March 2005 Archives

Is Dave Winer trolling, or is he genuinely as retarded as he appears?

Somebody (and I mean somebody that he would actually listen to, rather than somebody he would ignorantly disparage) needs to explain to him the myriad gaping flaws in these posts before any more of his readers get the false impression that his analogy has the slightest merit.

Scripting News has turned into a mouthpiece of FUD and abject idiocy. Very disappointing. It's reached the point where the only reason I read it is to keep an eye on which windmills Winer and his followers will tilt at next.

Dave, sometimes you are amusing, and sometimes you are interesting. Other times, you're just the enemy within. Stop, stop, stop hurting the Internet.

Alan Partridge commentates on the Boat Race (mp3, 850K, from On the Hour)

As a footnote to the Google Autolink brouhaha (previously blogged about here), I recommend listening to this 48-minute audio debate from IT Conversations. It's downloadable for free in various formats, and features Cory Doctorow (EFF, boingboing.net), Robert Scoble (MS) and Martin Schwimmer (Trademark Blog) arguing forcefully about Google's controversial link insertion feature.

A few comments:

• Although I've read their weblogs for a while, this is the first time I'd heard either Scoble or Doctorow, so it was interesting to put some voices to the names.

• No disrespect to him, but Scoble is better at blogging than he is at speaking. He didn't argue his case well, practically conceding the debate from the outset when he stated that AutoLink is not currently a bad thing. He seemed ill-at-ease and unprepared. Maybe somebody else would have been a better guest. (But not Dave Winer.)

• Doctorow, on the other hand, is a fast, aggressive debater and won this one easily (Scoble admits it). It made me realise how fortunate the EFF are to have this guy as a spokesperson on their team.

• One of Scoble's recurring tactics was to try to present the disagreement between the two as the differing perspectives of a 'user' (Doctorow) and a 'content guy' (Scoble). Since Cory has a popular website, numerous print articles and stories, and three published novels to his name, it was plainly ridiculous to imply that he's any less of a 'content guy' than Scoble.

• I may have imagined it, but towards the end it sounded like Scoble took a gratuitous (and quite bizarre) snipe at Firefox.

This audio show is the first of a new series called Sound Policy, and I'm looking forward to hearing what issues they might cover in the future... it's refreshing to hear intelligent people debating an issue in real-time that would normally just be a laggy to-and-fro of comments and trackbacks on websites.

I had an idea today. What if I could download a complete Wikipedia database snapshot -- the current versions of all 500,000 English articles -- and make a script to convert it to the text note format viewable by the iPod? I could make some use of the spare disc space that I can't seem to fill, and turn my iPod into a pocket encyclopedia. Ace!

Well, I hit the ground running. I started to grab the latest wikipedia snapshots and look at the things people had already done to convert these raw SQL table dumps into static, viewable content. I figured that my iPod's drive had more than enough free space (over 10GB) to store this amount of content. I looked at the basic markup that was available for use in these notes. And I knew that there was a 4 kilobyte size limit on note files, and that many articles would have to be split into several pages, but that it was possible to hyperlink between notes and so navigation around a multi-page entry would be a problem easily solved.

And then I found out that the iPod can only use a maximum of 1000 text notes.

Arse.

But, I tell you, this is a minor setback. Nothing will get between me and my pocket Wikipedia!

I'm testing whether Technorati is picking up my tags. Which means the inevitable test post.

Whoops. Where did the time go?

I bought and subscribed to City of Heroes for the UK launch, and have spent a substantial percentage of the last few weeks fighting bad guys in Paragon City. Unfortunately for me, the novelty has now started to wear off, exposing the game's stale innards. Like every other MMORPG, it's plagued by simplistic and repetitive gameplay, and success comes not from playing skilfully -- there is little skill involved -- but from devoting large amounts of time to the pursuit of levelling. It is rather fun, though, which for a time distracted me from the sensation of my brain slowly atrophying through the span of each session.

Negative as that may sound, there is actually much to be said in favour of CoH. Its gamer-friendly team mechanics, bustling urban setting, comic-inspired aesthetic, and regular content rollouts place it on a par with even the best of its competitors. And even though my superhero is undergoing a slight mid-life crisis, I'm not yet resigned to cancelling my account. My next billing date is in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to try to find a way to multitask the playing of CoH alongside some other, more mentally stimulating activity.

