Paul Mison’s Neighbors

No way Norway

nobody@vox.com(pebaline) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:02:41 +0100

Greetings dear Vox! It's been a while, yes? Maybe because I have been busy/ill/away/letting Project Rainbow Purple go down the drain. Maybe I'm allowed to have a little summer holiday? :) Well, I did have a little break last weekend and went over to gorgeous, gorgeous Bergen in Norway. I took my Holga 35mm camera with me to shoot some proper photos, too, as you can see.

vikings

Proper photos of Norwegian Vikings. Well, modern Vikings I suppose. :)

Madam Bergen

And proper photos of proper Norwegian madams, too. ;)

little house

As well as some proper art photos. Look at this gorgeous double exposure courtesy of lazy/forgetful winding up of film a la yours truly. I love happy photo accidents like this. :)

400 metres in 6 minutes

If you ever have a chance to visit Bergen please please make sure you visit the home of Edvard Grieg, Troldhaugen. His house is not actually the house in the photo on the left, but these two went together in a cute way. The place itself is amazing. Really. Some proof below:

scenery

camoflauge

The summer was so lush and green. BTW - Can you find the people in this 2nd photo? :)

I came back to London well-rested and relaxed on Monday, and I'm missing the place so badly already. (Thank you so much F&S!) I'm finding it hard to find the right words to describe it really, but I do love Norway very much. :) Things are now getting back to "normal" and I'm having to pull my purple socks up and start getting my set together! Purple is proving to be the most difficult colour to photograph for me in the whole project. And there I was thinking that orange was going to be the hardest one! :P

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thank.you.friends.

nobody@vox.com(.tiff) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 05:05:39 +0100

I was having a pretty miserable day today. A vicious combination of stress, frustration, and loneliness typically will do the trick. Thank the gods that I have good friends, like ee.en, who even after he was drenched with my personal sorrows, went out of his way to send me this song. Interpret it how you like, but listening to A Postcard to Nina was exactly what I needed.

A Postcard To Nina

Jens Lekman

.tiff's score

alex's score

Nina I just want to check in
'cause I think about you every second
So I send you this postcard just to say
Don't let anyone stand in your way

Cathartic aural experiences also go well with a hefty dose of internet lulz. I took this Internet Culture quiz out of boredom, and was awfully pleased with my 184 score (as demonstrated below). Alex took the quiz too, but since he knows teh HTML's, ultimately pwned me with his score of OVER 9000. Thank you, Alex.

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Lilypond

nobody@vox.com(acme) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:55:02 +0100

I've been quite busy recently organising my wedding. One of the geekiest parts was using Lilypond to produce beautiful engraving for the church ceremony (in the garden, not in a church). Our guests speak a mix of English and German, so we selected songs which are popular enough that everyone can sing the same tune, but with different words. It was fairly easy to hack Lilypond - there are lots of examples of its ASCII input online and many things can export to its format. It's a good tool which concentrates on doing one thing well. Check out the final product:

Lilypond

I'm going to be offline for the next few weeks. Secret honeymoon destination ;-)

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Blog move

nobody@vox.com(osfameron) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:51:30 +0100

I've enjoyed using Vox.com over the last couple of months but I'm finally taking the plunge and moving the blog to greenokapi.net/blog.

Though I've occasionally wanted more flexibility, the trade-off with a hosted service is that you waste no time tinkering, the only thing you can do is write. But the fact that Vox doesn't, at time of writing, handle comments gracefully reduces the value of the blog -- I've had some great comments and suggestions from readers, and I'd say that the feedback is one of the most useful effects of having a blog at all. Vox's insistence on signing up in order to comment is just a barrier to feedback, but I got tired of comments like "Hey, where did my last comment go?" because the default formatter apparently doesn't like code.

Of course, Wordpress has its hatefulness too. For a code-oriented blog you need the Text Control plugin, which is the only way to prevent it from moronizing newlines and making quotes "smart". (By default, Wordpress even turns ascii smileys into horrid yellow gifs, though this at least can be switched off easily).

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90s Music Monday

nobody@vox.com(Simon Wistow) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:24:16 +0100

I started working 10 years ago today. Or, at least, this Monday of the month 10 years ago.

It all started with a football match and probably some beer and ended up with me and a friend named Gareth walking up Liverpool Road to an interview at something called a "new media" company. Which sounded terribly Wired.

This was back when Wired was still very, very cool. Especially if, like me, you were arse deep in a course at Imperial College - the UK equivalent of MIT but with, if it's possible, even fewer women. Staring down the barrel of a job in investment banking, IT consulting or something in the vague but yet horrific-on-a-Lovecraftian-scale world of Java B2B I was rapidly starting to fear that the jig was up and that I was sometime soon I was going to be exposed as a consumate slacker.

