Posts in the Personal Category

During my recent trip to San Francisco, I was asked over edamame and sake what interests me right now.  Taken literally, that isn’t something I could possibly answer in a single evening: far too many things interest me.  Like clouds, for example.  However, since the question was actually about the Web and information technology, I was able to answer in only a few minutes.

1. Ground-up semantics—the area of interest that is actually about the Web itself.  XFN was the first step down what could be a very long, complex, and richly rewarding road.  By leveraging features of HTML, XMDP opens the door to letting people add the kind of information they find useful, and to do so in a way that just about anyone can grasp, which was one of the keys to HTML’s success, you may recall.  The idea is to allow for a distributed creation of semantic information, grown according to people’s interests and needs.  As more bits of semanticism get attached, the possibilities scale up exponentially.  Basically, it’s a self-organizing ad-hoc semantic network.

2. The intersection of mobile devices and global positioning systems.  One of the most common examples is the ability to leave information “hanging in the air.”  The idea is that if you’re using an M/GPS system, you can call up reviews of all the restaurants within a hundred feet of you, as an example.  These reviews would be data left by other people using the same system.  Another example is the ability to leave a note at a meeting spot for anyone who shows up late and doesn’t know where everyone else went.  I can also envision a variant on geocaching, where “hidden” messages are left in remote spots for others to find.  Walking tours could be highly annotated.  With the right system, you could set up a maze with no visible walls.

   Actually, I have an interest in more intelligent applications of global positioning technology.  In-dash mapping devices for automobiles represent a useful first step, but the devices I’ve seen are kind of crudely limited even compared to what could already be done, let alone what near-future advances might make possible.  But taking those ideas to the limit and crossing them with personal mobile devices just seems far, far too cool.  I wish I had more of an engineering bent, mostly so I could work on designing such devices.

3. Self-organizing ad-hoc sensor networks, otherwise known as “smart dust.”  There have been articles in recent copies of Scientific American and The Economist, but the general idea is that you create a bunch of tiny, rugged sensors and scatter them around an area.  They take readings and pass them back to a hub using routing that’s determined on the fly.  One example I read about was affixing a hundred or so sensors to a redwood tree in order to better understand the fine details of the tree’s microclimate.  The possibilities are endless, as are of course the privacy concerns.  Nonetheless, these kinds of systems have too many uses to just go away.  Conservation activities could benefit hugely from this kind of technology.  So could installation defense, for that matter.  Again, it looks as though an engineering inclination would really be useful here.

I guess the common theme that runs through all three is pretty obvious: I’m fascinated by systems that use simple (or at least simple-to-understand) parts to enable deep complexity, and those that use self-organizing principles.  Whether those principles are expressed through software algorithms or based on leveraging human behavior doesn’t actually matter to me.  The appeal lies in trying to figure out simple rules that allow for emergent behavior, especially the kind that wasn’t in any way planned ahead of time, and most especially the kind that seems totally chaotic and random until the patterns suddenly become clear.

Yes, I am one of those people who will stare at clouds for long stretches, trying to pick out patterns and understand the fine details of what’s happning within the clouds themselves.  I’m even more intense about it when I’m in the air myself and can see them up close, see them from unaccustomed angles.  It’s a bit of an obsession, to be honest, and one that makes me a bit pouty when I don’t get a window seat.  Even when there are no clouds to be seen, I can satisfy the same impulse by scrutinizing the world below, tracing humanity’s engineering of the landscape and reading what patterns I can find.

So yes, there is a lot that interests me.  Since I was recently asked, I thought I’d share just a bit of it, if for no other reason than to help highlight a few of the patterns in what can sometimes appear to be a very chaotic mind.

• Patterns of Interest was published on Tuesday, June 29th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Yesterday I returned from a whirlwind four days in San Francisco.  The primary reason for the trip was to conduct training for folks at the California Digital Library, but of course all kinds of other things happened.  Here’s the brain dump.

