Testing with screen, testing at Debian and Ubuntu
Scott James Remnant has a good story on test-driven development with screen.
Meanwhile, Debian Weekly News links to article by Lars Wirzenius on automated testing in Debian. A promising tool from Lars, piuparts, tests that packages install and uninstall correctly. More good stuff on automated testing on the Ubuntu Wiki.
This is great news even if you're not using Ubuntu or Debian, because you should be able to take a deb package with tests, put a wrapper on it, and use the package plus tests as a test for its dependencies as supplied in your own distribution or stack. Work done to automate testing in one environment helps everyone who uses the package.
Mon, 26 Dec 2005Intel graphics
Good notes on the Desktop Architect ("Dumbledore's Army") meeting at OSDL, from Dan Kegel. "Intel is currently doing things right; their graphics hardware isn't the highest performance, but their drivers are open. We should focus on a positive message praising companies that do have open source drivers."
So, yay Intel. You just sold me my next motherboard.
Sun, 25 Dec 2005MLP: freedom, time management
Benjamin Mako Hill on OLPC: "The developing world's "computers" will not be able to create or change the software that define them. The code that runs these devices will be proprietary and will remain immutable even in the context of additional hardware. Unless we do something about it."
Paul Graham writes, "Errands are so effective at killing great projects that a lot of people use them for that purpose. Someone who has decided to write a novel, for example, will suddenly find that the house needs cleaning. People who fail to write novels don't do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email."
A.J. Jacobs asks, "Why can't I join in on the biggest business trend of the new century? Why can't I outsource my low-end tasks?" in "My Outsourced Life."
Mon, 19 Dec 2005QoTD: Hong Kong law did not require Yahoo to betray Shi Tao
(Update: Yahoo's Mary Osako says the company "complied with local Chinese law". But that's not the question, is it?)
Original post date: 25 Oct 2005
"Companies in Hong Kong can entirely ignore the requests of Chinese police by sticking to the laws of Hong Kong.
However, your Hong Kong company betrayed its client and helped throw him into prison. This evil deed cannot be explained in any way but to say it was pandering to the communist dictatorship."
-- Liu Xiaobo in an open letter to Jerry Yang, Chairman of Yahoo! Inc.
(story on Boing Boing)
Sun, 18 Dec 2005Notes on "Saving the Net"
Communications companies are consolidating. The broken-up US phone monopoly has mostly merged back into AT&T and Verizon, and the cable industry is consolidating into a few giants: Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner. Carriers own the pipes the Internet runs on.
But carriers hate the important thing about the Internet—the fact that it, as David Isenberg once wrote, "just deliver(s) the bits, stupid."
In "Saving the Net", Doc Searls makes the case that in order to save the Internet from getting squashed by a legal regime that favors carriers, we need to build a better language to have arguments about Internet policy in.
Today, the Internet is losing the argument because we're using the wrong words, just as we've lost arguments about copyright law (and the DMCA, which is monopoly protection law pretending to be copyright law). Larry Lessig agrees with Doc about the problem of terminology in the copyright debate. Property sounds good, and, until you get down to the details, protecting something as "property rights" sounds fair. Likewise, the Internet argument goes the wrong way as long as it's just about "pipes" full of "content". Doc wants to remember that the Internet is also a place, with "sites", "locations", and "addresses", and it's a publishing system, with "pages" that we "browse" and "index".
Doc writes, "What I'm talking about here isn't "just semantics" or trivial in any other way. It's fundamental, especially to lawmaking and regulation."
"Thanks to the transport metaphor, even relatively pro-market and pro-Net regulators, such as former FCC Chairman Michael Powell, speak about 'consumers' having 'rights' to 'access' and 'attach' to 'connections' about which they should have 'choices'....One reason transport trumps place is that business itself is largely, though not entirely, conceived in shipping terms. The 'value chain' is a transportational notion. We speak of 'loading' goods into 'channels' for 'distribution' to 'end users' or 'consumers'."
"On the other hand, we have understood markets as places since marketplaces were the only kinds of markets we had....'Wall Street' is ontologically locational. It is a real place that serves, by what cognitive linguistics call metonymy, for the whole stock market, which we also conceive of as a place."
Although we use all three metaphors: pipe, place, and book, to talk about the Internet, the carriers' language domainates the policy debate. Doc writes, "They don't see themselves as a public utility selling a pure base-level service, such as water or electricity (which is what they are, by the way, in respect to the Net). They see themselves as a source of many additional value-adds, inside the pipes."
