wiredfool

Why not?

What if you threw an apocalypse and no one came? I mean, you really put you heart and soul into hyping the destruction of the universe, and no one noticed.

You’d do what you always do, go out, have a little champagne and toast the first day of the rest of your years.

Predictions for a new Millennium.

1. Purists will insist on celebrating it next year.
2. Pragmatists will celebrate it both years. (Like me)
3. Journalists both online and otherwise will engage in major futurist predictions and navel gazing. Roughly 1/10 of the predictions will be recognizably accurate. Navel gazers will end up annoying the rest of us.
4. The world will continue to surprise and dismay us, Surprise us of the variety and progress that can be made, dismay us with history version 3.0.
5. Freedom == prosperity. (Free speech, not free beer) Communites that become or remain free will be prosperous. The world is more free now than it has been since the dawn of civilization with the most dramatic changes occuring in the last century.
6. Humans have a non zero probablilty of wiping themselves out before the end of the next millennium. Rest assured that ultimately, we will be our own worst enemy. Give any species enough rope…
7. The earth will still be here a millennium from now.

So I ask for forgiveness for the past, and likewise grant forgiveness to those who ask. Lets not visit the sins of the father any more, but rather concentrate on the possibilities of the present. Be vigilant of evil, appreciative of art, and protective of freedom. And hope that we don’t repeat too many mistakes of history.

I should say up front that my politics are all over the map. I’m a financial conservative, but socially, I’m rather liberal. Perhaps that describes a libertarian philosophy. I wouldn’t be surprised if my views are actually set out in some book somewhere, I just haven’t found it yet. I read three newspapers regularly, The Wall Street Journal, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and The Stranger (a local alternative weekly). Each paper has its point, although the PI’s point may lie somewhere in the comics section. I should also mention that I’ve read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged recently.

If we’re worried about the WTO destroying the world, we should think again. More precisely, we should think about where this country is leading.

We’re worried about the envrionment when the average passenger vehicle weight has risen since the gas crisis of the 70’s. The bloated 4 door land yacht has been replaced with bloated jacked up 4wd land yachts. We have soccer moms driving 3 and a half ton trucks. Ford has just came out with a SUV so big that the first person to get one in Oklahoma peeled the roof off going into their garage.

We’re worried about the effects of big business, yet we are currently participating in the year end orgy of consumerisim called the “Christmas Buying Season”. Angels we have Heard on High, Tell us to go out and BUY.

We’re worried about the WTO infringing on our sovereignty. We, as a people, are voluntarily ceeding our sovereignty every time there’s an election and someone doesn’t vote. We lose sovereignty every time that we hold an election for an uninformed electorate. And we’re worried about a global body that when they do finally agree on something, we ignore them anyway. Oh yeah, and by the way, we’d like them to impose labor and major envriomental laws on the developing countries. It’s a poor weapon that can’t point both ways.

Friends, the WTO is following us. It’s being pushed by the desire for global trade, but there’s one engine that has been desiring global trade these last couple of years, the consumer of last resort: the American consumer. We don’t care so long as it’s cheap.

Well, some of us.

There are enough vocal consumers that some companies have figured out that it’s economically advantageous to “do the right thing”. Victoria’s Secret pays their workers well because the consumers demand it. The get better workers for their trouble. Starbucks, the focus of some violent protest in Seattle, seems to be doing pretty well. They offer benefits for part time workers. (At least the one in Greenlake was advertising that while looking for help). They require a premium coffee product that allows for a more ecological cultivation than the lower grade coffees.

Corporations understand money. Their entire purpose for existence is to utilize capital to generate profit. You cannot have a sustainable corporation that does not seek profit; look at the government for examples. To expect a corporation to do the right thing is wishful thinking, unless there’s some economic reason that the right thing is a less expensive alternative.

Developing countries understand money. When the recipient is willing, investment is a good thing. New jobs tend to raise the existing wage scale in a developing economy. It moves countries beyond sustenence farming economies. Investment requires at least some degree of stability, so that there’s some hope of a return on the investment.

Despots understand money. Historically, the great quasi-governmental lending agencies have had the easiest terms. They lend money and they don’t get repaid. The money flows into the country, skips its intended recipients and heads straight into the pockets of those in power. We get a lot of flack on how the US is so unfair that a large percentage of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of the richest x% of the population. It could be a lot worse; that wealth could be concentrated into several familes. They’re not hard to find, Look for billionaires in countries where the average yearly income is measured in hundreds of dollars.

