This is hands-down the best piece on the CBDTPA I’ve read yet. If you are trying to explain the implications of this legislation to someone, have them read this bit. It’ll help. It’s even funny!
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Doug
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Doug
I had one of those “Aha!” moments today, courtesy of an odd set of circumstances:
I’m currently re-reading Earth by David Brin. I find this to be an odd book, because the story isn’t nearly as compelling as the picture Brin paints of the near future. The setting is fascinating to me, and so it tends to provoke my thinking much more than the plot does.
Last night as I was reading I came to one of my favorite passages, a section where one of the characters is interacting with her computer system, reading mail and scanning news items her filters and clipping services have culled out of the fire hose of information that’s constantly directed at her by the ‘net of 2039. Brin’s descriptions of the technologies she uses are wonderful. We’re seeing the beginnings of some of what he describes in today’s syndication, content aggregation and weblogging tools.
It strikes me as I’m reading that the agents I’ve set up in Tinderbox are essentially the same thing that Brin is describing in this passage. What I’m missing is a good presentation interface; I can see that I have news items that match my criteria, but I haven’t come up with an efficient means of presenting those news items to myself. Nothing else will do, of course, but to climb out of bed at midnight and start mucking about in Tinderbox to see what I can come up with.
Now, I have about 20 RSS feeds I’m pulling in, and I use ten or so agents to parse through those feeds to look for key words and group the feeds based on those keywords. That allows me to see, for example, what news sources have articles on robotics at any given time. Using Tinderbox’s Map view, I can see that I have some number of feeds that match a given agents search terms. I can then drill down into that agent, and I see which particular feeds are the matching feeds. Double-clicking on a feed, then, will open up the contents of that feed, where I can read the pertinent news items, or click the link and open up my browser to go to the full story.
It works, but it’s clunky. There’s an awful lot of clicking and navigating into and out of cells on the map view. I can’t easily see at the top level of the view which feeds exactly are associated with which agents. I wanted something better.
Tinderbox has some really great text and HTML export capabilities, so my first thought was to build an HTML template, divided into sections corresponding to my agents, and then export the agents (with their accompanying news feeds). I knew building the template wouldn’t be any problem; this would give me a sort of “news paper” of my feeds in one long HTML file.
There were two problems, however. First, the same feeds frequently show up in more than one agent, because they contain stories that match more than one set of key words. While I’d be able to see everything, a lot of it would be redundant. Beyond that, I couldn’t seem to figure out a method for generating the file automatically. Publishing in Tinderbox is a manual operation, which makes a lot of sense given what Tinderbox is designed to do.
I decided to tackle the publishing issue first, since I couldn’t see any obvious way of dealing with the redundancy issue. What I wanted to do was automatically generate the HTML file when the contents of any of the agents/feeds changed. It seemed to me that if I could figure out the right set of actions to assign to an agent, I’d get there. After noodling over it for awhile, though, I was stumped; there just didn’t seem to be any way to get there from here.
Since I was stuck, I fired off an e-mail to Eastgate, describing what I was trying to do in general terms, and asking if it was possible in Tinderbox or if I should maybe try something in AppleScript. Since it’s Good Friday, I more or less shelved the idea for the weekend, figuring I wouldn’t hear anything for a few days.
About ten minutes later, my office phone rang. Much to my surprise, it was Mark Bernstein, Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems and primary developer of Tinderbox! Mark had received my e-mail, and tried to send me a reply, but he’d been caught up by the new anti-spam blacklist filters we’d put on the mail server this week. Mark was calling to let me know he’d run into problems, and to ask me some more detailed questions about what I was trying to achieve.
Now, here’s the cool part and the “aha!” moment. After we discussed what I was trying to achieve, Mark commented that I might be able to get the results I was really after not by doing any sort of HTML export, but simply by using Tinderbox’s Explorer view. It was like a light bulb went off. While I’d looked at Explorer view before, I’d never really tried to use it. A quick glance, however, revealed that Mark was right; with a little arrangement of my notes, I’d be able to easily see what feeds were being gathered by what agents, and I’d be able to navigate and read those feeds with a lot less clicking around and drilling down.
I’d been so caught up in two paradigms that I literally couldn’t see the easy solution that was right in from of me. To begin with, my propensity to always use the very graphical Map view blinded me to the other, very useful views available. Worse, my experience in recent years has been very server oriented, primarily using things like PHP and MySQL, so I naturally gravitated toward an implementation scheme that worked in a similar manner, blind to the fact that Tinderbox is a client application.
Okay, so as paradigm shifting moments go, this wasn’t all that huge; it isn’t like it’s going to bring world peace or anything. I do have a better interface to my information, which is useful, and I did get to see a couple of places where my thinking’s been blocked, which is even more useful and valuable. There are a couple of other revelations to come out of this experience, however, that I want to remember.
First, Mark Bernstein is a great guy; one who really understands what interacting with his customers is all about and one who genuinely wants his product to be first-rate. A lot of other people would have given up when that e-mail bounced. Mark took the time to look up my office telephone number and call me to discuss my question. In the course of the discussion, he could have said “Sorry, Tinderbox just doesn’t do that.” Instead, he sought to understand what I was really trying to accomplish, rather than just looking at my methodology. By doing so, he was able to steer me in a completely different direction to achieve the results I wanted. How many representatives of companies have you dealt with in the last five years that have been able to provide that sort of service? The first thing I did after getting off the phone with Mark was to collar a group of my colleagues and tell them about what had happened. That’s how we want our company to interact with people. Mark has passion for what he’s doing, and it shows.
