Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

I don't recall when I signed up for it, but I routinely get a newsletter from Baldur Bjarnason about software development with a focus on web development.

His new year's email includes some points on JavaScript frameworks that I'm suspicious I like because they so closely match mine.

But what they so clearly indicate is that web development has become a field whose outward appearance and, all too often, local practice, has been completely co-opted by the needs of the largest of enterprise corporations.

(Words in bullets are his. All emphasis is mine.)

Once you step outside of the social media bubble, however, vanilla JS and more ‘modest’ approaches like Svelte or Stimulus/TurboLinks seem to have reached critical mass in terms of sustainability.Irrespective of those newer trends, jQuery and PHP-driven, un-hydrated, old-fashioned server-side rendering still utterly dominate the web that people use.

Web dev driven by npm packages, frameworks, and bundling is to the field of web design what Java and C# in 2010s was to web servers. If you work in enterprise software [npm, framework, and bundling-through-transpilation driven patterns are] all you can see. Web developers working on CMS themes (or on Rails-based projects) using jQuery and plain old JS—maybe with a couple of libraries imported directly via a script tag—are the unseen dark matter of the web dev community.

What should worry you is that npm- and framework-driven web development feels just as painful as enterprise software dev because it is enterprise development.

He continues by comparing TypeScript -- and I think he means more specifically "enterprise TypeScript development", because there's lots to enjoy about TypeScript the language, nothing inherently evil about it -- to enterprise Java of 20 years ago.

TypeScript smells like Java.

The complexity of npm packages harkens back to painful Java packaging monstrosities.

JavaScript build systems are about as much fun as Java build systems, even though they are doing very different things.

Deployment, as implemented in the Kubernetes and Docker ecosystems, is exactly as hard to understand and use as its Java predecessors because those are their predecessors.

Then he has a few points that serve as a sort of manifesto for the non-enterprise developer.

Some of use work exclusively with SMBs (Small-/Medium-sized Businesses) and shouldn’t need to run the enterprise anti-productivity gauntlet. Our needs in terms of frameworks, bundling, and packages are very different from those working in enterprises with hundreds or thousands of employees.

It is not rational to expect [developers for small and medium-sized businesses] to be using enterprise-oriented tools and environments or to demand that we be happy about being saddled with your need for complexity.

I'd also ask people to take a close look at how they define what's an SMB project and what's an enterprise project. That is, defining projects by the size of the corporation that produces them isn't always -- heck, isn't usually -- the best metric.

Where something becomes "enterprise" is when you have hundreds of people working on the same project, in the same codebase. What npm/library-based bundling buys you is the ability to firewall smaller projects from each other. If someone writes a horribly inefficient page that no rendering library could solve without magic...

... your development process already includes a baked-in firewall to ensure that code doesn't adversely impact the rest of your system. You can stitch together completely independent projects easily, iff you really need to do that stitching.

But how big is your day-to-day work, really? How many of the problems "solved" by mass package import could have been solved reasonably well for your uses with a (think what's often derisively called a "NIH syndrome-induced") roll-my-own, homebrew solution?

Put another way, how many developers are really part of your specific product?

If it's not hundreds, ask yourself how much time you'd save on developer ramp-up, maintenance, and new development if you too used "jQuery and plain old JS—maybe with a couple of libraries imported directly via a script tag". Even in a team of "just" 20-30, the resource savings from going just 25% faster (a conservative cost of doing framework-style development in my experience) are unbelievable.

I'm not sure I know when going "full framework" is the best idea. At a conference, some friends of mine (coworkers) managed to corner a guy who was then working at Google on AngularJS (before Angular 2+). We talked to him a bit about AngularJS' pain points and how they solved problems of large DOMs, as our Knockout.js-based system was getting crushed in our more dynamic, feature-rich UIs.

His basic comment was that you can't fix these issues easily, and there was no silver bullet. Inefficient or complex UIs are trouble no matter where you build them.

The problem here was browser performance, which by definition isn't an SMB or enterprise problem. It's a client-side rendering one. Frameworks don't fix these issues. "Full framework" dev doesn't provide solutions to day-to-day problems, it provides the passive coordination that allows the amalgamation of code from hundreds of developers working at once.

Is that really the state your team finds itself in? Why would you want it to be?

