PREVIOUS:

NEXT:

 

When Nintendo cartridge meets spin cycle

January 14, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 4 Comments

I am accustomed to, and accommodated to, the fragility of our electronic gadgets. At best, they are built to have a fighting chance of surviving a few knocks. I have used Thinkpads until their plastic cases began to disintegrate, and I have an unusually durable cellphone — an antediluvian model with a black-and-white screen. But in general, our PDAs, Ipods, cameras and all other manner of digital gewgaw are prone to failure given the slightest abuse. And we accept this as the nature of contemporary stuff: cheap to make, quick to fail, cheap to replace — and your replacement will be faster, cooler, more capacious.

So when my son Jack reported, with a downcast face, that he had failed to remove three Nintendo DS cartridges from the pocket of a pair of pants that had just passed through the washing machine, I figured, oops — there goes $100 worth of ROM chips. I knew Nintendo does a great job of protecting its hardware from the depredations of its puerile customer base; how many times had I seen Game Boys survive impacts that would have totaled any laptop? Yet I had no hope for the laundered cartridges.

“Maybe they still work!” my son proposed, with the look of a gambler willing to bet on a long shot, knowing full well he faced brutal odds. I just pursed my lips and thought, “Dream on.”

I fished the pants out of the washer and located the cartridges — turned out to be two, not three. They seemed remarkably dry, yet I had no hope of their survival. This micro-finery of silicon and contacts, marinated in Tide and then roughed up by wash, rinse and spin? No way, Mario and Luigi.

I handed the cartridges to Jack and left the room, torn between urges to console my son and to chastise him.

A moment later, I heard: “YESSS! It works!” Sonic Rush had survived. So, we learned a moment later, had Pokemon.

Somehow, Nintendo had managed to manufacture a game cartridge that could take a licking from an eight-year-old boy — and his family’s household appliances — and keep on clicking.

To such engineering prowess, one can only bow.

Filed under: Personal, Technologyreport an error
PREVIOUS:

NEXT:

 

OSAF cuts back — Chandler leaving the nest

January 11, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 11 Comments

Earlier this week the Open Source Applications Foundation — the organization developing Chandler, whose work I followed for three years and whose story I tell in Dreaming in Code — announced what it called a “restructuring,” which meant laying off roughly 2/3 of its employees. (Infoworld’s story has the basics.)

So does this mean that Mitch Kapor, OSAF’s founder and chief funder, is “pulling the plug” on OSAF, as Techdirt has it, or “bailing on” Chandler, as a CNET blogger put it?

Kapor is indeed leaving the OSAF board and handing the rest of the reins to Katie Capps Parlante, who’s been running the project day-to-day for some time. That’s a big change. From what I can tell, though, this isn’t so much a “plug-pulling” as an amicable parting of the ways.

Kapor’s financial withdrawal is not a big surprise. He had told the Chandler developers several months ago that he intended to fund the project through the end of 2008 but no further; that decision had been discussed on the project’s public mailing list, so the looming changes couldn’t have come as a total shock to anyone who’d been following the story. (I write about these changes in a new epilogue to DREAMING IN CODE that will be included in the forthcoming paperback edition, due out in late February.)

What actually happened at the end of 2007, according to Parlante, who I interviewed today, is that OSAF and Kapor agreed that it would be healthy for the project to move out from under Kapor’s wing faster than they originally envisioned. Over the past year, Kapor has been less involved with Chandler and more focused on new projects (such as Foxmarks), and Parlante says that the project leaders felt that if they were headed towards independence anyway, it made sense to move faster.

“We’ve been joking that we laid off Mitch,” she says.

At that point, Kapor agreed to provide transitional funding for the group — less than he’d originally planned when envisioning paying the entire project’s bills for another year. That triggered the staff cuts.

