No Such Weblog

I had put down a number of LISP books before, simply not getting it. Then, on a too long plane ride, I read Paul Graham’s The Roots of Lisp — and there it was, a brief piece that demonstrated the sheer elegance and beauty that is to be found there.If, like me, you’ve always wondered about LISP, but never got it, this might be the paper to read.

A while ago, I ordered a memory extension at Amazon — or, rather, through Amazon. The first merchant took a while to not deliver; I called them, they tried to feed me some cheap excuses (which were rather obviously wrong). I cancelled my order, but that cancellation was only confirmed by the merchant once I tried to invoke Amazon’s guarantee.Overall, a pretty bad experience — this particular merchant didn’t do what they were supposed to do, they communicated badly, and they didn’t react in a timely way. Yet, I can’t give a rating in Amazon’s reputation system: After all, the order was cancelled… This suggests that some of the really bad merchants might have higher reputations there than they deserve, simply for the reason that the customers who were disappointed most heavily don’t get to rate them.(The memory extension has meanwhile arrived from a different merchant who got 5 out of 5 points for professionalism.)

Client-side SQL rules. And it’s rather useful: Google — the site recently rated worst major web destination for privacy by Privacy International (rebuttal 1, rebuttal 2) — has put out Google Gears, a browser extension which lets you use things like Google Reader in an offline mode. Functionality-wise, this seems to work nicely indeed, and I’ll try it again as the next couple of flights come up — reading blogs certainly sounds like good inflight entertainment.The extension’s key additions to today’s infrastructure: You can reliably keep both Web applications and significant amounts of data locally, such as the last 2,000 blog posts, and you can talk to that data store in SQL. Applications that can use these facilities have all the abilities that cookies could ever give them, and then some more; cookies simply look boring against this.It will be interesting to see whether (and how) the community overall takes up the tension between the functionality enabled and the privacy worries caused — both — by web applications’ ability to link interactions much more reliably than today, and to store larger and more structured amounts of data on the client. The tension is, in fact, non-trivial: On the one hand, reliable client-side persistency clearly enables reliable linking of different interactions. On the other hand, applications could be designed to be more privacy-friendly by actually keeping information on the client, and not transmitting it to the server. If anything, this shows that discussions about privacy online can’t be limited to the side-effects of this or that technology, but should actually focus on how the technology (and the data processed) are actually used.Meanwhile, Opera’s Anne van Kesteren points to Erik Arvidsson’s blog, which talks about a submission of the interfaces exposed by Google Gears to WHATWG/W3C coming soon. Anne notes the relationship to related work in the HTML5 spec. (W3C’s new HTML Working Group took up HTML5 as the basis for discussion with the editors and the WG going forward in May.)PS: In terms of security models, both the HTML5 and Google Gears work rely on the same-origin policy that’s well-known from cookie land.

Seems as if the kernel included with Fedora 7 has more problems than I anticipated: Suspend/Resume isn’t alone in leading to lockups; disabling Bluetooth using the appropriate keyboard combination has the same effect.I’m back to the last FC6 kernel until this gets sorted out. Yet, I’m surprised how reasonably usual activities still lead to regressions like this, on common hardware (a T43 isn’t that unusual).

Fedora 7 is out, and I’ve upgraded. The upgrade was mostly unspectacular.I use KDE as my desktop environment these days, but a number of critical applications (Firefox, Amaya, OpenOffice, gaim^Wpidgin) use gtk. It took a bit of magical fiddling with font settings to get GTK applications to use the right fonts again. When all seemed well, OpenOffice had a nasty surprise (freedesktop.org bug #4650; fedora bug report #232159) for me: The interaction with gtk-qt-engine is broken enough that the software becomes essentially unusable. I’m somewhat bewildered that this seems not to be treated as a priority by the Fedora folks: OpenOffice is, for all intents and purposes, an absolutely critical piece of application software that simply must run flawlessly on any Linux system today that claims it’s targeting the desktop.I’m now back to using GTK applications with a native GTK theme that looks similar enough to the KDE environment I’m in. Still, these two bugs alone may very well be enough to make ordinary desktop users switch to other distributions, or systems.Meanwhile, gaim is now Pidgin; with the change in name comes a change to an amazingly ugly icon theme — yes, even geeks like their desktop pretty!Edited, later: They’ve done it again — suspend/resume needs more manual fixing. This time, the bluetooth subsystem leads the kernel to lock up upon suspend. Fortunately, this is fixed by a simple /sbin/service bluetooth stop in the suspend script. Still…

I’ll confess that, when I’m wearing my “just a user” hat, I’ve (mostly) made my peace with Flash — usually, these sites tend to redner as intended, and plugin support in Firefox 2 was good enough to take care of my installation needs without me thinking much. Which means that flash sites are mostly noticeable for being annoyingly noisy (so much fun when you skype into a telephone conference), or maybe unusable — as my bank’s pretty new login form. (I’m back to paper when they make that thing mandatory for online banking customers.)In Silly season, Mark Pilgrim gives a fine rant, and a survey of the latest attempts to rebuild the Web by breaking its core design principles. Seems like the system I use is non-mainstream enough again to simply show me those “plugin not supported” errors for a while, as a reminder that some sites use proprietary technology at their own peril.Thanks to Microsoft and Adobe for the nice demonstration (again) of why proprietary just doesn’t work on the Web!(Found via Silverfish and Appallingo by Paul Downey.)

