Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Archives

About

Greatest hits

Archives for October 2006

Stuck inside of Iraq with the Swift Boat blues again

by

John Kerry: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

If you just read those words on their own, it’s pretty clear what Kerry is saying: Good students can “do well.” Those who maybe weren’t such good students — like, for instance, our current president — end up “stuck in Iraq.”

It’s not a great joke, and it’s no model of clarity. But only someone absolutely determined to score points would read it and state with certainty that Kerry meant our soldiers in Iraq are idiots. So of course that’s what Tony Snow and the GOP attack machine are saying. (CNN’s lead basically buys it hook and sinker.)

There’s the stench of Swift Boating here. But Kerry’s not up for election this time. The vote is about Bush’s disastrous Iraq policies. And anyone who really cares about the welfare of our troops — who’ve been thrust into an unnecessary war without the forces, the equipment, or the strategy they need to win — will realize that the Bush administration is playing a desperate game of “Don’t look behind the curtain.”

Maybe they’ll successfully hijack the news cycle for a day or two by twisting Kerry’s words. Every minute spent arguing about what Kerry might have meant is a minute we’re not talking about the wasted billions and the wasted lives. Sooner or later we’ll return to the stark fact of this White House’s responsibility for driving America into the Iraq ditch.

Kerry responds: “If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy… The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it… No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.”
[tags]john kerry, iraq, 2006 elections[/tags]

Rebecca Blood’s “Bloggers on Blogging” interview

by

About six months ago, while I was deep in the editing process for my book, Rebecca Blood emailed me and asked if I would be interested in doing an interview for her series “Bloggers on Blogging.”

Rebecca is one of the people who literally wrote the book (well, a book, one of the first and best) on blogging. So I said, sure — as soon as I’m done with Dreaming in Code. We reconnected over the summer and exchanged emails on a wonderfully leisurely schedule that actually gave me time to think about my answers.

Today she posted the result. I’m grateful for the opportunity to spout off at length both about my writing and about the nature of blogging, my ideas about it, how blogging has affected national politics, and more. It’s a great series — and great company to be in.

Here’s a taste:

With regard to blogging, what was your most memorable moment?

I think it would be sitting down at the computer late at night a couple of days before Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. I was heartbroken at the prospect of an unnecessary and ill-advised war. I grew up at the tail end of Vietnam and always assumed that, whatever other mistakes the nation would make in my lifetime, we would never let ourselves make that one again. I put my kids to bed, thought about the world Bush’s mistake was likely to shape for them, and poured out my heart in a post I titled Eve of Destruction (the comments are still at the old location).

When I hear people arguing that we didn’t and couldn’t know before we invaded Iraq what we know now, I recall that moment. It reminds me that many people knew just how deceptive and stupid the Iraq policy was from the start. And it makes me grateful that the Web and our blogs serve as a day-by-day and hour-by-hour collective record of what we knew and when we said it.

[tags]scott rosenberg, rebecca blood, blogging, bloggers on blogging[/tags]

Steven Levy talks about his iPod book

by

Steven Levy came to Sylvia Paull‘s Berkeley CyberSalon at the Hillside Club tonight to talk about the iPod and his new book, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. I haven’t read the book yet (Farhad Manjoo has, and his Salon review is a wonderful meditation on what, both good and bad, the iPod is doing to the experience of listening to music). There’s a nice excerpt online in Wired; Levy’s also got a blog on the topic.

Levy started off by largely disavowing his superlative title. Of course, he admitted, the iPod is far from perfect, from its too-easily-scuffable skin to its too-confining conception of digital rights management. He said the device represents more of a “perfect storm,” a perfect summation of all the issues that arise when a medium goes digital.

I have to say I didn’t find this too persuasive (maybe he makes a better case in the book!); it might be better just to say, “Book titles are chosen to get your attention,” and move on. Because everything else Levy has to say about the iPod is fascinating, amusing and important.

Levy sees the iPod’s shuffle mode as the key to its meaning — so much so that he got playful with the book, writing each chapter as a discrete unit so the whole book could be put on shuffle mode. There are four different sequencings of The Perfect Thing out there; no telling which one you’ll get. (Once upon a time, in my previous life as an arts critic, I did something similar in channeling the spirit of John Cage for a review of a celebration of his music.)

He asked the Hillside Club crowd how many listened to their iPod with shuffle on; I’d say about half the audience raised their hands. I wasn’t one — though I find shuffle an amusing novelty, mostly I love digital music for the control it offers me, the chance to be my own DJ, so why would I want to go random? After listening to Levy, I think I’ll try it more; he made a good case for seeing what interesting juxtapositions turn up between the music you’ve chosen and the moment you’re experiencing.