Walking in front of us was quite possibly the most beautiful woman I had ever seen - poised, ethereal and, I swear to god, glowing. I was completely smitten.

She turned out to be Fiona Brice and she was the office manager for the rather generically named New Media Com.

Remember that all interviews I had up until this point were in typical corporate offices - bad carpet, ceiling tiles, harsh overhead lights and cubicles as far as the eye could see - stuffed with stressed looking people in bad suits.

Therefore the New Media Com offices came as a bit of a shock.

The floor was polished hard wood and all the light came from a floor to ceiling patio windows with organicly shaped window panes. Since then it's been turned into a rather hip dance studio

Liverpool Road office

And the people! Young. Good looking. Not a single one of them wearing a Iron Maiden tshirt over old school trousers, their pasty white faces framed by oversized glasses and lank, greasy hair. Oh how I longed to be like them!

And the detail I remember most was that it was the first time I heard "Teardrop"

Massive Attack - Teardrop

Again, remember every other place I'd interviewed until then (one of which had made it very clear to me that even listenting to music via headphones was banned) and then imagine being in this amazing space with the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen (and who was offering us coffee like we were actual real people rather than rather dodgy chancers on the blag), hip young people with an air of quiet confidence and this achingly, achingly beautiful song.

Rather suprisingly they hired the both of us as employees number 9 and 10. It soon transpired that they were blagging it as much as we were. No-one new anything about new-media back in 1998 - you made it up as you went along and if it worked then you pretended that you'd known it would all along and if it failed you came up with an excuse on the fly and lied until you almost believed it yourself.

During the boom I hired everyone I knew and Profero, as it was soon renamed (the name being chosen, literally, by thumbing through my old Latin GCSE dictionary until we found a word we liked) started doing much actual, real, important campaigns such as Sky Digital and CNN. I tried my hand at everything - there's an old joke that goes "Can you play the piano?", "I don't know, I've never tried" and I was 20 years old and some combination of fear of being found out and youthful arrogance meant that I'd give anything a go - build a website for Miss World including a voting script in a weekend? No problem - the team came in on Monday morning to find me asleep on my keyboard. Client wants a promotional screen saver? Of course. I've never written one before but how hard can it be?

I worked there for over 2 years, juggling college work and usually 3 days in the office a week. Profero survived the bust that afflicted many of the bigger, trendier agencies out there and now has 12 offices from London to Madrid to Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai and, as of this year, New York. The last friend I hired (who came in to do 2 days of HTML work 9 years ago and forgot to leave) finally quit - albeit to work for one of the original 9 employees. Gareth's doing clever things with television in Australia and I'm here in San Francisco with a CV that once caused someone to remark that it reminded them that "... career was a verb as well as a noun".

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Literally, figuratively.

nobody@vox.com(Chris Devers) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:06:07 +0100

How hard can this be? Compare & contrast:

Literally:

3 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Literally \Lit"er*al*ly\, adv.
1. According to the primary and natural import of words; not
figuratively; as, a man and his wife can not be literally
one flesh.
[1913 Webster]

So wild and ungovernable a poet can not be

translated literally. --Dryden.
[1913 Webster]

literally
adv 1: in a literal sense; "literally translated"; "he said so
literally" [ant: {figuratively}]
2: (intensifier before a figurative expression) without
exaggeration; "our eyes were literally pinned to TV during
the Gulf war" [syn: {virtually}]

38 Moby Thesaurus words for "literally":
absolutely, actually, closely, dead, definitely, direct, directly,
even, exactly, expressly, faithfully, in all respects,
in every respect, in fact, ipsissimis verbis, just, literatim,
plumb, point-blank, positively, precisely, really, right, rigidly,
rigorously, square, squarely, straight, strictly, to the letter,
truly, undeviatingly, unerringly, verbally, verbatim,
verbatim et litteratim, word by word, word for word

     2. With close adherence to words; word by word.
From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:
From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:

Figuratively:

2 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Figurative \Fig"ur*a*tive\, a. [L. figurativus: cf. F.
     figuratif. See {Figurative}.]
     1. Representing by a figure, or by resemblance; typical;
        representative.
        [1913 Webster]

              This, they will say, was figurative, and served, by
              God's appointment, but for a time, to shadow out the
              true glory of a more divine sanctity. --Hooker.
        [1913 Webster]

     2. Used in a sense that is tropical, as a metaphor; not
        literal; -- applied to words and expressions.
        [1913 Webster]

