If my post about the “Please don’t use Comic Sans” dialog box got people chatting in the comments, yesterday’s edition of Chris Onstad’s popular webcomic Achewood should really stir the pot:
Hang on guys, I’m putting my steel-toed boots on! Click the comic to see it on its original page at full size.
I love that Lyle wants to give the guy a “curbie” (that’s the way Edward Norton killed that guy in American History X).
The Ginger Ninja and I had a little time to kill before flying home from Connecticut last Sunday, so we headed over to Borders to get some cheap books.
Right now, thanks to a combination of:
…it’s far better for us Canadians to buy books in the states.
While at Borders, I saw a display full of Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur, whose subtitle is How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, which is covered in today’s New York Times. I had enough time to read the opening chapters and came to my conclusion, an old stand-by for stupid, reactionary works: I’ve seen better paper after wiping my ass.
I plan to write a more detailed review and compare it to David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, which I received during my visit to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard last week. However, I’m loath to fork over ducats to line Mr. Keen’s pockets, which would only encourage him to keep going. Perhaps one of you has a copy that s/he’d like to sell me?
In lieu of such a review, let me point you to Larry Lessig’s blog entry on it, and more importantly, this comment made in response to said blog entry:
Keen’s a tool. I don’t need to read his book.
What have institutions added to our culture in the last hundred and fifty years?
Nothing.
If they had been running Rodin’s shop they would have thrown out the “mistake” that revolutionized his work. When a plaster model fell over, breaking the arm off, Rodin liked it. And changed art forever.
What has Keen done?
Besides edit and criticize?
Amateurs create signal, institutions mediate it—but can never improve it, only standardize it.
Every time an artist steps into new territory, he or she is, by definition, an amateur. We could quadruple the number of institutions and credentialed practitioners and never gain a single thing culturally, economically, educationally or personally.
This is nothing more than some weird kind of complete self-hatred.
No Sun Ra, no Sex Pistols, No Rolling Stones, no Knut Hamsum, no Pushkin, no Ginsberg — no nobody.
The answer is to stop fixing content prices and allow the market to differentiate itself just like every other market does. We have all the jeans we could ever hope to care about. Why not allow premium content to do the same with movies, books, magazines, music and TV?
It will eventually happen once digital distribution finishes destroying the very institutions Keen is trying to impress.
It’s not a moral question but a economic one.
Here’s the current xkcd comic:
Click the comic to see it on its original page at full size.
According to this quiz that rates a programmer’s personality type along four axes in a manner similar to the Myers-Briggs Personality Index, my programmer personality type is DHSB, which means:
If you’re curious as to what the various ends of the programmer personality type axes for this quiz are, here’s a page that lists them all.
Give the test a try and feel free to report your results in the comments!
This is an idea I’ve been holding since RailsConf 2006, and some of you may think that it’s a bit too early to unveil it. I think I’m just planning ahead.
The idea is called The Rails Pledge, and I strongly encourage all of you who are Rails developers — especially the more fanatical/fan-boyish types, the ones Chad Fowler referred to as “arrogant bastards” in his opening keynote at RailsConf 2007 — to take it.
It goes like this:
I #{stateYourName}
Do solemnly swear
That when the day comes
That a new application platform comes out
And developers flock to it like moths to the flame
That I will take it in stride
And remember the good times
And productivity
And camaraderie with other developers
That came about because of Rails.I also swear that
If this platform suits my needs better
And makes me a more productive and happy coder
And makes it easy to make my users happy,
I will glady migrate to it
Without whining.
(Rails developers who are also Battlestar Galactica fans: feel free to add a little flourish to the Pledge by adding “So say we all” at the end.)
It’s a long shot that anyone will actually take the pledge, but on the very off chance that you do, feel free to use the “I Took the Rails Pledge” button shown here. If you decide to take the pledge and record it as a podcast or post it to YouTube, let me know! I’ll even come up with a prize for someone who gets a recording of DHH taking the pledge.