How much exactly did Kapor commit? Referring to the deal that launched the Mozilla Foundation in 2003, which Kapor brokered when AOL was shutting Netscape down, Parlante says, “He’d told AOL to give Mozilla enough support for it to become viable on its own, and he decided he should follow his own advice with us.” (In 2003, AOL put up $2 million, and Kapor himself put up $300,000, to fund the Mozilla Foundation, which is now a hugely successful enterprise, based on Firefox’s revenue from Google.)

Chandler started in 2002 as a high-profile project that aimed to produce a novel personal-information manager and demonstrate that the open source development methodology could produce innovatively designed desktop software. But the work proceeded at an agonizingly slow pace, and it took about five years for OSAF to ship a usable “Preview” edition last fall.

So there’s no question that the cutbacks represent a come-down for a project that started out with such grand ambitions and golden prospects. But surely there are better metaphors for what’s happening than “pulling the plug”: “leaving the nest,” perhaps. In fact, as of the end of the month, OSAF will move out of its longtime home at Kapor’s offices on Howard Street in San Francisco’s SOMA district and become a virtual team.

From the start of OSAF, Kapor had made clear that he did not envision the project as an open-ended philanthropic obligation, but rather as a test-bed for new ideas in software design and project organization. During the time I spent at OSAF, he would regularly repeat his belief that OSAF ultimately needed to become financially self-sustaining.

Parlante says OSAF will use its transitional funding period to explore lots of different business models — everything from selling advertising or charging for service to community support (donations and fundraising) to business partnerships or deals to bundle the Chandler Hub server with other products. “Open source business models are always a little up in the air, they’re always changing — that’s true even of Mozilla,” Parlante says.

Can Chandler survive on its own? Right now I’d give it good odds for continuing in some form: as long as there are developers interested in continuing work on it, there’s no reason for it not to. It will be harder, but by no means impossible, for the organization to find enough money to support a small full-time staff beyond the transition.

The obituary writers are already chomping at the bit. And of course many of the criticisms of OSAF’s mistakes are accurate. Still, those mistakes are now history. Since shipping the Preview version of Chandler its team has sped up the flow of new releases, new features and bug fixes, suggesting that the pressure of looming independence has already made a difference. The question is, does Chandler today offer enough innovative value to build a thriving community and win support — both volunteer development effort and cash?

Given the history, it would be foolhardy to say “yes” for sure; but I think it’s also a mistake to say “no way.”

I’m a veteran of a company that spent roughly three years disproving premature reports of its demise. Salon is still around and doing good work. It’s certainly going to be challenging for OSAF to continue on its own, and it’s entirely possible that the organization will be gone within a couple of years. But writing it off today seems wrongheaded to me.

Of course, in spending so much time and thought on telling Chandler’s story, I invested something of myself in it, too, so maybe I’m just unwilling to let go. But there are other indicators that the project is unlikely to simply evaporate.

At the very moment that OSAF announced its cutbacks and the obituary writers jumped the gun, geek-hero blogger Cory Doctorow posted an enthusiastic endorsement of Chandler on the extremely popular BoingBoing. Doctorow’s post might be part of an effort to rally support for Chandler among its users now that its future isn’t guaranteed. That’s what happens when an enterprise that people care about is threatened. Or maybe it was a spontaneous coincidence — that happens too!

The big question is whether enough people care enough about Chandler to keep it afloat. In a sense, that is the final experiment in the OSAF lab, and as long as Kapor continued to fund the project out of his own deep pockets, it would never be able to get results.

* * *
I’ve posted this before I’ve had a chance to talk with Kapor, because this story is already generating a lot of commentary. I’ll update as needed. This is what he told Infoworld:

“I would say I had a lot of ambitions that we wound up, for very good and practical reasons, scaling back on,” Kapor said in an interview Thursday. He described the outcome as “a working subset of a grand vision.”

Kapor said his interest in continuing waned. “We found ourselves in the situation that the team wanted to continue on very much,” he added. “I found myself in a different place. I did not have that same level of commitment and desire, because I had the original dream in mind.”

