1. 23 October 2008

    The Haskell School of Expression

    Paul Hudak

    504 days ago

    Good book on haskell. I grabbed it off amazon a while ago, but it took me a while to get to it. And I just read the book, didn’t do many of the exercises due to the fact that I was reading it to eat time on the soccer bus mostly. I’m kind of mad that Hudak spends so much time on writing an elementary graphics system, because the book is pegged as a kind of multimedia tutorial in haskell, and of all the media that there are graphics is the least interesting to me. It’s got some nice chapters later on about music though, and I actually understand what first class functions are now. (Ruby doesn’t have them, although the constructs available to you there do make a huge difference coming from a language like java, and are fairly powerful.)

  2. 13 October 2008

    Everyware

    Adam Greenfield

    514 days ago

    Adam Greenfield’s 81 theses on the future of ubiquitous computing. Shoudl’ve nailed ‘em up to a door somewhere. A sensible look at how computers are set to work their way further and further into our daily lives, hopefully for the better, but who knows.

  3. 12 October 2008

    From Counterculture to Cyberculture

    Fred Turner

    515 days ago

    “Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”

    Lots of ticked pages. I finished reading this last week, but for some reason it’s taken me forever to getting to writing stuff down.

    See also:

    The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor

    There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly rake part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. Mario Savio, December 1964, 11

    We are compiling a vocabulary and a syntax that is able to describe in a single language all kinds of phenomenon that have escaped a common language until now. It is a new universal metaphor. It has more juice in it than previous metaphors: Freud’s dream state, Darwin’s variety, Marx’s progress, or the Age of Aquarius. And it has more power than anything else in science at the moment. In fact the computational metaphor may eclipse mathematics as a form of universal notation. Kevin Kelly, 15

    With this new ‘magetachnics’ the dominant minority will create a uniform, all–enveloping, super–planetary structure, designed for automatic operation. Instead of functioning actively as an autonomous personality, man will become a passive, purposeless, machine–conditioned animal whose proper functions, as technicians now interpret man’s role, will either be fed into the machine or strictly limited and controlled for the benefit of de–personalized, collective organizations. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 29

    Beware of leaders, heroes, organizers.
Watch that stuff. Beware of structure freaks.
They do not understand.
We know the system doesn't work because we're living in it's ruins. We
  know that leaders don't work out becuse they have all led us only to 
  the present, the good leaders equally with the bad… What the system
  calls organization—linear organization—is a systematic cage, arbitrarily
  limiting the possible. It's never worked before. It always produced the
  present.
    Published by Seed, an underground San Francisco paper, 36

    — Charles Reich’s The Greening of America 37

    Stewart Brand meets the Cybernetic Cyberculture

    — Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (“asserted that mankind was leaving a typographic age and entering an electronic one”) 53

    The Whole Earth Catalog as Information Technology

    To journalists like Ed McClanahan, writing in Esquire magazine, it appeared that “the whole diffuse business [of the Whole Earth Catalog] was held together by some mysterious principle of internal dynamics, some inscrutable law of metaphysics which I simply didn’t understand, which no one who hadn’t actually been close to the very center of the entire Whole Earth operation could even begin to define.” Nearly forty years later, that law looks less like an abstract principle of metaphusics than the product of Stewart Brand’s network entrepreneurship and the convergence of systems theory and New Communalist politics that it facilitated. 71

    For the members of the Lama Foundation, as for the Transcendentalists of New England, “The essence of spirituality was practicality.” 75

    I always thought tools were objects, things: Screw drivers, wrenches, aces, hoes. Now I relaize that tools are a process: using the right–sized and shaped object in the most effective way to get a job done. A reader–written letter printed in the Whole Earth Catalog, 83

    They were not simply tools to do a job; they were mechanisms that transformed their users into actors in the dramatic myths of American individualism. The readers of the Catalog, the nature of these items hinted, might be exceptional individuals, might be part of a vanguard, might in fact be able to merge consumption and technology with the dream of pre–industrial community. 93

    Page 102 mentions the story of the infamous Whole Earth demise party, which saw $20,000 given out to people who could come up with good ideas. One of the ideas that got started from this money turned to be the Homebrew Computer Club

    Taking the Whole Earth Digital

    In Felsenstein’s words, the Whole Earth Catalog reminded its readers that “you don’t have to leave industrial society, but you don’t have to accept it the way it is.” 114