The WTO can not force the europeans to eat genetically modified food, (nor processed american cheese food, but I digress). The WTO can not force americans to go out and buy the biggest SUV we can find. The WTO can not force us to buy dolphin unsafe tuna. The WTO is powerless when compared to the consumer.

Not only is the WTO not such a bad thing, it’s better than the alternatives. While the WTO is not an open body, it’s far more visible than back room agreements that would take place in its absence.

Yes the envrionment is a mess. It got that way because there’s a species on this earth that doesn’t understand the costs of what they are doing. We keep looking around for the next inexhaustable resource. The envrionment does not add up on any balance sheet that I know of, but at some point we are going to notice that existence is becoming precarious. Inexpensive clean water supplies require unspoiled land. Oops. Forests filter our air. Oops. Green space moderates asphalt jungle temperatures. Well, warm is good, right? It’s getting so the snow on Mt Rainer never is white, at least when viewed from Seattle. But this doesn’t mean that the WTO is any more or less culpable than the people that drive it.

If there is to be change, it’s going to happen from the people. Without the support of the people, there is no reason for our leaders to follow. Without consumers, there’s no reason for trade.

Well, that’s not quite correct. Change will happen anyway. We just might not like the direction it’s going.

Stay tuned for next week, when we try to figure out what happens when “Earth Shrugs”.

As of Thursday, things seem to be returning to normal.

Wednesday night, the police were chasing residents through the streets of Capitol Hill, gassing and setting off concussion grenades till 2 in the morning. A city council member got gassed trying to mediate. The gas was thick enough that it was drifting into apartments off the gound floor. It started as a generalized WTO protest, and ended as a peaceful protest by residents who wanted the cops to leave. Well, peaceful on the resident’s side.

It was odd to go to Michael’s place on Capitol Hill, see a gas mask, and think that it was an entirely resaonable thing to have. Michael was gassed a couple of times near his apartment, and had a pellet gun pointed at him by police while he was standing on his front steps. By the way, gas masks are now illegal down town, much to the dismay of the president of gasmasks.com.

Another city council member was pulled from his car by police while he was on his way to a reception.

Thursday, there were people walking around Capitol Hill with signs saying “I have no trust in the Seattle PD”. Thursday night’s protest was peaceful on both sides. The protest outside the court house was peaceful.

Apparently Seattle has recalled mayors before.

Quotes from the paper:

“The residents were singing christmas carols. The tear gas came during
silent night”

Brett Smith, 10 year veteran of the PD:
“We’re so upset or squad of 10 or 11 wants to do our own protest march when this is all over.”

The thing that scared me the most was how quickly the scene went from protest to a state of emergency. As I prepared to go to Capitol hill on business Thursday, I made sure that I had phone numbers stored seperately from my cell phone, in case I got caught up and randomly arrested. The slide from normalcy to police state was too comfortable for my taste.

I-695 did not go far enough.

While I-695 is a welcome reduction in the cost of owning a motor vehicle, owning a car is still too expensive. I am saving about $250 next year, but that savings is dwarfed by my insurance bill and the cost of parking in downtown Seattle.

It is unfair that just because I choose to drive a little red sports car that my insurance should be over $1000 per year. Everybody knows that the insurance compainies are as wasteful as the government, so they should be able to survive on $30 per year per driver. All they have to do is cut out insurance fraud and waste.

Now that the convenient bus service to downtown is being cut, my parking bill is going up. It is criminal to be charged $200 per month just to park a car in a location where I don’t have to get wet on my way to work. Parking fees downtown are highway robbery and should be limited to $30 per month. The lot owners will make it up in volume.

I-695 was a good first step, but still does not lower barriers to car ownership enough. Driving is a God given right, so we should all be able to drive for free!

Sarcastically Yours,

Eric Soroos

*** Amazon.com

Death of the net predicted, this time from “Amazon’s Net Patents”
.gif at 11. A while ago, I posted this detailing that I was boycotting amazon.com due to their spamming practices. Since that page went up, their market cap has gone up by orders of magnitude. I’m thinking that the boycott wasn’t that effective.

*** net.censorship

A misguided attempt to require “download filters” in Arizona Universities.

*** Y2K

My “Y2K” Predictions. And my response to Mayor Schell’s festivites here.
*** WTO

As some of you may know, the WTO met in Seattle the week after Thanksgiving, 1999. It didn’t go well. I wasn’t out protesting, but I have some observations. See “Seattle and the state of the occupation” for more details.