UPDATE: I did catch up with Mitch Kapor late today. He confirmed the accuracy of this account. “It’s time for me to move on,” he said. See also Kapor’s own blog post on this topic.

I’ve also received a couple of anonymous emails from people involved in the project, suggesting what I’m sure is just the tip of the iceberg of disagreements over Chandler’s direction, its leadership, and the personnel choices involved in the layoffs. Having lived through the difficulty of such events more than once myself, I know that they’re deeply emotional — and that there is often more than one “right” view of the situation. I haven’t been following Chandler closely enough for the last couple of years, since I wrapped up the book, to gauge the accuracy of these perspectives.

I also don’t yet know exactly who’s leaving. I’ll try to link to the participants’ own reports. Here’s Ted Leung’s announcement of his departure. Here’s Matt Eernisse’s. And Mike “Code Bear” Taylor’s. Taylor and Eernisse have both joined Seesmic, Loic LeMeur’s new startup. Brian Moseley, who for a long time was the central developer for the Cosmo Server (later Chandler Server), is also leaving.

Funny footnote: Moseley and I crossed paths a decade before we met at OSAF; he was part of a small development team of Cornell students who wrote the first, somewhat disastrous version of Salon’s Table Talk in 1995. He’s plainly become a very different developer in the interim. His colleagues went on to fame and fortune during the dotcom boom before going bust.

Filed under: Dreaming in Code, Softwarereport an error
PREVIOUS:

NEXT:

 

My next book: the story of blogs

January 7, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 37 Comments

I left Salon last summer with the idea of working on a new book. I’m happy to report that the book now has a deal and a publisher — Crown, with whom I had such a happy experience on DREAMING IN CODE — and I’ll be spending the next year or so researching and writing it.

I am, I think the word is, stoked.

The topic will seem obvious to any of you who’ve been reading my stuff over the years: It’s going to be a book about bloggers and blogging. The working title is SAY EVERYTHING, and we’re describing it as the story of how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and what it means for our culture.

Upon delivering this news I typically hear two wildly divergent responses from two different groups of listeners. People in the tech world tend to react like this: “Blogging? Oh, that’s so 2000!” They think blogging is something that happened way back in the early part of this decade, about which everything has already been said. Meanwhile, people outside the tech-industry bubble — who’ve never heard of Techcrunch or Techmeme — respond with variations on “I’d love to read that.”

I should probably point out here that the population of potential readers in the second group outnumbers those in the former. Yet I belong to the first group myself. So I also hope to show the insiders that there is more to be learned and understood about blogging than they perhaps realize.

In other words, I’ll continue to do the sort of writing on technology I’ve always done, since I started back at the old S.F. Examiner: trying to be accurate enough to keep the respect of those immersed in the field, and insightful enough to hold their interest, while doing my best to make sure that everything I’ve written appeals to smart people who know nothing about the subject. It’s a bit of a straddle; some readers thought I pulled it off with DREAMING IN CODE, some thought I fell to one side or the other. I’m going to try it again.

Why blogging? I think I harbor a secret wish to spend the next couple of years explaining that writing a, you know, book about blogging is really okay — and that, no, I don’t think it should have been a blog instead.

Seriously, there’s a great tale that has still not been fully told of how the practice actually evolved — from technical invention to media craze to cultural phenomenon. As the haphazard efforts to mark some sort of 10th-anniversary-of-blogging this year proved, people are still a little fuzzy on the basics of the story. (Rebecca Blood’s account from 2000 remains invaluable, but it’s incomplete and now far out of date.)

When Mike Arrington asked, last summer, “Will Someone Who Actually Cares About Blogging Please Write the History Of It?,” I just smiled. But I wasn’t ready to talk about my plans yet; I remain uncharacteristically superstitious about announcing big projects until their financing is in place. I realize this is terrible un-Web-2.0ish of me, but there it is.

