Geekdom as a state of mind

As someone who is fortunate to have many non-techie friends, I am often struck by their bewilderment at the pleasure I get from technology, and especially that sort-of-aesthetic thrill one gets from seeing something done really neatly — what Slashdot readers would call ‘cool hacks’.

Example 1: Last night I downloaded a beautiful little application called the Salling Clicker. What it does it turn my Sony-Ericsson T68i Bluetooth phone into a remote control for my PowerBook — so I can drive iTunes (or, more importantly, Keynote) while walking about. It’s a lovely, elegant application and it works perfectly and I’m thrilled with it. But already I can see my friends wrinking their noses in disbelief. “You’re excited about using your phone as a remote control!!! How pathetic is that?” I can understand their disdain, but it doesn’t lessen my pleasure at seeing something done so well.

Example 2: I use my PowerBook for all my work, most of which involves writing. The writing tools available on the Mac — from OSX TextEdit to MS Word to Dreamweaver — are marvels in their way. But actually they are too elaborate for what I do most of the time, which is to write plain text. So I’ve been hunting for a Really Simple, Fast and Efficient text editor for a while. Now I’ve got one — Haxial TextEdit. By the standards of the OSX interface, the program is incredibly crude. It even breaks some of the rules of the OS X GUI — by having its own File etc. menu bar for example. It has its own fonts which are crude by comparison with those of OS X applications. It looks damn ugly and has no formatting capability — all it does is put text on the screen. In fact, it looks like something derived from the early days of time-shared Unix machines. But it’s incredibly fast and gives instant word-counts so is just what I need for stream-of-consciousness note-taking. I love it!

Which only goes to confirm, I suppose, that I’m just a geek at heart. Sigh.

Blogs have legal protection — at least in the US

Wired story. “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can’t be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers. Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily. “One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they’re not just selling information — they’re selling reliability,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren’t necessarily selling anything, they’re just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn’t exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward.”

Random thoughts from Old Europe

I’ve just come back from a day in the heart of what Don Rumsfeld patronisingly called “old Europe”. Following on my column last Sunday about the surge of interest in Open Source software in Germany, I went to Berlin (courtesy of IBM) to talk to some people who are determined advocates for non-proprietary standards in the public sector. Arriving this morning off the early flight from Stansted, I was struck by how nice it was to escape (temporarily) from the Anglo-Saxon world. The Blair-Bush axis has given me a very jaded feeling about the US. And anti-European feeling runs very high in the UK — and not just among Xenophobes either. Britain is really a very insular society, and insofar as it looks outside itself at all, it looks to the US. We’ve moved imperceptibly to an acceptance of a US worldview — towards a subconscious acceptance of the idea that there is really only one way to organise a society: the American Way.

The truth is, of course, that there are many ways of organising societies, and the German way is very persuasive. This after all is a country which is remarkably prosperous, peaceful (and peace-loving) and civilised. Sure, the economy is going through a rough patch (the right-wing Economist is consistently scathing about German economic policy), but the overwhelming impression one gets from the new Berlin is of prosperity and stability. This, remember, is a country that only recently re-absorbed its severed, looted, impoverished other half.

There’s still an incredible amount of new building going on, plus a lot of restoration. But what I hadn’t realised — or expected — is how civilised the centre of the city is. There is traffic, sure, but it’s nothing like aas crazy as London or Seattle. The streets are quiet. And — my big test for a capital — it’s a city where I feel I could safely cycle. It also has a nice cafe life. And prices that are eminently reasonable compared with the UK.

As I walked around, I fell to thinking that modern Germany is a perfect illustration of nation rebuilding done right. This was a country that was ruled — and ruined — by a brutal, murderous, genocidal dictator. It was then destroyed by war. Yet look at it now. If the Americans could do something like this in Iraq then one would feel better about it. But in fact their efforts post-Iraq-war are pathetically feeble compared with the effort that went in to rebuilding Germany. That may be partly because the middle East is a far more alien place to Americans than was post-war Germany. (After all, many Americans have their family roots in Germany.) But it’s also partly due to the impoverishment of the Bushies’ vision, and the poor calibre of their people. Just think of comparing anyone in the Bush Administration to General George Marshall or Harry Truman. Or Dean Acheson. Or George Kennan. Or, for that matter, even John Kenneth Galbraith.

One thing I simply had to do. I walked down Friedrichstrasse to Checkpoint Charlie, which was one of the frightening places of my boyhood, because of what it portended for all of us.

This was the flashpoint which could have ignited the war that would have incinerated our planet. For me, growing up in a society without television and hearing about it only on the radio, the place had an eerie, creepy fascination. And now, after walking a few blocks, here it is:

Odd to think that this was once where East met West in a stolid, imbecilic stand-off (much like the one that still exists in Korea). Now I can stand there and look both ways — East…

And West…

Needless to say, the place is now a tourist trap. There are stalls selling Russian officers’ caps and Soviet medals and insignia.

