L’Affaire DiIulio

/ current events

Esquire magazine recently published a four page letter (long, but worth reading) by John DiIulio, former head of faith-based initiatives for the President, describing the way the Bush White House is completely driven by political calculations, not by policy. He has since apologized, saying his word were “poorly chosen.” This apology has all the plausibility of Claude Rains being shocked–shocked!–to discover gambling, since the letter was so well written. And indeed, DiIulio subsequently offered a “clarification” of the apology, saying that good manners required it. In any case, the episode does show that the Bushies don’t like dissent in the ranks, and presumably had some lever they could use to pry this retraction out of DiIulio. I wonder what.

Metablogging stuff

/ net stuff

A confluence of factors have prodded me into spending the whole day nerding about in the Movable Type back-end.

Movable Type recently went through an upgrade. I was reluctant to install the upgrade, since I had made some custom mods to MT, and wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to reproduce these in the new version. But that new version also has some nice bells and whistles that I wanted, like the handy Search field you see here.

Blogger has been having trouble, and that’s where Jenny’s blog lives (or lived, to be precise). I offered to help her move her blog into MT, and after a week of frustration, she accepted this offer. But I figured “I’ll be damned if I import her old blog, just to wind up updating MT at some point in the future.”

So it was time to bite the bullet. I wiped my old installation of MT off the server (keeping the database, thank you) and installed the new one. Went through the process of customizing it again. Imported Jenny’s blog. Rejiggered my templates to work in her blog with her look. Started messing with the new features. Installed John Gruber’s nifty Smarty Pants plugin.

All things considered, the whole process went pretty smoothly, and more quickly than I’d hoped.

Piracy and all that

/ current events

Tim O’Reilly, publisher of fine technical books with animals on the covers, dropped a mind-bomb a couple days ago on the subject of piracy and file-sharing. Some very well thought-out counter-arguments to typical Hollywood positions.

He does say one thing that doesn’t quite ring true:

The music and film industries like to suggest that file sharing networks will destroy their industries.

Those who make this argument completely fail to understand the nature of publishing. Publishing is not a role that will be undone by any new technology, since its existence is mandated by mathematics. Millions of buyers and millions of sellers cannot find one another without one or more middlemen who, like a kind of step-down transformer, segment the market into more manageable pieces. In fact, there is usually a rich ecology of middlemen. Publishers aggregate authors for retailers. Retailers aggregate customers for publishers. Wholesalers aggregate small publishers for retailers and small retailers for publishers. Specialty distributors find ways into non-standard channels.

My favorite file-sharing site was Audio Galaxy. It has almost no files to share anymore, thanks to the MPAA, but it still does have the feature that made it better than, say, Napster: it apparently uses some kind of agent technology to present “other people who liked this also liked these” recommendations. This was great–I discovered some new music that way, music I simply wouldn’t have found otherwise. With a reasonably fast connection, it was like audible websurfing.

Audio Galaxy could be considered an aggregator, but I wouldn’t call it a publisher. In a world of unfettered P2P, people really could be self-publishers, and something like Audio Galaxy could thrive. And I wonder if some kind of completely decentralized “taste-sharing” mechanism could be worked out through something akin to FOAF (the “friend of a friend” vocabulary).

But unfettered P2P is a pipe dream. Hollywood wants complete control over the terms under which we enjoy their product (and you damn well better enjoy it if you know what’s good for you). Disney has copyright extended everytime the mouse is on the verge of entering the public domain, and a TV exec says that skipping commercials is theft (I wonder if simply watching a show where you are a member of the wrong demographic is also theft?). A bill has been introduced to Congress that would explicitly permit Hollywood to hack into your PC and poke around for pirated content (and indemnify them in case they, oh, accidentally trashed your hard drive in the process). And so on.

Hollywood also would probably like it if people like me, who are creating media outside the system, would stop competing with them (if you call this competition). But I can picture the bones of a science-fiction story along the the lines of Farenheit 451, where ownership of industry media has become so onerous that people create a complete samizdat network of old public-domain and homemade entertainments.

Work is hell

/ tidbit

Years ago, in its earliest days, I found on the Web some hilarious stories of tech-support hell. These stories have proliferated.

What would be worse than working in tech-support and putting up with people whose stupidity is almost aggressive? Working at a porn-video shop. Oh, much, much worse. Great stories, though.

Blue Genie Bazaar

/ Austin, personal

Went to the Blue Genie Bazaar last night. Numerous exhibitors, and a generally high quality of stuff. There was one maker of very nice art glass selling his stuff for embarrassingly low prices.

The Blue Genies–three guys doing commercial art–have a wickedly funny style. One of their pieces was a giant replica of a handheld vacuum cleaner sculpted from an enormous Rice-Krispie treat.

You are not your toy

/ tidbit

An article in today’s New York Times discusses the sense of outrage that many Porsche enthusiasts have at the fact that the maker of their dream cars is now making an SUV, the Cayenne.

