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Web 2.0: Server husbandry

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From Eric Schmidt’s argument that network-based computing would prove irresistibly more reliable than alternatives, to Jeff Bezos’s pitch for Amazon’s on-demand storage and computing services as a means to “let people spend more time and dollars on the differentiated part of what they’re doing, less on the undifferentiated,” to Microsoft exec Debra Charpaty’s presentation about the nuts and bolts of building and running datacenters, one focus of this Web 2.0 conference has been on the server side of the old client/server dichotomy.

Web services are great, the argument goes, but don’t forget about what it takes to deploy and maintain them. “The Cloud” is a nice metaphor for everything that’s “out there” on network-based services, Charpaty argued; then she showed slides of endless racks of machines and squat, windowless buildings sprouting on desolate flats, and declared, “This is the real cloud.”

In one sense, these vast, electricity-hogging, heat-dissipating, cycles-generating structures are the new mainframes. Yet they are also the nerve-centers for an approach to computing that’s more distributed than ever before.

How do the businesses at the heart of the Web industry manage to juggle their determination to dominate the increasingly centralized business of providing the new basics, like storage and raw network-based processing, with their professed dedication to the values that shaped the personal computing industry that gave birth to theirs — values like freedom of speech, individual empowerment, and the unlocking of personal creativity?

That’s the big question underlying all the other controversies more visible on the surface here, like Net Neutrality or intellectual property or open APIs or data mobility.
[tags]web2con, web 2.0, web services[/tags]

Morning-after joke No. 1: “Gridlock looms”

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This morning’s Wall Street Journal headline: “Wth Democrats’ Gain, a New Divide: Threat of Gridlock Looms As Republicans Lose in Key Battlegrounds.”

Let’s see. “New” divide? As if the nation’s politics haven’t been bitterly divided for years?

As to the “threat of gridlock,” it’s hard to imagine what “gridlock” could be any more paralyzed and ineffectual than the previous congressional term. With a clear majority in both houses and the White House, the GOP was unable to do anything except prosecute a disastrously bungled war and implode into a mess of shame and scandal. If that’s “getting things done,” I’ll take the new gridlock any day!

This is important to watch — it’s one of the many spin-memes the Republicans will be tossing out in coming days. “Beware of gridlock! Democrats must roll over and play dead for the president or it will harm the nation!” This and similar notions deserve to be skewered early and often.

UPDATE: I notice that the online version of the story now has a less ridiculous headline: “Democrats Take Control of House: Divided Government Looms As Voters Seek Change; Senate Outcome Close.” So somebody’s still awake over there.
[tags]congress, elections 2006, wall street journal[/tags]

Razor-thin still cuts it

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It now seems conceivable, though one hates to invoke a jinx, that the Democrats might take the Senate as well as the House. If they do, it will be by the thinnest of margins — a few thousand votes in Virginia, perhaps something like that in Missouri Montana.

And if that happens, we can be sure that we will hear, both from the GOP’s spin brigades and their friends in the media, that a Democratic victory by such tiny margins isn’t that big a deal, and that the Democrats better watch it, and behave.

At that moment, listeners should flash back to recent political history’s most infamous close election: Florida 2000. The entire edifice of the Bush Administration has always rested on the thinnest of hotly disputed margins. That meager foundation never seemed to stand in the way of the GOP’s maximalist efforts.

Should the Democrats end up in control of both houses of Congress, sure, they should work professionally, with the opposition, to “solve the nation’s problems” — to use the dutiful formulation of the career politician. But they shouldn’t let the closeness of their possible win clip their wings.

A victory is a victory — an “accountability moment,” indeed! A sweep of two houses would indeed be a sweep of two houses, and a mandate lies wherever and whenever voters give you a win that gives you clout.
[tags]2006 election, senate, democrats[/tags]

Web 2.0 launch pad

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While we clink glasses over House victories and bite fingernails over squeaker Senate races, here are some notes from today’s sessions at Web 2.0.

Thirteen new companies offered five-minute pitches for new products and services at the “Launchpad” event here.

