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Can you send a file to the Internet?

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I’ve always thought of the Internet not as a place but as a means of connecting other entities — sites, servers, people, etc. (Hey, in that sense maybe it is “a series of tubes”!) From its beginning in the antediluvian mists as what was known as a “network of networks,” connecting pre-existing but now-forgotten networks with a common set of protocols, the Internet was not a destination but a means of transport between other destinations.

So for me, the phrase “on the Internet” isn’t ideal, but it makes some sense as shorthand meaning “on one of those other things that is on the Internet.” But recently I’ve noticed a couple of usages that caused me to stop short. Both were in the New York Times, and from writers who are as or more steeped in Net lore than I am.

In an otherwise highly useful recent roundup of backup services, David Pogue refers to “online backups, where files are shuttled off to the Internet for safekeeping.”

Files “shuttled off to the Internet”? I can picture files that are shuttled across the Internet, to some server or disk array or whatever. But what happens to a file that’s sent to the Internet? I get this picture from the old Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk took a trip through the transporter and didn’t come out the other side; his molecules got scrambled in interstellar space. If I send my file “to the Internet,” I’d really worry about those bits just sort of dissolving into the void.

Similarly, John Markoff’s fascinating piece on botnets from Sunday’s Times, Attack of the Zombie Computers is a Growing Threat, begins with this sentence: “In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower.”

Does the Internet have any “defenses” at all? Individual Web sites and corporate networks and ISPs do, of course, and they are all scrambling to deal with the torrent of spam being produced by these bot-infected zombie computers.

In a sense, I suppose the Internet has structural defenses, in the form of the relative security of the protocols and conventions users rely on (like encryption), and social defenses, in the form of the people who work hard to stymie the stuff that bad actors do. But these are not really “the Internet’s defenses”; they’re things that people do to defend their Internet-connected computers.

This probably sounds like nitpicking, but I think there’s something at stake in how English usage shapes how we think about the Net.

The great thing about the Internet is that — unlike its “walled-garden” predecessors — it is not a single place with one set of “defenses.” In the memorable words of the “World of Ends” manifesto by Doc Searls and David Weinberger, “No one owns it; everyone can use it; anyone can improve it.” (And, as the botnets show, anyone can try to wreck it, too.) When it comes to descriptions of the Internet, I am instinctively biased towards language that embodies these principles, and my brain registers a little squawk of concern when it encounters phrases that don’t.
[tags]world of ends, language, usage, internet, john markoff, david pogue[/tags]

First responses to Dreaming in Code

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I spent many, many years writing reviews — of plays, movies and books. Over the next few weeks, it’s my turn to be on the receiving end. I have vowed to savor the praise, to engage with the honest feedback, and to avoid tiresome quarrels with any pans. Hold me to that if I slip, okay?

I got some warm advance comments from Joel Spolsky earlier this week, and that was cool — since Joel’s reliably entertaining commentary was one of the factors that persuaded me it’s possible to write about programming without putting readers to sleep. Today marked my first mainstream review, in BusinessWeek. They liked the book, calling it “a fascinating look inside one software-development project” and saying that I “know my subject” and “its scenes are vivid.” I’m grateful for the praise.

BusinessWeek also said that it was “frustrating” that, at the end of the book, Chandler still isn’t done: “Under deadline pressure from his publisher, [Rosenberg] sat down to write the book even though the project had not been completed.”

In fact, the decision to wrap up when we did was mine. No one at Crown, my publisher, pressured me. No publisher wants to wait forever for a manuscript, I guess. But I’m sure if I’d gone to Crown and said, “It will be a better book if we wait another six months,” they’d have approved.

If it had looked like the product was going to be complete (or reach some critical milestone) in only a few more months, I’d have just pushed back my writing schedule. But at the end of 2005, which is where the book’s saga leaves off, there was still no way to predict when the Chandler story would end.

More important, I felt that I’d already unearthed more answers to the questions I’d set out with — why is making software so hard? why does it take so long? what can we learn by observing the intricacies of a real-world project? — than I could possibly fit in one book.