And then here's a final comment from Bjarnason about how the thinkspace of development has been dominated by the enterprises -- he does a good job in the balance of his new year's points discussing how we see so much enterprise-specific information because those enterprises have a vested interest in making that come to be.

The divide between what you read in developer social media and what you see on web dev websites, blogs, and actual practice has never in my recollection been this wide. I’ve never before seen web dev social media and forum discourse so dominated by the US west coast enterprise tech company bubble, and I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades now. The pre-2000 dot-com bubble comes close although that one came attached to an actual financial bubble and happened before social media had evolved into its current form.

Anyhow, it's a good, thought provoking post, and worth a full read.

Labels: development, enterprise, javascript, npm, web, web 2.0 shiite

I was listening to the Supertop Podcast today (you should too -- in the past, this show has had some great sponsors), and they were discussing Manton Reece's micro.blog Kickstarter, which added and met a stretch goal at $80k before it was all said and done.

I shelled out $10 to see the ebook, mostly because I'm intrigued, but not real sure what the project is about. On a past episode of Supertop, the guys mentioned that they weren't real sure what the project was precisely about themselves (EDIT: Turns out Daniel on Release Notes told Manton this same thing back on January 20th!).

Manton has discussed on his podcast, Core Intuition, several times about how much he's sweated the video for that Kickstarter (come to think of it, I don't think I ever watched!), but his real kicker (har har) is that he never actually precisely described what it was he's doing, so we're left to imagine micro.blog to be whatever we want it to be. It's a book about bringing back blogging, and it has a Twitter-like component. Not only that, it promises to "embrace... the open web". These are all laudable goals. Who wouldn't want to be on board?

But isn't that two services?

Interestingly, the stretch goal was...:

Stretch goal update: if we reach $80,000, I'll hire a community manager for Micro.blog to help build a safe community from the start. See this update on Kickstarter for details on the stretch goal and a new feature called Safe Replies.

A community manager? Wait, what? An open web service with a manager? How do you pull that off, exactly?

There are a number of obvious strategies. One is that the manager lords over a single server which is used to disseminate posts, and that your publishing process lets that server know as you're posting your content. Then others subscribe to that server in typical client-server fashion.

But that kills the open, doesn't it? Someone holds your access to your own subscriptions!

Maybe you could have a service that gives out guids for posts -- or even users -- that it doesn't feel a cultured schmoe would like to see, and your client uses those review services to pre-censor your open content. Nevertheless, management is much different than open.

I think a management/review service is a very different project from this one:

Do you remember how the web used to work? How the web was supposed to work?

In the earlier days of the web, we always published to our own web site. If you weren’t happy with your web host, or they went out of business, you could move your files and your domain name, and nothing would break.

Hopefully what this means is that we have two services. One is an open stack for publishing & consuming and the other is a review service that you can optionally use.

What is micro.blog?

Whether micro.blog is open or managed is precisely what I've wondered from the start. Manton's mentioned using (or replacing) Webmention, a w3c spec, a few times. That's an interesting move.

Webmention is sort of like an anonymously built webring -- remember those? When you'd slap a banner on your site so that anyone clicking could go to the "next, prev, or random" member of the same virtual community? Webrings built some of the first web-based, self-consciously social networks, versus, say, simply chatrooms and newsrooms based on topics, though I guess chatrooms and IRC were close.

Anyhow, webrings are sort of what Medium has effectively replaced. Now your blog has a social component [again]. Before, you had related conversations linked together. Now you link the conversations themselves. Webmention and Medium both accomplish this in one form or another.

What's necessary to have an open conversation?

But micro.blog is apparently more than that; it's also a Twitter replacement. And for that -- high intensity, short-form conversations broadcast publically -- you either have to subscribe to an RSS feed (or equiv) for someone's "micro blog posts" and then follow all reciprocally linked replies, or you'd have to have a centralized server which keeps track of unique names and collects and gives out all of the posts/information.

The first, a feed subscription, is a Webmention (or effectively a webring, though often even webrings had a server providing the "random" linking) like function. The second is a centralized client-server setup that's more susceptible to command and control. Even if there are, in theory, thousands of potential manager servers, it's still not really an open system.

And it's not really the openness that necessarily drives growth. I mean, there are already open Twitter alternatives. Building it doesn't mean that they'll come. There's a reason Twitter is still the 800 lbs gorilla.

