Steve Reads

An article in today’s Times is interesting primarily because Friedman repeats the fallacy that WiFi stands for “wireless fidelity,” which is a sign that the people at the Times just don’t get the joke — that WiFi is named in analogy with HiFi. Someone on BoingBoing – probably Cory — mentioned this a while ago.

One thought that occurs to me while reading Friedman’s article is that the world will not end if our economic systems change, or if the Net changes, or anything like that. The world adjusts. This is why I more or less skim over sky-is-falling predictions about the end of the Net or the end of the airlines, for instance. People still need to fly, so the airlines won’t die. Maybe these airlines will die, but others will replace them. The demand for bandwidth will only increase, so Internet companies will still thrive. People will still want music, so the whole debate over Napster and its ilk strikes me as kind of uninteresting at one level, even though it’s quite interesting at many others: people have been listening to music for thousands of years, and will be listening to it for thousands more. Concern about the death of the music-publishing business seems kind of silly.

The Friedman article, for no particular reason, reminds me of all of this.

I’m now in Dublin, staying with my friends Sharon and Louise. They’re wonderful people who’ve treated me incredibly well. From a purely potato-love perspective (to use the phrase from Herzog), it’s also been great: I’m sleeping in a comfortable bed for the first time in a week, in a room all by myself. Hence I’ve been sleeping continuously for eight hours every night. I wonder how I’ll feel when I return to the hostel in Paris on the first of July.

Prague was nice. It’s a beautiful place which everyone should visit, though it would be good to know Czech before you go; the locals seem to despise those who don’t speak their language. If you speak German, you’re in some luck, but any other language – I tried French and English — won’t do.

The legal situation in the States seems to be much better while I’m away than when I’m home. First we had the copyright stuff that I mentioned recently, and now the decision to overturn most anti-sodomy laws. Of course George Will is up in arms about this – and, to be fair, is up in arms about “judicial activism” generally — but I think the effects will be indisputably positive. And I’ve discovered over time that “judicial activism” is a codeword meaning “social policies with which we disagree.” Strict construction sounds like such a great idea, and sounds like it should be the only coherent way to interpret the Constitution, until you discover that the Constitution does, in fact, have vaguely worded amendments by design. The Framers knew that times would change, and hence that they shouldn’t write perfectly concrete principles. Strict construction is a pipe dream, and moreover a lie: those asserting that they’re strict constructionists can’t even abide by their own principles.

So now life will be a little bit better for my gay friends. Judicial-activism concerns aside, this can only be viewed as a gain for our society.

Maybe if I stay away longer, Bush will be impeached.

I’m still reading weblogs from Europe, albeit in a much more cursory way than I do from the U.S. Also, I’m avoiding blogs with a relatively low signal-to-noise ratio, like Metafilter. But I am reading Larry Lessig’s blog, and I’m happy to see that the Public Domain Enhancement Act will be introduced into Congress. This is very exciting news. Let’s all petition our Congressfolks mercilessly until this goes through. There’s no reason not to charge copyright holders a measly dollar after their works have been around for 50 years. Let’s restore some balance to the process.

I’m here in Prague, using an honest-to-goodness QWERTY keyboard for the first time in a few days. I only have half an hour here. I have all kinds of thoughts, all of which I’ve been committing to a journal and few of which I have time to blog. Maybe later. For now, I’ll just say that I wonder whether my approach to travel is a little limited. I’m hitting Paris, Prague, Dublin, and a number of cities in France. The problem is that it takes quite a while just to figure out where to buy food, where drug stores are, how to do laundry, etc. I wonder whether I would be better served by just going to one or two cities for a week or so each.

More to say. Maybe later. Hostels are cool thus far. I would recommend the Village Hostel in Montmartre in Paris, and thus far all indications are that the Arena Hostel in northern Prague is cool.

It is now 1:16 a.m. My man Josh Wretzel and I have just wrapped up a three-hour phone call. It seemed to take about five minutes. I don’t know how he and I do it. I think it’s because he’s one of my best friends and I love him more than I can say.

I’m on hold right now with Sprint PCS, which reminds me of an idea: wouldn’t you rather not be on hold, but instead have them just call you back when your call reaches the head of the queue? Then you could go about your business and not have to wait by the phone (or wait with a cell phone sitting uncomfortably between chin and shoulder). I wonder why no one does something like this yet.

Via The Morning News: Christopher Hitchens has written a scathing attack on Bob Woodward’s coverage of the Iraq War (cache). I’ve not read Woodward’s book on the war, but this article and many others convince me that Woodward is little more than a sycophant. (All The President’s Men is a great book, though. I hear that The Final Days is, too.)