     3. Abounding in figures of speech; flowery; florid; as, a
        highly figurative description.
        [1913 Webster]

     4. Relating to the representation of form or figure by
        drawing, carving, etc. See {Figure}, n., 2.
        [1913 Webster]

              They belonged to a nation dedicated to the
              figurative arts, and they wrote for a public
              familiar with painted form.           --J. A.
                                                    Symonds.
        [1913 Webster]

     {Figurative counterpoint} or {Figurative descant}. See under
        {Figurate}. -- {Fig"ur*a*tive*ly}, adv. --
        {Fig"ur*a*tive*ness}, n.
        [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  figuratively
       adv : in a figurative sense; "figuratively speaking,..." [ant: {literally}]

The words are opposites. To be figurative is to use a metaphor. To be literal is to avoid metaphor.

So why does everyone use "literally", regardless of which sense they actually meant, and no one seems to use "figuratively", ever?

Consider these random recent examples from my NetNewsWire history.

First, from "The Oil Drum", a repeat offender (which, to be fair, is mostly aggregating quotes from other sources):

"Drumbeat May 31, 2008":

The image from their website shows the current and last 48 hours’ level of activity with yesterday’s large earthquake, magnitude of 6.1 - 6.3, literally off the chart
Well, no, if you were able to measure it at 6.1-6.3, then it can't have been "off the chart", could it now?

"Drumbeat June 5, 2008":

..."After 200 years of having an industrial economy, we're quite literally facing a dead end," he said in a telephone interview this week. "If we keep going this way, we will be dead."
A "dead end" is a road that doesn't connect to another road. It has nothing to do with mortality, nor the direction in which one faces.

"Drumbeat June 15, 2008":

The reduction in supply is like a land slip under water, and the resulting wave is literally like a tsunami.
Here's a hint: if you had to sneak the word "like" in there, then you're speaking figuratively, not literally, because you're using a simile, and a similie is like a metaphor.

"Drumbeat June 29, 2008":

Few would deny that Alberta's heavy-oil producers have to literally clean up their act.
Actually, I deny it. Right off the bat, an "act" isn't a physical object that one could possibly "clean up", so right there you're off to a shaky start. But even looking past that, to "clean up one's act" is a figurative concept implicitly, so unless there were some kind of way to take a mop to an intangible concept, this one is another swing & a miss.

But I'll leave Oil Drum alone now, as their intentions are good, even if their writing style isn't.

Steven Berlin Johnson: GAMES AND THE IPHONE:

That's a whole new industry that Apple has NEVER seriously tried to be competitive in, but the touch and accelerometer hardware/software built into the iPhone means that they are -- literally overnight -- the Wii of the handheld gaming market: a platform where the controller innovation changes all the rules.
So, Apple is going home at 5pm, but then sneaking back into the office after midnight and, hey presto, magically transforming themselves into a video game console? No.

Slashdot: Apple Laptop Upgrades Costing 200% More Than Dells:

Either there's a serious difference in the quality of components being used, or Apple is quite literally ripping off those who aren't able to upgrade hardware themselves.
So, after the midnight video game transfiguration shenanigans, Apple is then going around and tearing off clothing -- or worse, maybe even limbs -- from gullible customers? How gruesome.

NPR: Will Democrats Care if the Clintons Are (That) Rich?:

Will ordinary voters, especially those making less than $50,000 a year, be OK with a putative champion who's literally making 400 times as much?
I would hope so. After all, counterfeiting is illegal, right?

I, Cringely: Leadfoot: Sometimes going green hurts more than it helps.:

[Tin whiskers] just grow. And when they get long enough they either touch another joint, shorting out one or more connections, or they vaporize in a flash, creating a little plasma cloud that can carry for an instant hundreds of amps and literally blow your device to pieces.
So these things are able to respirate? They can draw in a breath, and then exhale, and by so doing, and with enough force, they can puff your device into pieces? Golly.