So there’s a story, one about how innovations emerge, how they bubble up from the creativity of geeks and pass into the wider culture. There’s also an argument, one that I’ve been making for ages, in different forms, from my very first column on blogging eight years ago: that blogging is not, despite what you hear from so many different quarters, a trivial phenomenon. And that, despite all the dismissals (most recently by Doris Lessing), blogging — far from contributing to the demise of culture and the end of civilization — actually offers a lifeline in the sea of information overload.

There’s much further to say but that’s enough for now. More as the work progresses!

Filed under: Blogging, Net Culture, Personal, Say Everythingreport an error
PREVIOUS:

NEXT:

 

Mind-changing thoughts for the new year

January 7, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 2 Comments

Every year around this time John Brockman poses some Big Question to his Edge discussion group, a salon of scientists and intellectuals. The results are typically all over the map but you can almost always find something of value and/or use. This year’s question was “What have you changed your mind about?” Here are some nuggets I excavated from the sprawling pile:

BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin writes about how online communities need tending, describing BoingBoing’s experience with managing its comment space (the site hired Making Light‘s Teresa Nielsen Hayden to moderate). Her conclusion is that online discussions are best moderated by human hosts rather than voting systems or algorithms:

Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes everything. Small actions by focused participants change the tone of the whole. It is possible to maintain big healthy gardens online. The solution isn’t cheap, or easy, or hands-free. Few things of value are.

This isn’t exactly news; the gardening metaphor as applied to online conversation has a long history stretching back to the early days of the Well (and probably Usenet as well) and extending more recently into communities like Flickr and Wikipedia. But each new generation of online services needs to learn this lesson through experience; BoingBoing has managed it well.

Linda Stone writes insightfully, as always, about attention — and how we habitually hold our breath as we answer email (I tried observing myself and, yes, it’s true!):

I believe that attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit and that we can enhance or augment our attention with practices like meditation and exercise, diffuse it with technologies like email and Blackberries, or alter it with pharmaceuticals.

But lately I have observed that the way in which many of us interact with our personal technologies makes it impossible to use this extraordinary tool of attention to our advantage.

In observing others — in their offices, their homes, at cafes — the vast majority of people hold their breath especially when they first begin responding to email. On cell phones, especially when talking and walking, people tend to hyper-ventilate or over-breathe.

The rest is here.

Nick Carr — echoing ideas in his new book, The Big Switch, which I’m reading now — jumps off from a line by Chinese leader Hu Jintao to argue that the Net is becoming more centralized:

It’s not Hu Jintao who is deluded in believing that the net might serve as a powerful tool for central control. It is those who assume otherwise. I used to count myself among them. But I’ve changed my mind.

Kai Krause, who created software tools for designers that were hugely popular a decade or so ago, writes about the frustrating ephemerality of creativity in the software field.

Noting that “hardly any of my software even still runs at all,” he writes:

I used to think “Software Design” is an art form.

I now believe that I was half-right:
it is indeed an art, but it has a rather short half-life:
Software is merely a performance art!

A momentary flash of brilliance, doomed to be overtaken by the next wave, or maybe even by its own sequel. Eaten alive by its successors. And time…

Finally, Alison Gopnik, the psychologist and coauthor of The Scientist in the Crib, writes about the purpose of imaginative play:

Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans – especially vivid for an English professor’s daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies?

…In fact, I think now that the two abilities — finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds — are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don’t just tell us what’s true — they tell us what’s possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don’t think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

A fine insight — one that generations of readers of science fiction and fantasy know in their bones already.

Filed under: Blogging, Culture, Food for Thought, Net Culture, Science, Softwarereport an error
PREVIOUS:

NEXT:

 

Elvish brews

January 6, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 3 Comments

We drink a lot of craft beer around here, particularly around the holidays. I have a strong bias in favor of local beer, not just for the usual reasons — support local businesses, reduce the carbon footprint, and so on — but also because, with most beer, freshness really does count. While wonderful beers are being made abroad, by the time they get here you can never be sure they’re in decent condition.