• I can’t believe what great friends we have.  At a Sunday afternoon party at the gotomedia pad, we were joined by college friends from Oregon, others who live a four-hour drive from San Francisco, and another from Cleveland.  You read that right: one of our local friends flew out to the Bay Area to be at the party.  Well, that and to take a vacation in California, but still!  And that doesn’t even count the WaSP folks who also attended, like Simon, Porter, and Molly, who came from Kansas, Washington DC, and Arizona respectively.

  It was at the same party that I finally met Porter’s wife, so I can now stop referring to her as “Porter’s imaginary spouse.”

• If there’s one thing I envy about San Francisco, it’s the BART system.  You can get darned near anywhere, and it makes commuting from the city over to Oakland a snap.  This is particularly true when your hotel is on a stop, and so is the place you’re headed.  Despite this, I still got turned around in downtown Oakland and was very nearly late for the second day of training.  The only reason I was able to find the place at all was that we’d walked over to the training facility the day before, so I was able to identify and use landmarks to reconstruct our path, and thus find the labs.

• It turns out the BART ticket machines run on Windows.  I found this out by the usual method, of course.

• In a conversation about the presidential campaign and Ohio being considered a key battleground state because of its employment situation and political complexity, one of my hosts opined, “The Bay Area pretty much spans the political spectrum from liberal to extremely liberal.”

• At the WaSP and Friends after-dinner party on Tuesday, Tantek publicly announced his departure from Microsoft.  He refused to say where he was going next, although we’ve since learned that he’s headed to Technorati.  By Wednesday evening, I’d actually come to that conclusion without having seen the post, but of course I didn’t manage to post until now, so I look like a poser instead of eerily prescient… although if you’d take the word of a VP at Macromedia, he could attest to my prediction.

  Like others, in a way I’m sorry to see Microsoft losing such a passionate, intelligent, and committed standards advocate.  We could speculate all day as to whether or not there’s even room for people like him, but one could assume the same about AOL, and they funded a whole standards team for a few years.  In any case, Tantek firmly believes this is the right thing for him to do and seems happy with the life change it represents, so I can’t be anything but happy for him.  I can’t wait to see what he does at Technorati (and really hope the service stabilizes in the near future).

• I spent a goodly portion of Tuesday evening talking, at various stages, with Rebecca Blood about the Web, adoption, growing up in the Midwest, and more.  On my flight home Thursday, I was delighted to discover a mini-profile of her in a Time article titled “Meet Joe Blog.”  It’s kind of a weird feeling to open a national magazine and read about someone you’d talked to just two days before.

• Not only did Metagrrrl spend some time with my laptop at the party, so did Min Jung Kim.  Geez, this thing gets more action than I ever did.

• At one point during the party, someone was copying a movie to his or her laptop.  I observed this activity for a few moments, then turned to Jonas Luster (who managed to get a picture of me drinking some MS kool-aid) and said, “You know, in Soviet America, the movies rip YOU!”

  Okay, maybe you had to be there.

• Bay City Roller Coaster was published on Friday, June 25th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the General and Travel categories.
• There have been no replies.

Chris Adamson has an interesting post over at the O’Reilly Network about code in books and articles.  In summation: should code be given a special license, separate from the actual text?

While CSS isn’t code, exactly, the same basic questions apply to the stuff I’ve written.  Let’s take my most recent title, More Eric Meyer on CSS.  It contains a copyright statement that says, in effect, you can’t reproduce the book’s text, in part or in whole, without permission.  There is no distinction there between the explanatory text (“Margin collapsing is an interesting problem in some cases, and here’s why, blah blah blah…”) and the styles.  Taken literally, the copyright statement says that you can’t re-use any of the CSS I created in your own designs.

This is clearly in opposition to what I think most of us would agree is the expectation, which is that you can use styles (or code) as you see fit but you can’t take the ‘narrative’ text and pass it off as your work.  But where’s the dividing line?  Suppose that, for whatever reason, you really like one of the designs in Project 4.  We can agree that you should be able to re-use the styles presented, but a whole design?  Is that fair?  I can imagine many arguments both for and against, many of them variants on the classic slippery-slope argument.

In my particular case, the situation is even less clear.  As anyone who drops by the book’s site will discover, the project files are freely available for anyone to download.  You aren’t even expected to own the book as a condition of using them.  That makes them less protected, I would think, than if they were on a CD that accompanied the book—but how much sense does that make?  Again, I can envision several arguments on both sides of the issue.  The same questions would arise for any author that provided code samples for download, as many do.