May 25 is pangalactic Towel day. In memory of the late Douglas Adams, please carry a towel around all day, and put it to some appropriate use. The flickerati also mark the day by posting photos of themselves and their towel. The tag is, obviously, towelday.For technorati:

towelday

In a prior life, I’ve been a member of ICANN’s At-Large Advisory Committee from 2003 through 2004. I was one of the folks who, back then, were seeing ALAC as an advocacy platform, and focused on the policy side of its work, pushing for what, in our judgment, were Individual Internet Users’ best interests. Honestly, I can’t claim a whole lot of tangible success for that, despite hard work by a number of people.To this day, I still occasionally dangle my feet into these waters, though I’ve again and again promised myself not to do it again.To say I’m disappointed by what I’ve seen recently would be an understatement: While I’m happy there is a number of people who, presumably, really want to move things, I’m appalled to see how discussions among both European and North American participants take on an increasingly divisive tone. There isn’t much to be seen of a common goal to advocate users’ interest in ICANN — rather, a lot of fighting for table scraps (when there’s more than enough work for anybody who wants to gamble some of their time on ICANN and its at-large activities!). ALAC’s ICANN staff support seems most interested in staging pretty signing ceremonies and press events, one per ICANN General Meeting.The result? Artificial and rushed time lines, premature consensus calls, and a lot of bad blood and mistrust among participants who really ought to be working together (and have been able to talk reasonably to each other before they got into fights around ICANN). Also, the ability for ICANN to pretend that there’s real end user participation and representation, when there are really very few ways (if any) for ALAC to make a real difference in policy decisions — even though the committee has some limited power to help shape ICANN’s policy agenda.Here’s a Gedankenexperiment for you: Imagine ALAC was simply shut down. Would things change for the better? Or for the worse? Would we maybe see more thinking about what accountability in ICANN’s processes might really mean? (And no, the sometimes surreal ombudsman doesn’t provide that.) Would we see the organization really be any less sensitive to users’ needs?2007-05-21 edited to add: Relevant comment threads are in Wendy’s and Patrick’s blogs.

The story of the tastelessly overloaded diamond necklace that had been allegedly ordered by Marie Antoinette (and subsequently led to a major public scandal in 1780s France) can be found at Wikipedia. Antal Szerb’s version, written in 1943, however, goes far beyond just telling this particular bit of history: In his uniquely ironic tone, we get an extraordinarily vivid introduction to the institutional and social history of the highest echelons of the ancien régime, right before its fall.Szerb brings this time to life brilliantly. Historical characters become tangible, among them Marie Antoinette, Jeanne de Saint-Rémy de Valois (impoverished descendant of the royal Valois family, and chief villain of the story), Cagliostro (about whom Szerb notes that he didn’t know much less about medicine than any other physician of his time), the Cardinal Rohan (whose boundless naiveté contributed greatly to the general debacle), and finally the Count of Haga (also known as Gustav III of Sweden; his political aptitude serves as a stark contrast to the French royals’ political talent). Tangible, too, the court’s customs, the functions these customs had (many of them obsolete at the time), the reaction when Marie Antoinette (daughter of Empress Maria Theresia) comes in and stages a fashion rebellion — and the ways in which the Comtesse de Saint-Rémy social engineers her way through all that.Interesting, Szerb’s observations how the court attempted to get closer to the ordinary citizens, and at the same time demystified itself, thereby maybe helping the revolution along — a theme, incidentally, that resonates in The Queen‘s recent rendition of British monarchy’s crisis around the death of Lady Diana. “The ancien régime didn’t perish so much for its vices, but for its virtues,” Szerb writes.This book is a true treasure trove for the historically interested, but never boring or dry, but always fun, entertaining, ironic, colorful. If you know to read Hungarian or German or one of the other languages it has been translated to (I’ve been unable to find an English translation), go read it.

One of the sessions at WWW 2007 that I’d really have loved to attend (but couldn’t) was Mashing up the Mobile, by Paul Downey and Uros Rapajic of British Telecom.Fortunately, their slides are now available online, and I got a quick intro to much of the content while playing booth babe at the W3C booth on another day of the conference. The work that Paul and Uros are doing essentially explores what happens when you connect mash-ups, RSS feeds, and mobile phones with each other in all kinds of ways, and then just let the ideas flow. The results are both playful and powerful.While talking to Paul, I also learned about Twittervision, Dapper, and what happens when you feed geotagged RSS into Google Maps (try it). Good stuff!