    — “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums”:http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html 116

    They [computing pioneers] were also inventing a new, collaborative, play–oriented culture. THe programmers and engineers at PARC and Resource One had long distinguished between “hackers” (those who figured things out as they went and invented for pleasure) and “planners” (those who pursued problems according to a ser and less flexible strategy). Brand picked up on this distinction and mapped it onto the larger, New Communalist critique of technocracy. Hackers, he wrote, were not mere “technicians,” byt “a mobile newfound elite, with its own apparatus, language and character, its own legends and humor. Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.” 117

    — “The computer itself was the new LSD”, 117

    “Self-sufficiency” is an idea which has done more harm than good. On close conceptual examination it is flawed at the root. More importantly, it works badly in practice. Brand, 121

    In a series of essays published in a 1972 bestseller entitled Steps to an Ecology of Mind, [Gregory] Bateson outlined a vision of the natural world as a set of information systems in interaction with one another. […] This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology. 123

    Bingo.

    Bateson’s vision clearly echoed the New Communalist critique of technocracy. Like the former commune dwellers, Bateson offered a new consciousness as an alternative to the destructive, mechanistic forces of the bureaucratic America. Yet he did not call for the establishment of alternative communities. For Bateson, mind was simply present in all social and natural relations. To recognize that immanence and to act in accord with it (and thereby possibly save the world from ecological disaster), individuals need not join an alternative community; they could simply work to influence whatever local “system” in which they found themselves involved. 124

    Within the AI Lab, wrote Levy, echoing Stewart Brand’s 1972 piece for Rolling Stone, there were two kinds of workers: planners and hackers. The planners were theoreticians, usually of the mind, who thought of computers as tools that could be used to generate or model information. The hackers focused on the computer systems themselves and on seeing what they could do. Within the lab, a culture clash emerged. 133

    I think hackers … are the most interesting and effective body of intellectuals since the framers of the U.S. Constitution. No other group that I know of has set out to liberate a technology and succeeded. They not only did so against the active disinterest of corporate America, their success forces a corporate America to adopt their style in the end. In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy. High tech is now something that mass consumers do, rather than just have done to them… The quietest of the ’60s sub–subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and most powerful—and most suspicious of power. 138

    Virtuality and Community of the WELL

    In 1989 Gullichsen went so far as to register the word cyberspace as a trademark. In return, William Gibson (who coined the term) trademarked the word Gullichsen. 163

    — Mondo 2000 164

    — JP Barlow saw an “underlying grammar to nature” in Pierre Teilhard De Chardin and Gregory Bateson. 165

    The Triumph of the Network Mode

    While the marchers of the Free Speech movement attacked the factories of American industry, those facories were bringing forth an unending stream of consumer delights for American youth. This presented college–aged Americans with a predicament: how could they reject the core institutions of American society and yet reatin access to the products of that society and the pleasures they offered? 244

    The back–to–the–landers of the New Communalist movement simultaneously turned their backs on the militarized bureaucracy of the state and embraced the systems theories, the technocentric orientation, the emphasis on mind, and the collaborative, experimental sociability that had grown up within it. 245

    The commune itself became a social laborator, and daily life an experiment. Social and intellectual boundaries collapsed; each woman or man became her or his own inter-disciplinarian, seeking to build a whole self and a whole world. 245

    Now isn’t this just how it should be?

    Across the 1970s and 1980s, as the communes of the back–to–the–land movement crumbled and disappeared, Stewart Brand and the entrepreneurs of the Whole Earth group preserved these hopes by welding them to the computer technologies and flexible organizational practices of the rapidly emerging postindustrial economy. 255

    The rhetoric of peer–to–peer informationalism, however, much like the rhetoric of consciousness out of which it grew, actively obscures the material and technical infrastructures on which both the Internet and the lives of the difital generation depend. Behing the fantasy of unimpeded information flow lies the reality of millions of plastic keyboards, silicon wafers, glass–faced monitors, and endless miles of cable. All of these technologies depend on manual laborers, first to build them and later to tear them apart. This work remains extraordinarily dangerous, first to those who handle the toxic chemicals required in manufacture and later to those who live on the land, drink the water, and breathe the air into which those chemicals eventually leak. These tasks also continue to be the province of those who lack social and financial resources. In the mid–1980s, for instance, the Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated that 25 percent of the overall Silicon Valley workforce—approximately two hundred thousand workers—consisted of illegal aliens, many if not most of whom worked in manufacturing. In the same period, 75 percent of all Silicon Valley assemblers were women, many from the Third World. In recent years, both manufacturing and recycling have migrated overseas. And once again, women and the poor find themselves disproportionally engaged in high–risk work. Unprotected by American laws, factory hands in China and elsewhere labor eighteen hours a day at wages that often hover around thirty cents per hour building new computers. In China, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, workers earn similar wages breaking apart computers with their bare hands to salvage the parts within.26 260