The one that jumped out at me, unsurprisingly, given my history of interest in personal-information managers and the focus of my book on one such project, was Stikkit. It’s a personal-information manager (and sharing tool) built around a sticky-note metaphor. It looks like it has a heritage stretching all the way back to the old-fashioned “terminate and stay resident” note-taking programs like Sidekick and free-form PIMs like Lotus Agenda. Stikkit is led by Rael Dornfest, who I know from his work organizing many editions of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I made a note to myself to explore it further tonight, but it appears to be down at the moment. More later!

I was also intrigued by Klostu, an attempt to create a “super-social network” linking together the separate islands of the “Boardscape” — the thousands of disconnected message boards across the Net. This strikes me as smart: there were tons of communities sharing stuff online long before anyone had coined the term Web 2.0, and it makes a lot of sense to serve them.

The presenter for Instructables, a site featuring user-contributed “how-to” projects, repeatedly emphasized that his service’s most important feature is the passion of his users. He’s right: more than spiffy software or innovative business models, that’s what makes any Web venture — “2.0” or not — matter.

Here are the rest of the projects:

Omnidrive and Sharpcast: Two different approaches to syncing stores of content across multiple machines and devices.

Turn: Automated ad targeting.

Sphere: “Less geeky” blog search.

Adify: Instant advertising networks.

3B: Three-dimensional, walk-through Web browser.

ODesk: Hiring market and distributed management system for software developers.

Venyo: Reputation management service for bloggers.

Timebridge: Outlook add-on for meeting scheduling.
[tags]web 2.0, web2con, launch pad, stikkit, klostu, instructables[/tags]

Web 2.0 — day one

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There is a decided atmosphere of hysteria in the halls here at the Sheraton Palace Hotel, where the Web 2.0 conference — suddenly rechristened a “summit” on its eve — has gathered for the third time.

Outside these walls, the ancien regime of a corrupt Congress may be about to crumble. But here, the crazed talk is all about startups and mashups and buyouts. If last year’s event offered what I called a strong whiff of “heady eau de dot-com,” this year we are drowning in the bubbles.

When I checked in at the conference registration, the woman working the desk apologetically asked to check my photo ID. Earlier, someone had jumped the desk and tried to steal some badges.

Later I’ll post about the companies from the Launch session. And we’ll see how the network holds up for liveblogging some of the talks.
[tags]web 2.0, web2con[/tags]

Our elections are broken; new Congress must fix them

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Whatever happens at the polls today, you can count on one thing tomorrow: lots of post-mortems about disastrous problems with voting machines.

We thought that there’d be at least one positive outcome from the Florida 2000 debacle: Americans everywhere would realize how broken our elections are, and they’d rise up and demand change. The change, alas, has yet to happen. One reason is that it’s too easy, after election day, to return to our normal routines — until we wake up two years later for another “Groundhog Day” experience as we realize that, oops, the system is still a mess.

The other reason is that the party in power since 2000 has had no wish to fix the problem. Generally speaking, when fewer people vote, Republicans are happy. When Republicans control local governments, they’re happy to see chaotic situations in which their local officials can oversee recounts and such. Historically, the Democratic party has been the party of a wider franchise; Republicans spend their time looking for ways to make voting harder.

So let’s see if we can agree, now, as we head into the polls, on what the new Congress should do once we’re done electing it: Let’s get serious about improving our elections. They should be held on weekends, for starters. If they are going to use modern digital technology, we need paper verification, and the systems should be based on peer-reviewed, open-source software that can be independently appraised for its security and fairness.

Elections are run at the state and local level, so mandating this sort of thing nationally is quite difficult, but Congress tends to find ways to enforce its will when it needs to. When you control the federal purse, you control a lot. It shouldn’t be that hard for Congress to say to a state: Fix your voting mess, enable democracy, or we cut off your cash. What could be more important?

BONUS LINK: Legal guide for bloggers and citizen journalists on Election Day. Know your rights (though the laws on issues like photography at the polls are oddly vague).
[tags]elections, u.s. elections, voting machines[/tags]

Code Reads notes and other doings

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First, my apologies for falling behind on this project — travel and freelance work ate into my writing time. From now on I should be able to keep more to schedule.

This week concludes our Dijkstra marathon. Next week we’ll tackle Knuth’s retort to Dijkstra, “Structured Programming with go to Statements”. The week after, it’s on to Mitch Kapor’s Software Design Manifesto.

Thanks to everyone who has posted comments; you’ve kept some informative and spirited discussions going in each of the previous Code Reads postings, and I, for one, am learning a lot!