Thus do we make tourist trophies out of emblems for which people once died and were killed. There’s also a Museum of the Wall which I’d like to have visited but couldn’t because I ran out of time.

And here’s a funny thing: it was on this day (June 26) in 1963 that Jack Kennedy went to Checkpoint Charlie and made that famous speech with the phrase “Ich Bin Ein Berliner”. He made the speech at the Brandenburg Gate, but the East Germans had put up huge red banners which blocked his view into East Berlin. At Checkpoint Charlie, however, he was able, like me, to look East.

I want to go back to Berlin again, to spend some proper time there, go to the Opera and museums and churches and sit in cafes. For, whether Jacques Chirac and Tony Blair like it or not, this city is now the heart of the new Europe.

BBC goes the whole hog

Every bit of content on the enormous BBC website is now accessible through syndicated RSS feeds, and can easily be incorporated in weblogs. A list of the new feeds can be found here. Dave Winer writes: “This is a milestone in the world of open syndication on the Internet. I can’t recall a day when so much great content came on line. Bravo BBC.” Amen to that.

Blogging goes mainstream in Britain?

Well, well. Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme — required listening for all Britain’s chattering classes — had an item on Blogging today. It was based round a discussion between Cory Doctorow and a woman from Handbag.com whose name I didn’t catch. Overall, it was quite an illuminating item — for a mainstream media outlet anyway — though the lady from Handbag trotted out the hoary old objection about ‘quality’ — i.e. that one has to be ‘careful’ about what one reads on sites that are not professionally edited. Hmmm… Given the garbage that is regularly passed by ‘professionally edited’ outlets (e.g. Britain’s tabloids, Fox TV), I think on the whole Everyman Blogger has a lot to recommend him.

Illegal-art.org

Inspired project. Quote:

“The laws governing “intellectual property” have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork–as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s–will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed.

The irony here couldn’t be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it.

The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the “degenerate art” of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court.

Loaded with gray areas, intellectual property law inevitably has a silencing effect, discouraging the creation of new works.

Should artists be allowed to use copyrighted materials? Where do the First Amendment and “intellectual property” law collide? What is art’s future if the current laws are allowed to stand? Stay Free! considers these questions and others in our multimedia program”

And now for something complete different… corporate blogging

Seems to me a contradiction in terms. Blogging is a personal activity (though I can understand project teams having a collective Blog). But the NYT is adamant that corporate executives “are beginning to participate in an activity once thought to be the preserve of technology geeks and political partisans.

Executives are beginning to blog.”

Hmmm… The first corporate Blog cited looks pretty awkward. It’s written by the CEO of a conference-organising firm and suggests that he can’t quite disentangle his personal thoughts from his CEO-think. Another example is written by a PR executive, and the third is Tim O’Reilly’s wonderful Blog, which doesn’t really count because although Tim runs a terrific company, in spirit he’s a geek.

Pop-up windows and serendipity

I hate pop-ups — and my web browser (Safari) blocks them. But today I was using Mozilla on Linux and this picture

popped up. It’s an Irish landscape which I recognise from my childhood, but I cannot for the life of me recall where it is. Sigh.

Peter Cochrane on spam
From a recent column.

“Averaging a spread of recently published surveys, it seems that:

– 40 per cent of us receive more than 100 spam emails a week

– 20 per cent really object to spam

– 80 per cent with children worry even more about spam

– 40 per cent worry about pornography

– 50 per cent are really irritated about wasting time deleting spam

– 50 per cent don?t use spam filters

– The Nigerian banking scam is now the second largest industry in that country

If spam continues to grow at its present rate it will totally dominate by 2004 and stands a good chance of bringing down the entire internet through overload.

I think it is up to individuals, companies, ISPs and network providers to join forces to spam the spammers.

This column was dictated after deleting 13 unsolicited emails. The tape was then handed to my secretary and typed up on her Apple G4 laptop. It appeared on my screen four hours later via a cable modem link. I revised it over breakfast on the Ipswich to London train and despatched it to silicon.com from Liverpool Street Station using my 2.5G mobile. ”

The Iraqi Quagmire

Sobering piece by Scott Rosenberg. Quote:

Back in March, on the eve of war, I quoted one knowledgeable observer’s predictions:

In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory.

That’s pretty much the way it’s gone. This analysis from the New York Times’ Michael Gordon outlines the shape of the guerrilla war we are now locked in, in which each day’s news brings another report of an ambush or an attack, another dead American soldier, another reprisal against some Baathist holdout, another batch of Iraqis wounded or killed.

The warmongering crowd sneered at those who cautioned of this likelihood; we were lily-livered traitors whose use of the word “quagmire” was lampooned as a ludicrous artifact of the Vietnam era. Then consider this quote which appeared in a dispatch from the Times’ Steven Lee Myers, who appears to have spent enough time with the troops he is covering to win their trust:

“You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home,” Pfc. Matthew C. O’Dell, an infantryman in Sergeant Betancourt’s platoon, said as he stood guard on Tuesday. “Tell him to come spend a night in our building.”