    Footnote 26: “Hayes, Behind the Silicon Curtain, 23, 54; Rogers and Larsen, Silicon Valley Fever, 144; Schoenberger, Where computers go to die.”

  4. 04 January 2007

    Machine Beauty

    David Gelernter

    1162 days ago

    I thought this was going to be more of a look at HCI, but instead it’s beating the drum for beauty and technology. Preaching to the choir a bit, as I’ve already decided the issue for myself. Being written in 1998 dates it a bit, but an interesting read nonetheless.

    Complexity makes programs hard to build and potentially hard to use; beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. 22

    “to hell with mathematics; let’s teach our programmers about beauty” is what we ought to hear. 27

    The mark of a well-designed interface is that, as soon as you see it, you immediately form guesses about how it works, and the guesses turn out basically to be right. 88

    Lifestreams as diary (111) – I think this is really what I’m going with this here website. It’s sort of a slice of what I’m about right now. I’ve cut down ‘past’ by only putting one article on the main page and making it a bit of a pain to go back through old stuff. But just a quick portrait of myself through the things I’ve said/linked/listened/done lately.

    Great technology is beautiful technology. If we care about technology excellence, we are foolish not to train our young scientists and engineers in aesthetics, elegance, and beauty. The idea of such a thing happening is so far-fetched it’s funny – but yes, good technology is terribly important to our modern economy and living standards and comfort levels, the “software crisis” is real, we only get from our fancy computers a tiny fraction of the value they are capable of delivering: we are a nation of Ferrari drivers tooling around with kinked fuel lines at fifteen miles per hour. 129

  5. 27 August 2006

    1292 days ago

    Sandwich

    Get it?

    via Kjell Olsen1292 days ago

  6. 04 April 2006

    1437 days ago

    Mother Earth Mother Board

    Delightful Neal Stephenson article on the laying of undersea cable, written about 10 years ago.

    In 1870, a new cable was laid between England and France, and Napoleon III used it to send a congratulatory message to Queen Victoria. Hours later, a French fisherman hauled the cable up into his boat, identified it as either the tail of a sea monster or a new species of gold-bearing seaweed, and cut off a chunk to take home.

    The rule of thumb for calculating revenue loss works like this: for every penny per minute that the long distance market will bear on a particular route, the loss of revenue, should FLAG be severed on that route, is about $3,000 a minute. So if calls on that route are a dime a minute, the damage is $30,000 a minute, and if calls are a dollar a minute, the damage is almost a third of a million dollars for every minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark.

    It’s when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain – sometimes illusory gain – that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse.
    The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over. But it took only a few seconds, and if you were looking the other way when it happened, you might have missed it entirely – you’d see nothing but blue breakers rolling in from the Mediterranean, hiding a field of ruins, quickly forgotten.

    They [Alexander Graham Bell, et al] electrified the reeds in such a way that they generated not only acoustical vibrations but corresponding electrical ones. They sought to combine the electrical vibrations of all these reeds into one complicated waveform and feed it into one end of a cable. At the far end of the cable, they would feed the signal into an identical set of reeds. Each reed would vibrate in sympathy only with its counterpart on the other end of the wire, and by recording the pattern of vibrations exhibited by that reed, one could extract a Morse code message independent of the other messages being transmitted on the other reeds. For the price of one wire, you could send many simultaneous coded messages and have them all sort themselves out on the other end.

    The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

    Kjell Olsen1437 days ago

  7. 02 April 2006

    1439 days ago

    Prisoner of Redmond

    During one of those last long nights working to deliver DOS 2.0 in early 1983, I am told that Paul Allen heard Gates and Ballmer discussing his health and talking about how to get his Microsoft shares back if Allen were to die.

