided a slow pitch or set up by Michael; or is it that there are just large differences in world view?) (86O)
[1] There are designs and prototypes in PurpleWiki that support: (86P)
- TransClusions amongst a network of commonly sourced PurpleNumbers, using a RESTful tool to register and resolve nids. (86Q)
- TransClusions from sites that have granular addressability like purple numbers but are not part of a PurpleNumbers network. (86R)
June 01, 2004
Purple Placement
In Purple Pilcrows Tim Bray explains how he's adapted his purpling of posts to use an exposed on mouseover Pilcrow which merges several ideas from this weekend's purple breakthrough. It's great how that works. (854)
I like the pilcrow and the mouseover trick. When developing PurpleWiki and related tools one of the reasons we didn't do any hiding of the link was so that people would have the cognitive breakdown that makes them wonder what's going on and do a bit of investigating. For a first time visitor to Tim's posting there's no way of knowing the pilcrows are there without a mouseover. Once you are in the know, though, you're good to go. (855)
This is the delicate balance of present-to-hand and ready-to-hand in tool design. (856)
While I like Tim's building on shoulders solution very much I do have one quibble: (857)
Also, as several others have noted, it’s not obvious that you need an anchor on every paragraph. (tb) (858)
If the author of a document is in charge of where the anchors go, then the author of the document is in charge of what a reader can reference (and later, perhaps, transclude). This sets a precedent for authorial, uh, authority that I find distasteful. The linkability of content is a way of opening up the system to allow greater review, commentary and reuse. Tim's solution is reasonable (adding the links when there are sufficient granules in the document to warrant granular addressing) but leaves room for a later adopter to be less open. (859)
This is why comments about granular linking reeking of ego struck me as way off base. PurpleNumbers and similar systems aren't there for the author. They are there for the reader, the responder, the critic. (85A)
The mouseover solution makes it possible to id everything with abandon, so why not? (85B)
Meanwhile, I'm going to keep mine as visible numbers because I like to transclude (the T marks the transclusion and links to the original source): (85C)
