I’ve been mucking around once-again with terminal programs; trying to see if I can make this an environment in which I really feel at home. I remember the first time that I used MS Windows (3.1 or 3.11, I think) and how strange it was to get used to a mouse. Till that time I’d been using WordPerfect for DOS, and sometimes Einstein and similar programs. I never imagined I might want to return to that, and now it’s quite hard to go back.

My motivation is not nostalgia, but the realization that terminal programs offer greater freedom and promise a more distraction-free environment. I could manage with simpler hardware and software. My computing environment would depend much less upon the vagaries and advances in hardware, software and web services. It’s a kind of adventure. In text-based computing there is a greater uniformity in what is presented on the screen. The mouse is superannuated, impressive hardware specs and graphics power become redundant. The screen is clutter free and quiet. I have no doubt that once the adjustments have been made, this would be a much more productive environment.

So I’ve been making experiments again with Mutt as my mail reader, and Emacs as my text editor. There are programs like ttytter (for Twitter) and MC (a wonderful filemanager). I’m currently trying out the Guake terminal, whereby one flips in and out of a full-screen terminal with the F12 key. Different programs can be opened in different tabs.

The main difficulty in working in the terminal is coping with panic attacks when suddenly stumped about how to do stuff at a very basic level. For instance, I’m relatively comfortable already with all the main Mutt keystrokes. But the need to store and retrieve files and messages opens up whole new areas of uncertainty and frustration. This kind of computing requires skills which grow less and less necessary in a world dominated by IOS devices and intuitive software. And indeed, an alternative simplicity can be obtained by purchasing a tablet or a Chromebook, where there is no need to deal with the operating system. But I find that to be somewhat limiting, a surrender of control. Opensource computing is about retaining control over one’s working environment, rather than being subject to limitations that are imposed by large companies.

I feel that a cleaner, simpler, freer computing environment matches the yearnings of my spirit towards minimalism, detachment from consumerism and reduced preoccupation with “things”. But I’m not sure yet. It’s still an experiment.

I’d love to like Google Plus Pages, but it is, at the time of writing, still poorly developed and inflexible.

I’m first of all happy that Google Plus finally became available for our Google Apps for Education domain. That’s quite recent. Previously Google made it available only to Apps for Education college and university domains. Finally they understood that this was illogical and unworkable because Google Plus is becoming so deeply ingrained in their products, and anyway it is possible for Apps administrators to limit usage in accordance with Google Plus age restrictions (14+).

But the change to Google Plus has been a step backwards for organizations, particularly with regard to photo albums. Picasaweb galleries could formerly be given an organizational name. Now under Google Plus, the gallery is titled after the user. That’s awkward for a company or an organization, and one would like to move the gallery to a Google Plus page. But that too is impractical. The major and insurmountable difficulty, is that it would be impossible or impractical to move all previous albums to a Google Plus page, since every album in the gallery would receive the current date. And the current date is unalterable. Only the photos in an album can be reordered. The albums themselves cannot be reordered. Google Plus photo albums are linked to posts, which might be fine. But dates for posts are also uneditable. That if one uploads photos for today’s important event, but then wants to go back and upload photos for an event that occurred a week ago or last month? Last month’s photos will be at the top.

There are further limitations. Google Plus Page photo albums are not based on Picasaweb. Picasaweb enabled fine tuning of the albums, and allowed also for an album description. These features are not there under Google Plus. Finally, the only way to upload photos to a Google Plus page is via the web interface. It cannot be handled by Google’s successful desktop application Picasa, for example. Google does not provide, as in Picasaweb, cut-and-paste code snippets for linking to the album, or embedding photos or slideshows – though all of this may still be possible with a little hacking.

For all of these reasons, I’m wondering whether to abandon Google entirely for my organization’s web archive, and move all the photos back to our web site. Formerly Google’s service provided a nice repository. I would store all the photos on Picasaweb, and embed a slideshow when posting a new article on our site. Now that’s less convenient.