Also remember that one of the giveaways for backing micro.blog was, "You can reserve your Micro.blog username even before the book is finished." Username? How is there a unique username on the open web without, say, an ICANN? Nonprofit or not, you're still centralized. Users won't own everything until you're using a mesh/p2p-ish network with the possibility of data collision -- and the algorithms to manage them. (Welcome to the world of public keys...)

In any event, I hope the book makes this stuff clear, and some folks bite on creating infrastructure. Even if Manton's holding the keys to "the" central server, it's an interesting experiment. How much can he offload hosting to keep costs down, but still provide reliable content? And how difficult would it be to make an Android client... ;^)

micro.blog is an interesting pie in the sky, but it's going to be a real pain to pull off and deliver on all the ambiguous promises it's perhaps unintentionally made. I wish him luck.

Labels: open, twitter, web 2.0 shiite

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Thursday, January 09, 2020
A proven failed pattern: npm- and framework-driven web development I don't recall when I signed up for it, but I routinely get a newsletter from Baldur Bjarnason about software development with a focus on web development. His new year's email includes some points on JavaScript frameworks that I'm suspicious I like because they so closely match mine. But what they so clearly indicate is that web development has become a field whose outward appearance and, all too often, local practice, has been completely co-opted by the needs of the largest of enterprise corporations. (Words in bullets are his. All emphasis is mine.) Once you step outside of the social media bubble, however, vanilla JS and more ‘modest’ approaches like Svelte or Stimulus/TurboLinks seem to have reached critical mass in terms of sustainability.Irrespective of those newer trends, jQuery and PHP-driven, un-hydrated, old-fashioned server-side rendering still utterly dominate the web that people use. Web dev driven by npm packages, frameworks, and bundling is to the field of web design what Java and C# in 2010s was to web servers. If you work in enterprise software [npm, framework, and bundling-through-transpilation driven patterns are] all you can see. Web developers working on CMS themes (or on Rails-based projects) using jQuery and plain old JS—maybe with a couple of libraries imported directly via a script tag—are the unseen dark matter of the web dev community. What should worry you is that *npm- and framework-driven web development feels* just as painful as enterprise software dev because it is enterprise development. He continues by comparing TypeScript -- and I think he means more specifically "enterprise TypeScript development", because there's lots to enjoy about TypeScript the language, nothing inherently evil about it -- to enterprise Java of 20 years ago. TypeScript smells like Java. The complexity of npm packages harkens back to painful Java packaging monstrosities. JavaScript build systems are about as much fun as Java build systems, even though they are doing very different things. Deployment, as implemented in the Kubernetes and Docker ecosystems, is exactly as hard to understand and use as its Java predecessors because those are their predecessors. Then he has a few points that serve as a sort of manifesto for the non-enterprise developer. Some of use work exclusively with SMBs (Small-/Medium-sized Businesses) and shouldn’t need to run the enterprise anti-productivity gauntlet. Our needs in terms of frameworks, bundling, and packages are very different from those working in enterprises with hundreds or thousands of employees. It is not rational to expect [developers for small and medium-sized businesses] to be using enterprise-oriented tools and environments or to demand that we be happy about being saddled with your need for complexity. I'd also ask people to take a close look at how they define what's an SMB project and what's an enterprise project. That is, defining projects by the size of the corporation that produces them isn't always -- heck, isn't usually -- the best metric.** Where something becomes "enterprise" is when you have hundreds of people working on the same project, in the same codebase. What npm/library-based bundling buys you is the ability to firewall smaller projects from each other. If someone writes a horribly inefficient page that no rendering library could solve without magic... ... your development process already includes a baked-in firewall to ensure that code doesn't adversely impact the rest of your system. You can stitch together completely independent projects easily, iff you really need to do that stitching. But how big is your day-to-day work, really? How many of the problems "solved" by mass package import could have been solved reasonably well for your uses with a (think what's often derisively called a "NIH syndrome-induced") roll-my-own, homebrew solution? Put another way, how many developers are really part of your specific product? If it's not hundreds, ask yourself how much time you'd save on developer ramp-up, maintenance, and new development if you too used "jQuery and plain old JS—maybe with a couple of libraries imported directly via a script tag". Even in a team of "just" 20-30, the resource savings from going just 25% faster (a conservative cost of doing framework-style development in my experience) are unbelievable. I'm not sure I know when going "full framework" is the best idea. At a conference, some friends of mine (coworkers) managed to corner a guy who was then working at Google on AngularJS (before Angular 2+). We talked to him a bit about AngularJS' pain points and how they solved problems of large DOMs, as our Knockout.js-based system was getting crushed in our more dynamic, feature-rich UIs. His basic comment was that you can't fix these issues easily, and there was no silver bullet. Inefficient or complex UIs are trouble no matter where you build them. The problem here was browser performance, which by definition isn't an SMB or enterprise problem. It's a client-side rendering one. Frameworks don't fix these issues. "Full framework" dev doesn't provide solutions to day-to-day problems, it provides the passive coordination that allows the amalgamation of code from hundreds of developers working at once. Is that really the state your team finds itself in? Why would you want it to be? And then here's a final comment from Bjarnason about how the thinkspace of development has been dominated by the enterprises -- he does a good job in the balance of his new year's points discussing how we see so much enterprise-specific information because those enterprises have a vested interest in making that come to be. The divide between what you read in developer social media and what you see on web dev websites, blogs, and actual practice has never in my recollection been this wide. I’ve never before seen web dev social media and forum discourse so dominated by the US west coast enterprise tech company bubble, and I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades now. The pre-2000 dot-com bubble comes close although that one came attached to an actual financial bubble and happened before social media had evolved into its current form. Anyhow, it's a good, thought provoking post, and worth a full read. Labels: development, enterprise, javascript, npm, web, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 1/09/2020 10:06:00 AM