One of the themes at the heart of Dreaming in Code is the strange nature of what I call “software time.” Working on software often means entering a sort of twilight zone in which the normal timeline of the calendar becomes a bottomless black hole.

If the Chandler story had provided a slam-bang finale, that’s how I’d have ended the book. Instead I tried to give Dreaming in Code a conclusion that’s peculiarly true to the material, in a way that I hope readers will find pleasing.

At book’s end, the Chandler team was just beginning to use their own program in “dogfood” fashion. I’ll be posting more soon about what’s happened with Chandler since that point; 2006 saw considerable further development, with a new focus on a “ship-it mindset,” and a fully usable “preview” edition is now scheduled for an April 2007 release. (Katie Parlante, one of the Chandler team’s key managers, has posted an update over at the OSAF blog with more details.)
[tags]osaf, chandler, book reviews, dreaming in code, businessweek, joel spolsky[/tags]

Good reads: Danner on Iraq, Wolf on the new atheism

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Things have been quiet here lately as we prepare for January, which will be a big month at the Wordyard, what with Dreaming in Code arriving. More anon — as soon as we get through the holidays and I shake off my traditional solstitial cold virus.

In the meantime, a couple of odds and ends of valuable reading — links to curl up with next to the fire when you’ve got some time:

  • If you don’t have time to read the full texts of books like Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine and Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, you owe it to yourself to read Mark Danner’s New York Review of Books piece, “Iraq: The War of the Imagination,” which summarizes them and puts them — and the disastrous war they chronicle — in a grimly coherent context:

    Nearly four years into the Iraq war, as we enter the Time of Proposed Solutions, the consequences of those early decisions define the bloody landscape. By dismissing and humiliating the soldiers and officers of the Iraqi army our leaders, in effect, did much to recruit the insurgency. By bringing far too few troops to secure Saddam’s enormous arms depots they armed it. By bringing too few to keep order they presided over the looting and overwhelming violence and social disintegration that provided the insurgency such fertile soil. By blithely purging tens of thousands of the country’s Baathist elite, whatever their deeds, and by establishing a muscle-bound and inept American occupation without an “Iraqi face,” they created an increasing resentment among Iraqis that fostered the insurgency and encouraged people to shelter it. And by providing too few troops to secure Iraq’s borders they helped supply its forces with an unending number of Sunni Islamic extremists from neighboring states. It was the foreign Islamists’ strategy above all to promote their jihadist cause by provoking a sectarian civil war in Iraq; by failing to prevent their attacks and to protect the Shia who became their targets, the US leaders have allowed them to succeed.

    …Saddam Hussein and the autocracy he ruled were the product of a dysfunctional politics, not the cause of it. Reform of such a politics was always going to be a task of incalculable complexity. Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope—in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.

  • And over in Wired, don’t miss Gary Wolf‘s excellent discussion of the new evangelical atheism, “The Crusade Against Religion”. Here’s its rousing peroration, in a direct line of descent from Mill’s On Liberty:

    The irony of the New Atheism — this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism — is too much for me. The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there’s always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.

[tags]atheism, iraq, mark danner, gary wolf[/tags]

Why this year’s Time “Person of the Year” should be the last

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So Time magazine went and decided that — 2006 being the Year of User-Generated Content ™, aka the Year of YouTube Being Acquired By Google, and also the year that big corporate media companies began to see the rot in their financial foundations — its person of the year is “you.”

Dan Gillmor points out that the very nature of this choice presupposes a rapidly obsolescing notion that the magazine’s own editors are still on the other side of the barricades from the teeming content-generating masses. Jeff Jarvis asks what the fuss is all about, “this is nothing new.” Dave Winer says that Time is still too focused on the value created in the “wisdom of the crowd” aggregation of a multitude of voices, when the really important value lies with each individual voice.

I would add that, if Time’s editors put real stock in their choice and believed in the notion they are now promoting, then, having chosen “You” as the “Person of the Year,” they would announce that this is the very last time they will meet in solemn conclave to anoint a Person of the Year. Gatekeeper, retire thyself! No more bogus end-of-year popularity contests!