There’s also the question of what rights can or should be granted to the reader with regard to code.  I might hypothetically make the styles all freely available to anyone, but only under the condition that attribution be given to the source (either me, the book, or both).  Wouldn’t you, as a reader, find that rather annoying?  I would.  “You mean I have to give Eric credit just to use two CSS rules that create this cool effect?”

I’ve always operated on the principle that any markup or CSS I write about is fair game, because otherwise what would be the point of writing about how to use it?  I can see it now: “use of the CSS presented in this tutorial, including any derivative works, without the written consent of the author is prohibited.”  Yeah, right!  That would be something like a dictionary prohibiting you from using any words you look up, including all modifications and misspellings.

So should books contain an explicit license regarding use of the code?  If so, what kind?  I expect readers and publishers will have different viewpoints, although the more clueful publishers probably won’t be too far away from the typical reader perspective.  There’s a part of me that wonders why we even have to be explicit about this at all—after all, there’s been a sort of tacit acceptance of code re-use to date—but in a litigious DMCA world, this is an issue that probably has to be addressed sooner or later.

As I ponder the subject, I’m currently contemplating putting all my code samples under a Creative Commons ShareAlike 1.0 license, both now and into the future, just to make sure the bases are covered.  Then again, perhaps an explicit Public Domain license would make more sense.  Which one would be better, or is there a superior approach I haven’t considered?  Let me know.

• Code Constraints was published on Monday, June 14th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Books, CSS, and Tech categories.
• There have been eighteen replies.

Earlier this morning, I obtained a Continental OnePass account for Carolyn.  She’s six months old, and she has a frequent flyer number.  Even if our schedules remain absolutely static from now until the end of 2004, Carolyn will have earned close to 10,000 miles toward Silver Elite membership before she reaches her first birthday.

I can’t decide if this frightens or amuses me.

• Air Baby was published on Saturday, June 12th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Carolyn and Humor categories.
• There have been no replies.

Yesterday afternoon, in a small court room on the twenty-second floor of the Franklin County Courthouse in downtown Columbus, Ohio, Kat and I legally finalized our adoption of Carolyn.  There were just two witnesses to this event: the legal representative for the adoption agency, and the magistrate who conducted the proceedings.  The entire proceeding was recorded using a PC to digitally capture the audio, which I thought was rather advanced for a government agency.

To get to the courthouse, we drove two and a half hours through bursts of rain and heavy interstate traffic.  The hearing took less than twenty minutes.  After taking some pictures with the magistrate, we drove back to Cleveland.  After an hour or so to rest, we celebrated this milestone yesterday evening at our favorite restaurant, Matsu, with a small gathering of friends.  For the first time in my life, I ordered a Big Boat o’ Sushi (I’ve always wanted to do that), and with the help of everyone at the table the decks were pretty well cleared.

Until now, I haven’t said anything here about Carolyn being adopted, although it might have been possible to infer it by reading very closely between the lines of some early posts.  To a large degree, this silence was dictated because the adoption wasn’t legally complete.  In a legal sense, we were just borrowing her from the adoption agency on a six-month trial basis.  During that time, we were regularly visited by a social worker who, I assume, was making sure that all was well, that she was thriving both physically and mentally, and that we hadn’t done anything that might be considered unsafe, such as setting up a crystal meth lab in the kitchen or acquiring a pet grizzly bear or something.

Where it truly matters, of course, things haven’t really changed.  Our love for Carolyn is as deep today as it was yesterday—maybe a little deeper, because as every day goes by it seems that we love her (and each other) a little bit more.  All that happened in Columbus yesterday was that the state officially and irretrievably recognized what was already true: Kat, Carolyn, and I are a family, with everything that implies.  We will share joys and sorrows, work together and play together, overcome obstacles and support each other.  We will love each other for the rest of our lives.

I’m not sure what I did to be granted such a wonderful daughter and wife, but whatever it was, it must have been really, really good.

• Adoption Day was published on Friday, June 11th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Adoption and Carolyn categories.
• There have been three replies.