Friday, February 03, 2017
A [possible] critique of micro.blog I was listening to the Supertop Podcast today (you should too -- in the past, this show has had some great sponsors), and they were discussing Manton Reece's micro.blog Kickstarter, which added and met a stretch goal at $80k before it was all said and done. I shelled out $10 to see the ebook, mostly because I'm intrigued, but not real sure what the project is about. On a past episode of Supertop, the guys mentioned that they weren't real sure what the project was precisely about themselves (EDIT: Turns out Daniel on Release Notes told Manton this same thing back on January 20th!). Manton has discussed on his podcast, Core Intuition, several times about how much he's sweated the video for that Kickstarter (come to think of it, I don't think I ever watched!), but his real kicker (har har) is that he never actually precisely described what it was he's doing, so we're left to imagine micro.blog to be whatever we want it to be. It's a book about bringing back blogging, and it has a Twitter-like component. Not only that, it promises to "embrace... the open web". These are all laudable goals. Who wouldn't want to be on board? But isn't that two services? Interestingly, the stretch goal was...: Stretch goal update: if we reach $80,000, I'll hire a community manager for Micro.blog to help build a safe community from the start. See this update on Kickstarter for details on the stretch goal and a new feature called Safe Replies. A community manager? Wait, what? An open web service with a manager? How do you pull that off, exactly? There are a number of obvious strategies. One is that the manager lords over a single server which is used to disseminate posts, and that your publishing process lets that server know as you're posting your content. Then others subscribe to that server in typical client-server fashion. But that kills the open, doesn't it? Someone holds your access to your own subscriptions! Maybe you could have a service that gives out guids for posts -- or even users -- that it doesn't feel a cultured schmoe would like to see, and your client uses those review services to pre-censor your open content. Nevertheless, management is much different than open. I think a management/review service is a very different project from this one: Do you remember how the web used to work? How the web was supposed to work? In the earlier days of the web, we always published to our own web site. If you weren’t happy with your web host, or they went out of business, you could move your files and your domain name, and nothing would break. Hopefully what this means is that we have two services. One is an open stack for publishing & consuming *and the other* is a review service that you can optionally use. What is micro.blog? Whether micro.blog is open or managed is precisely what I've wondered from the start. Manton's mentioned using (or replacing) Webmention, a w3c spec, a few times. That's an interesting move. Webmention is sort of like an anonymously built webring -- remember those? When you'd slap a banner on your site so that anyone clicking could go to the "next, prev, or random" member of the same virtual community? Webrings built some of the first web-based, self-consciously social networks, versus, say, simply chatrooms and newsrooms based on topics, though I guess chatrooms and IRC were close. Anyhow, webrings are sort of what Medium has effectively replaced. Now your blog has a social component [again]. Before, you had related conversations linked together. Now you link the conversations themselves. Webmention and Medium both accomplish this in one form or another. What's necessary to have an open conversation? But micro.blog is apparently more than that; it's also a Twitter replacement. And for that -- high intensity, short-form conversations broadcast publically -- you either have to subscribe to an RSS feed (or equiv) for someone's "micro blog posts" and then follow all reciprocally linked replies, or you'd have to have a centralized server which keeps track of unique names and collects and gives out all of the posts/information. The first, a feed subscription, is a Webmention (or effectively a webring, though often even webrings had a server providing the "random" linking) like function. The second is a centralized client-server setup that's more susceptible to command and control. Even if there are, in theory, thousands of potential manager servers, it's still not really an open system. And it's not really the openness that necessarily drives growth. I mean, there are already open Twitter alternatives. Building it doesn't mean that they'll come. There's a reason Twitter is still the 800 lbs gorilla. Also remember that one of the giveaways for backing micro.blog was, "You can reserve your Micro.blog username even before the book is finished." Username? How is there a unique username on the open web without, say, an ICANN? Nonprofit or not, you're still centralized. Users won't own everything until you're using a mesh/p2p-ish network with the possibility of data collision -- and the algorithms to manage them. (Welcome to the world of public keys...) In any event, I hope the book makes this stuff clear, and some folks bite on creating infrastructure. Even if Manton's holding the keys to "the" central server, it's an interesting experiment. How much can he offload hosting to keep costs down, but still provide reliable content? And how difficult would it be to make an Android client... ;^) micro.blog is an interesting pie in the sky, but it's going to be a real pain to pull off and deliver on all the ambiguous promises it's perhaps unintentionally made. I wish him luck. Labels: open, twitter, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 2/03/2017 01:57:00 PM