I asked Levy whether the pro-shuffle and anti-shuffle tribes divide by age, hypothesizing that maybe a forty-something like me is still rebelling against growing up listening to bad radio, whereas a younger person who grew up with digital music might be craving more serendipity. But Levy said he hasn’t noticed an age skew between pro- and anti-shuffle-ites (he’s a bit older than me and is a shuffle-ite himself). He guessed that it’s more like the division between people who have the patience to organize their lives around PIM (personal information management) software and those who can’t be bothered. That makes sense — the PIM devotees (I’ve long been one) would also have the patience to program their own listening.

Levy also talked about the strange experience people have when they find that their ostensibly random shuffle mode seems to play favorites; for him, Steely Dan just kept on showing up. A column he wrote on this topic evoked a torrent of amusing email, some of which he read. Deeper investigation among mathematicians led him to conclude that Apple wasn’t lying when it said that shuffle really is random — and that the experience people had of shuffle “favorites” is actually a statistical phenomenon known as “clustering” that turns up in nearly any random distribution.

Lee Felsenstein asked Levy about what the iPod’s triumph has done to narrow public space, now that so many of us are walking around with our own private soundtracks. Levy’s answer made sense for a New Yorker: “When I’m on the subway, I don’t really intend to do much social networking.” But what about outside of dense urban conglomerations (the kinds of places Steven Johnson celebrates in The Ghost Map)? Do we need more alienation in the cookie-cutter exurban communities where human connections get more and more tenuous? The “don’t bug me” message is useful on mean streets; but out in the vast wasteland, iPod-induced solitude may be worth worrying about.
[tags]steven levy, ipod, shuffle[/tags]

Steven Johnson interview — plus: where I’ve been

by

Tonight on Salon’s cover — in our brand-spanking new home page design, which we’re quite proud of — you’ll find my interview with Steven Johnson. It’s about his fine new book, The Ghost Map, as well as sundry other topics, including his new tool for organizing the local Web, Outside.in; why cities aren’t environmental disasters; why nuclear terrorism is more of a long-term danger to city dwellers than bioterrorism or epidemic; how innovators change a scientific consensus; and more.

Johnson has been one of my favorite authors ever since his Interface Culture, which I wrote about back in 1997, so I relished the opportunity to talk with him once more.

Apologies for light blogging here. My spare time has been devoted to hunkering down on a big freelance project. It’s almost done, so normal programming here — including a return to Code Reads after an unplanned one-week break — will resume shortly. I have a couple of posts I wanted to make from OOPSLA, and a few other interesting things lined up.
[tags]Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map, cities[/tags]

COPA trial begins

by

As longtime readers of this blog know, Salon and I have both been deeply involved in the ACLU’s challenge to the 1998 Child Online Protection Act from the start, which means this epic has been going on for something like eight years.

Under normal circumstances, the fact that multiple courts have already preliminarily ruled against the law — an Internet censorship bill masquerading as a “protect our kids from porn” measure — should have sounded its death knell a long time ago. But the Bush Justice Department loves its social issues, and instead of folding up its tent based on the preliminary proceedings, Justice has taken the issue to a full trial.

The trial started this week in Philadelphia. Joan Walsh, Salon’s editor, testified Monday. There’s a full transcript of the day’s proceedings available from the ACLU. (Back in 2004 I wrote about the Supreme Court hearing on COPA.) As there’s news on this I’ll keep posting it.
[tags]copa, child online protection act, internet censorship, aclu, salon[/tags]

Off to OOPSLA

by

I’ll be heading up to the OOPSLA conference next week (I’ll be there all day Tuesday and Wednesday). It’s in one of my favorite cities in the world, Portland; and it’s a chance for me to brush up on the software realm as my book nears publication.

OOPSLA stands for “object-oriented programming, systems, languages and applications”; it’s a venerable conference dating back about 20 years, and it serves as something of an epicenter for the more visionary or radical tradition in the software development world.

I attended OOPSLA two years ago, and it was one of the highlights of my book research — with presentations from all sorts of interesting people, including Alan Kay, Jaron Lanier, Ward Cunningham and Richard Gabriel. This year’s speakers include Brenda Laurel and Charles Simonyi.

If you’re at the conference and want to chat, leave a comment here or drop me an email.
[tags]oopsla, portland[/tags]

Random morning notes

by

I’m in Seattle today on business. So as you would imagine the local paper here pays special attention to, among other topics, all things Microsoft.