But I couldn’t resist buying a tasting run of the entire line of Ridgeway Brewing’s holiday line, which I found by happenstance at the local Beverages and More. Here’s what I got:

Bad Elves brews

I knew the names and art would delight my kids. I couldn’t know, but found out, that these brews were excellent. Turns out Ridgeway is a project of the brewer from a beloved brewery in Henley-on-Thames called Brakspear that recently shut down.

Anyway, the Ridgeway line — Bad Elf, Very Bad Elf, Seriously Bad Elf, Criminally Bad Elf, and Insanely Bad Elf — are escalatingly stronger beers, from 6 percent alcohol to over 11, ranging from a sort of British take on an American IPA (Bad Elf) to a monster barleywine (Insanely B.E.). I loved them all. The hops and barley varieties Ridgeway uses are quite different from the ingredients typically used by American microbreweries, and, after years of drinking West Coast beers, I enjoyed venturing afield.

(If you’re into beer, I recommend William Brand’s California Craft Beer newsletter and blog.)

Filed under: Beerreport an error
PREVIOUS:

NEXT:

 

Remembering Bob Watts

January 4, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

I was deeply saddened to hear from my former colleagues at Salon that Bob Watts, who served as Salon’s art director for many years, passed away early this morning after a long fight with cancer. (Joan Walsh’s remembrance is here. And here are other remembrances from Salon people.)

I knew Bob from his start at Salon as a photo intern in 1998, but worked closest with him during the dark years after the dotcom bubble burst, when Salon’s prospects were dim and budgets were slim. Some of Salon’s editors fought their own guerrilla battles against our financial woes by spending money they didn’t really have, and it was my job as managing editor to try to reel them back toward reality. I never had to do that with Bob: at the end of each month he’d calmly deposit the art department’s report on my desk, and it was so reliably in order and under budget that, I confess, I took to reviewing it less and less closely over the years. It could simply be counted on, as could he.

Stereotypes paint the artist as undisciplined and indulgent. Bob wasn’t a stereotype; he was the real thing, and so he approached his work with care and consideration, balancing his own abundant inspiration with the needs of the people around him, working fast on ridiculously tight deadlines to create consistently delightful images.

He must have produced, literally, thousands of Salon cover images over the years, each one a witty or moving or beautiful little time capsule. I will miss them, as I will miss him.

Filed under: Personal, Salonreport an error
PREVIOUS:

NEXT:

 

Why the primaries don’t matter

January 3, 2008 by Scott Rosenberg 3 Comments

Today’s Iowa caucuses mark the moment when endless months of vapid punditry collide with the cold reality of the preferences of real voters. I welcome that. But I am blissfully indifferent to the outcome of the primaries. The horse-race-handicapping that will fill the headlines in coming weeks feels meaningless this year.

Whoever wins Iowa, New Hampshire, and the super-Tuesday blitzes following, it seems certain that there will be a strong Democratic candidate and a weak Republican nominee. The GOP leadership knows this, which is why it’s so glum. The Republicans will field either Romney, a fake; Giuliani, a joke; Huckabee, yet another Southern former governor with a lot of faith and no understanding of the world (that worked so well last time!); or McCain, a former maverick who has lashed himself tightly to the sunken ship of the current administration’s failed war policies and is detested by the Republican “base.” I do not see how any of them could win the White House in the current climate. (And no, I do not think Ron Paul is going to ride a dark horse to victory, either.) This may prove wishful coastal-state thinking, and a lot can happen in the next 10 months. But that’s how it looks today.

I have minor preferences among the Democratic field — I find Obama’s freshness and Edwards’ populist fervor a little more inspiring than Clinton’s “I’m competent” pitch. But any of them would make a good president, and any of them would put an end to the governmental nightmare of the past eight years, and that’s all that matters this year.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall suggests that the DC press corps’ long love affair with McCain would be a substantial boon in the general election.

Filed under: Politicsreport an error
Newer Posts »