Thinking of the last post, in which I quoted an email to Jon, I’m wondering whether there’s some cool way to integrate the web and email. For instance, wouldn’t it be neat if there were some automated way to respond to someone’s email with only a URL? That is, I start writing a response in my usual email client, and after I’ve sent the message it gets saved as a web page on my server, and the body of the email gets replaced with a URL. This buys you at least three things: first, the email would be editable at least until your recipient read it; second, you could unsend it by simply deleting the URL pointed to in the email; and third, you could serve the email to the recipient using SSL, which means that at least half of the transaction (server-to-recipient, the other half being sender-to-server) would be encrypted. Most people don’t use PGP, so this would be a braindead way to buy some more security. I suspect that this email-to-web idea would buy a lot of other results, but those are the ones that come up offhand. It’s handy in a case like my response to Jon; I made some edits, and ideally Jon would see the edited version. But the way email works, he sees only the first copy that I sent him.

Possible problems with the approach include a couple obvious ones: first, most people aren’t running web servers, though I suspect it’s only a matter of time before a lot of people are running servers of some sort. Second, there’s still the matter of security between sender and server, but that’s actually not so hard to manage; a simple little program like scp (pscp under Windows) will send a file over an ssh-encrypted tunnel, as long as the remote machine is running the ssh daemon. Again this gets back to the problem that most people aren’t running servers, and most people wouldn’t know how to. It’s an idea, anyway, which I now commit to the ether.

I normally love everything that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes, but her latest – on a remake of the “Stepford Wives” (cache) — is just a collection of hastily-drawn stereotypes with little connection to the complicated relationships between men and women. “Mr. Rudnick says  . . .  men have grown even more anxious about gender issues and begrudge having their hegemony shredded by women, gays and minorities,” writes Dowd. Really? Do you have even the slightest bit of evidence to back that up? The whole column is filled with terrible generalizations such as these.

I don’t want to lose any more respect for this eminently respectable columnist, but I’ll hardly have any choice if she keeps writing tripe like this.

Does it strike anyone else as a really poor reflection on our democracy that our fundamental freedoms often exist at the behest of the Justice Department (cache)? I applaud them for fixing an obviously wretched system, but I’m again reminded of George Carlin: if they can take these “fundamental human rights” away from us, they’re not fundamental human rights.

A joke tonight from Bijoyini, via her friend’s family in Ohio: “A Buddhist walks up to a hot-dog vendor and says, `Make me one with everything.’”

Some people are now freaking out about “illegal” sharing of downloadable cell-phone ringtones. Supposedly there’s a $400 million market a-brewin’ for such ringtones. Putting aside the ridiculous “piracy” concerns for a while, I’ll just ask: $400 million!? For ringtones?! Like, MIDI-quality ringtones? All of which are annoying?

Let me state it very clearly: if your phone rings long enough that you hear more than a few notes of the tone, you are momentarily my enemy. Put the fucking thing on vibrate, fuckers. (Not that any of my readers are necessarily fuckers; the label applies more abstractly, like using “you” to mean “one.”) If you have to carry it in your handbag, where you can’t feel the vibration, then use some unobtrusive single-tone warble. I do not want to hear “Stairway To Heaven” on your fucking phone.

Some T stations only allow you to buy passes during the first four days of each month and the last four days of the preceding month. Other stations — Back Bay and a few others — allow you to buy them through the 15th. But not all passes: a Zone 4 pass is only available at North Station and a few others. Combo passes are only available at select T stations including Harvard. Most stations don’t have vending machines. A weekly combo pass isn’t a swipable pass like the monthly passes are; instead you have to show it to an MBTA employee, who will wave you through. But some T-station entrances don’t have employees on hand, so they’re conveniently labeled “Token and pass only.” But when they say “pass only,” they mean “swipable pass only,” because – as noted above — there needs to be an employee on-hand to wave you through with a non-swipable pass. You could buy passes on the web, but only for a few days every month. You can’t register on the website for some kind of monthly subscription thing, whereby you’re charged automatically for a pass that you get in the mail on the same day every month. If you miss the pass deadlines, you can buy at certain stores. But those stores — like Harvest Co-Op — don’t sell all passes; typically they only sell subway and combo passes.

Is that clear? Good. Glad I could clarify that for you.

My friend Adam — frequently cited here — is getting married to a remarkably sweet woman named Rachele. The Reverend Rachele Rosi, actually. They told us tonight at Adam’s 27th birthday party. Congratulations to them both. I know Rachele less well than Adam, but she’s always struck me as sweet, forthright, honest, intelligent, genuine and decent. I wish the couple a long and happy life together. I care a great deal about them. (Your author is fighting back tears as he writes this.)