But I was struck by the near-Kremlinological level of focus in a front-page item in the Seattle Times business section that reported on the failure of Microsoft to send Windows Vista off to manufacturing according to schedule — or, wait a minute, it’s not really a schedule, it’s just that a Times reporter saw a sign in a building window a week ago that said the new operating system would be off to manufacturing in a week. But now it seems that was wrong.

This kind of Vatican-smoke-signals reading felt more like trade-journal stuff or material from an obsessive blogger. In fact it’s both; the real story — in more detail and with a far more appropriately light tone — comes from veteran Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley’s blog.

Meanwile, Microsoft has released IE7. Walt Mossberg points out that mostly it’s about catching IE users up with features that Firefox has always had. IE users get tabs! This is a good thing, don’t get me wrong — it’s just so long in coming that it feels like it barely matters. Opera gave me tabs so long ago I can’t even remember life without them.

Finally: Front page of the Journal today features reporter Pui-Wing Tam’s personal account of her year-long surveillance by the leak-crazed Hewlett-Packard investigators. At the bottom of the front page: an H-P ad. (This is either the first or one of the first times the Journal has placed advertising on its front page.) Is this a plain old “whoops”? A sign of how airtight the Journal keeps the seal between church and state? Or an act of corporate contrition (“We spied on you, we’re sorry, here’s some business”)? Who knows? It’s certainly eyebrow-raising.
[tags]microsoft, vista, ie7, hewlett-packard[/tags]

Code Reads #3: Edsger Dijkstra’s “The Humble Programmer”

by

Code ReadsThis is the third edition of Code Reads, a weekly discussion of some of the central essays, documents and texts in the history of software. You can go straight to the comments and post something if you like. Here’s the full Code Reads archive.

This will be a briefer entry than I originally planned. I’ve fallen behind a bit this week! So rather than post about all three essays I mentioned last week, I’m going to confine myself to “The Humble Programmer,” Edsger Dijkstra’s Turing Lecture, delivered in 1972.

In “The Humble Programmer” (text, PDF) Dijkstra offers an overview of the programming universe as he saw it in 1972. In the ’50s and early ’60s, programming pioneers struggled against the “painfully pinching shoe” of inadequate equipment. Then they got the more powerful machines they longed for. “But instead of finding ourselves in the state of eternal bliss of all progamming problems solved,” Dijkstra wrote, “We found ourselves up to our necks in the software crisis!” The problem was that the upward curve of ambition driven by new hardware capacity outran the improvements in software:

As the power of available machines grew by a factor of more than a thousand, society’s ambition to apply these machines grew in proportion, and it was the poor programmer who found his job in this exploded field of tension between ends and means. The increased power of the hardware, together with the perhaps even more dramatic increase in its reliability, made solutions feasible that the programmer had not dared to dream about a few years before. And now, a few years later, he had to dream about them and, even worse, he had to transform such dreams into reality!

From its title to the repetition of phrases like “the poor programmer” to its references to “the intrinsic limitations of the human mind,” the essay presents a chastened vision of the human capacity to create software: the programmer, Dijkstra says, must be “fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull.”

[Read more…]

Eye-raq: Santorum, Tolkien and terror

by

I am the first in line to enjoy a good Lord of the Rings analogy. But there is something distinctly off in Sen. Rick Santorum’s effort to recast the Iraq War in Tolkienian terms:

Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has been drawn to Iraq instead.

Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1950s fantasy classic “Lord of the Rings,” to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand.

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” Santorum continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

The trouble here is not that Santorum is daring to compare a bloody real-life tragedy to a fantasy novel — pace my colleague Tim Grieve, who brought this bizarre tirade to my attention, or the spokesman for Santorum’s opponent, who complains, “You have to really question the judgment of a U.S. senator who compares the war in Iraq to a fantasy book.” That doesn’t bother me. Myths and fictions offer us powerful ways of seeing and talking about the real world. Popular politicians — like Ronald Reagan, who borrowed his “Evil Empire” imagery from George Lucas — understand this.

No, the problem is that Santorum’s analogy makes no sense. I think the senator means to offer a Middle Earth version of the GOP’s “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” but he’s messed it up badly. (Warning: Tolkienian geekery ahead!)

First of all, in Tolkien’s saga, the good guys are outgunned and outmanned by the Dark Lord, whereas in our world, the U.S. is a “hyperpower” whose military, in 2001-2, seemed to bestride the world. Second, in Tolkien, the good guys sent Frodo with the Ring into the depths of Mordor as a sort of last-ditch, bet-everything gamble; then they sent an army to the gates of Mordor as a diversion — to keep the Eye occupied and distract it from the hobbits headed for Mount Doom.