Monday, June 30, 2014
Apps are what bookmarks should've been, right? How many sites do we really go to on a routine basis? And when we go there, there's usually a pretty specific way we want to interface with them. Cloud utility mobile apps are what bookmarks on feature steroids. Labels: apps, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 6/30/2014 10:28:00 AM

Thursday, April 22, 2010
The NY Times' "Ethicist" is Anything But From The Ethicist - E-Book Dodge - NYTimes.com: [Q:]... The publisher apparently withheld [a Stephen King book's eBook version] to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y. [A:]An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical.... Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability... What crap. Is the book out of print? Is that hardcopy somehow obsolete now? Of course not. There's obviously value added with the eBook or ole C.D. wouldn't've wanted it. How does Mr. Cohen (the "Ethicist") decide when you've paid enough into the system to begin illegal civil disobedience? Can I pay for the movie in the theater and then download? Better parallel: Can I burn a Blu-Ray b/c I've purchased the DVD at full price? What if I paid a clearance price for the DVD? Have I still paid in enough for someone to forward me a bootleg Blu-Ray in high def? If I've read the book, can I sneak into a theater showing the movie that's not quite filled? Where's the harm in that? Would it really put poor, poor CD out to take along that "more than three and a half pounds" of codex on his trip? Really? Look, if you want a law changed because, in this case, you feel superior enough to remark "the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology", then start lobbying. Now show me one fair law that's anticipated a specific technology perfectly. Sort of another anachronism, ain't it? Honestly, I think eBooks are an interesting way to leverage your ownership of IP into more profit. As long as we're not EULAing hardcopies, knock yourselves out. Furthermore, in this case we have easier solutions for CD. Wait for the g******d eBook to be released. Trade time for money. Read another book on your trip. I just finished Water is Wide* by Pat Conroy on my iPod. You'll enjoy it. If you want to read a new book now, ya gotta pay. Or why not go to your local library and reserve a copy to read while you're waiting. That's a pretty good deal, isn't it? You're not out a buck. Now you read Conroy on your trip and you get to know the latest and greatest from that sick-o King[1]. And guess what, you've already paid for the privilege. Take advantage of it. Had Cohen even so much as said, "Though the risk of being caught is low, it does exist, and in NY the penalty is [X]. I would also say that you need to delete the eBook as soon as you return from your trip, when its marginal utility is gone, and that once the eBook is released, you should stop using this rationalization immediately," I would have felt a little better. As it stands, it bothers me that a representative of what's essentially the record of the United States could show such a simpleton's approach to ethics and encourage his readers to break the law without understanding the ramifications on themselves and the corporations that provide them with their goods. I'm no corporate cheerleader, but when a "ethicist" rationalizes stealing in officially sanctioned e-print, you know society's gauge of right and wrong had long since made a turn for the gutter. [1] Actually, I'm suspicious King is one of the best authors alive. I've read a few of his books that aren't about blood and guts, and they're all exceptionally well written. Still, I tried that city in a bubble book and couldn't get past the first few chapters. SICK. It's all about how you apply yourself, I guess. Labels: blu-ray, business, control, copyright, digitization, DRM, ethics, evil, hats of money, kindle, licensing, nyt, web 2.0 shiite, zealousness posted by ruffin at 4/22/2010 12:05:00 PM