Carriers are lobbying Congress to create a new regulatory environment—not one that would turn back the clock to pre-Internet times, but one that would give them the best of old and new: Internet flexibility with pay-per-view business models. Doc: "The Net's genie, which granted all those e-commerce wishes over the past ten years, won't just get shoved back in the bottle. No, that genie will be piped and priced by the packet."
SBC CEO Edward Whitacre said about Google, MSN, and Vonage, in an interview with BusinessWeek, "How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it."
Besides framing the discussion, what else can we do to save the Internet? One alternative is to build our own "Last Mile." Susan Crawford writes, "I’m confident that any attempt at writing down network neutrality will be so qualified, gutted, eviscerated, and emptied that it will end up being worse than useless....The only way around this issue is to avoid it by encouraging the development of alternative online access methods, and being careful not to let the incumbents call them illegal....It should be no more illegal to have an open wireless network in your house than to practice the piano with the windows open. And having an open wireless network can lead to a community mesh network and a host of devices that open immediately to others, connecting us to the world."
The optimistic point of view is that the Internet doesn't need saving. Tim Lee, in response to "Saving the Net", writes, "There are dozens and dozens of specialized applications that various users access for legitimate reasons—games, VPN networks, porn streams, instant messaging, etc. There is no way that Comcast could individually approve and inspect every such application. A permission-based Internet would be unacceptably crippled to millions and millions of customers. No company is going to succeed with millions and millions of angry customers." So far, he's been right. Attempts by a few carriers to mess with VoIP services have been quickly rolled back. And, Lee adds, network neutrality legislation could do more harm than good. "The commons movement is absolutely right that lobbyists and lawyers should keep their hands off our culture. By the same token, we need to insist that they keep their hands off the Internet."
So saving the Internet isn't about users versus corporations, or Right versus Left, or even regulation versus non-regulation. The Pro-Internet side is divided on the network neutrality regulation issue. The Market won't buy Internet service that doesn't connect to the weird corners of the net, and regulations tend to work in favor of lawyer-rich companies anyway.
Best case, all we need from the law is legal wireless networks. But no matter what, we need something from the law. Doc tells us that we don't get bad law because politicans are bought off, but because "one way of framing the Net--as a transport system for content--is winning over another way of framing the Net--as a place where markets and business and culture and governance can all thrive."
"Saving the Net" is about having the right discussion, not about what the result of the discussion would be. That discussion needs to, at least in part, think of the Net as a place, and understand its value as a place. "We need to make clear that the Net is the best public place ever created for private enterprise, and that the success of the Net owes infinitely more to personal initiative than to the mesh of pipes in the ground beneath it."
That's Doc's "Saving the Net" argument as I understand it, and the good thing about it is that it raises more questions than it answers. I originally linked to it with my idea about putting letter to Congress functionality into blog software, and Doc collected that and some other followups. Here are some more things I think about at the same time as "Saving the Net": fiber down the fenceline, city Internet exchanges, the role of the small ISP, what kind of a deal on connectivity could the Homeowners' Association of a decent-sized condo complex get, and how much more could a developer sell houses for if the neighborhood GigE network happened to peer with the local school district? If the Internet is about building places, let's look to people who already think in terms of building places to participate in building it. (Doc, is the builder planning to meter that fiber he's putting in? I know when I got some Cat 6 put in, the question didn't even come up.)
Sat, 17 Dec 2005QOTD: funding and innovation
It may be a career-limiting opinion, but after 10 years in this business, I can confidently (albeit naively) conclude we have too much money. More important, I contend this overfunding is limiting our ability to innovate, which has negative consequences for America's warfighting capabilities.
-- Capt. Dan Ward, USAF (PDF)
Fri, 16 Dec 2005Predictions for 2006
Advertising goes direct. This year, the New York Stock Exchange wiped out the "seat holder" system. In 2006, we'll see the same thing happening to ad buying and selling—and we'll see more innovative media companies do no ad selling at all, just using Google. The coming ad network price/feature war between Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo won't hurt.
"Death of Java" greatly exaggerated. In the 2000 paper The Cost of Migrating COBOL Developers to Java, the Gartner Group points out, in the nicest possible way, that it's cheaper to treat programmers as disposable than to pay for retraining and wait out their productivity ramp-up. In the real world, tool turnover means staff turnover. And in the real world, problem space knowledge and organizational knowledge are much more important than tool knowledge. So you're going to keep your COBOL++, I mean Java, developers.
Platforms get granular for self-defense. Tired of worms that attack software you don't use, but that you need to patch anyway because it's part of the "platform"? In 2006, you'll get better dependency checking to deploy just what you need, and update services that are smart enough not to bug you about software you don't need to update because you don't have it. (Gentoo has done some interesting work in this area, so be prepared for some "I told you so".)