Except they do seem very effective at sparking conversations online.
[tags]time magazine, person of the year, youtube, dave winer, jeff jarvis, dan gillmor[/tags]

Good reads: Journal interview with Thomas Lee

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Lee Gomes interviewed Stanford engineering professor Thomas Lee in the Wall Street Journal yesterday; the subject was the history of microchips — but Lee uses that material to offer some trenchant observations on the nature of creativity.

For instance, he says, the transistor was invented in the 1940s by a group led by William Shockley — but not in cliched “eureka!” fashion. Instead, it was “something they stumbled on while they were trying to diagnose their earlier failures to invent a transistor.”

Gomes asks Lee how we got from transistors to integrated circuits:

Because of a somewhat bored and nervous new hire at Texas Instruments, a young kid named Jack Kilby, who eventually won the Nobel Prize. He had been hired in the summer of 1958 and given a project that left him unenthusiastic. He was hired just before the entire company went on a two-week vacation. Rather than just goofing off for the two weeks, he decided to come up with an alternative to his assigned project, so he wouldn’t be seen as just a complainer. So during those two weeks, he invented the integrated-circuit concept.

Failures, accidents, things stumbled upon, stuff people do on the side: that’s how the world moves forward.

Lee’s moral? “You shouldn’t feel bad about being in a state of ignorance; if you are an enlightened person, you should be in a perpetual state of ignorance. And be very suspicious of linear histories, because it means either that the author had an ax to grind, or he hasn’t done his homework, and there are lots of side stories left to be uncovered.”

Read the whole interview.
[tags]wall street journal, transistors, microchips, integrated circuits, history, creativity, thomas lee, lee gomes[/tags]

Yahoo reorg: “audience” over here, “publishers” over there

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Interesting. Yahoo announces a corporate reorganization with the following explanation:

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced a reorganization of its structure and management to align its operations with its key customer segments — audiences, advertisers and publishers.

Nothing unusual there. Sounds like your good old-fashioned off-line media company. Except, hold on a minute: Hasn’t Yahoo spent the last few years repositioning itself as the big Internet media company which understands that its “audience” and “publishers” are the same people?

This is the message I have heard in conference talks by Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz; it’s the message Yahoo gave by acquiring Flickr and Del.icio.us; it’s the message of the great success of Yahoo’s “Hack Day” events, which deliberately blurred the line between the corporate “us” and “them” in the developer community. Google may have more PhDs and keener algorithms, this vision of Yahoo had it, but Yahoo understood the social dynamics of the new, user-driven Web far better than the competition. Or so it seemed.

So either (a) the message never really made it to the top of the company; (b) it did, but now it’s being jettisoned, which would be too bad; or (c) the reorg will need another reorg real soon.
[tags]yahoo, yahoo reorg[/tags]

Post departures spark sinking-ship suspicions

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This week two well-known Washington Post journalists upped and quit their newsroom to start a new venture on the Net. That got tongues wagging across the blogosphere — and across the print business as well. In some quarters the action was granted watershed-like status. Brave souls striking forth from a crumbling old world into the wilderness? Or, er, rodents fleeing a listing mothership?

The hubbub simply sounds quaint to this grizzled veteran of the flight-from-print-to-Web meme. This isn’t the start of something big; it’s the latest in a long, long line of defections that have been piling up for many years. Chris Nolan notes some recent examples, including her own, in a letter to Romenesko; I flashed back somewhat further in time.

When a half-dozen of us left the S.F. Examiner newsroom en masse in 1995 to start Salon our colleagues looked at us like we were nuts. Give up good union jobs? Nobody wanted to read on the Web, anyway! John Markoff wrote in the New York Times that our departure was a harbinger of a new world in which newly independent “tribes” of journalists would break free from their corporate overlords and light out for the new territories.