Santorum says the war in Iraq was meant to keep the Eye distracted. But what kind of diversionary maneuver keeps more than a hundred thousand troops fighting and dying for years? And what are we distracting our enemy from? Who are our hobbits? What secret plan is underway to break the power of Al-Qaeda once and for all? None, of course, because this is where the analogy dissolves into air: In Middle Earth, the Dark Lord’s forces are centralized and his minions are incapable of operating independently; in our world, our enemy is organized as a headless guerrilla network. There is no “Eye” to distract.

It’s hard, in truth, to find any useful Middle Earth analogy to the Iraq War: the parallels break down across the board. Still, you might think of Bush’s invasion of Iraq as the equivalent of a beleaguered Gondor, attacked by the armies of Mordor across the River Anduin, sending its army off on an expedition to Far Harad, after its leaders issued proclamations that the White Council had incontrovertible evidence of the Haradrim’s possession of Rings of Mass Destruction.

Something like that, anyway. But as you can see it really doesn’t work, even when you try harder than Santorum.
[tags]iraq, rick santorum, tolkien, lord of the rings[/tags]

Ballmer explains Windows delays — or, how Vista is like Iraq

by

Steve Ballmer was interviewed in Saturday’s Times. Noted:

Q. What was the lesson learned in Windows Vista? After all, it wasn’t supposed to ship more than five years after Windows XP.

A. No. No, it wasn’t. We tried to re-engineer every piece of Windows in one big bang. That was the original post-Windows XP design philosophy. And it wasn’t misshapen. It wasn’t executed, but it wasn’t misshapen. We said, let’s try to give them a new file system and a new presentation system and a new user interface all at the same time. It’s not like we had them and were just trying to integrate them. We were trying to develop and integrate at the same time. And that was beyond the state of the art.

This is at once an unusually candid and an oddly defensive statement.

Ballmer is saying that, in 2001-2, as Microsoft pondered the next phase of Windows’ evolution post-XP, the company deliberately chose to “re-engineer every piece of Windows in one big bang.” It’s a telling choice of phrase. In the software development world, “big bang” (typically used in “big bang integration”) is used to describe a bet-it-all strategy that involves building lots of parts of a system separately and waiting until the end to hook them up and hope they play nicely together.

So Ballmer is essentially admitting that the “design philosophy” of the new Windows was founded on a risky, widely discredited approach. Then he turns around and says that it wasn’t “misshapen” — twice.

Misshapen? Is this a new buzzword I’ve somehow missed? Did the Times reporters mistranscribe “mistaken”? What is Ballmer talking about?

Then he says, “It wasn’t executed.” Note the passive voice, correct for it: “We didn’t execute it.” Which means, “We didn’t do it.” That’s, you know, obvious, I’d think.

Then Ballmer closes the explanation by declaring that the problem wasn’t one of integration; it was even worse than that — it was that Microsoft, the largest and most successful software company in the world, set out to simultaneously “develop and integrate” new versions of all the core functions of its central product. Now, in 2006, the company understands that this was “beyond the state of the art.” But back in 2001-2, they didn’t see that.

This is a fascinating rationalization. I’m loathe to draw too facile a comparison between the tribulations of a technology company and the drama of global conflict. But here, I think, there’s a clear and illuminating parallel between Microsoft’s hubris in this era and the Bush administration’s overreaching in Iraq — two phenomena that overlap almost precisely on the historical timeline.

And no, of course I don’t mean to suggest that there is any moral equivalence, or that the sad saga of a software product’s delay is in any way an event of equal import to the tragedy of an unnecessary war of choice resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. But there are some similarities, too, to wit:

Bush’s team — chests puffed large from its success in invading Afghanistan post-9/11 — ignored conventional wisdom and disregarded expert intelligence and invaded Iraq, only to discover that the effort to control and transform that country was beyond its means.

Gates’ team — surveying a decimated post-dotcom industry landscape as the “sole superpower” of technology — simiarly ignored conventional wisdom and disregarded expert knowledge. Incremental development? Continuous integration? They are for mere mortals. Microsoft, with its mountain of cash and its armies of developers, could bring brute force to bear on the most intractable of large-systems development problems. The company would rip out the guts of all of Windows’ key subsystems and renovate them at the same time — because it was invincible!

The result was predictable. Now a more humbled Microsoft is limping to the finish line with a version of Windows that — whether users find it reat or so-so or terrible — will always be overshadowed by the ambitious claims once made for it. In the context of that falling off, Ballmer’s statement is positively bizarre.
[tags]microsoft, steve ballmer, windows, vista[/tags]