Okay, Ronald Reagan died.  I got it the first six hundred times.  I grew up in the Eighties; I remember the Reagan years quite clearly.  He did a lot of good things, a lot of bad things, and a lot of ambiguous things while President, just like every other President I can remember, but frankly, at this point I think people are starting to go a little overboard.  As usual, Jon Stewart nailed it squarely (if I may paraphrase): “The ones I pity in all this are Ford and Carter. Because they’re watching this and thinking, ‘When I die, no way am I getting that.’  My advice to them: die while saving a baby.”

Still, I think the way the Liberal Media has totally ignored his death is just a travesty, don’t you?

• Reagan’s Dead? Really? was published on Wednesday, June 9th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

A brief sampling of vignettes from this week’s trip to Iowa City:

• I got my picture taken with a bunch of people who’d driven from Wisconsin to be at the Web Camp.  As the picture was being taken, I felt like we were all bunched together to a degree that would have made a modest person blush.  The photo makes it look like the people on my side of the group were fearful of catching contagious diseases from each other.  Weird.

• While walking around downtown Iowa City with some folks from the conference, we passed a Mexican restaurant called “Gringo’s”.  A block away, we passed an ice cream parlor called “Whitey’s”.

  Do I even have to tell you that I’m not making this up?

• Tuesday night we had dinner at an Italian place, and when the hostess asked me if I’d like some freshly grated cheese on my entreé, I said I would.  “Just tell me when,” she said as she started.

  There was a short pause as she grated away.  “More?” she inquired.

  “You bet,” I replied.  “Did you ever see the TV commercial with the huge pile of—”

  “Oh, yes,” she said with authority, still grating.  “At my last job, that’s all anybody ever said to me.”

  “I think that’s enough,” I told her.  “And thanks for so thoroughly shooting down my lame, unoriginal attempt at a stupid joke.”

• Iowa City, and for that matter the Cedar Rapids airport, are dotted with “Herkeys”, which are four-foot statues of the local sports mascot that have been ‘enhanced’ by various artists.  The statue outside the Museum of Natural History, for example, was covered in fur and titled “Bigfoot Herkey”, while the one in the airport sports a business suit, travel bag, and cell phone.  What I found interesting is that none of the Herkeys I saw had been structurally modified, either by addition or subtraction, but were simply decorated in some fashion.  I wonder if that was a participation constraint, or if perhaps the mascot is so revered that nobody even considered performing artistic surgery.

• Just past the Museum of Natural History I glanced up at the roof of a building to see the American flag at half-mast.  I actually had to think about it for a second before I made the connection, but I thought I’d check.  “That’s to honor Reagan, I assume,” I said to Mark Hale, the conference organizer.  “How long are flags going to be lowered for him?”

  “I heard thirty days,” he said.  “Although I think ten of those might be in memory of the Democratic Party.”

• Live From Iowa! was published on Wednesday, June 9th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Humor, Speaking, and Travel categories.
• There have been six replies.

Television possesses a scary, scary power.

All day today, Carolyn was in a cranky mood, no doubt because yesterday she got her six-month vaccination shots.  As the day wore on, she was less and less amenable to distraction.  We tried feeding her dinner, and that worked for a while, but then she started crying.  We switched to toys, and that was good for a few minutes before the sad face returned.  Kick-and-play seat, no good.  Jumping chair, nothing.  Walking around while bouncing her in my arms kept her to a minimal crank, but stopping for more than a minute caused the crank to escalate fairly rapidly.

So, at last, in desperation, I put her in front of the television and started a Baby Einstein video.  From the moment the TV turned on, she calmed down.  We ran through the DVD twice, and she didn’t so much as fuss.  Even the end credits kept her captivated.  She stayed calm after the television was turned off, nursed, and went quietly to sleep.

This may be in part because it’s roughly the sixth time she’s seen the television on in our house, so there was a certain novelty factor involved.  If anything, this little episode has reinforced and deepened my determination to keep our children’s television exposure to a very bare minimum as they grow up.

• Electron Opiate was published on Friday, June 4th, 2004.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been twenty-seven replies.