NYT Freakonomics Blog: Will Mark Twain Lose the Same House Twice?:

There’s nothing like being able to literally walk in the footsteps of someone else from long ago — seeing where they worked, slept, ate, and maybe cheated at cards.
So I take it then that Mark Twain left physical impressions in the ground, and from them you can put your own feet in the same impressions, and somehow this deepens your understanding of how he worked, slept (with his feet on the floor, presumably), ate, and played cars? Shoes heavy enough to leave such impressions over a century later must have been very painful to wear.

that

The Simple Dollar: Finding Inspiration for Financial Change:

For a very long time, I kept a picture of him literally wrapped around my credit cards, so I would see his face each time I pulled it out [...]
Steven Berlin Johnson: TURNING 40:

My diet was literally plain vanilla: For my first thirty years, I actually hated chocolate.
Wise Bread: Best of the web: How to write the perfect thank you note:

Buying a tub of pretzels and parceling them into snack bags is literally 3 times cheaper than buying the individual bags.
WBUR's The ConverStation: “What’s In Your Wallet…I Mean iPod”:

He finds “Car Talk” quite literally laugh-out-loud funny as he listens on his recently purchased iPod Classic.
WBUR's The ConverStation: Googling ‘bur:

It seems that Jill Price can’t, quite literally, forget a thing.
Slashdot: BMW Introduces GINA Concept Car, Covered In Fabric:

The doors literally peel away from the side of the car, the engine bay opens up down the middle, and pretty much everything (such as headlamps) is hidden until the fabric reveals it.
Rands in Repose: The Button:

He’s not going to engage in witty repartee, he’s literally going to ignore your button exploration questions, and this is going to annoy you.
O'Reilly's MacDevCenter: Gordon Meyer: One Week with EyeTV Hybrid:

I live in the city, and can literally see the broadcast towers on nearby skyscrapers [...]

Clearly, the word no longer has a place in good writing. Just say no to it. Literally.

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Isaac plays with a sticker

nobody@vox.com(Chris Devers) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:44:46 +0100

Isaac plays with a sticker

This video was just after Isaac's first birthday, in April 2007. He had recently learned to stand up, but couldn't really walk yet. He seemed to be just starting to understand things like "mirrors" and "cameras", and that the image he was seeing on the laptop was in fact him. Anyway, his therapist is going to want to bookmark this some day, so I figure I should try to make it easy for them.

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In a world without oil, where would it make sense to live?

nobody@vox.com(Chris Devers) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 06:46:35 +0100

VARIAVALVE QUICK VENT HEAT-TIMER

Human societies have always depended on having ready access to cheap, efficient means of transportation.

The Egyptians built their kingdoms along the Nile. The Greeks built their civilization among their islands. The Mesopotamians had the Tigris & Euphrates, the Indians had the Ganges, the Chinese had the Yangtze. Later, the Romans and Incas built vast empires laced together by paved roadways.

In America, the continent was [re-]populated first by ships & horses, then Conestoga wagons, then the locomotive, then automobiles and airplanes.

The topography of ordinary life is a reflection of this need to have access to transportation, balanced against other needs for agriculture, trade, industry, and so on.

From what I've seen of Germany, most of the old cities & towns are organized along roughly similar lines, with a dense cluster of homes & other structures, clearly demarcated from the surrounding countryside -- often by a literal wall. Of course, this probably has old medieval origins where the people would live together in town but farm in the fields, and occasionally would have to hide behind the walls as the town was besieged by some invading army or mob. But it also means that for ordinary life, the things you need are all within walking distance of home -- your job, the people you trade with, and so on.

Never Cry "Arp!"

Older American cities on the east coast started out along similar lines, but with less fear of invasion (after all, Native Americans tended not to have cannons & muskets) plus good roads and horses to get around with (not to mention the allure of an entire vast continent to stretch out across), they never really had the tight, walkable density that old European cities had.

And then, of course, the train came, and not long behind it, the car. If you look at how American cities are laid out, especially as you move west, and as you look at cities that had most or all of their growth in the 20th century, it's obvious just how much these places grew up with the assumption that the car would always be there, would always be cheap, and was strong enough to be the almost physical foundation of how society is built, lives, and works.

But what happens if the car goes away, or is just too expensive to use any more?

It could be grim, according to an Atlantic article from March

It could be really grim, according to a LA Times article from this week.

"You'd have massive changes going on throughout the economy," said Robert Wescott, president of Keybridge Research, a Washington economic analysis firm. "Some activities are just plain going to be shut down."
[...]
Push prices up fast enough, he said, and "it would be the urban-planning equivalent of an earthquake."

American suburbs just aren't ready for this. Hell, even the cities are mostly unprepared for this. With a handful of exceptions -- New York City, San Francisco, and a few others -- even most city dwellers tend to need a car to get around. The transit systems aren't in place in most places, and where the are, they tend to be running near capacity (and over budget, accumulating debt), and are not equipped to service a big uptick in ridership in a short time frame, which is what we could see if oil prices continue their climb towards $200/bbl and beyond (they hit $140 this week).

(And, as if it needs to be said, nothing the next president can do is going to change any of this.)