Tuesday, July 07, 2009
I've broken Netflix For months now, Netflix hasn't so much as ventured a recommendation -- or, if it has, they have been few and quickly dismissed. This despite my having rated 444 movies. Seriously? You've got nuttin? If I've got Bloodrayne on my list, isn't it likely I'll watch anything? Maybe my queue's long enough and my plan sorry enough they don't feel they need to entice me into using Netflix more. Still, I'd expect recommendations and an upsell. In other news, I'm at least temporarily tired of blogging about much of anything, really really like what I've seen of Paintbrush for OS X (which does what Seashore should have done for OS X: provide a Paint replacement), and believe that Ogg Theora will eventually be used more for commercials than anything else. That's right, the new built-in video codec in Firefox will be used to ensure everyone in that browser sees what are now Flash adverts without a hitch. Until bandwidth costs < licensing, I'm not sure why anyone would walk away from what's already on the scene -- Flash, Silverlight, h.264. In fact, Apple's serving the h.264 Kool Aid as quickly as possible, putting hardware support into every consumer Mac it makes in addition to the iPhone. I'd like to see Theora do to video what png did for images on the net. Still, the only place they make sense -- file size is small enough and the desire to get the message out there more pull than push -- is advertisements, and even then only for adverts being pushed to folk with Firefox browser strings. Labels: apple, control, copyright, firefox, iphone, licensing, paint, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 7/07/2009 12:47:00 PM

Sunday, September 07, 2008
Why Chrome Won't^H^H^H^H^H WIll Crash Windows Mr. Beal's cleverly named businessweek.com piece, Why Chrome Won't Crash Windows, misses a key point in understanding Chrome's importance. First, a quote: It's our infatuation with the Google brand, more than the technology inside, that will boost Chrome's market share and further extend Google in our daily Web activities. As for being a Windows or Internet Explorer killer, don't count on it. Did Gmail kill Hotmail? Will Google Docs kill Office? Did Google kill Yahoo? How about Google Reader -- it's killed nearly every stand-alone RSS reader I've tried. Now each of these use the browser as their host platform. I've already shown Chrome's ability to take Google Reader offline. Does Firefox do this? Not yet... If Chrome can extend Gmail, Reader, Docs, Maps, search, Scholar, Books, etc etc etc onto your desktop, the OS will finally become a commoditized complement. This kills Windows. Rather, it negates the advantage one OS has over another, in large and almost exclusive part. Again, Google is with chrome making Java's play, and they are, to date, doing it successfully. There's more than just a cute icon to be gleaned from Google's portrait of Java applets as a bunch of dancing moons. What Google is saying is that where Sun failed so miserably and laughably in Web 1.0, Google's winning in version two. Google is killing the OS in ways Sun wanted to with Java and couldn't. It'll be interesting to see if Google can succeed. Labels: browsers, chrome, dancing moons, firefox, gmail, Google, java, microsoft, web 2.0 shiite, windows posted by ruffin at 9/07/2008 08:31:00 PM

Thursday, August 21, 2008
Raiding the archives From <Glazblog/>: Firefox is the root of the buzz, the root of the income, the root of the success, the root of the massive hiring process Mozilla started. Seamonkey is not a part of it any more, xulrunner is not a part of it any more, I hardly see how webrunner fits into that strategy, Mozilla just does not care about the editing companion to Firefox whatever its name Nvu or Composer, and Thunderbird is itself taken out from under the wings of Mozilla Corporation. The whole thing is about Firefox. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying it's bad or good. It's factual, period. So the modernity factor, the quality factor, the freedom factor and the coolness factor are NOT attached to the name 'Mozilla' for the public, sorry to say. I mean, I kinda got that feeling already. What I suppose I didn't quite understand is that not only has any sort of brand recognition with Mozilla been ditched, it's been ditched because it gives inferior performance in public considerations. Mozilla is not a neutral, relatively obscure brand, it is, instead, negative, dated, and unuseful. There's a reason it's called the browser war, I suppose. But what does this say about the place of html authorship and email in the public? And we're back to the question of what is [that hated moniker] Web 2.0 supposed to mean? iMovie to YouTube takes the place of Mozilla Composer to your geocities site? Labels: business, firefox, mozilla, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 8/21/2008 09:39:00 AM

