Anotherku

Sorry for all this;
I’ve been busy all weekend.
This is a cop out.

Prideku

Pride is effing great.
Just be sure to bring sunscreen.
Ow. Ow ee oo ow.

What My Belt and My Operation System Have In Common

They can never be declared “finished.”

This one time, I was hanging out in #freeculture. I was thinking about installing the latest version of Songbird. I had installed an early version awhile ago, and I remembered it being buggy and lacking key features. So I asked the people of #freeculture, “is Songbird finished?” Someone (I don’t remember who) responded, “software can be finished?”

This is a really cool idea, and it’s one that Free Software embraces. It’s somewhat obvious that software could always be better–more useful features could be added, bugs could be fixed, and compatibility with more pieces of hardware and software could be added. With proprietary software, the people distributing it have the power to declare that it is finished. They can simply refuse to continue to develop it, and because they are the only ones who can legally do so, development stops and evolution of the software ends. With Free Software, even if a group of developers dissolves or a company becomes bankrupt, the public has the freedom to continue to develop and re-distribute the software. Free Software cannot be killed, and it cannot be definitively declared finished.

I made my belt out of duct tape. As with anything else made out of duct tape, it eventually starts to stretch or peel. When that happens, I add more duct tape. At one point, I added strips of white on top of the black for a cool zebra effect. When the space between notches rips and the holes get too big, I just add a couple new layers of duct tape and then cut new notches. If my belt were made out of leather, I wouldn’t be able to easily add or subtract parts without “ruining” it.

My duct tape artwork is significantly different from my ceramic sculpture in this way. When I make a sculpture out of clay, I let it dry, fire it, glaze it, and fire it again, and then it’s done. It has been declared finished, and its form is fixed. I can’t decide later that I want to add parts or take parts away. If the handle breaks off a teapot, any repair work will stand out against the rest of the piece, which is “finished.”

With my duct tape belt (and my other duct tape artwork), the material medium is culturally understood as a tool for repairs, especially quick fixes. Thus, the idea of a construction made entirely of said material is weirdly recursive and cool. Similarly, many members of the Free Software community use the term “hacking” to refer generally to “coding” and sometimes any sort of “working” or “doing.” A common understanding of the noun form, “hack,” is something like “a quick and dirty fix.” A “hack” is the duct tape of coding.

I have the power to adapt and fix and remix my belt–in fact, by the very nature of its construction, it encourages me to do so. The same goes for my operating system, GNU/Linux. This is empowering.

Listom.at (Formerly Lyst) Source Now Available

It’s ugly, poorly documented, and without version control. But now it’s free to the world.

Listom.at

Yet Another Marathon

I will post at least one thing on this blog every day, for at least the next 7 days.

Whether you like it or not.

So I Was Walking Down the Street, Right?

And there was this woman in front of me. Sorta short and probably middle-aged. Suddenly she starts doing this little hobble thing to pick up speed. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I walk aggressively quickly, so I was probably trying to pass her at the time. She tries not to let on, but she’s kind of looking every time we pass a set of windows so she can see how close I am without looking over her shoulders. She’s obviously straining herself to put this awkward little hop in her step so that she can stay in front of me. It’s in a less-than-busy area, but nonetheless we’re passing a couple storefronts per block, and I notice one or two other pedestrians.

At first, I’m sad. I want to say, “relax, lady, I’m not going to hurt you.” But I worry that’ll just scare her more. Or she’ll whip out her pepper spray on me. Literally, I’m afraid that if I address her, she’ll either scream, sprint off, or start putting her free trial self-defense lesson to work.

Then I start getting annoyed. At this point, I’ve slowed my pace just a tiny bit, she’s still struggling, and every time i speed up she speeds up too. I try going further to either of the sidewalk, but she keeps nervously hobbling along and making sure to stay in front of me. I’m offended that she’s read me as a threat. How could I possibly have looked threatening, with my stonewash skinny jeans and bright purple american apparel hoodie (hood down, mind you). I’m incredibly skinny, and kind of pimpley. I was carrying a burger, eating as I walked. Perhaps it was my mohawk (well, more of a “dirty hawk”)? Or just my quick pace? Maybe she’s just had a bad experience, perhaps involving someone who looked something like me? Certainly the fact that I’m male had something to do with it.

Either way, I’m pissed off that this lady has obviously passed some sort of judgement on me, and I really don’t feel like slowing down (again, if you know me personally, you’ve probably noticed this). I still kind of feel bad that she’s scared, and she’s obviously having trouble keeping up the pace, but at the same time, part of me is saying “That’s what you get for accusing me of being a predator. Not my problem you’re being paranoid and judgmental.”