I never felt very tribal, myself. I just know I’d rather help build something new and exciting than work for something old and valuable where all I could do was watch helplessly while its owners gutted and dismantled it. At Web 2.0 Roger McNamee repeated a point I’ve heard before: The newspaper industry is not doomed, it’s committing suicide. Its managers and owners have decided to “harvest” its value with 24 percent profit margins rather than invest the money to move its assets into a new era and onto a new platform.

In other words, you might say, journalists aren’t abandoning newspapers for the Web; rather, newspapers are abandoning journalism to the Web. Not all newspapers at the same pace, of course, and not all at once, and not without lots of fights. But the process is real, it has been underway for over a decade, and though it will take decades more to unfold it shows no sign of being reversible. The only thing notable about this week’s Post story is that the newsroom exodus is beginning to reach those places — like the Post, or the Times, or the Journal — where print journalism is likely to last longest.
[tags]journalism, washington post, salon, web journalism, roger mcnamee[/tags]

Open source: Linux TVs and “virtual piecework”

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I recently joined the legions of Americans upgrading their TV sets, trading in my trusty and still functional (but awfully faded) 20-year-old RCA box for a fancy new Pioneer plasma display. I’m the sort of consumer-electronics purchaser who actually reads the manual; flipping through the Pioneer’s book, I nearly jumped out of my seat when I discovered the entire text of the GNU Public License. Yes, it seems that somewhere in its innards, this TV is running Linux!

In other open-source news, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting lead piece the other day about Zimbra — the open-source challenger to Microsoft Outlook ‘n’ Exchange. I’ve followed the Zimbra saga from afar because the product is in certain ways a competitor to Chandler, the project whose story I tell in my book. (Yes, Zimbra’s name derives from the Talking Heads song, which is in turn a borrowing from Dada poet Hugo Ball.) The Journal piece, by Robert Guth, was a thorough description of how a modest-sized startup company is leveraging the work of an open-source community.

What I found strange about it wasn’t the idea that, nearly a decade after the concept of open-source software development was first introduced to the mainstream (and almost as many years after Andrew Leonard’s groundbreaking work on the subject at Salon, that I was proud to edit), the whole idea can still be framed as a novelty. No, what was really off about the piece was its headlines: “Virtual Piecework…Trolling the Web for Free Labor.”

I suppose there is still a faction in the software world that dismisses the complex social and behavioral structures that have created substantial software products like Firefox, Apache and the Linux in my TV set; in this view, open-source developers are simply chumps who give away “free labor.” And I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find that stance echoed in the Journal. But I was anyway. Guth’s piece was a smart introduction to the process — at once idealistic and pragmatic — of distributed open-source software development; the reductive headline was jarringly disconnected from the content that followed.
[tags]open source, linux, plasma tvs, wall street journal[/tags]

Miscellany: Of drapes and atheism

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I’ve been hit with the accursed virus that’s going around — not a computer bug; the sniffly, rhinovirus sort. Meanwhile, I’m working my way through Don Knuth’s “Structured Programming with go to Statements”; the Code Reads for that should be up within a day or two.

In the political world, I keep returning to the condescending fuss the GOP made before the election about Nancy Pelosi having already begun to choose her new drapes. President Bush followed up with more in his “we took a thumpin'” press conference.

And all I can think is, drapes? This election was all about pulling back drapes. Bush’s Washington has been a place of closed curtains and shut doors — from the Cheney energy panel to the secret rendition of prisoners to the zipped-up treatment of the press. Pelosi could mint some appropriate symbolism by simply leaving her windows uncovered. Whether she does so or not, let’s hope for a little more sunshine on the workings of government now that we’re no longer a one-party state.

If politics is too mundane and Iraq too depressing, go read Gary Wolf‘s wonderful Wired essay on atheism. It’s a great tour of the subject with stops at the doors of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Wolf concludes that, although atheism is the logical and philosophically sound stance for a scientific person, there’s something off-puttingly evangelical about its most fervent advocates, and that’s why the great bulk of us non-believers tend to identify as agnostics instead.
[tags]atheism, nancy pelosi, gary wolf[/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]