    I’d sure feel good about buying my computer software from those guys. The combination of Allen having distanced his financial well being from his MS stock and an Iowa anti trust suit being heard this year lead Cringely to believe:

    Based purely on character (or lack of it), I confidently predict that Microsoft is going down. It should be interesting.

    via Kjell Olsen1439 days ago

  8. 13 January 2006

    What the Doormouse Said

    1518 days ago

    The charter tale of how military research with computing machines collided with the 60’s counterculture movements (anti-war, anti-establishment, psychedelics) in southern california and wove the fabric from which todays enormously popular personal computing industry grew.

    A real good read, pulling a whole lot of stuff into more or less one coherent thread.

    Summary

    Quick note: This is a very general recollection of the book I wanted to put down before forgetting everything. I wrote if after reading the last page, and might have a name wrong somewhere. If you find any glaring errors, leave a comment.

    It starts in the late forties with the establishment of two research institutes by Stanford, SAIL (Stanford AI Labs) and SRI (Stanford Research Institute). Computing is done within glass rooms, with colossal mainframes and time-sharing terminals.

    Doug Engelbart comes up with the grandiose vision of augmenting human abilities instead of replacing them with artificial intelligence, which over a period of twenty years grows into NLS, an ultimately failed computer system which rivaled in scope that of today’s internet. NLS failed due to its extreme complexity, but did advanced word processing, email, remote access, hypertext, and was generally way before its time.

    Englebart had been influenced by such subversives as Ken Kesey (and his merry pranksters), LSD, and other recreational drugs. He headed his own lab within SRI (ARC), which was funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), but regarded by the other groups at SRI as a bunch of hippies.

    As ARC grew it fragmented, and Englebart failed in keeping the lab together and moving it further toward his goals of augmentation for each and every individual. Many of his engineers moved onto the next big deal in what was to become Silicon Valley, Xerox PARC.

    PARC was split into two groups, one still focusing on the development of a timesharing system, and one developing the personal computer as Englebart saw it. Headed by Alan Kay, PARC pioneered computing as we know it today, although their computers were much too expensive to be commercially viable.

    Kay’s group negotiated an agreement with ARC (Englebart’s lab) to further the development of NLS, which never came to fruition. Englebart was a staunch proponent of complexity, he once decided that his finished system would have 55,000 commands to be learned by the layman. Ultimately PARC moved toward simplicity, coming up with a GUI for a word processing application that took no more then an hour to master, and ran on a machine with it’s own display, keyboard, and mouse.

    The west coast attitude of PARC ultimately clashed with that of Xerox, an east coast corporation. Although PARC pioneered the computers that ten years later finally became cheap enough to sell to the people, the focus of the personal computer revolution moved to individuals building their own machines as independents.

    They were never much, and couldn’t compare to the prohibitively expensive and powerful machines with large corporate/military backers, but they finally brought the computer into a situation where it was infinitely valuable.

    The people’s computer company was a storefront in which people could cheaply rent computing time by the hour. Text based games began to catch on. A subset of the BASIC programming language was conceived, Tiny BASIC, to run on the puny PC’s that were obtained.

    Tiny started it’s own movement, and the PCC started a magazine to send out to it’s developers. Text based games were becoming all the rage, and visionaries started teaching how to program text based adventure games to all comers.

    The Homebrew Computer Club was started, which ultimately sparked companies like Apple and Osborne to go into business. Fred Moore, an itinerant engineer, programmer, and radical who, because he though money was the root of all evil, ended up being given $15,000 by Stewart Brand at an epic Demise Party for the Whole Earth Catalog, had finally found something to do with the money: promoting free and easy access to information. Personal computing. Moore tried to start teaching a class on Hardware for PCC, but it wouldn’t happen. He ran sent out a notice as to when and where the first meeting would be held, and people turned up.

    The meetings grew, fostering open discussion and presentation of information about computers. People would bring the machines they’d built to show off. Programs would be exchanged.

    Moore eventually left the club, his idea of freeing information having been realized but also having sprouted all kinds of entrepreneurial enterprises, eventually coalescing into the single largest accumulation of dollars – the personal computer revolution. How ironic.