Eventually, she takes a sharp turn to go inside some little liquor store or something.

I’m still not sure what to make of this. I’m still kind of angry at her, but I also feel bad that I scared her. I make a point of not flaunting my masculinity and I try to subvert my male privilege, yet this still happened. Welcome to the city?

Quickie Idea: Crowdsource Typo-Correction on Blogs

Here’s what it looks like:

Visitor notices a typo in a blog post. Luckily, there is a “correct typo” button, probably near the “comment” button. She clicks it. She sees the same “edit post” interface as I do when I edit posts. Or, better yet, Ajax magic is employed to turn the body of the post into a stylized textarea, so that the user doesn’t have to translate the position of the error in the rendered post into the position of the error in a marked-up text. Either way, one captcha and one “submit” later, I get an email that includes the output of a diff on the post and the updated post that the user submitted (in other words, i’m told specifically what was changed). I can either click a link to approve or submit the change in my web browser, or i can simply reply to the message with “yes” or “no.”

Someone write this wordpress extension now plz. kthxbai.

Rough Idea Re: Free Network Services: Massive Abstraction Layer for Personal Servers

The “thing” in FLOSS right now is Free Network Services, and for good reason–proprietary network services are a serious threat to privacy and overall computing autonomy (especially network and data portability and control).

My idea is for a chunk of FLOSS built specifically for personal servers that abstracts the cumbersome process of installing and configuring (and updating or otherwise managing) individual network/web applications, probably through a simple, password-protected web interface. For example:

I want to run a local laconica install on my personal server. I go to parkerserver.com and log in. Similarly to how i would aptitude install from ubuntu, or (more closely) how i would (as of more recent versions) install a new extension to my wordpress blog, I search for packages whose name match “laconica.” Then I click install.

Same for instantiating a blog, a wiki, a web-based rss reader… hopefully even email hosting and webmail. Installing wordpress is extremely simple as it is (editor’s note: parker loves wordpress), but if the piece of software that i’m imagining could make available in a standard format some config options (database login credentials, port config, server type, other server software/web apps installed), then installing wordpress could literally be a question of pressing a button, and the entire install process, including database config, etc, could all be abstracted. Also, the software should be able to itself be updated through its own web ui (seems crazy, but wordpress does this).

Next step: What if this shipped with a specialized gnu/linux distro (maybe Ubuntu for maximum user-friendliness or gNewSense for maximum freedom)? The idea is that you buy a cheapo tower on ebay with no OS installed, pop in an install CD, and then you’re ready to go. Now, this initial config will necessarily be somewhat painful. The software could try to automatically detect network topography and carefully walk the user through stuff like port forwarding… but only so much of this process can be automated. Nonetheless we can get close. Ubuntu Server ships with apache, mysql, php, etc, and it would probably be trivial to add this extra package.

Also, in terms of scalability as well as software freedom, it’s probably a good idea to make information available to the user about logging in remotely. Perhaps ssh, or perhaps just remote desktop … i’m not sure whether or not a normal gui should be installed on the machine… i’m imagining that one shouldn’t be necessary if the web-accessible front-end is robust enough, and it’s easy enough to get the server online and keep it online (probably the weakest link… again, this has to do with network topography). In fact, if other OS tasks, like installing packages, rebooting the server, rebooting the operating system, configuring user accounts and SSH/SFTP/FTP, etc could all be accomplished from an inviting web interface, operating a personal server and running your own network services would seem like a much less daunting task.

Lyst: Hopefully Something Useful Soon

Introducing: Lyst
This has been a little side project for a while. I kind of gave up on it for a bit when I realized that it had already been done over at instapaper.com.

But recently I’ve been thinking about all the cool stuff that’s going on with Free Network Services like laconica. This project could still prove useful if it’s built as a Free Network Service. The Free alternative to instapaper. Plus I’m sure I could think up some cool features that instapaper doesn’t have

So I want to turn this into a FLOSS project. I don’t really know what that entails. To start, I’m going to add a little “about” page and GPL the code very very soon (hopefully). From there, maybe it’s an svn repo, an project on sourceforge, and a wiki? I don’t really know, and to be honest I don’t mind handing this project off to someone else if she has more time to organize it and make it happen. I just want to see it happen.

Please contact me if you’re interested in helping out with this project.

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