Thoughts From Eric Archive

The title of the post exists mostly because I vowed in a public setting to use it, but there is a story behind it.  I just don’t remember the details right now, because it happened more than 24 hours ago and I’m very tired.  I remember that a small group had gathered at Crepes on Cole for brunch yesterday, and the conversation kept veering wildly from highly geeky to very much the opposite. At some point, the subject of Tantek being in trouble (for a comment? an action? a bug in IE/Mac?) came up, and it was asserted that he needed to be spanked.  (“Oh, yes, yes!  A spanking!  A spanking!”) Then it was observed that we should probably check first with his girlfriend to see if that was acceptable.  So I turned to her and said, “So, is it okay with you if we spank him?”

Her reaction was so priceless (and his nearly as amusing), I ended up teasing both of them about it several times, and I wasn’t alone in the effort, either.  She never did answer the question, so we still don’t know where she actually stands on the subject.  It was a weird day.  Relaxing, but weird.  Early on we were discussing relationships and the subject of polyamory came up.  I speculated that the increasing practice of polyamory might be linked to the rising incidence of attention-deficit disorder.  It’s so crazy, it just might make sense.

Pretty much the opposite of ADD is the viewpoint espoused by the Long Now Foundation, which aims to get people thinking about the next ten milennia as opposed to the next ten minutes.  Tantek and I met up at the Herbst Pavilion to see Brian Eno give a free talk on the Long Now, and there turned out to be an even Longer Line.  With space for 700, and probably 750 in the hall by the time they closed the doors, there were very likely three or four times as many people in line as were eventually admitted.  The talk itself was interesting, and Mr. Eno’s presentation style was done in such a calm, deliberate, paced manner that I felt a little more in touch with the Long Now by the time we left, which may or may not have been done on purpose.  The instant the talk was over, Tantek and I headed out a side door and toward the parking lot at a jog so we could the crowd to their cars; we had no desire to get stuck in a traffic jam trying to leave.  This would be ironic except for the statement I remember from the presentation, that the Long Now perspective is meant to make the world “safe for hurry” by slowing other parts of life a long way down.  So we hurried safely, and benefitted from the effort.  Yay us!

In many ways, I’m intrigued with and approving of the Long Now concept.  If we as a society could take more of a long-term view, we might make different (and hopefully better) choices about how we relate to our surroundings.  If you knew that you’d be around for five centuries, how would you live your life differently?  If you knew humanity would occupy the Earth for the next ten milennia, how might that alter your patterns of behavior?  I’ve generally lived my life employing a long-term perspective, but the longest term I employ tends to be my lifetime.  While I might plan for retirement and how I’ll pay for the education of children I don’t even yet have, I don’t generally make plans that are centered on my great-great-grandchildren, because I will almost certainly never live to meet them.  Does that make them any less real, or worthy of consideration?  Maybe it does, but even the act of deciding that will require a longer view than I usually take.

Clay Shirky’s recent essay on the Semantic Web has stirred enough attention that I had non-techie friends forwarding me the URL.  I found it interesting, especially since over the last few months I’ve been working with a few sharp people on a way to address one of the points Clay touched upon.  We’re almost ready to make our work public, so watch this space for details as well as an addition to this page.

• Tantek == Spanking? was published on Sunday, November 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal, Travel, and Web categories.
• There have been no replies.

Thanks to the power of the Internet, I received some amazing news I just have to share.  You may or may not be aware that I once claimed the title “Friend of the Developers’ Children” for myself.  This was a play on Jeffrey Zeldman‘s “Friend of the Japanese Children,” which I always found kind of amusing and cool all at once, just like the Toho movies that I presume inspired it.  Well, I have an even better title to claim now: “Namesake of the Japanese Children.”  Congratulations to the Sasano family on their new arrival!

Speaking of children, Kat and I had our own experience with a small one recently:  we played host to the four-and-a-half year old daughter of some friends while they went out of town for a weekend.  We all had a pretty grand time, what with taking her to see Brother Bear, but I discovered something about myself that I’d long suspected.  I have not only The Voice of Authority, but also The Look.