Twitter brings me news of many things. This evening I finally explored what was all this about “Gangnam Style”, words that I’d seen repeated numerous times, and discovered the phenomenon of K-pop. If I were the right age and had an ear to other kinds of media, or had teenage kids in the house, I certainly wouldn’t need Twitter to find out about that, but it’s good that I haven’t insulated myself completely. I watched a couple of catchy youtube clips and satisfied my curiosity. It isn’t something I’d go in for, but it’s refreshing to re-discover that Europeans and Americans no longer dominate world popular culture as strongly as they once did.

Then there was David Shulman’s amazing article in the New York Review of Books about kudiyattam, an epic Kerala drama form, which is about as far as you can get from K-pop. It’s a disappearing genre in which plays can last 150 hours and go on for weeks. This summer, thanks to help from the Hebrew University and the Rothschild Foundation – but probably thanks mostly to Shulman – that’s exactly what happened. A 29-day play that hadn’t been staged for two generations was revived and staged for a group of Sanskrit and Malayalam students.

Says Shulman: “Sitting through a play that lasts 130 hours might sound a bit exhausting, and at times, of course, one’s attention wanders. There were moments when I, like others, would fall asleep to the hypnotic beat of the mizhavu drums and wake minutes later to a world of bewildering, even outlandish, color and movement. Still, this performance changed my life and, given a few hours, I could even tell you how. I doubt that I’ll ever again have the opportunity to give myself entirely to a month-long performance that inexorably builds up to a climax of truly unimaginable power.”

Three summers ago, I met him at the airport on a similar trip out to Kerala. We were going to Chennai and he, with a group of students to Kochi. And at the end of the journey we happened to meet again at Amman airport. I’m sorry in a way that I didn’t keep up my Sanskrit studies and take part in such adventures. But I’m happy that David Shulman is there, helping to keep alive the culture of Andhra and Kerala, when he’s not braving the tear gas of the army and violence of settlers, on expeditions to West Bank villages.

This evening attended a talk in the village by Meron Benvenisti on his new book, which, in the current reality seemed like a form of escapism. (I wonder how many people died in Gaza while he was speaking?) Benvenisti told how his experiences and perception of regional realities had led him to believe that there is no chance for Israelis and Palestinians to live separately, and that therefore they will need to learn to live together. He says that he doesn’t make prescriptions about how that may happen: the job of a writer, according to him, is mainly to ask questions and pose dilemmas for the reader to try to deal with.

In Gaza, Israel continues to pound the residents. Today it moved away from its so-called precision strikes, with a result that around 26 people were killed, including many children. It proceeds with this barbarism thanks to a warm mantle of world support – particularly from the White House. At the same time, it apparently knows that it won’t get the leeway to continue like this for very long before the tide of world opinion turns against it. Still, with all those troops on the border – more than in the Cast Lead campaign four years ago – it wouldn’t take very much to spur them into a ground invasion. Perhaps a direct hit that scrores a few casualties would be enough. Beyond human intelligence, or lack of it, much about warfare is chance; like the trajectories of Hamas’s wayward rockets. Some of these, according to the army, are actually duds: they’ve been stripped of their payloads in order to give them a longer range. “They’re basically pipes,” said one official. So Israeli and American taxpayers are spending $50,000 a shot to knock hollow pipes out of the sky.

No Israeli really believes that this military campaign will produce anything substantial. So whereas the human toll and the risks are great, the possible tangible benefits are few. Israel is spending millions and risking a great deal in order to win a bit of quiet. And it could have obtained that quiet more successfully by other and cheaper means.

There’s something about email that induces dread.  Logging into it I experience a kind of knot in my chest – a heavy feeling of not knowing how to start and then where to continue.  There’s just so much of it, and it keeps coming.  Sometimes it brings complex tasks and other times it’s just stuff that needs to be deleted.

I’m familiar with the GTD system, and have experimented with many different tools.  Recently I’ve gone back to ActiveInbox, but also tried IQTELL, a great system currently in beta. But with all these systems, email remains a chore.  It’s as if the medium itself gets in the way.