Now, I’m hardly a fan of SUVs, and I think this is a dangerous adventure in brand extension for Porsche, but I still want to grab these whiners by the shoulders and give them a good shake. They’ve got too much of their identity invested in their cars. Their comments are telling:

“A Porsche S.U.V. will, perhaps forever, cheapen the brand…Which demographic will this thing attract? My guess is BMW poseur types.”

The existence of the Cayenne won’t change anything about the old 911, except the way 911 owners perceive other people’s perception of the Porsche brand. These guys (I’m guessing they’re almost all guys) imagine that they derived some kind of aura by owning a Porsche, and that aura will disappear once the company starts making such an unglamorous vehicle, and less worthy people start buying it.

I did a translation a few years back that gave results from a focus group study. A luxury-goods company showed the focus group members–already enthusiastic customers of the brand–a prototype sports watch. The reaction was so negative, and so uniformly negative, that they scrapped the whole project. I’m guessing that Porsche focus-grouped the Cayenne six ways from Sunday, and decided there was a market for it. But it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

Redesign

/ net stuff

Feast your eyes, hungry readers. I’ve blown a few hours that I shouldn’t have redoing this site. The page you see now uses nothing but CSS for layout–no tables, except for the calendar (which is tabular by nature). I still need to re-do some of the static pages, and I may want to rejigger the structure and the appearance a touch, but I’m pretty happy with it. Let me know what you think (if you care).

Although he probably doesn’t know if, I am in debt to Derek Powazek, from whose page I lifted an extremely obscure, but apparently critical modification. Technical details follow:

I had attempted to use XHTML for my page in the past, but was having a hard time getting the date to line up on the left of the main text. There are some positioning tricks you can use to get it to look right, but those depend on knowing the height of the left-hand slab in advance, which is inelegant at the least. In turns out that by switching to HTML 4.01 Transitional, the float: left/float: left trick would work. If anyone can explain why this makes a difference (and if there’s a way to make the trick work in XHTML), I’d love to hear it.

Interface uniformity

/ technology

Steven Berliner Johnson writes on the contrast between Apple’s trend towards using specialized apps–iApps–to handle different media types, and Microsoft’s rumored move towards integrating everything into one do-it-all file manager. This sounds a lot like the BeOS file system, actually.

This is a false distinction, in a way. While iTunes (for example) provides a certain lens onto the files it manages, and a handy one at that, it doesn’t eliminate the value of a good file manager. Indeed, the current version of iTunes can help keep your music directory organized in the Finder–as long as you like it’s organization scheme–and there are scripts that can let you organize different, if you don’t. iPhoto is a program I don’t use at all because it doesn’t leave my photos in their original JPEG format–it merges a bunch of photos into a single monolithic file, which I don’t like. (Many people choose their e-mail client based on how it manages files as well.) I can certainly see how iPhoto would be useful, but I don’t like being locked in–it makes it easy, as long as you do things its way. (It only communicates with one photo-hosting website, also.) Umberto Eco once wrote that the Mac is “Catholic” in its insistence that there is one way to do things. This isn’t always true on the Mac (though with the Unix underpinnings, in some ways it is moreso now), but iPhoto is definitely “Catholic.”

Johnson writes

Consider the default layout of iPhoto, which shows you a broad mosaic of all your digital photos scaled to fit the size of your screen. If you have more than a couple hundred pictures, this means each image is the size of a thumbtack, but Apple includes a handy zoom tool that lets you instantly zoom in and out to focus on a particular batch of images. It’s much easier to find the photo you’re looking for by scanning iPhoto’s mosaic than it is to pore over document names in a directory overview. (It also happens to look very cool, particularly the zooming effect.)

Now, you could conceivably apply the iPhoto zoom to all your data: Turn on your computer, and you see a list of document titles and tiny icons; zoom in on one section, and a spreadsheet comes into focus or a Web page; zoom all the way in, and the document appears on your screen at normal size, ready to be manipulated. This would be an innovative approach to file management, but also a spectacularly inefficient one because a spreadsheet or a text document reduced to 5 percent of its usual size is indistinguishable from any other spreadsheet or text document. But it works great for photos.

Arguably, Apple did just that with the zooming Dock, which is supposed to act as a holding-pen for any document we want to keep handy but not active. And Apple has been justifiably criticized for this feature, for exactly the reasons Johnson mentions.

Johnson quotes Bill Gates, who says:

Right now when you use Windows, the way that you step through your photos, the way you step through your music, the way you step through e-mail or files, they’re all different. You have to learn different user interfaces, different search commands. … The idea of Longhorn is to have one approach, one set of commands that work for everything, including all of those things. And so the number of concepts you have to learn is dramatically less.

Gates is missing the point. If I want to find something, regardless of what program I’m in, there will usually be a text field with a Search button next to it. The problem isn’t so much that users need to learn different applications as it is that different applications may not implement common features (like Search) in a predictable, understandable way. There’s no user advantage to one massive application that provides all the lenses I could want onto my e-mail, my music, my photos, and my calendar. And there can be an advantage to applications that narrow the context.

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