Monthly Archives: November 2005

Traditional Values

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I love the way given a heterogeneous audience a single bit of humor can be at once all kinds of humor.

Fun Fact about Common Lisp: standard Common Lisp has no networking libraries at all, but it does have a built in function to print integers as Roman numerals — using either the new style (14=XIV) or the old-style (14=XIIII) Roman numerals.

Dave Roberts) choosing to pass over it’s author’s fun but sarcastic invective and labels it sardonic irony.

In the good old days audiences were more homogenous. It was easier then for the humorist to know his target audience. That informs the question of why it is so widely presumed that nice people don’t do humor.

Misc Links etc.

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More links…

Franco is still dead, and Stanford B School researchers say that who you know dominates who get’s the job (abstract); now with improved with social networking.

Very fun screen cast of about the Java Script library known as Mochi.

Cool winter weather browser shows snow cover, percipitation, tempurature, elevation, etc. etc. etc. Those guys at the national weather service? They Rule!

A nice complement to my attempt to estimate the cost/mile of driving the car; here’s an attempt to estimate cost/mile of shoes.

And from that same source hiding images in sound.

I gather that the president of U of Chicago said:

A university is “an aggregation of sovereignties connected by a common heating plant.”

The internet is a aggregation of sovereignties connected by a common search engine? The general pattern here is that if you drop down Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs sooner or later a point to rendezvous your common cause will emerge.

Gamer Group Think

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Interesting posting by Liz Lawley on how players of CMU’s picture classification game game the system. The players quickly discover that there certian schemes garner more points than others. Liz illustrates a number of examples where that tags the pictures with less than optiminal tags.

I have a bone to pick with the folksonomy fans. It seems to me that these folks have never met a institution they found worthy. The larger the institution the less worthy it’s outputs. Or in short: individuals good, institutions bad.

Let’s adopt that mindset and look at what Liz uncovered. The players in this game develop more allegence to the game than then classificaion task. They strive to supress thier individual knowledge. They attempt to socialized their behavior to that of their model player. Oh my God! Look! It’s group think.

Ha!

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This slashdot comment reflects a common misunderstanding about how open source works…

“I just setup an Apache web server for use at home, and now I’ve got 4 Apache developers living in my basement. When they showed up, they said they were my Apache community overhead and I had to let them stay there. Oh, and I apparently have to feed them too!”

You do not need to feed them. If the demand for food is strong enough somebody will volunteer.

DNS Cache Snooping

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If you do sysadmin tasks for a group of people one of the challenges of the job is that your log files are full of bits of info that should be kept private. Here’s an example I’d not thought through sufficently: the DNS (Domain Name Server), actually the DNS cache. When one of your users visits a site (for example the url: http://cult-of-the-vile-snail.com/) the DNS server helps them.

Most DNS servers keeps a cache of the names looked up. That makes later attempt to lookup the cult-of-the-vile-snail faster and reduces upstream load. Here’s a curiosity. The protocol for talking to the DNS server has ways that allow you to ask just for immediately availably entries; and not look further upstream.

Thinking about starting an inquisition? Worried about your colleagues falling for the snail cult? Ask the DNS server. In some scenarios the DNS server can leak information about what the other users at your site are doing. By asking the DNS server if it has cult-of-the-vile-snail in it’s cache you can discover if anybody local has visited that site.

I had known for a long time about this privacy leak around local DNS caches.

I hadn’t realized what this paper points out. You can use these tricks on DNS servers out in the wild. For example say you wanted to squat on some domain names and you wish to know which misspelt domain names would be good choices. By poking a few thousand public DNS servers you can get a good estimate of which misspellings are common. Or say you wanted to do market research on how popular a competitor’s domain name is; same trick.

Here is a guy using this trick to get a picture, and amazing pictures they are too, of how wide spread the Sony rootkit is.

I certainly hadn’t realized how subtle the privacy implications of getting a good configuration for your DNS server is.

Power: Command v.s. Social

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The label passive aggressive is oft ascribed to others but rarely subscribed to. When you deploy this label your accusing the other side of acting both with a hidden agenda and out of weakness. Note that the accusation of a hidden agenda is usually an indirect way of admitting that you haven’t a clue what the other side is on about. Notice also that the accusation of aggressive is a step toward admitting that the other side has power. Negotiating power. The exaggerated language is a failed attempt at self deprecating humor. Humor about the of the fear this realization has engendered.

A black and white model of negotiation might hold that it’s what you do when your not acting. In that characterization it becomes the opposite of acting, i.e. passive.
But real negotiation is work. The work of negotiating is the work of finding a common understanding. That search involves uncovering workable models of the other sides agendas.