Following up on the Seattle occupation, “WTO 2 weeks later” discusses some of the reasoning why I think that the WTO is not such a bad thing. It takes into account not only the protests, but also the economics driving the organization.

*** I-695

I live in the State of Washington, which recently passed I-695, which has to be the most popular misguided piece of drek in recent memory. The public debate was frightening in its inaccurate numbers and general “who cares, someone will bail us out” attitude.

The sponsor is dismissing legal challenges as a waste of money, when court review of legislation is essential for the function of the state. And now the sponsor wants to bring us more of the same.

So I wrote a “letter to the editor” of the PI. It may or may not be published by them, but certainly can be published here.

In recent news, I-695 was declared unconstitutional. It’s being appealed. Good riddance.

The theme for the evening was Manila. We were sorry that Brent Simmons
could not join us but understood that his theme for the evening was final
touches on Manila. To Brent and all of Userland- beautiful job!

Our group was a little small with Thanksgiving only being two days away.
Michael Gilbert was our host and Eric Soroos did the honors of demonstrating
the Manila installation process and pointing out recent Userland
developments. Lauri was in attendence and balanced our conversations with
the ease of a seasoned marketing person. I rounded out the group with my
enthusiasm for my first Manila site ( http://www.whitney-hall.com/fishOn ).

In looking at Manila, we drilled into several areas of discussion:

• Control panel- an HTML interface for managing Frontier.
• Site Heirarchy feature- including the built in examples of FAQ and
  Feedback.

• Server menu, ease of creating new sites and installing sites when gDB’s
  are moved between machines.

• We also discussed the idea of Manila sites as sub-sites within manila
  sites.

Topics that we need to return to in a future FUG meeting include the Manila
search engine and syndication.

One unresolved question is: How do you control the location of the calendar
within your template?

Our conversations turned around many other subjects as well. I just
finished “Weaving the Web” by Tim Berners-Lee and Michael and Lauri had
recently seen him give a speech in Seattle. We agreed that his integrity,
and vision of a future based on ideals instead of the aquisition of wealth,
was the very reason for the sucess of the web. On a similar topic, we
discussed the upcoming meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle.
Sounds like the mass of dignitaries, media, and protestors is practically
going to shut the city down.

We also drilled deep into some of the interface issues regarding discussion
threads. We talked about the continued life of NNTP servers and various
News interfaces. This led to spirited brainstorming about ways to visually
reveal the structure of a discussion Group thread as a means to quickly
navigate that thread. Eric got excited by this and took some notes so we
are all hoping he digs further (hint). (see “Thread View”, ed.) I was also lucky to get a
mini-demonstration of Eric’s mail server and his recent efforts to build a
manilla like control panel interface. This looks like another item for my
to-do list.

We agreed that our 4th Tuesday meeting schedule would be difficult over the
holidays and that we would meet again in January.

*** The Problem

Frontier (optionally) backs up all the changed GDB’s each day. Unfortunately, they reside on the same machine as frontier. This is not a good thing for the terminally lazy, as my recent system adventures might prove. I was very nervous until I got the few databases that weren’t backed up off the machine recovered.

*** Possible Solutions

Solution #1 is to save GDBs to a shared drive. It’s ok, but not a completely elegant approach. For instance, the data is still on your lan. Off site backups are a good thing too.

Solution #2 is to use the built in http or xml-rpc server to do remote backups.

If you’ve seen the Qube, they present a checkbox list of items to back up, you select what you want and your web browser downloads an archive with the backed up files. Restores are a multipart form upload. This is elegant. I want it in frontier, but automatic.

*** Proposed Architectures

Client == machine to be backed up.
Server == machine with big tape drive.

• Push. The client machines upload the appropriate GDBs whenever they feel like it.
• Pull. The server queries the client as to the databases that they wish to upload. The client returns with a list of databases. This could trigger the push, or then the server asks for each GDB individually.

Push is good from a security standpoint, although it could be an issue if two client machines hit the server at once with GDBS that will saturate the incoming connection for any length of time. Using push also means that machines that are not always connected could backup when they are online.

Pull is good for the server scheduling the uploads, so that the GDB’s can be done serially if that is necessary, or in parallel if bandwidth permits.

I would think that gzip encoding might be a very useful thing for this application.

We were looking for answers to the question: what do beginners want?