Here’s what happened.  We were all having dinner together and Emma was sitting next to me.  She was swinging her legs back and forth and giggling and generally acting her age.  It was really kind of cute.  But then she rotated in her chair to face me, paused a few seconds, and, giggling, kicked me in the leg.  Not hard, but still kicked, which is something her parents don’t tolerate any more than I do.

My head snapped around to stare her in the eyes, but I didn’t say a single word.  I just… looked at her.  The effect was in some sense astounding; Kat told me later that she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.  Emma’s broad, slightly mischievous smile very slowly faded into a concerned expression, then a pout, and then a hangdog expression.  I think she glanced over at Kat, who wasn’t saying a word either.

“What do you say, Emma?” I asked her in a quiet, level tone.  She didn’t say anything, but looked almost hurt and turned away to face the other direction, head hung low.  I asked her again if she knew what she’d done, and what she should say.  In a voice so small it could have been eclipsed by a proton, she said, “M’sorry.”  Then she went around the table to crawl into Kat’s lap.  I found out later that she whispered to Kat, “Uncle Eric is a scary man.”  (“Uncle” is an honorary term in this case.)  Kat laughed and agreed with her that I can be a scary man when I get angry.  Kat reminded me that I needed to tell Emma I still loved her, which I did and she accepted.

Here’s the slightly strange part: I knew, as I stared at Emma, what I was doing.  I could feel the blaze in my eyes, the set in my face, the rebuke in my stance.  I knew I was admonishing her without words.  I was just as confident that it would have the intended effect.  I’d been on the receiving end of similar rebukes when I was a child, and had learned my lessons well.

Later that night, I called my sister Julie to relate the story, which she found very funny.  We’d been talking about Mom in recent weeks, and Julie had told me that she felt closest to Mom when riding a motorcycle.  I found this to be very odd, because I was unaware that Mom loved motorcycles.  Apparently she’d planned to ride one before she died but never got around to it.  Anyway, I told Julie that I’d discovered I feel closest to Mom when disciplining a small child.

It was, mostly, a joke.

• Child’s Play was published on Saturday, November 15th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Just as I was reaching the end of my radio show this morning, the Emergency Alert System (EAS) suddenly activated.  I hadn’t triggered our equipment; this was an external alert coming in, taking over the air signal.  My stomach immediately clenched and I swore softly, firing up the browser on the in-studio computer to hit CNN.  Wondering, desperately and dreadfully, what had happened now.

It was a test of the system, of course.  But here’s the thing: there was no leading announcement.  They hit the tones, and then told us it was a test.  Maybe that’s the way the system ought to be tested.  It felt every bit as real and scary as I expect it should.  An hour later, I was still wound kind of tight.

• This Just In was published on Wednesday, November 12th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Yesterday morning I got a completely unexpected, and not at all pleasant, telephone call informing me that someone I knew back when I worked for CWRU had quite unexpectedly died a few days ago.  I also became responsible for passing word on to some people I know who also knew the deceased, including Kat’s brother Neil (who’d already heard).  In Neil’s case, he’d really lost a friend.  For me, a former co-worker with whom I’d been friendly had died.  It isn’t nearly the same thing.

So Jim Nauer, who’d also known the deceased, and I went to the calling hours last night.  I went for a number of reasons: I’d known him, I’d known several of his friends, and I had Neil’s condolences to pass on to those who were left behind.  I also went with a tinge of fear, because it would be the first memorial service I’d attended since Mom died in April, and I wasn’t sure how I might react.

As it turns out, I focused on the people who were grieving more deeply, who really needed the support, and did my best to express my sympathies without dwelling overmuch on the situation.  Because, as I’ve discovered in the past six months, in the face of a loss so great, all you can really say is, “I’m sorry.”  And the only real response is, “Thank you.”  Anything else said beyond those two things is an awkward attempt to better express everything we’re feeling at those moments—but in the end, it comes down to expression of sorrow, and acknowledgment of that expression.

I found myself thinking that I would never be able to talk with this person again, never hear them laugh, and I remembered that the same thoughts came to me at Mom’s memorial service.  The feeling of a vast gulf suddenly discovered was hard to shake.  My mind kept trying to reject the situation, to decide that nobody had died—they’d just stepped out for a little while, and would one day be back.  I wanted to deny the finality of what had happened, and kept having to force myself to face it.