Jonathan Coulton’s Code Monkey was the catchy nerd-friendly rock tune of last year. This year, the crown could very well be johnnyOnline’s Love Two Point Oh, which features lyrics like:
You’re prettier than fine CSS
You’re finer than http://del.icio.us/
as well as the “09 F9…” HD-DVD code as whispered backing vocals.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is:
In his “Sprawl” series of short stories and novels, William Gibson made many references to World War III’s “cyberwar” component, especially in the novel Neuromancer. Willis Corto, an important character in that novel, is the sole survivor of a particularly important but forgotten operation in WWIII called Screaming Fist, which I’ll let Wikipedia summarize:
Operation Screaming Fist was an American military operation aimed at introducing a major virus into a Russian military computer. One of the main characters of the book, Corto, took part in the operation as a colonel. The operation was significant in that it involved dropping the team assembled for it by flying them across enemy lines on light gliders, with each member plugged into the first prototype cyberdecks. Unfortunately, the operation had been grossly mismanaged and had not taken into account certain aerial defenses. As a result, Russian EMP weapons were used against the gliders shortly after they entered Russian airspace. In the ensuing chaos, Colonel Corto escaped in a Soviet helicopter gunship and was the only survivor.
While it wasn’t as visually dramatic as soldiers and hackers on ultralights descending on a Russian military computer installation in a daring night raid, the denial-of-service attack on Estonia is just as Gibsonian, judging by the way the news outlets have been tossing about terms like “cyberattack”, “first war in cyberspace”, “cyberattack” and “digital Maginot Line.
What I find really interesting is that the only futuristic thing about the whole affair are the “cyber-” terms used to describe it. The actual attack itself isn’t anywhere as exotic or future-tech-y as Neuromancer and all those other cyberpunk novels of the ’80s and ’90s made such things out to be. In fact, a lot of it seems so damned ordinary:
| Cyberpunk stories | Real world |
|---|---|
| Cyber-attacks often required physical infiltration of a heavily-guarded site by a team comprising crack paramilitary troops and “console cowboys”. | The cyber-attack didn’t require anyone to physically go anywhere; it was all done online. |
| Cyber-attacks often required specialized viral software (“icebreakers” in Gibson’s novels, where “ICE” stood for “Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics”) that had to be written by AIs and were available only to the military or from specialized black market dealers like The Finn. | Cyber-attacks do make use of specialized viral software, but they’re written by humans — often teenagers with plenty of spare time — and are relatively easy to obtain if you hang around the right online circles (or wrong ones, depending on your point of view). |
Cyber-attacks were typically pulled off using very specialized hardware built by hardware gurus. Here’s a line from hardware specialist Automatic Jack from the short story Burning Chrome:
|
This cyber-attack was carried out by a botnet, which is essentially a lot of ordinary home computers — stock machines and “commodity hardware” — whose spare cycles are being harnessed by a virus that probably found its way in there via spam, malware site or some other rather ordinary vector. |
| Cyber-attackers interfaced with their machines by “jacking in”; that is, linking themselves to their machines through electrodes, through which they’d operate in a virtual reality-like environment.
If they ran into “Black Ice”, a deadly form of anti-malware countermeasures, their nervous systems would get fried. |
Cyber-attackers interfaced with their machines by “logging in”; that is, linking themselves to their machines through a keyboard, mouse and monitor, through which they’d operate in a command-line environment.
If they typed too long without a break, they’d get carpal tunnel syndrome and their wrists would get fried. |
| Cyber-attack targets were fancy-pants specialized computer installations accessible to few, such as military supercompters in Neuromancer’s backstory or the AI complex in its climax. | The cyber-attack target was the Estonian internet, which people used for everyday activities, from banking to email to looking at pictures of other people’s cats with funny captions. |
| Fashion: Many hackers wore leather, black jeans and mirrored shades. | Hey, this is also true in real life! Score one for Gibson! |