I could imagine a transformation of email that turns it into something like fun. Ways of making it flow more easily, and maybe giving small rewards.  Perhaps there should be a pie chart in the corner showing that you’ve completed 40% of your mail.  Or a way of changing it into a kind of game; a fight with a dragon or a treasure hunt.  Silly, I know.

I’ve been catching up on my tech reading after the summer. In particular, I’ve been interested to see some developments regarding social networks. First of all, Twitter has been busy restricting use of its API and commercializing its operations. In parallel, a new social network called app.net has started up, based on a subscription $50 per year model. (I think I like Pinboard’s model better.) Meanwhile, the Diaspora team have retired and turned development over to the community. Despite their hype, it looks like they have thrown in the towel. Friendica too, headed by Mike MacGirvin, has declared defeat – at least of the original distributed model – due to a) lack of popularity and b) the trend towards restrictive APIs of other networks which limit interoperability. Status.net and its free hosted identi.ca server seem to be continuing. It has everything that app.net can offer. Its code is already developed, the service is up and running, and it is free. In some ways, it works better than Twitter. With its mixture of free open source packages and paid services, Status.net operates in a similar way to the proven model of Automattic / WordPress.

The main challenge of all of these networks is to obtain a large-enough user base. It’s as if there is only room (outside of niche markets) for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Tumblr, and a couple of others. Maybe MacGirvin is right in maintaining that the distributed model will eventually succeed.

Yet somehow the case reminds me of instant messaging. In the 1990s there were several competing services and user complaints about their lack of interoperability. A few companies tried to create a catch-all basket for the various services. AOL and others tried to block them. Now, nobody seems to care any more. People subscribe to multiple services and manage as best they can. Similarly, with the social networks, people cross-post, or share in whatever service they have open at the time. They suffer the inconveniences of advertizing, and of algorithms that hide their content, and adopt a cavalier attitude towards privacy. It’s all very hit-and-miss. Experience shows that there is a greater likelihood that people will live with the failings of their networks than that they will vote for a free distributed universal standard.

With the TENT protocol – another innovative idea to emerge this summer – there has been some progress on another front towards such a standard. My tech knowledge is not sufficient to understand what advantage the adoption of such a protocol could give over the existing protocols employed by services like Friendica and Status.net.

My current top fantasy:  Taliban engineers crack the codes of American drones and succeed in re-directing them towards American military installations.  Or Palestinian engineers do the same and turn around Israeli drones to attack the bases that send them.

I hope they do; wish they’ll succeed:  not out of some mad sympathy for violent means or causes, but because the moment this happens, drones will cease to be an effective weapon.  The risks in deploying them will be too great.  And that will be one less 21st century weapon of doom to worry about.

We are only at the beginning of the drone warfare era, but already what was till recently science fiction has become an effective weapon.  We know that scientists are working on insect-sized micro-drones, and can only imagine what horrors await us in the not-too-far-distant future.

Just as the threat of mutual destruction became the best protection against nuclear warfare, we may have to come up with new strategies to make the use of new weapons technologies ineffectual.

Frank Herbert in the Dune books foresaw ways in which humankind may take a step backward, with the Butlerian Jihad – a huge revolt against “thinking machines” that saves them from destruction.  Similarly, energy shields are outlawed, due to the explosive effect of their interaction with lasguns.

What we really need is a change in consciousness.  It isn’t just a problem that science fiction writers predict a perpetuation of current human conflicts into future centuries, but that we are currently spending billions on horror-technologies that aim to darken our lives.

UPDATE: (BBC)

Researchers use spoofing to ‘hack’ into a flying drone

29 June 2012 Last updated at 10:54 GMT

“…But the big worry is – it also means that it wouldn’t be too hard for [a very skilled person] to work out how to un-encrypt military drones and spoof them, and that could be extremely dangerous because they could turn them on the wrong people.”