June 2004 – Page 9 – a crank's progress

a broadside

Somewhere along the way, among other things lost in the translation from Good Idea to Market Share, we lost our way in the exceedingly great idea of Unix as a flexible collection of small tools.

Looks like I woke a giant . . . .

Gary lays waste to the current computing landscape and it’s plethora of redundant libraries, excessive dependencies, features a/k/a chrome at the expense of lightweight utility.

His conclusion takes me back to the halcyon days of 1994/5 when Java was new and cool (and didn’t do anything you couldn’t do with an animated gif). The Promise in those days was small, lightweight apps or even components that were available on demand. Need a spreadsheet? One click downloads one to your desktop, opens your file, and you just use it. The issue at the time was micropayments: how would you pay for this kind of thing? Metered usage, like your dialup charges? Not really valid in the broadband era. A subscription? That means paying today for a hamburger you may never eat.

Of course, given the improvements we see in stuff like AbiWord, the KOffice suite, OpenOffice, we could see these things being made available for free, with some kind of service value-add for a business model/revenue stream for people who care about such things.

The fly in the ointment? The operating system. Who cares about an operating system? Why should anyone but a programmer care about an operating system? Why hasn’t the very idea of anything below file management and whatever applications you use been abstracted away? And that of course takes us back to another Promise from the 1994/5 era: the notion of doing it all in an application that ran on all platforms, looked consistent, had the same interface and features no matter what was behind it. That was Netscape’s plan, in the course of which they planned to render Windows as nothing more than “a partially debugged set of device drivers.”

So here we are ten years on. Are things better? Are we more free to do what we want with our computers on our internet?

MT plugin for addressable grafs?

ongoing · Purple Number Signs:

I look at these things and the idea of sticking a visible anchor on each paragraph to make it addressable seems like, well of course! In particular here at ongoing where I’m prone to write thirty-paragraph rambles with multiple allegedly-related arguments, it would make Mark Pilgrim’s life so much easier if he could directly point at a paragraph that’s particularly wrong. ¶

O, LazyWeb, can this come to pass for MovableType 2.x?

This is a very cool idea, and I like how Tim has a. distilled it to a symbol that literally means ‘paragraph’ and b. has implemented it to it only shows up when you mouse over the associated block of text.

90% of an education takes place outside the classroom

John Kerry intern scandal – Alexandra Polier’s account:

The Education of Alexandra Polier

Falsely accused of having an affair with John Kerry, the “intern” sifts through the mud and the people who threw it.

A great read and a strong young woman: it’s clear from reading this article that she isn’t shallow enough to have done what she was accused of.

It would be heartening to see the press follow up on this and explain just how ephemeral this “story” was, how a few scandal-hungry reporters and editors can trample someone’s good name. It would be something to see their faces on the front page of their own papers with an accurate description of their utter failure as journalists. Brian Flynn at the The Sun (the top-notch paper with a naked girl on Page 3) hid behind his wife to avoid talking to someone he defamed. The guy who ran the faked pictures of British soldiers abusing POWs resigned: this clown should be canned.
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