So, Kingdon...

What kind of crap have you got on that machine? You sure spend a lot of time on it!

Today is the day, I'm cleaning out my computer so I can give it up, I'm really not sharing it very well... that is, whenever anyone comes to use it, I am in the way! That's almost worse than paying money to use the machine.

I used to say I'm a programmer who avoids programming at all costs. What does that mean? Most of these toolkits have lots of bells and whistles, and it's very hard to sell to a non-programmer. People use this computer, and I write software, but my audience is sometimes very small. At the same time, I'm part of a much larger audience of users, and a member of many highly fragmented communities. Some are millions, most have never met.

I wanted to write this post without a web browser. Google tells me there are two options; I'm sure that there are more, but reallistically there are two paths: Windows Live Writer and Blog.gears, both of them use Web components, and one must actually run in a web browser (though supporting offline operation.) I was planning to document all of the software that I've installed, so that I can find it again after I've lost it. I'm deleting it... the computer is nearly full, and I want to make sure that people can use it without running out of space.

Plus, I have too many development environments and backup schemes. There's something to be said for redundancy, but when it impacts your productivity, you need to take a hard look and make some decisions about what needs to go. On Jupiter alone (10GB) I have DriveImageXML, BitTorrent, CoLinux with ArchLinux, the FactorCode VM, a Ruby environment with some gems required by Substruct and whatever else I've been testing on this machine (Python has already been deleted), SSH clients for Git and for personal use, as well as Subversion, with finally Groovy, Griffon, and Apache Ant.

I also forgot to mention WatiR, the Web Application Testing in Ruby framework... and this fabulous collection of software known only as VENUS-736, for the size of the archive at the time the release was fixed, 736MB. I'll be totally honest, it was only 208 until I added a movie. You like movies, right? I think you ought to watch more movies, that's why I included it.

10GB is about half of the largest quota I've allocated in my new schema for system backups, so I'll stop the listing there, and post again once I've got it all copied somewhere safe. Somewhere safe is the RAID5 array at the office. It's especially safe today, since the bootloader failed, and nobody else in the office is trained to bring it back up. (Nobody that I would trust, anyway.) So, I'll go turn the crank a few times and say Hi to my friends at Venture Creations, and my 11 readers at SixthLayer (you must know who you are?) will hear from me again pretty soon.

The Mall Store Promotion

You've got $80 in your pocket, and you don't need a telephone-phone? I want to offer you my promotion. Meet me in the stairwell in half an hour. Take your phone with you and I'll take your money, you can get another one for a hundred bucks if you pay the contract. Keep paying the contract, after they raised the price. It's my insurance policy. You've got deep pockets, right?

Do you wanna call me, if I'm only gonna take your money? No, you're expecting me to call you, and you think I'm gonna need a phone for that. So, give me your phone and I'll pay the bill. Tell them I already paid it, and they'll go away. Tell them to take your name off the list. Then, ask for more help, and see if you get.

They already got your social security, and you can't ever have it back. Go ahead and throw my phone in the river when you're done with it. It's prepaid.

Thanks!

File Sharing Distro Round-up

I'm overextended, I've got computers in too many places, none of them are secure server cages, and I need to protect my data. This computer under my desk is protected, but my desk is in a partially secure area; someone can walk by and shut off my machine, and I'm dead in the water until I get back to the office and turn it on. Worse, they could steal it!

They probably won't steal it.

My next computer is this laptop. This laptop is falling apart; I used to take it with me everywhere, now I just don't go anywhere. I've got this desk, nobody else wants it, I just leave the laptop here and work out of a single desk. It's not a reliable server. I used to run Subversion off of this machine by VisualSVN, but I shifted some data around, and now it doesn't work. The ports aren't listening, they'll have to take the disk home to get access to that.

Finally, there's my house machine; it's running Debian, it's got several chroot'ed environments, there are a handful of system services that don't come up unless I determine to use them, some of them run on conflicting ports, and most of them have issues stemming from the fact that the machine runs behind two firewalls. Not a big deal; we can forward ports left and right, but it should really connect with a VPN so there's a single point of contact in case the node vanishes from the network. If I go, it probably comes with me.

Or who knows, they might even buy it?

Great, I have lots of computers, but we need to tag assets, so they don't get lost, or accidentally misplaced. My buddy Pete has got a machine that he wants to put in a cage upstairs, the server cage, exactly the perfect place to put a safe backup data store. He's pretty sure we're going to have to run Windows. I'm still jockeying for Xen, so we can save on licensing and keep our hardware maximally utilized, but VMware has this concept of infrastructure machines that are not workstations, and I'm planning to run with it.