Real estate sign out window

So -- and I'll probably break out this section into a post of its own later -- given the choice of where to live, where does it make sense to live now? The days of suburbia as the standard lifestyle for a large fraction of Americans seem to be numbered. The cities are getting nicer, but if you want things like good schools and low crime, the suburbs are seen to be the way to go, but how long will that assumption hold up? Can things really change as fast as the LA Times article suggests? I'm not betting against the possibility.

Assuming you can't pull up roots and move to New York, San Francisco, or heck London or Paris, then where would be a good place to live for the next 10, 25, 50 years? What criteria would a "nice", "smart" place to live be? Good access to public transit, preferably rail, but bus should work too (there's always biodiesel or electric trolleybus options). Being able to walk to things like jobs, schools, and supermarkets would be good. Access to a river would be nice -- just in case we get reduced back to Egyptian levels, though I'm not quite that pessimistic yet -- but I'm willing to assume that some kind of motorized means of transportation is going to be a permanent fixture of human society now, even if individual, personal motorized transportation may not always be taken for granted the way it has been for the past century. What else? For that matter, what kind of physical home makes sense? Should we all move in to Manhattan / Soviet style apartment complexes, or is a patch of lawn still an option? Is an oil heated home any better or worse than gas or electric? The time to plan seems to be now.

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The Nozzle

nobody@vox.com(Simon Wistow) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:29:14 +0100

The Nozzle

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ICANN FAIL

nobody@vox.com(Lee) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:15:37 +0100

I've never been a fan of ICANN. They're a ludicrously costly organsisation whose "authority" stems from administrative stewardship for some of the internet's universal namespaces. As I used to point out: ICANN costs millions to run every year and their job is to make very occasional changes to small text files - a job I'd happily do for a fraction of the cost.

As someone with some background in net-ops I've always understood that the most elegant bootstrap for a distributed, de-centralized, system is a conservative and tightly controlled hierarchical namespace with a minimally small root. Authority for the DNS namespace isn't granted by governments (with the exception of the US Dept of Commerce) or international treaty. There's no real "root" to the authority ICANN that claims, it's “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions” (to use a phrase that others have borrowed from William Gibson).

The authority for management of the DNS namespace is granted by whoever runs the root servers. The root servers are determined by whatever resolvers think they are. The resolvers are usually informed by "root.hints" (a file distributed with Bind) that bootstraps the chain of authority when a nameserver is started.

Who's the kingmaker here? It's just as much the ISC (makers of Bind), as it is the ops staff configuring the nameservers, as it is the company determining their policy of which root to use, as it is the customer complaining he can't send email.

The prevailing attitude is, for the sake of operational sanity, keep using the ICANN root.

Limited experiments in increasing the number of gTLDs (generic top-level domains, as opposed to country-based domains) have been shown to benefit two groups - name registrars and international trademark lawyers - an insignificant number of people as a percentage of Internet users, but whose interests are hugely over-represented at ICANN. I'd argue that, at best, new gTLDs such as .biz have provided no benefit to the public - and are dominated by registrations by either spammers and scammers (hopping from one blacklisted domain to the next) to purely trademark protection registrations. And each new gTLD pulls us further from de-centralization, which (in theory) impacts internet stability.

The theory of "bigger root = less stability" is one I personally subscribe to. Others point to the successful management of ".com", a huge flat namespace, as proof that DNS is robust enough to have a root namespace of millions. They may well be right, but increasing the root of an authoritative namespace like DNS isn't something we can retract. If they're wrong, we're screwed - simple technical clarity that only years of being a grumpy sysadmin can provide.

I've been online on two occasions when the .com servers have failed. My observations at the time were that this did have some knock-on effect to .uk domains - but largely .uk stuff was working fine. Smart hostmasters have authoritative nameservers under at least two different TLDs precisely for this reason. Localization of failure is the benefit of distribution and de-centralization.

With the recent decision by ICANN to flatten the namespace they've shown themselves (in my eyes) to be unsuitable stewards of the root. In my mind (and perhaps others) they're shifting from "de facto root" to merely the "dominant alt-root" - no more legitimate than any other. It's clear that if any authority is going to be claimed, it's going to come from somewhere like the ITU or UN. International bodies like this are, by their nature, slow moving and conservative - exactly what namespace management needs.

And for alt-roots - now is your time. Set up new alt-root servers, grandfather the ICANN root as of this date, then charge hefty administrative fees to include any of the new ICANN-approved domains (registrants can clearly afford it). If you're a large ISP already running a good few resolvers this is a potential new revenue stream - it's practically free money.

In fact I've always suspected it was the secret business plan for OpenDNS.

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