My first experiment will entail listening to an audiobook (or podcasts) while gaming. This sounds a little bizarre, but I think it might help. I would probably be a lot more enthusiastic about the game if instead of thinking at the end of a session that I spent a whole evening doing something fairly monotonous, I could say to myself "well, I got through 3 more chapters of A Short History of Nearly Everything... and I gained half a level."

Look for me in Paragon City... I'll be the superhero wearing white earphones and an expression of distant concentration.

LOS ANGELES (TRP) -- The world of sci-fi fandom was stunned into silence today with the news that, in an unprecedented assault on quality television, a group of three rich people of questionable taste has donated $3m US in an effort to save the cancelled television show Star Trek: Enterprise.

Millions of longtime Star Trek fans, many still celebrating the recent mercy killing of this latest cancerous taint on the name of the Roddenberry franchise, are now faced with the possibility that this and other extreme acts might force Paramount to concede to the terrorists' demands.

The perpetrators behind the funding, whom police and angry mobs are still attempting to identify, might be planning further acts of aggression. Police warned that they may be armed and are likely to appear 'rich but uncultured'. On Wednesday the front page of the FBI website carried a warning that suspects "should under no circumstances be approached by the public or argued with on Usenet".

"It's a war of competing ideologies", said Prof. Joshua Levin from M.I.T. "Whoever these contributors are, they do not understand our values, our morals, our desires. Their way of thinking is totally foreign to us." Approached on the campus, a group of vocal Star Trek fans was less conciliatory in tone. "I've been waiting for four years for this wet turd of a show to end," said one, "and if I ever find out who these three cruel bastards are, then they're going to get intestinally acquainted with my 16-inch ERTL model of Deep Space 9."

Many fear that the minority actions of those fighting for Enterprise will lead to extreme acts of retaliation. Indeed, shortly before this report went to press, a story broke on the wire services quoting unconfirmed reports that the dismembered remains of Connor Trinneer have been found in a dumpster on the Paramount backlot.

I guess I just don't understand the hysteria initiated by Dave Winer and others over Google's AutoLink technology. Their argument, as best I can summarise it, is that functionality at the client end that inserts additional links (map links over addresses, amazon links over ISBNs, etc.) into webpages is unethical, even evil, despite the fact that the process is user-triggered and never automatic. The opponents of this functionality believe that this changes the content itself, and that authors should be able to opt-out.

The slippery slope argument has been deployed more than a few times; perhaps people are unaware that malware that rewrites webpages has been around for years, and that it's much more self-serving and clandestine than Google's service, often not even betraying its own presence; it's difficult to imagine how any product of a legitimate company could get close to the genuinely nasty software that already exists in great numbers.

In a post that really gets to the core of the issue, Yoz Grahame describes his criteria for a well-behaved content transformation utility:

If a content-modifying function:

1. has a definition that is completely understood by the user
2. is only invocable at the user's request and in isolation (i.e. not automatically)
3. has an effect limited to the user who invoked it

... then it's entirely within the spirit of the Web, no matter what modification it performs. No exceptions.

Google Autolink qualifies, and Yoz thinks that makes it fine. I agree.

I don't recall ever making an agreement with any website owner that I would interpret and render your page code in a manner dictated to me. Once your HTML enters my computer, then as long as I don't republish any changes, it's fair game for me to munge, manipulate and corrupt as I see fit. If I want to replace every occurrence of the word 'Bush' with the word 'poopyhead', if I want to remove every banner ad so that I never see them, if I want to block popups and malicious JavaScript, then I can and I will. I'll change the presentation as I see fit, and do the same with the content. And I will make use of any third party software I choose to help me do these things.

None of these client-side transformations infringe the rights of content producers -- no matter how paranoid -- in any way. Your work isn't compromised simply because I have chosen to customise my view of it. What happens between my network socket and my web browser is my business, not yours.

If, as a web content producer, you have a problem with this, then a) I really think you might be in the wrong job/hobby, and b) I suggest that you stop offering your work for the time being and start developing DRM for webpages, so that you can ensure that your page is only ever viewed in its pristine, pixel-precise state... because all this crap about your HTML being 'sacrosanct' is antithetical to the spirit of the web.

(There are smart people on both sides of the argument, and of course there's a possibility that I'm missing something. So if you want to change my mind, then show or describe to me any transformation that you could make to your personal view of my site -- or a theoretical site I could own -- that would make me give a damn, and I will do a 180. And if you oppose AutoLink, go and sign the petition... at a measly 88 signatures at the time of writing, it's making the vocal look like a bit of a minority.)