We're going to have to prove a list of assets and an automated collection process for the backup server, or Pete's not going to be interested. He's definitely not interested in buying a car that's got a little hole in the gas tank, and he's probably not thrilled about the idea of sharing such that his resources could become unavailable on-demand by someone else's request.

Who would want to have that? Today's business is built on downloadable, freely available systems with promotional, marketing, and educational materials supplied by Accellion, T-mobile, UserScape, VMware, rBuilder Online, cryptographers at large, and the many generous donors that are part of the Open Source community!

Listen, OK Here...

I'm gonna be straight with you. I've got a certain budget for food and entertainment (and if you talk to the starving people in Nigeria long enough they'll tell you, "We are very bored! Food is our entertainment!") and just because I spend it with you does not mean you're special.

I'm not Will Smith. No man is an island. I've got to get done the things I've got to get done, and to some extent doing extra past that level is not going to deliver any tangible benefits to me. Sure, there's speculation and I might get something incredible accomplished by working long hours...

But come on! You only live once, and I could die tomorrow. So, it's better to document everything thoroughly, or they're going to have a hell of a time untangling my mess after I'm gone... right?

Lets have some fun with this. You don't have to join the Debate club if you haven't already.

Could Be Worth a Lot

Remember: this information could be worth money!

So, I was trying out Fedora Core 9 on my new USB stick, which I can take anywhere and use at any computer to boot Linux without necessarily affecting the contents of the hard drive.

The mouse cursor was not showing up. This is a neat problem. Without two computers, it was a struggle to get into the forums and find the details of anyone with a related problem: the mouse is connected and when it's moved around the screen, it highlights selectables just like if it were a mouse pointer... but, you can't see it, and incidentally since its invisible, it also doesn't ever change shape.

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Device"
Option "HWCursor" off

In a college full of smart people, some of them using Fedora Core, and certainly many of them using nVidia and HP computers, and still nobody in my office had ever seen this problem before, or was prepared to offer a solution.

This information could be worth money!

Career Coders get Tracks

I heard that Rentacoder.com has real money up for coding tasks, but I don't know how hard it is to please those escrow judges... assumedly, if they want to keep the programmers coming back, they will pay them. This is not necessarily a given! There are so many competing todo lists, I just heard about GTD Tracks from my buddy Brandon, I hope these tasks find their way to the top of my doings and may I please don't get distracted by shiny features or anything else!

This program called Tracks is all about David Allen's GTD methodology and implementing it into your working patterns, I've seen those programs come and go, the last one I liked a lot was actually called Trac and I still have a deployment of that kicking around on my network somewhere. It's about project management, yes, but Tracks acknowledges that it's actually about context management too.

My buddy Dan wants to put together a website. It's for an entertainment company that he's interested in starting, he wants to sell tickets to shows and maybe music, maybe online distribution vectors, maybe t-shirts, well there are plenty of people doing that kind of thing and it would be good to have some examples for him when we go and talk on Monday. I'll put together a document, which I hope he'll read.

See this is what you've got to understand first and foremost: your one big project may have several components, and you might not be able to convince all of your clients that they should foot the bill for each and every one of them. And, you might not be able to slip it past them in an extra fee, sometimes there is unpaid work that no paying clients will own up to having generated, and sometimes there is work that just doesn't get done for lack of time, funding, or interest.

Back to tracks: you should track it all if it's not too much trouble, for some contexts might eventually have to be cut, and this could result in alterations to the quality or delivery date of your final product. Maybe Dan's entertainment website doesn't need Java or Groovy for scripting, maybe it doesn't even need PHP! If all of the model content providers and sellers have outsourced the scripty functionality of their own websites, then maybe you're really just working on a design and a layout, and implementing it into pages of HTML and templates of CSS.

Maybe Don has been here before, where Dan and I are about to go... "all I know is, I hate writing press kits!" Time to get creative, and it should look nice.

There are also totally online communities where information is exchanged as currency, like ProZ.com, and RentACoder.com, even Dice.com and Monster.com fall into this category.

Can't I bill someone for all of this work? Who says there's not any money in Free Software? I heard about Inkscape and Scribus who both address this problem of layout, like Microsoft Publisher and Adobe Somethingorother, except these pieces of software are in the public domain and licensed under GPL, so there's not any Anteing Up to get started playing the game.

The output is the same around, Portable Document Format (PDF) except that predictably, Microsoft has declined to support the standard that everyone else is using. And who's to say they're wrong for doing that? They almost sold me a copy of their software, I had clients sending me files in Publisher format, am I going to tell them "no! take your proprietary files and green money somewhere else."

Maybe some day...