Speaking of the hassles of international calling, it surprises me that international rates from cell phones are so expensive, given that there are cheap calling cards available; calling my friend in China would have cost $0.31 per minute using MinutePass, had he picked up. You’ll notice that almost no one places international calls directly from a cell phone. Shouldn’t we expect that if the market were functioning properly, cell-phone companies would lower their international rates to get a piece of the pie?

Again, I suspect this will stop being an issue when Internet phones take off. People are slowly getting used to the idea that visiting a website in China should be as cheap as visiting one down the street. Even if it actually costs the backbone networks more to transfer bits onto a Chinese network, we’ve grown to expect that the ISPs will spread this higher cost across all their customers and charge everyone more or less the same amount. Sooner or later, people will expect this from their phone service.

I just tried to call a friend in China using my prepaid calling card (I use MinutePass, which has worked well — granted, it was a small sample — calling Ireland and Mexico a few times), and I’m reminded of how the limitations of the phone system make simple automations hard. I had to call an access number, enter a PIN, select a menu option, then dial a phone number. I should be able to enter this into my phone book under “Flynnie,” then press one button and let it go. Instead I have to retype the same digits (10-digit PIN, 1-digit response to a prompt, 15-digit international phone number, plus however many keystrokes I need to pull the MinutePass access number from my phone book) every time I want to call. If we were designing the phone network today, there would be a dozen ways to make it work better; the typical approach nowadays would be to wrap an XML tag around every part of our interaction with the phone. I’m waiting for the day that voice communication becomes just another Internet application, with a far richer and more flexible interface that makes simple tasks simple.

I spent a wonderful day with three really splendid women, and on the phone with a really wonderful guy. First I went to visit my friend Laura, promising her that I’d help her install a Zip drive on her Linux box; I helped her install Debian last week, and it’s like what they say about saving someone’s life: you’re responsible for them ever after.

Turns out that the Linux work took forfrigginever, including a long time on the phone with my remarkably generous (he has to be, to help me this much) friend Adam during which he tried to help me figure out what was wrong with Laura’s machine. We had to install the (if memory serves) vfat driver, the fat driver, the parport driver, the parport_pc driver, and finally the ppa driver, in that order. That is we needed to install all the drivers to make a parallel port work before we could even hope to get the parallel-port Zip drive working. The ultimate trick involved going into the BIOS and forcing a particular mode on the parallel port (since at least one document asserts that the “standard parallel port/enhanced parallel port” distinction is important).

I’m going into this much detail in a non-technical space for two reasons. First, I hope someone will google for some set of search terms and come across this page when in a moment of deep frustration such as I experienced today. And second, I’m looking for some confirmation of something Adam told me today that fascinated and angered me. His claim is that Microsoft and the BIOS manufacturers (Phoenix, AMI, etc.) have a little collusion going on which helps explain the difficulties one tends to have getting hardware to work with Linux: the BIOS companies will give Microsoft their proprietary hardware information so that Microsoft operating systems are relatively easy to install. This information is proprietary and expensive, so the open-source community can’t afford it. Consequently, Linux programmers need to guess how to make their low-level code work with hardware. They do a passable job of it, considering the hurdles. It’s absurd to me that BIOS information could even legally be proprietary, given the obvious difficulties it causes for the free market.

So I ask: can someone give me any reputable citations confirming or refuting the claim about BIOS information being proprietary and distributed to Microsoft through an NDA?

Anyway, the technical portion is over. (That was a cue for those who skimmed over it. In time, I’ll use a better system of XML tagging and cookies to allow readers to filter out that sort of thing if they’re not interested.) Laura was nice enough to drive me over to my friend Liz’s place, where Liz hooked me up with antibacterial ointment to combat the pinkeye that she gave me earlier this week. It’s already feeling quite a lot better (thanks, Liz!).

Liz drove me to Kendall (my friends are nice to carless people), and I took the T to meet my fabulous friend Bijoyini. I’m in the throes of becoming-good-friends with her, and she’s a real joy to be around. We ate at a great tapas restaurant on Newbury Street in Boston, owned by the same people who run Dali. We had hoped to take a nice walk around the Common, but the fatigue brought on by sangria and an intoxicating meal killed us both; we took buses back to our respective abodes and crapped out. (Or at least I did; not sure whether she did.)

So all in all, it was a splendid day with three charming women. I hope that happens again soon.

There’s a nice little spoof of “A-list bloggers”, which is of course more fun if you read the blogs that he’s mocking.

Whether or not Joi Ito is a Wanker, his girlfriend is intensely attractive.

My friend Adam links to a Q-and-A session with Dave Eggers where Eggers rants about the concept of “selling out.” I’ve excerpted the rant, and have come up with a response. I’m curious whether I’m near the mark.