Software entrepreneurs in India disintermediate marketing to the US. Most US open source users, developers, and "power" proprietary software users will deploy or seriously test at least one product—possibly open source, possibly proprietary—with an India-based brand name.
No future in carrier discrimination threats. Giving preferential treatment to web sites that pay a special fee would be a dumb move inviting retaliation. In response, a non-pipeowner could deploy a Coral-like service, and make carriers pay to peer. This is a big Won't Happen. Would have been a great "Internet War" news story, though.
Other predictions:
Bruce Perens: "Feature phones and the content sent to them will prosper in markets where many people ride mass transit - and not elsewhere."
Nancy Weil: "Because of the dominance of BlackBerries among lawmakers, their aides and others who work the corridors of Washington, D.C., the need for patent law reform will be pushed to the fore..."
Thu, 15 Dec 2005Cage bout!
First Matt Cutts vs. assclown SEOs! Next, Matt Asay on Red Hat vs. Novell!
JavaScript Hash Cash
Hey kids! Prior Art! Great idea, and it looks like it's working, but I'm wondering...if you run the JavaScript once, you get four hours to spam like a madman. I'm thinking about something like this for a simpler form-based site, but without encrypting the JavaScript itself. The form would have hidden fields containing a string A and a length L, and the JavaScript would run until it finds a string B whose hash matches the hash of A in the first L bits. Then you could turn up L until the script runs within the length it takes a user to type a thoughtful comment on a slow machine, and of course on the server side only accept the form submit if B passes the test. Go back to the form again and you get a new A.
(To make this extra leet, I should find a hash function whose implementation in JavaScript runs not too much slower than some future spamware's implementation in C.)
Fri, 09 Dec 2005Google Analytics and saving the media we need
Programs such as Google Analytics and AdSense Referrals show that Google is already starting to offer advertisers and publishers a better deal in the text ad market.
Looking at it from the content site point of view, this smells like something that could totally change the media business, or maybe I should say finish the change in the media business that the web started.
How about this for a future: in order to run a content site you don't need an ad sales force, you just need Google. You don't need a marketing department or reader surveys, you just need Google. Or whichever one of the text ad vendors is giving you the best combination of money and tools today. Probably Google, since they don't have cash cows outside the text ad business to protect, but that's another story.
This could be an incredible hollowing out of the media business. The "business side" is getting the same Silicon Valley Make Your Job Obsolete Magic from Google that typesetting and pasteup got from Atex, Adobe, and Apple.
The only problem is, it has to work. Some kinds of media can fail and we won't miss them. Other kinds of media aren't allowed to fail.
For example, the daily newspaper is as important a link in the information chain as the clerk at the courthouse who makes copies of legal documents for you. We have a First Amendment right to do independent journalism not because it's important for someone to have the right to do journalism, but because it's important for people to actually do it.
Fortunately, we have a way to tell if media disintermediation is going to work. Find people who are way ahead of the curve, and watch them. If you're interested in making disintermediated media succeed, help them. So here are some point people, canaries in the coal mine, pioneers, whatever you want to call them.
1. Jonathan Corbet: Extra services are nice, but Google is eventually going to have to make with the cash to keep its AdSense sites happy, and keep them from straying off to Microsoft or Yahoo. If the Text Ad Wars work right, LWN will do well. But if an A-list content site such as LWN isn't seeing enough revenue to do the Google-based content business model, that's a warning sign.
2. Dan Gillmor: The daily newspaper business model is falling apart, but the political role of the daily newspaper is more important than ever. If the great Bayosphere experiment to save local journalism doesn't make it, we're in trouble.
3. John Buckman: It's easy to say that the music business is hopelessly broken and that it's time to start over, but actually doing it is another matter. Making musicians happy with download, CD, and license revenues is, in the long run, the freedom-loving Web's most powerful defense against calls for recartelization.
The mice that sang
(update 9 Dec 2005: Nicholas Carr writes, "The online ad market is going to become more efficient. Much of the profit that now goes to the operators of the ad-serving technology will be redistributed.")
(update 7 Nov 2005: it begins. I wouldn't sign up for AdSense yet; better deals are on the way.)
Two important things happened today (2 Nov 2005), media-decentralization-wise.
One. Microsoft is preparing a huge push into the market for online advertising. Can you say "Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google all competing to offer your web site a good text ad deal"? I knew you could. Google is going to have to start passing more of the AdSense wealth on to the content sites.
Will the media company of the future be just Editorial, no ad department? Seriously, will the new generation of ad mongers not just replace media buying operations but also the ad sales departments of the media companies?