For now, I'd better work on my presentation. I don't think we need to clear the cache, if they want to steal my work from their cache, I think the browser has made it hard enough to do that, I should reward their labor with my data. There's nothing really stopping me from shooting back with a lawsuit, or some slanderous sounding remarks, much much later, when I find out they're using my copyright and they haven't paid the fee.

This should all be worked out on paper and ironclad before anybody asks too many questions, they could even reveal just how much you don't know and well that would be pretty embarassing wouldn't it? To my adoring fans, til Saturday when we speak again.

Jyte Claims: Kingdon Did Not Travel to New Zealand

There is a way to create digg buttons on this page, but it's not built into the interface in an obvious way, and now I can't remember how to do it. I think I created some files on my hobo11 server a long time ago, and I think I might even still have them, but at this point even Thursday is not being maintained regularly, I guess I'd better spend some time on my infrastructure.

I can show you instead, the Jyte service which was introduced to me by Korean MyID.net OpenID provider service. Here, I can claim that I am the person referred to by http://kingdon.myid.net/ and also http://jackthemac.myid.net/ -- it might not mean anything, because most Jyte users don't know who "I" am, and safe bet that most Jyte users also don't speak Korean, so they wouldn't gain any information by visiting either URL.

These URLs are known as OpenID providers, and by entering them into a web page that knows how to authenticate against an OpenID account, I have just offloaded the job of keeping Kingdon's identities by using some servers in Korea. By posting them to this page, I might have "signed" it or "tagged" it. The mechanics of OpenID are much more complex, and beyond the scope of this article.

DNS is a layer that counts as the world's central "claims broker" on names, it really obsoletes Trademark for the Internet community, except as a means of arbitration. DNS is wholly undemocratic. If you think that you have a claim to a name, your choice is to either pay a fee to the person who already owns the name

(hopefully, the common pool, otherwise the fee will be inexhorbitant or "negotiated")

OR you can escalate the matter to the International Convention for Assigning Names and Numbers (ICANN) who will undoubtedly charge at least as much to provide an opinion. Which, could go either way.

The Domain Naming System is a cog, which could be a golden cog encrusted with diamonds, but instead it is a simple cog. The DNS infrastructure is an example of technological feudalism, where Jyte is an example of a social democracy for deciding truth and value of a "fact," such as ownership of a name.

Somebody has traveled to New Zealand.
Somebody named Jack has traveled to New Zealand.
Somebody named Kingdon has traveled to New Zealand.

All of these are statements, and I would bet that all of these statements are also true facts. With Jyte.com, you can make claims and tie them to an OpenID. Since I can have more than one OpenID, I can actually contradict myself using this service!

The value of such course of action is uncertain. One possible application is to reflect a changing opinion. At any rate, that two servers in Korea say a thing is true does not make truth, and does not necessarily mean that Korea says such a thing is true. That the fact is proven, and that the proof is satisfactory to someone knowledgeable, well, that also does not mean the thing is true.

North or South?
I have no idea. All I want is an IP address of my very own, that people will recognize as mine when they see it. Can you recognize your friend's phone number without Caller ID? Caller ID (and lets not worry too deeply about the reliability of the numbers returned by that system) is an expensive database to maintain. This is not a difficult claim to substantiate: first accept that all databases are expensive, add next that yours surely does not do everything you want it to do.

Of course, that a claim is popular and that a lot of people provide an opinion, does not mean that the truth of the fact is unprovable, or that the claim is really important. It could just be thought-provoking. Some of these popular claims are serving to discourage me from wanting to use the service!

There should be no space between a function name and the paren that starts the argument list.

This claim demonstrates an apathy towards political issues. What? Yes, if you have time to argue about whitespace, I posit that you do not care about politics. Should I add this fact to the database? This is getting tedious now.

http://rochester-arabic.blogspot.com/2008/04/blog-post.html

Kingdon Did Not Travel to New Zealand.



Now, we have opened up a number of issues: it is possible for one person to have more than one identity, and it is possible for a person to make false claims. In Prolog language, you store a database of "facts" and you query asking, "is this fact true."

Back to the matter of the day: what is the effect of posing a claim in the negative? If I am taking a survey, and I am asking "did Kingdon travel to New Zealand" I am sure to generate a different response than if I ask, "is it true that Kingdon did not travel to New Zealand?" One of these may be a leading question. You could also ask, "Kingdon, how was your time in New Zealand?"

And if you do ask that, I'll do my best to keep from looking frustrated and discouraged. I'm sure that New Zealand appreciates your tourist dollars, and I don't want to discourage anybody from visiting that great island nation of New Zealand. And if I say "New Zealand was great," you can bet that it's still great as it was when I was actually in New Zealand. That was, never. I didn't go to New Zealand. For real, it's a made up story. I don't know where it came from.

Peace Out Folks