Beginning tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday, 11/7), I’ll be at the Web 2.0 Conference, from which, wi-fi willing, I will try to do some live or semi-live coverage. If I can keep my eyes away from the election returns…

Code Reads #4: Dijkstra’s “Notes on Structured Programming”

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Code ReadsThis is the fourth 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.

The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible.”
— Edsger Dijkstra, “Notes on Structured Programming”

“Notes on Structured Programming” (1970) is the third and, for now, final Edsger Dijkstra work this series will look at. The paper fills out the terse observations in “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” and the historical overview of “The Humble Programmer” — and offers some detailed examples of the disciplined sort of approach to programming Dijkstra was advocating at the time.

In his 2001 “What led to ‘Notes on Structured Programming'” Dijkstra recalled that he wrote the original “Notes” while emerging from a depression; he felt that his previous work on ALGOL and other systems had “only been agility exercises” and he now faced tackling “the real problem of How to Do Difficult Things.”

[Read more…]

Saddam trial Orwell watch

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We understand that, ever since the timing of the initial invasion — whose urgency was partly dictated by the need to “finish the job” well in advance of the 2004 election cycle — the Bush administration has done everything it can to orchestrate events in Iraq for maximum electoral impact.

So the fact that Saddam Hussein’s verdict has emerged immediately preceding U.S. elections can be safely ascribed to Bush’s desperate need to show some results from the Iraq fiasco.

This morning, White House spokesman Tony Snow said that suggestions that the U.S. “schemed” with the Iraqi court to time the verdict were “preposterous.” “The judiciary is operating independently,” he said. “It’s important to give [Iraqis] credit for running their own government.”

No, I don’t think the White House needed any “scheming.” The Iraqi court knows exactly what its “mission” is without being explicitly ordered. Coordination doesn’t require command.

The simple fact remains: this verdict represents a last-minute spasm of the GOP’s desperate hang-on-to-power campaign. And the White House is doing its Orwellian part in loudly denying the fact and protesting the Iraqis’ independence.

Sadly for them, the election’s outcome won’t really make a difference to the bloodshed in Iraq, the dynamics of which long ago spun out of American control. And once U.S. forces have abandoned the wreckage of the occupation, how long do you think Saddam’s judges have left to live?

UPDATE: It seems the court didn’t actually even finish preparing the full verdict. But there was some strange compulsion to report the verdict in abbreviated form on Sunday. See Josh Marshall’s post. This pretty much shreds the “Iraqis are independent, they work on their own timetable” lie.
[tags]saddam hussein, tony snow[/tags]

Vanity Fair’s Neo Culpa

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Vanity Fair talks to the neoconservative intellectuals who goaded the nation into invading Iraq and finds that they are, unsurprisingly, aghast and pointing fingers. Mostly, the fingers point at the incompetence of the Bush administration. “I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent,” says Kenneth “it’s going to be a cakewalk” Adelman. “They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era.”

“The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless,” Adelman says.

Here’s the problem with that: In the real world of international affairs, there is never an opportunity to disentangle the essential from the circumstantial. Circumstance rules. Execution is everything. Otherwise, we’d all just sit around, wish for world peace and goodwill towards all men, and wait for the happy result to unfold.

If you start with the assumption that anything is possible and everything will go right, it doesn’t matter what you advocate — the entire conversation is preposterous. It’s like saying, “I support the policy of regime change in North Korea by beaming our new mind-control weapon at the dictator’s head and making him abdicate.” A noble and beneficial idea — “but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless.”

To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal words, you’ve got to grapple with the world you have, not the world you want.

Nearly every single one of us who argued before the war that it was a mistake to invade Iraq agreed that Saddam Hussein was an awful dictator who, in the abstract, one would wish gone. But invading Iraq to overthrow him carried mad risks — risks that we have now seen play out in their near-worst scenarios.

Balancing judgments of risks against desired goals is the very essence of foreign policymaking. The neocons are eager to blame Bush administration competence, and they’re right, but it doesn’t get them off the hook. In their own foreign-policy field, the neocons — based, now, on their own testimony — have now definitively proven their own incompetence. It is time, really, for them to stop pontificating and go away.
[tags]vanity fair, neocons, neoconservatives, iraq, bush administration[/tags]