Two. That great "singing mice" story that got so much ink today is from a paper on PLOS Biology. Yay PLOS! And it isn't just about being the next Big-Name Media Scientist—open access matters for incoming scholarly citations, too.
Squeak!
Type checking and test-driven development
Bruce Eckel asks, "This became a puzzle to me: if strong static type checking is so important, why are people able to build big, complex Python programs (with much shorter time and effort than the strong static counterparts) without the disaster that I was so sure would ensue?"
...and links to Robert C. Martin, who asks, For many years we've been using statically typed languages for the safety they offer. But now, as we all gradually adopt Test Driven Development, are we going to find that safety redundant? Will we therefore decide that the flexibility of dynamically typed languages is desirable?
Bram Cohen on How to Write Maintainable Code—among other things, "Write test code" and "Write in an easy to maintain language".
Corrupt CDs, networking with lasers, holiday greetings
Ed Felten: "DRM is used as a weapon not against infringers but against market rivals." More Ed Felten: "Having set off down the road of CD copy protection, the music industry shouldn’t be surprised to have arrived at spyware. Because that’s where the road leads." Actually, just subscribe to his feed already.
Laser networking instructions: Do not remove the spider that will inhabitate the slot between the hood and the tube of the transmitter. Neither remove his web. The spider is a part of system design.
Neologism from David Weinberger: A "digital fright page" is a page that warns you against using content in ways you used to think were legitimate. I just made it up.
Tue, 06 Dec 2005Blog to Congress
(updated 6 Dec 2005: fixed HTML mistakes in the Blosxom flavour, changed link to point to new version. Thanks to Michal Migurski for the HTML sanity check.
More "blog to Congress" discussion from smallbrain.net, Ruby Sinreich, and Doc Searls. Are we a Movement yet?)
Original date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004
It's a familiar complaint. "You web weenies blog until your hands fall off from carpal tunnel syndrome, but when it's time to write a letter to Congress, you don't have the time or you're all elbows with the word processor."
Well, it's time to stop that sorry situation right now. Here's a Blosxom flavour to turn any Blosxom entry into a letter to the appropriate member of Congress. Preview, print, and stick it in an envelope. Thank you.
By the way, the digital TV transition, combined with the DMCA, threatens to extinguish political free speech as we know it. Have a nice day.
Instrumenting software
Arnaud Legout has some excellent data on the real-world performance of Bittorrent's "rarest first" and "choking" algorithms. Also see this journal entry from Bram on why no error correcting codes in Bittorrent.
Personally, I'm having fun with GStreamer and its groovy debugging and logging system, which I'm using to write a "HEadless Music Player"—I squatted a sourceforge.net account for it and everything. So far it's not ready for public consumption since my supposed-to-be-nifty shuffling code somehow figures that the user wants to listen to Jonathan Coulton's cover of "Baby Got Back" over and over. If you get the print Linux Journal, check out the article by Robert Love on GIOChannels. Just what I need to fix the joystick support. The basic idea is that with a laptop in the trunk, plugged into the aux in of the car stereo, I can use a USB joystick for pause, skip, and all that. When I get time I'll take the joystick apart and mount the board behind one of the little black "you didn't buy that accessory" panels, and put a switch on the front. Until then, that's why there's a joystick lying on the center console.
Mon, 05 Dec 2005Carriers
My Linux Journal exit interview with Doc Searls is no longer subscriber-only. Fans of Saving the Net may enjoy Jim Thompson's "fiber down the fenceline".
Wed, 30 Nov 2005Call centers, music, parking
Your call is important to us. (via Dan Gillmor.)
Copyright, music festivals, the line between music and performance art—good interview with DAC Crowell (via John Buckman.)
Just park instead of cruising around, and you'll save time.
Quick-and-dirty company reputation analyzer.
Commenter eddy joaquim writes, " before ever buying anything I always go to google and type 'company name+scam'".
Tue, 29 Nov 2005QoTD: Bruce Schneier on Sony
Making digital files not copyable is like making water not wet. You can't do it.
Thu, 24 Nov 2005Photos for the future
Doc, it could be a good idea to shoot photos of all those wires in the walls before the Sheetrock® goes up. I wish I had some inside-the-walls photos of where everything is in this place.
I have the same problem of lack of ventilation in the server closet. If I were having a custom house built, all machinery would live in the server closet, and I'd just run VGA and USB to the office—no noisy computer in the office for me.
Bill Pollock showed me a handy Buffalo file server box that might be good for central media storage. Don't know if there's a way to manage it without the proprietary-OS-only management utility, but if you could solve that problem, I bet with a couple scripts you could podcast off of it.
--
Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>