Quick Wesch Critique Michael Wesch's youtube post is interesting in that it tries to make key distinctions between the use of traditional manuscript against the use of hypertext, but it's misleading in a number of ways I find particularly troubling. Let's be blog-a-rific and not compose these in any meaningful, synthesized way, and just list 'em out in the order they pop from the fingers. 1.) The fade from the white page of pencil to hypertext can be interpreted in one of two ways. The first is that there is a continuum between paper-manuscript and digital cultures, and the second is that there's a stark break. You watch as the actor moves from saying that digital text is different because it moves or can be changed in some strange way, but the editing continues until linking/hyperlinking/hypertext is settled on as the key distinction. Unfortunately what we just saw in the paper-manuscript suggestion was already doing a great job saying that this is not the case. There is no Web 1.0 or 2.0. Each set of technologies, whether keyboard, text editor and browser or pencil, paper, and printed page have their own means of remediating the dynamic functions depicted in that video. Read Heather Jackson's Marginalia and then tell me manuscript culture didn't have the same functionality as digital text. Both are compositional forms where the method of composition is the same as the method of publication, both typically allow avenues for easy coauthorship by readers/consumers/audiences, etc. The differences seem obvious enough, and they are useful ones. Digital media (with enough infrastructure -- server/proc speed & RAM, software, bandwidth) can quickly scale to allow for "flash mobs'" worth of interest, for example, whereas books with particularly impressive marginalia are much harder to share with millions at once. Yet these are differences, not strengths deserving 1980's style synthesized background music promising intellectual liberation. One allowed for the flourishing of the Tuesday Club, and the other allowed for Matt Drudge. The real difference between the two is the ability to move from a controlled, known audience to a potentially anonymous one, which I often rant about when people try to argue that privacy has been lost online. It's not so much that any of this is privacy but the expectation of anonymity... what are the ramifications for culture whose cities include the potential to walk down the street arguing personal matters with your spouse knowing that the comments aren't likely to be heard by anyone which you know personally? It would seem digital communication is only now catching up with the changes in the gross urban populations that have increasingly become the rule. Certainly the community of the shared gossip fence has died (and the gossip has likely gone digital without it). Which moves us from unearned break number one (as it becomes clear Wesch would rather argue a paradigm shift (meaning a quantum leap) between the abilities of paper-manuscript and digital text rather than something that does the same work differently) to unearned break number two -- the video's implication that HTML and XML are such totally different animals -- he trivially makes the case that you can't consider the format without the human behind it (a concept key for understanding any digital standard, like HTML, XML, and their SGML brethren), but the impression for the uninitiated is a dangerously misleading one, which I guess I'll talk about later. In brief. to say that HTML caused a static Web 1.0 and that XML allows for a dynamic Web 2.0 where form completely separates from content is horrendously oversimplistic. Makes for a groovy video, but does not, as presented, invite needed inquiry. (And as if Web 2.0 as currently conceived is an improvement...) It also tends to overlook that html was initially conceived as a means of providing markup whose display would be regulated by the way the browser's user set the preferences. I should find an older browser, but for now you can see a few vestiges in Netscape Communicator 4.77, which I had handy. EDIT: Here's a picture from Netscape 2.02. The operative option is highlighted (and it's in v4 as well) -- "Always use mine." -- I'd also add that one of the biggest changes from my undergrad days to today is the rigid policing of access to academic journals. Fifteen years ago, anyone could walk off of the street into their state university and have, within reason, the same journal access that their university professors had. Now, access to online journals are very carefully tracked, thanks to the power of databases and digital delivery/publication systems, and online-only subscriptions mean that access can be stolen away at any moment, shoved back into an exclusive virtual rare book room. Labels: acad, web 2.0 shiite, youtube posted by ruffin at 8/21/2008 12:03:00 AM