One frame to shovel all this into is ‘coordination problems.’ Some coordination problems are solved by command control; which is typically viewed as masculine. Some coordination problems are solved by emergent behavior arising out of common cause (pool of common practice). This is often called community and typically viewed as feminine. Of course all the real systems and interesting systems are in the middle space between these two fantasy worlds.

Power is found in both these systems at their network hubs. Which is obvious in the tree topology of the command and control hierarchy; and even in the more complex variations on that where different dominions of authority (say: management, engineering, marketing, pr) are overlaid. Efficient, stagnant systems may have no conflicts to be resolved at these hubs; but that’s rare. The function of the nodes in the topology is to both execute the ritualized parts of behavior but more interestingly to resolve conflicts – i.e. to do the negotiation. In a hierarchy this puts the guys in the middle nodes into interesting role of bridging between two differing world views. Which opens them up to the accusation that they are two faced.

In the community coordination systems the network hubs draw all their power from their role as negotiators; though that’s rarely the term used. Social networking is another name used. The powerful role in these systems works off the energy created by the diversity of world views found across the hubs contacts. Moving information and resources around to create common cause. Telling engineering about what marketing has discovered. Connecting somebody in manufacturing with somebody in engineering that might know somebody who can resolve the problem de-jour. Like the middle manager in a command and control hierarchy the hub can be accused of unclear loyalties.

Of course this is all terribly over simplified. But the male-bossy-hierarchy model is more likely to see the female-chatty-networking as passive aggressive.

Folktales, Folksonomies, and Swallowing the Sea.

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I’m a sucker for  grand explain everything attempts to categorize it all.  I find them extremely amusing. Here for example is a five node template that attempts to encompass all folktales. (You can also use this for presentations to your angel investor.)

There is a much more complex template that aspires to the same goal, see here.

The awe inspiring attempt to categorize the universe of folktales is the six volume work by Stith Thompson (who’s name is suspiciously similar to Sith); the Motif-index of Folktales.

The motif-index to distills out the ingredients of all folk tales. “Identity test based on [glass] slipper fitting.” Folktale ingredients is a finite set; at least they are if you limit your self to those Stith could read in a lifetime. Reading some sections makes it clear that’s a fools errand. For example, kinds of fools: “Stupid Wife,” “Extravagant Wife,” “Stupid Husband,” “Stupid Village,” … “Foolish Brahmin,” … “Foolish city dwellers,” “cowardly fools,” … “bungling fools.” Clearly this set is innumerable. 

Many entries in the motif-index are sufficient to let you visualize an entire story. “Fool sent to acquire two 15 year old slaves returns with on 30 year old slave.”

Some of the short comings are quite telling. For example, there are only a handful of entries on slander. Recall Karl Rove’s motto: recovering from slander is like recovering water spilt on dry earth. Other holes arise because Thompson didn’t have access to all the folktales out there. So, others have tried to fill in the gaps. For example: “Sparks of burning cannibal woman become mosquitoes“, has a Native American origin.

Like accounting codes (Horses 10101506), or the Dewey Decimal system (Composting 631.875), the entries in this grand classification have identifiers (F952.1 – Blindness cured by tears).

Systems like these always have an owner, the authority. Thompson’s system evolved from a system designed by Aarne. Aarne’s system was an index to stories; where Thompson’s system finer grain – story elements. I’m not sure I have the history straight, but it appears that some effort was made to update Aarne’s system creating the Aarne-Thompson index of story lines (AT 762 – Woman with three hundred and sixty-five children.).

Thompson failed to establish a clear line of succession for who’d own his system when he died. So if you want to update it there’s nobody to talk too. Which is a problem. As we know, the semantic web wishes to encompass all these systems. (D???. magic helper who can swallow sea).

One might imagine going to the IETF and proposing a new protocol – folktale. (folktale:/AT/1384 – Man sets forth to find three others as foolish as his wife.). You might complain that such a thing wouldn’t have an obvious protocol. But then I’d point out that are already approved URI “protocols” that don’t have what most practitioners would think of as protocols (domain names, ports, etc.) tel:, info:, and tag: are three examples.

The puzzle with these kinds of identifiers is how to bridge from the carefully designed household which is their home into less rule bound global space of URIs. The tel protocol (tel:+1-416-395-5400 Dial-a-story at the Toronto Library) is a exemplar of that process; since there is a highly regulated and extremely complex universe of phone numbers. Phone numbers have high stakes politics, commercial players, property rights, etc. etc.

