Uncategorized

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The blogging canvas

There’s something about blogging – I’m not quite happy with the canvas, with the medium. I write mostly for myself, but am drawn to the public quality of blogging, in a similar way perhaps that writers and artists are drawn to do their work in corner cafes. But, with all of that, the problem is that you write a post. Then you put it up. And there it is. On a pedestal that you’re not really sure about, or whether it fits. To go back and make changes seems somehow dishonest. Yet that’s what I feel like doing. And the medium doesn’t seem to suit that. Anyone who is going to read a posting will probably see only the first iteration anyway. And the blogging software is clunky. You go into a text editor, then look at it as it shows up on the page. I would like the process to be totally different. Words would appear in the blog as I’m writing them. Then I would go back and change them – half a minute or a year later. I’d look at the screen, change a word here or there, or scrap a whole paragraph. Of course, it’s not necessary or worthwhile to do that with most compositions; and many of them are no longer important a little while after they have been written. But not everything about a blog should be linear and fixed to a calendar.

How social networks ought to work

Note: this posting is still a work in progress

I’m tired of the multiple services through which we connect to people, and tired too of closed garden monopolies like facebook. It would be better if there were a single way to post our profiles and messages somewhere on the web, and for these to show up in whatever network we chose to view them: comments too would show up with the original post. There wouldn’t be a need to join new services unless we wanted to do so, and we wouldn’t need to fake interest and take membership in a certain network in order to find our friends. The appearance of our profile and postings on a given network would be up to our friends. Networks would be windows on the entire people web.

Friendfeed partly embodies this concept in its “imaginary friend” feature, though I have never really worked with this. The problem on friendfeed is that it is possible to add imaginary friends just one at a time. There is a posting on the subject of importing imaginary friends here. For Twitter Friends, some ingenious person has created an automatic script that imports all Twitter friends who are not already on Friendfeed: http://huddledmasses.org/convert-twitter-users-into-friendfeed-imaginary-friends/. I can’t use that, since it works only on Windows and Internet Explorer.

Besides FriendFeed, it is possible to use other aggregators – though usually only for the main services. There is AOL Lifestream (formerly socialthing), Brizzly, Threadsy (which also does email), the Flock browser – and many others. It will be interesting to see if Google Buzz begins to add more services besides the few that it already offers.

The aggregation solution actually solves only one side of the problem.  In order to pull in friends, you still need to join networks.  In a way, it would be better if we were back in the era before social networks and everyone added their content to blogs (as I am doing now). 

There’s another related issue that there is a certain meaning to the communities in which our friends “live”.  In writing, they have in mind their network of people that cohabit their social network.  Kurt Starnes talks about this in a recent blog post “Going native in the age of aggregation“.

We are often not interested in every aspect of our friends’ activity on the web. We are interested to the extent that their interests overlap our own. We may follow a friend on Facebook due to a similar interest in social issues, but be dismayed to find that the majority of their comments are about family life. In conventional blogging, it is possible to solve this problem by assigning categories or tags to our postings. Then it should be possible to subscribe to an RSS feed on a certain topic. In Social networks, it is possible to join groups, subscribe to rooms, or create separate Twitter accounts, but most people are not very methodical about compartmentalizing their web activities. Perhaps in the future the Semantic web will find solutions to this.

Right now, if I want to follow a friend’s activities on the web, there is no easy way to do so without visiting each of the networks in which s/he is engaged. Often people replicate the same content across multiple networks, though inconsistently. If I were able to centralize all of their postings in one place, such as by using Friendfeed, I would probably end up with multiple identical postings. The best is if they are using a well managed lifestreaming service, which brings together the many separate threads of their web activity. Then it would be possible to obtain an RSS feed of that page. But RSS feeds do not permit much interaction with the original content.

Happy so far with Linux Mint

It’s 10 days since I uninstalled Windows 7 RC from my laptop and replaced it with Mint, a Ubuntu derivative, and so far I’m happy. I was happy enough also with Windows 7. I think it’s a great operating system, and the best Microsoft has produced so far. But to continue using it – according to Microsoft – I would have had to uninstall the release candidate version and replace it with a new version. i.e., it would not have been possible simply to update Windows. And then there’s the cost. I hate “crippleware” – software in which some features have been deliberately disabled, but would also have been unwilling to pay the high price Microsoft wants for its full version.

So I installed Linux Mint. It’s based on Ubuntu, but is designed rather attractively by its Irish developer. The graphical user interface is closer to Windows Vista, though it has a flavor of its own (mint flavor I suppose). Installation was very easy, and I haven’t been forced to do anything terribly complicated to get things working as I like. There was a small problem with the wifi – it worked but kept cutting out. In a forum, someone suggested replacing the native Ubuntu wifi handler with Gnome’s WICD. I did that, and it worked fine.