The second important thing to come out of this process today was to remember that it takes interaction with people who see things from a different perspective to generate those “aha!” moments. I haven’t had a lot of those in the last couple of years, and I miss them. When I traveled a lot and did consulting and training with a lot of diverse groups, I had paradigm shifting moments all the time. These days, I work with a very close, very heterogeneous group that’s been together for quite some time. We’re very used to each other, we instinctively know how we all react and work, and we have a very high level of trust. All those are very good things, particularly for operating a smoothly functioning business. There can be a real tendency toward group think, however, if you aren’t careful, and it isn’t always the best environment for creative thinking.
I have a few days off next week. I think I’ll use them to mull over the lessons of today and discover some ways of injecting some creative chaos back into my life and business.
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Doug
Al has a great rant about the impending health care crisis. What’s more, what he’s talking about can be generalized to a much wider range of issues.
He’s dead right, too, that the writing is on the wall and has been for quite some time. Unfortunately, Western culture, and Americans specifically, seem poorly-suited to long-term thinking and planning. Fixing something before it’s a crisis just doesn’t seem to be something we’re capable of.
I and my colleagues make a handsome living because of this, but I really do wish it wasn’t so.
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Doug
Today, another entertainment-industry purchased politician weighed-in on selling our rights to Disney. This time, the action is in the House rather than the Senate. That’s right; Eisner bought himself a supporter over there, too.
I’m all for the campaigns to fax out Congress people and the like, but my cynical side says that the out-of-touch and corrupt idiots in D.C. won’t pay much attention to that stuff. After all, we just keep electing them again and again, just like the sheep we are, don’t we?
Personally, I think it’s time to get serious. It’s time to boycott the products of the entertainment industry. I had to admit I was a bit stunned by the number of people who blogged the Oscars; if you’re so disgusted by the behavior of the industry, and so appalled at the quality of crap they put out, and so upset at how they treat people - why did you watch the damn show?
I’m done buying CD’s, DVD’s, and going to movies until the industry shows some sanity. Disney and Sony and all the rest won’t get another red cent of my money until this legislation is defeated, and the industry cartels are called to task.
I also plan to closely watch the voting records of my elected representatives. If anyone of them supports either of these bills, I’m committed to trying to make that the end of their political careers. Maybe I, alone, can’t make much difference, but I’ll be damned if I’ll just sit here, examine my navel, and do nothing.
Imagine for a moment what it would be like to be the target of a million really pissed off geeks, all expert at digging into online information and publishing it, hell-bent on getting your corrupt ass thrown out of office. We could do something about this, if we wanted to.
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Doug
Wow. Milton Berle and Dudley Moore both died today.
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Doug
Salon has a pretty good article on encryption software, specifically the now more-or-less defunct PGP and the open source GNU Privacy Guard. The article covers a little about the history of personal encryption software, what happened to PGP once controlled by Network Associates, and wraps up with a discussion of current open source efforts.
If you don’t use GPG, you might want to look into it. I don’t have occasion to use it all that frequently, but most of us probably have circumstances where we send e-mail we don’t care to be easily read by others, or want to establish as definitely originating from us via a digital signature. If you use OS X, check out the excellent tools being provided by the folks at MacGPG and the plug-in for Mail.app from GPGMail.
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Doug
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Doug
Trenton, N.J. (SatireWire.com) ó Under a new law designed to protect minors, local police departments will now be required to inform residents any time a known Roman Catholic church moves into their neighborhood.
Critics, however, charge that Egan’s Law is unconstitutional, specifically because it relies on religious profiling and is intended to safeguard only one segment of the population: young males. But State Sen. Carmela Truto, a Catholic who co-sponsored the bill, used church doctrine itself to prove only one segment needs protection.
“In the Catholic Church, after 2,000 years, Mary is still a Virgin,” she said. “So clearly, they’re not interested in girls.”
Okay, it’s a cheap shot, but it’s funny.
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Doug
I hate sendmail.
Oh, sure, maybe it handles the majority of mail traffic on the Internet and has a history of robustness and security and flexibility and all. I still hate it.
I mean, I’m all for cryptic configuration files and all, but there’s a line even I won’t cross!
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Doug
It strikes me as ironic that OS X celebrated its first birthday within a day of the release of the production version of Palm Desktop for OS X. I suspect that Palm’s foot dragging on porting their application may have really hurt them with Mac users.
I never did manage to get the beta to synchronize with my Palm correctly, and found the desktop software to be remarkably prone to file corruption. In the end, I’ve switched over to using Tinderbox for most of my personal information needs, and am actively looking for a good calendar substitute. As for my Palm itself, I’ve completely stopped using it. This weekend, I went to turn it on and the batteries were dead, something that hasn’t happened ever before in the two years I’ve owned it.
If you make it impossible for me to use your hardware or software for long periods of time, be careful. I’m liable to find out I don’t really need it anymore.