The tag URI is almost all the way over to the other side of things. Though all tags URI’s have an authority, in this case a domain name or an email address, they are primarily designed to be extremely light weight to create. I like that the tag RFC uses the term mint for the act of creating a tag; many of these identifiers have all the properties of property rights or currency. While I guess there isn’t anything to prevent an authority from announcing that he is governing his tags with great pomp and circumstance that’s not the typical behavior.

Info urls come closest to being a generalized scheme for bridging from the URI identifier space into the identifier spaces ruled by others. For example the info URI: info:ofi/enc:UTF-8 denotes something in the OFI world, i.e. the National Information Standards Organization’s OpenURL Framework. Messy, but necessary, these bridges.

While I still think my favorite entry in the motif index entry is “Fool mistakes pumpkin for asses egg.” I now know that the UPSPC code for asses is 10101509 and that pumpkins don’t have a code.

Engineering as a Profession

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Some more notes from my reading on proffessionalism.

Engineering is just different than the three archtypical professions Law, Medicine, and the Priesthood.

1. Knowledge base changes faster
1a. Reduces opportunity and value of standarizing practice patterns.
1b. Reducing the advantage of mature practitioners.

2. Work products are more tangible.
2a. Can be inspected by third parties
2b. Market performance plays much larger role in quality assesment.
2c. Services more easily mediated (i.e. thru middlemen)

3. Origins in market success, not failure.
3a. Origins in upper class entrepenurs.
3b. Exagerated: extent of both Consultancy and Entrepenurship.
3c. Conflicted loyalities: states via public goods, commerce entrepenurship.

4. Engineers are "Salaried Professionals"
4a. More like hired labor than service providers.
4b. Consequence of 2c.
4c. Fact at odds with 3b.

Some of this varies depending on which branch of engineering you look at. For example civil engineers often build public goods for the state and to a degree their platform of knowledge is more durable than say software engineers who are often tied to entrepenurial capital and thier platforms are in continual flux.

I think it’s quite telling that engineering as a practice, particularly in America, spun off of the upper class and it’s practitioners tend to presume they still have the power and mobility of members of that class inspite of the fact that the majority of engineers are hired labor working for large firms.

I’m amazed at how much consequence flows from the tangible nature of the work compared to the three professions mentioned above. These tangible objects can be tested in two ways. One very micro: another professional or the end user can evaluate them. The other is very macro: the marketplace can evalute them. The market is, of course, a swarm of idiots so this distinction is huge.

The other consquence of having working in a profession with a tangible work product is that third parties can buy and sell it. Politicions can sell the roads, tinmen can sell the aluminum siding, marketing can sell the software.

Misc Links

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Property rights – now a new major religion

Thrifty nude beaches?

Eating your own tail.

Users space filesystems are cool (language bindings).

For example you can finally build secure file systems doing things such as enforcing: ‘this guy can only make this pattern of requests’. How about edit Flickr in emacs?

Color Bubbles and temporary dyes.

Audio Search via speech recognition.

Guest host any PC OS on Mac or PC, for free.

It bothers me that this worked. I wonder if people are subletting pixels.

Pricing Games – Vendor Madness

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I filled up the car with gas for $1.97 a gallon a few days ago at one of this group of three gas stations about 5 miles from my house that have been selling gas for 20 to 40 cents less than everybody else ever since about the middle of September. There are a handful of single stations around the region who have been similarly discounting their prices.

I bet there is some great liturature on how gas station owners signal each other to assure that prices are set in a way that avoids driving them all out of business. So I’ve been wondering about this handful of stations that appear to have decided to ignore that and attempt to sell huge volumes of gasoline at very low mark ups. I find these self regulating markets thought provoking. Presumably the other gas stations in their local area are – ah- no pleased.

Turns out the three stations are owned by one guy. Yesterday the town showed up to install new curbs around one of his stations. The town didn’t bother to tell him they were comming. The town’s story is that some of his buyers were darting in and out of traffic and that better curbs would regulate things better.

This effectively shut down that station, in particular the gas delivery truck couldn’t get into the station. This stressed out the owner.

So he lowered prices for a hour to $1.04. Word quickly spread and the entire road was quickly backed up with eager buyers. His daughter says he lost $6,000. The town wants to charge him for the extra traffic police costs this triggered.

The owner’s stress level rose further. Apparently he then wrapped him self in the american flag, showed up at the stations, threatened suicide, and well had a nervous breakdown. He’s in the hospital now.

At this moment all three stations are closed, which I suspect made the rest of the stations in that part of town happy. I suspect there is more to this story than meets the eye.

Meanwhile the mess in the natural gas market looks like it’s just getting worse and worse.

“We need to declare a national crisis,” Andrew N. Liveris, the chief executive of the Dow Chemical Company.