In a way, it’s almost impossible to reconcile the person who was with the absence that is.  We keep trying to escape into delusions of temporary separation.  But that way lies anger toward the absent party, since if they could come back, then their continued absence must mean that they don’t want to come back.  It also becomes impossible to move on, because you keep waiting for them to end their own exile.

I’ve had occasion to wonder if perhaps one of the great comforts of religion is that it gives you someone to blame, and then someone to forgive, for the death of a loved one.

• Parting Thoughts was published on Tuesday, November 11th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

This completely and utterly rocks.  I’m going to set up a Virtual PC drive just to try it out.  But Matt Haughey’s question is worth considering: why didn’t we know about this sooner?

• One System, Many Explorers was published on Thursday, November 6th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Browsers and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.

I’ll return to the Longhorn/XAML thing when we know more, hopefully tomorrow, from Microsoft itself.  In the meantime, I have two more license plate sightings to share, because that’s the kind of thing I do.  The first was another shade of purple: AA65EA.  I realize all the standard Ohio plates that correspond to hex colors will be varying shades of purple.  They’re still rare enough to merit my attention.  I keep hoping I’ll see a web-safe license plate, but that’s a fairly long shot.

As for the second plate, it was J CHRIST.  Turns out the Big J drives a black Pontiac Grand Am GT.  Who knew?

• Licensious was published on Sunday, October 26th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Personal category.
• There have been no replies.

Robert Scoble has said that Ryan Dawson isn’t a Microsoft employee, which I all but said he was in my last post.  Robert also said that Ryan hasn’t seen Longhorn, and thus can only be making guesses about it.

My apologies for the misunderstanding concerning Ryan’s affiliation, and the nature of Longhorn Blogs, which I had taken to be a Microsoft-sponsored site.  It isn’t; it’s a community site where anyone can get a blog and start posting.  Presumably about Longhorn.

As for the rest of my post, where I expressed my concern over what might happen in Longhorn and how that might affect the Web, my thoughts were not based solely on Ryan’s post, but were instead the end product of several months of thought and information from a number of sources.  If anything, Ryan’s post was simply the trigger that got me to fully express them in public.  I hope to one day be able to point back to that post and say, “Wow, was I ever off the mark there.”  The nature of speculation is that it is often proved incorrect, and I can accept that if it happens.  I’d far, far rather be wrong than right in this case.

Regardless, we’ll get our first taste in a few days.  It will be interesting to see what people think.  It’ll be even more interesting to see if Longhorn is limited to Intel architectures or not.

• Whoa, Big Fella! was published on Saturday, October 25th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.

I was going to talk about the CSS class I start teaching tonight at Cuyahoga Community College.  That’s been trumped.

Microsoft blogger Ryan Dawson spent a little time talking about XAML last night.  What’s XAML?

The quick and dirty: XAML is a way to create applications in the browser (or out for that matter).  For example, imagine a text editor with the rich UI of Windows, but portable in the browser.  XAML doesn’t even have to be an application; it could be your existing website in a more structured manner.

The quick and dirty (2): It is basically an XML structure with CSS and JavaScript.  The CSS defines the appearance and the JavaScript dictates behavior.

Go read it.  I have some thoughts, many of which have been stewing for a while, so come back if you’re interested.

(…pause to idly wonder if XAML is pronounced “zammel” or “camel”…)

Okay.  This all looks fantastic, although it’s less groundbreaking when you realize Mozilla already did it with XUL (“zool,” in case you were wondering, just like in Ghostbusters).  Think of it: a rich development and Web services environment built entirely out of open technologies like XML, CSS, JavaScript, and so on.  It’s like a dream come true.

Then again, maybe it’s a nightmare.  I said in “Checks and Balances“:

…the whole Eolas situation probably doesn’t have the Microsoft folks in a benevolent frame of mind regarding standards.  If they just abandoned the public Web and moved everything into a closed, proprietary sandbox of some kind, they might be able to avoid these sorts of problems altogether.  That’s exactly what I expect them to do in Longhorn, and the expectation worries me.  If the whole world moves into the sandbox—and let’s face it, in an e-commerce sense, IE/Win is the whole world—what reason would there be to pay any more attention to the Web?