    Stuff for me to further investigate

    Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog, 155)

    Information wants to be free, and information also wants to be very expensive. Stewart Brand

    Ren���?⬨�� Daumal 177

    Fred Moore (on money, 193-8)

    Ivan Illich

  9. 29 October 2005

    1594 days ago

    ongoing • New Mac

    ...as soon as there’s some x64-based meat-grinder running Solaris that turns on instantly after sleep and and anti-aliases well and Just Works with whatever wifi, and doesn’t make me download drivers to do basic stuff, I may be outta here.

    When pigs fly, Mr. Bray.

    via Kjell Olsen1594 days ago

  10. 27 October 2005

    1596 days ago

    Government Keystroke Loggers in Laptop Computers!

    This is stepping a bit over the line. Where have all the civil liberties gone? hoax!

    Computer manufacturers appear to be cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security to make every person who buys a new computer subject to immediate, unrestricted government recording of everything they do on those computers!

    via Kjell Olsen1596 days ago

  11. 21 September 2005

    1632 days ago

    InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine - spack.org/wiki

    So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we’ve evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

    Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

    It is quite inconceivable that superior hacking tools could have been created from a blank sheet of paper by product engineers. Even if they are the brightest engineers in the world they are simply outnumbered.

    The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert to the command line interface, and run GNU software, when it made sense. A few years ago, Be Inc. invented exactly that OS. It is called the BeOS.

    via Kjell Olsen1632 days ago

  12. 14 September 2005

    1639 days ago

    Wired News: Stars Rise at Startup Summer Camp

    Wired writeup on the results of Y Combinator summer founder program.

    via Kjell Olsen1639 days ago

  13. 01 September 2005

    1652 days ago

    New algorithm for learning languages | Science Blog

    For example, the sentences I would like to book a first-class flight to Chicago, I want to book a first-class flight to Boston and Book a first-class flight for me, please may give rise to the pattern book a first-class flight—if this candidate pattern passes the novel statistical significance test that is the core of the algorithm.

    via Kjell Olsen1652 days ago

  14. 28 March 2005

    1809 days ago

    DNA Key to Decoding Human Factor (washingtonpost.com)

    “Most of the time this happens the password is some quirky word related to the suspect’s area of interests or hobbies,” Hansen said.
    Hansen recalled one case several years ago in which police in the United Kingdom used AccessData’s technology to crack the encryption key of a suspect who frequently worked with horses. Using custom lists of words associated with all things equine, investigators quickly zeroed in on his password, which Hansen says was some obscure word used to describe one component of a stirrup. ??2??

    Relying on a word-list approach to crack keys becomes far more complex when dealing with suspects who communicate using a mix of languages and alphabets. In Operation Firewall, for example, several of the suspects routinely communicated online in English, Russian and Ukrainian, as well as a mishmash of the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets. ??3??

    ...”steganography,” which involves hiding information by embedding messages inside other, seemingly innocuous messages, music files or images. ??3??

    via Kjell Olsen1809 days ago

  15. 20 January 2005

    1876 days ago

    ~/doc/tricks.vim.html

    I’m trying to learn vim a little so I can use ssh to edit files quickly, but there is a lot to learn – and not that many good tutorials.

    via Kjell Olsen1876 days ago

  16. 1876 days ago

    Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent

    I don’t know what all the fuss over googles new rel="nofollow" has been, but Ben Hammeresly does a good job at bunking it:

    There’s no incentive for me to spam those sites for the sake of getting Pagerank, that is true, but there’s even less incentive for me not*to. Why would I bother even testing the site for rel=”nofollow”? I might as well just hit it and leave. It’s less work for me, for exactly the same gain (some) and exactly the same loss (none).

    All it does is shift the problem from the high pagerank blogs we here might have, with rel=”nofollow”, custom sanitize settings, and mt-blacklist in full effect, all the way over to the less technically adept. And that is one enormous customer service problem heading towards Blogger, 6A and the rest.

    Technorati will have to choose if it’s a site that measures raw interconnectivity, or some curious High School metric of look-at-that-person-but-don’t-pay-her-any-attention that the selective use of the rel=”nofollow” attribute will produce. For many purposes, this would mean the results are totally debased and close to useless.

    The web has always been build on links – and yes, when it was build there wasn’t this marauding problem of comment spam, referrer spam, and really, there wasn’t spam at all – but I don’t think that the solution to spam is to fundamentally corrupt what has become the primary presence of the web – the interconnection and relation between various nodes in the larger network.

    via Kjell Olsen1876 days ago

  17. Also somewhat recently

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