I also fiddled a little with the fonts. Before downloading MS core fonts (like Arial, Times New Roman, etc), there was a problem with some browser fonts – like Arabic – being over bold. After installing the Windows core fonts, this made the system fonts a little gritty, so I took a backward step and brought the system fonts back to normal. Now all my fonts are at least as beautiful as in Windows. They are actually a little nicer.

I also had a little problem with my 2 Brother inkjet printers (DCP 130C at work, DCP 150C at home). Installing the files from Ubuntu’s repositories worked, but then I discovered the margins were off. (Tip: to check that, get OpenOffice to print a page border.) So I downloaded the Linux drivers from Brother’s website instead. I also installed the scanner drivers, since these printers are multifunction devices. It was a joy to be able to scan directly to PDF again, using gscan2pdf.

The best thing about the change to Mint is how zippy my machine has suddenly become. I had gotten used to the sluggishness of Windows 7. And now even a heavy program like OpenOffice is opening almost instantaneously. The same is true of file viewers, browsers, graphics programs, etc. The only unfortunate thing I have noticed is that music slurs a little when I’m doing heavy file operations like copying directories back and forth between the computer and an external hard drive.

Speaking of which, it’s always dangerous to move files off a comptuter in order to reformat it. I lost a number of files due to Windows 7’s Libraries feature. I somehow failed to copy every directory in the library. Moral: when backing up files, it is better to do so from native directories, ignoring Windows 7 Library shortcuts.

Every few months I dither between Windows and Linux – but every time I return to Linux it has gotten a little better. And Mint is just super! The change was worthwhile.

Usablelogin.net/.com

There’s a service on the web known as Usablelogin.com, which provides a purportedly safe login system for any of those scores of web services that we eagerly sign up for – often using the same password for all of them. Originally, like many services we first hear about on readwriteweb or mashable, Usablelogin was a beta service for which one had to make a special request – and I may have done so.

This morning I received an email from Usablelogin.net, which passed through Gmail’s filters to my inbox:

[Update: The email appears to be genuine and actually originate from Usablelogin.com! – see comments]

Dear Beta Tester,

Thanks for your interest in testing UsableLogin. This is our private “Beta” release, and you’re one of the very first to try it out!
UsableLogin is a web service that lets you log in securely to your favorite websites with one codeword.

Get going in three easy steps — it only takes a few minutes.

1. Click the link below to sign up for your account:
https://dashboard.usablelogin.net/invitation?invitation_code=7xxxxxx [changed]

2. Download the extension (you’ll need Firefox 3 or later).

3. Add your favorite sites! Your UsableLogin box will appear on the sites you add, letting you log in with one codeword.

Send your questions and comments to us by visiting https://dashboard.usablelogin.net/bug_report.

Thanks again for helping us! We’re looking forward to hearing from you soon,

— Your Friends at Usable Security Systems

Enough said.

Two afternoons

Yesterday afternoon, just after I’d got on my shoes to go for a walk with Yonatan, I heard him say, “What’s going on – are those squatters (Yotam and his girlfriend) destroying the house? – toilet’s blocked! He dashed off to the other loo and I went to investigate. The toilet bowl was full almost to the rim. I waited till it drained a little, got the rubber plunger and flushed again. Got up a good pumping motion.

Within a minute, things started to happen. A brown liquid began to ooze up into the bathtub, and foul smelling sewer water, blobbed with turds and pulped toilet paper burst up through the floor grate, flooding the entire bathroom. And it continued to surge up. If it hadn’t been for the slight sill at the bathroom door, the brown liquid would have continued to push through the house. I gazed at what was happening, a little stunned. It was truly an awful sight. I told Yonatan, I might not be coming for a walk after all.

Unblocking the sewer outside was easier than expected. Very quickly I found and extracted the tree roots that had invaded it. But cleaning up the bathroom was a quite a bit harder. That involved wading into ground zero and getting all that brown stuff down back down where it had come from. Within a couple of hours, the bathroom was cleaner and sweeter smelling than it had been before the incident.

This afternoon, I really did manage to go out for a walk. Just before the sun went down, I strode out of the village with the dog. The woods were full of flowers. The undergrowth was much higher than it had been a few days ago, and I trampled through green leaves that were already knee high. I was listening to shuffle music on my ipod. A lovely selection of songs followed one another, just by chance. When U2’s Miss Sarajevo came on, with Luciano Pavarotti’s aria in the middle, I couldn’t help thinking that music is something actually divine. It’s deeply spiritual, even when the artist himself doesn’t know it. And Miss Sarajevo – a song written to capture the spirit of a town in the midst of a cruel war – is simply sublime. Soulful music seems to rise up most defiantly where inhumanity is at its ugliest.