We might say hey, fine, let’s get Microsoft and its partners the hell off the Web so we can go back to developing it the right way; let’s take back the neighborhood.  That would make about as much sense as rooting for Flash to be the technology used on every Web site in existence.  When one company owns the medium, everyone else loses.

These thoughts were largely fueled by rumors I’d been hearing over the last few months; those rumors were obviously about XAML.  I also wondered if Dave Winer had been hearing similar rumors when he made his famous “locked in the trunk and going over the cliff” comment about the Web.

Remember, this is a very large corporation we’re talking about here, never mind that it’s Microsoft.  They will develop technology in a way that increases profits.  Their goal is pretty obviously is to build rich capabilities directly into Longhorn, so that Windows users get all kinds of cool stuff for “free.”  Picture it: when you open the “Search” application and type “flights from Cleveland to New York,” it returns airfares for you right there in the search results box.  But from where are those airfares going to come?  Orbitz?  Not bleeding likely.  How about Expedia?  Yeah.  Just maybe.

Now, think about searching for a band like Our Lady Peace.  You get links to fan sites as well as links to buy their albums.  Who’s going to supply those e-commerce links?  If I were a betting man, I’d say a Microsoft partner.  In hotly contested e-commerce sectors, the bidding wars over those partnerships will be outrageous.  Microsoft gets the best of both worlds: a transaction fee for purchases their OS users make in the Longhorn Corral, and whatever money Amazon or Buy.com or whoever pays them just to have the chance to pay them transaction fees on those sales.

Now consider the issue of who will supply news links, which can lead to major ad revenue when users follow the link to a story.  MSN is the obvious venue, of course, and whoever’s partnering with them gets their ads on the Longhorn desktop.  So when it comes to sports scores and headlines, for example, ESPN is pretty set up—as long as they can stay a partner.  How much will that privilege cost them in five years?

And where will AOL be then, now that Netscape is effectively dead and Mozilla‘s been spun off?  As Dave Shea wrote from 2009, “AOL executives surprised to discover ‘foresight’ carelessly crossed out of their dictionaries.”  More recently, Simon Willison said:

On the negative side, this looks set to represent the ultimate browser lock-in – in a few years time when IE 7 comes as standard on new PC s I wouldn’t be surprised to see the corporate software development world moving almost exclusively to this technology – after all, it’s going to be extremely easy both to develop and to distribute and it will have all of the benefits of a web application without the downside of the restricted GUIs offered by HTML.

Exactly so.  Microsoft, having learned what it needed to know from playing in the public Web space, is now positioning itself to pick up all the e-commerce and go home.

Permit me to repeat myself: “When one company owns the medium, everyone else loses.”  Everyone from design firms to tool vendors to browser makers will have to dance to Microsoft’s tune.  We have until about 2007, maybe 2008, to prevent that from happening.  Can it be done?  How?  By whom?  If XAML lives up to its potential, Microsoft won’t need the W3C any more.  Why should they play by the open community’s rules when they can create their own very lucrative and highly controlled gated community?

I want to be wrong.  I want to think that XAML will be open, interoperable, available for anyone to hook into whether or not they’re a partner or Longhorn developer.  I want to believe that Safari and Mozilla will be able to surf the XAML sea just as effectively as Explorer.  I also remember my history, and the past behavior I recall doesn’t bode well for the future.

I’ll admit that a lot of my concern is self-interested.  If XAML locks up the Web, then I’ve got a lot of scrambling to do.  I can very likely stay employed, since CSS is apparently a big part of XAML, and probably do pretty well for myself.  I’m not sure if my heart would be in it, though.  One of the things I love about the Web is its big, sprawling, open nature.  I’ve fought against fragmentation for years; I’ve been fighting the open standards fight for longer than I care to remember—for longer than a lot of you have been working with the Web, in fact.  That all stands in jeopardy now.  I may, at long last, be caught in the crushing, extending embrace.

If that’s so, I suppose I’ll have plenty of company.

• Corralled was published on Friday, October 24th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Standards category.
• There have been no replies.