We had 2 new attendees, one of whom has a DG based website up, the other has played with frontier for about 30 minutes. Of the previously known people, there was me, (SA, but easily distracted), Michael (Very experienced, also easily distracted with neat ideas), Ivy (who has done a couple of frontier websites and is a graphic design/writer who has very little patience when Michael and I go off on a techincal tangent), Lauri (new frontier user but used to instructing about technical systems) and Ken (Intermediate frontier user)

We also touched on the question of how to train designers familiar with marking up each piece of text by hand to create designs that can be built by scripts and templates.

The upshot is that there are several pieces of the puzzle.

• Tutorial of how to navigate the frontier app/odb.
• An overview of what’s already been built and what is availiable w/o major programming.
• Tutorial on programming using Usertalk and programming in general

In all cases save the first, examples and sample sites/packages were considered very useful. Michael and I had a couple of side discussions of the form: I’d really like feature X, it needs to be a sample. Followed by me saying, I was just thinking that this week, I’ve implememnted it/ it’s on the todo list. We were pondering trying to get 10 or so projects that scratch an itch, get some working beta code out there and trying to build a open source community around it. Projects that are things that programmers will use every day so that the fix and extend them. On the list of 10 things, we’ve started to fill out a list of stuff that we really want to see happen. (See “projects”)

• Networked Bookmark List
• Address book or other flat file db functionality using a simple prefs.root
  type interface.
• Filtered news feeds.

Of these, I’ve started the filtered news feeds, to the point of almost having a site live to do it. I also mentioned that I am serving my netscape bookmark file via frontier and a filespec link so that I can get to it from anywhere in my world.

There were a couple of comments about the support associates program.

• It hasn’t been well promoted to the general population at this point.
• Ken liked the fact that there was a phone call interface that happened and showed up on one of the mailing lists. we also pointed out that there is a great value in being able to distill your question down to an email, since it forces you to think through your problem.

The Seattle Frontier Users Group meets every fourth Tuesday of the month, at 7pm. We will be meeting at the offices of Socialecology (my employer) at 1818 Summit. (near Denny and Olive on Capitol Hill) Email seafug@soroos.net for directions.

January’s meeting will be held on Tuedsay the 30th (yeah, that’s the fifth tuesday), at 7pm. There’s no adgenda at this point.

We have reports of some previous meetings online.

• “November Meeting Report” (1999)
• “October SeaFUG Meeting” (1999)
• “September Manila Demo” (1999)
• August Meeting Summary (missing in action)
• “July Mailserver Demo” (1999)

Note: this stuff is old.

A collection of scripts and other interesting things that could be useful for people making frontier websites. The mailserver is on hiatus for a while, till I get a releasable version again.

• “Frontier-TOC”: Merged into the Userland Frontier codebase.
• “PicsPicker”: Some image management stuff for Manila.
• “Esoteric Settings”: Mainresponder settings, exposed for Manila
• “Patch Tool”: the basis for being able to stick Frontier odb items into source control. Probably superceeded by cvs integration (see frontierkernel.sourceforge.org).
• “JSP Proxy Responder” A Frontier responder to proxy incoming requests to another server.
• Radio Userland Remote Player Xml-rpc interfaces on the a linux box and the drivers in RU to Store, Stream and Play mp3s.
• “Imagemagick Thumbnail Script.” A perl script to run imagemagick on the command line to produce thumbnails and meduim sized images. You need perl, imagemagick and a machine with a command line. (i.e., NT, linux, or probably Mac OsX)
• “XML-RPC via SMTP” / pop. This is a minor extension of xml-rpc to work over an email connection.
• “EmailThisPage” script to email a copy of the page to someone who may be interested. Note that Userland now includes similar functionality in Manila.
• “Notify me” script to notify me when someone replies to a posting of mine in the discussion group.
• Version of “prefsSuite.drawNavigator” that allows for templates for the links.
• Perl/NT “Keep it Up” script. Queries frontier every minute to make sure that it’s answering queries
• “Thread View” for the discussion group. – From any message in a thread, I want to be able to see the relation to all of the other messages in the thread.
• “DrawCalendar” This is a drop in replacement for the main responder calendar script. It provides a single non-table calendar that shows one week back and ahead in individual days, And links to Next/Last week, month, and year. I like it better than the original calendar for cases where I just want to see relative dates and when I might be accessing the page through lynx, a textmode browser. That and it’s just different.