Wednesday, August 06, 2008
It's the power of DRM, and the dangers of "Web 2.0" shite From a Macrumors.com post called Apple iTunes Still #1, but Amazon Gaining - Mac Rumors: Amazon, however, saw a rise in ranking from #5 to #4, which NPD attributes to both strong CD sales as well as Amazon's introduction of their MP3 music store. The digital rights management (DRM) free solution provides iPod users a convenient and compatible alternative to Apple's iTunes. Apple's still #1 when it comes to selling digital music (ie, CDs + downloads), Wal-Mart's two, and Best Buy's three, but Amazon is 4, apparently passing Target. Several months ago I mentioned that "Keeping DRM free 'not Apple' is the only bargaining chip the music companies have," and that I thought it was a smart move by Universal to hedge their bets by going DRM at the iTunes Music Store and DRM-free at Amazon. I'm pretty sure that's not the only thing -- or even the primary thing -- going on with Amazon's move from 5 to 4 (even if Amazon's online store stole 10% of iTunes' customers). Instead, what we're likely seeing is that CD sales and music download sales are relatively unrelated markets, and adding an online store was a gain for Amazon all the way around. Even if Amazon only sells a quarter as many online downloads as they have CDs in the past, that's a 25% gain [minus a small number of CD buyers moving to online downloads]. If anything, Amazon's online music store is probably helping them sell more CDs, especially if the NRD counts used sales from 3rd party vendors. The CDs are just a link away from the mp3s. I imagine anyone on the chart could move a bit with that sort of change. I was interested to see that a company in the UK offering the following music subscription service for ISPs to install: Scant days since UK music labels reached a deal with six of the country's leading ISPs to begin turning the screws on the nation's estimated six million file-sharers, 7Digital has entered the fray, offering ISPs a range of services designed to let them offer music to their customers as part of their subscription. This is Web 2.0, as the corporations want to see it. The UK ISPs are already throttling back on people who use p2p. The deal - which has been agreed to by BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse - also means file-sharers could see their broadband connections slowed, or removed altogether. And then we see something like 7Digital's suggestion, above, that these same ISPs could license what essentially becomes a free or easily controlled subscription music service on what amounts to their own intranets. This is exactly the kind of control net neutrality seeks to remove. I have to think universities would start doing something similar. I mean, if you don't want 18-22 year olds trading music illegally, what can you do? Give on-campus students all that music for free, using a plan just like the 7Digital one for UK ISPs. Except that it ain't free; the licensing fee is going to be thrown in with tuition. And what's great? Once you leave school (or, more generally, your ISP or what-have-you), all that music you once could listen to drops right back into the virtual rare book room. You graduate, and your music is gone. Want to listen again? Pay again. Personally, I don't want tax dollars going to license pop music for teenagers, much less tax dollars earmarked for "education" going to only temporarily license that pop music, but I'm not real optimistic that it won't happen. This also has some real repercussions for the possibilities for smaller ISP start-ups. If Web 2.0 style controls like this one become popular, how are they going to be able to make the same deals with ~~record~~ music companies? They probably won't, at least not for the same prices per client. Okay, as always, buy used books, trade for all your digital music, and if you're out tonight, don't forget, if you're on your bike, always, always, always wear white. (I was doing this before TK, thanks very much. Well, at least independent of.) Labels: amazon, DRM, iTunes, online distribution, wal marts, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 8/06/2008 07:24:00 AM

Friday, June 13, 2008
MobileMe vs. Gmail Building on yesterday's post about Gmail fighting the desktop platform, as I watched the "Apple guided tour" to MobileMe, it hit me that MobileMe is the desktop's shot back. Actually, it's more that someone with stock in the desktop, here namely Apple, is doing the same thing as Google's apps, and hoping it plays into hardware sales. Sure Google has the Google Mini (hrm. interesting name), but beyond catering to a very few companies decently serious about search, they aren't yet in the hardware game. I hate to end all Rudy Mancke style (the most inane 45 seconds on radio), but I will. "Isn't it interesting how the side of the bread that's buttered for different companies influences the way they use the same technologies?" I now feel compelled to pimp high end retreat homes oxymoronically placed in a preservation site. Labels: apple, Google, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 6/13/2008 11:38:00 AM

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