Die, TinyURL, Die!

A couple of years ago, I wrote about TinyURLs, noting:

they are a great idea: too many Internet addresses have become long snaking strings of apparently random text. But the solution - to replace this with a unique but shorter URL beginning http://tinyurl.com commits the sin of obscuring the address, an essential component of the open Web.

Well, I don't want to say "I told you so", but "I told you so":

The link shortening and redirection service TinyURL went down apparently for hours last night, rendering countless links broken across the web. Complaints have been particularly loud on Twitter, where long links are automatically turned to TinyURLs and complaining is easy to do, but the service is widely used in emails and web pages as well. The site claims to service 1.6 billion hits each month.

That post worries about having a single point of failure for the Web; that's certainly valid, but for me the malaise is deeper. Even if there were hundreds of TinyURL-like services, it wouldn't solve the problem that they subvert the open nature of the Web.

Far better for the Web to wean itself off TinyURL now and get back to proper addressing. Interestingly, blogging URLs often do that, with nicely descriptive URLs that let you form a rough idea of what you're going to view before you get there.

When the Microsoft Train hits the Brooksian Wall

For a long time enthusiasts of the open source development methodology have predicted that the traditional method will sink in the sand sooner or later. And since, as far as we can tell, Microsoft still employs such methods, the expectation is that one day its operating system upgrade would be a downgrade.

It's hard to tell from all the noise in the comments, but preliminary results seem to suggest Vista is that downgrade:

Extensive testing by the exo.performance.network (www.xpnet.com) research staff shows that SP1 provides no measurable relief to users saddled with sub-par performance under Vista.

And here's some corroboration that people are beginning to realise that the Microsoft train has hit the Brooksian wall:

Ninety percent of 961 IT professionals surveyed said they have concerns about migrating to Vista and more than half said they have no plans to deploy Vista.

What's a Paglo?

That was my first question to Brian de Haaff, CEO of the eponymous company. This is what he said, (more or less):

Francisco Paglo was a virtually unknown Italian explorer who first set sail as a lookout on Cadamosto's expedition to the Gambia River in 1455. Upon completion of a distance learning course in creative writing, he published a stirring account of the exploration from his viewpoint in the crow's nest, which was widely published throughout Europe. It ultimately caught the eye of Prince Henry the Navigator who was a Portuguese royal prince, soldier, and patron of explorers. Prince Henry summoned Paglo, and thanks to his generous funding, sent him on an expedition around Africa's Cape of Good Hope in 1460 to trade for spices in India. A storm pushed him off his target, and he finally dropped anchor in what is now known as New Zealand.

He never did set foot in India, but in New Zealand he remains a hero for bringing the country its first sheep, and his birthday (April 1) is celebrated every year with giant mutton pies. A growing movement has petitioned the government to officially establish the day as a national holiday — Dandy Mutton Day, in reverent appreciation for Paglo. On the eve of March 31 each year, children leave tiny bales of hay in their family rooms, hoping for the safe return of his ghost to their home and a flock of sheep for their family. Those who have been good the preceding year and have prepared fresh bales receive a bowl of lamb stew and freshly-knit wool socks and sweaters from their parents. But poor behavior and unkempt bales is frowned upon as a sign of disrespect, and these unfortunate kids receive a clump of manure.

And this is what the company does:

Paglo is a search engine for IT that specializes in searching the complex and varied data of IT networks, and in returning rich data reports in table and chart formats, as well as simple text hit lists.

As someone who was smitten with search engines ever since the early days of Lycos, WWWW and Inktomi, I was naturally highly receptive to this approach. Search has become the optic through which we see the digital world; applying it not just to traditional information, but also to corporate IT data is eminently sensible.

Things only got better when I found out that the search engine crawler was open source (GNU GPL to be precise). This makes a lot of sense. It means that people can add extra features to it to allow discovery of all kinds of new and whacky hardware and software through the use of plugins; it also means that people are more likely to trust it to wander around their intranets, gathering a lot of extremely sensitive information.

That information is sent back to Paglo, encrypted, where it is stored on their servers as a searchable index of your IT assets that can be interrogated. Now, obviously security is paramount here. I also worry about people turning up with a sub poena: after all, those search indexes will provide extremely useful information about unlicensed copies of software etc.; Paglo, not surprisingly, doesn't think this will be a problem.

There are other interesting aspects of Paglo, including its use of what it calls "social solving":

We do this by allowing all users to save their search queries and publish them for anyone’s use. The elegance here is that you can immediately access any query that’s been saved and made public, and run it against your own data. (Only the query syntax is published. The data itself, of course, is private to each user.) This is especially helpful when you need a query that searches out a complex relationship – such as between users and the applications they have installed on their desktops – and you do not know where to start. The permutations are endless, but since the core concept is the same, any saved query can be used against any set of network data.

But in many ways, the most interesting aspect of Paglo is its business model:

We are maniacally focused on delivering the most value, for the most users, as quickly as possible. To achieve this, we are removing barriers to getting started (like complex installation and cost) and making the service convenient to use. Our experience and the history of the Internet tells us that lots and lots of thrilled users of a free service are much more valuable than a handful of paying customers. If we are successful, you will love Paglo, use it daily, and tell your colleagues and friends.

Yup, that means that they don't have one, but they're really, really sure that if everyone uses them, they can find one. Of course, that's precisely what Google did, so there are precedents - but no guarantees. Let's hope the final business plan proves more credible than the explanation of the company name.

When Oink Went to Piggy Heaven

Here's a wise post on why it is utterly pointless pursuing P2P services and their associated tracker aggregation sites:

What effect has this attack on tracker sites had? Well, to use the example of Oink, it has been entirely negative for the mafiaa. I didn't know what Oink was, as I had never heard of it, until it was busted. I now do know the names of the two successor sites now based on news reports of what happened after Oink went to piggy heaven. Should I ever care, I now know where to go for illegal torrents. I suspect there are several million more like me who were handed a roadmap by just about every IT news site out there, along with the news that absolutely zero people using the site were busted along with the ops. Can you say own goal?

Interestingly, what this comes down to is access to information: thanks to the Internet you and I have as much - often more - clue as to what's going on everywhere than the traditional news gatekeepers.

GNU Affero GPL: Second Draft

One of the vexed questions in the free software world is what should be done about software as a service, when the service is based on free software:

All versions of the GPL allow people to use modified version of the software privately without being obliged to make their modified source code available to anyone. When people put software on a public server, the question is less clear: is that private use or public use? This was called the "software as a service" issue, or "SaaS".

The FSF's answer is a special licence, known as the GNU Affero GPL, which is now in its second draft.

Modular Magazines

After modular books, now this:

Google may soon begin to offer users the ability to create customized, printed magazines from Internet content. And print ads included in the magazine would be customized, too.

The future is modular.

From Remix to Re-enactment

I wrote recently about the remix and it's relevance to an open content world. Here's an interesting exploration of remix's sibling, re-enactment:

Once you start thinking about the idea of re-enactment, you start seeing it everywhere. Maybe the argument could be made that we're in a cultural moment devoted to re-enactment. Much of what we write off as novelty can be put into this category. The Internet recently was excited about old people re-enacting iconic photos of the twentieth century; see also choirs of old people performing Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia". Or choirs of small children doing much the same. But less ironic presentations abound: off the top of my head, Japancakes just released a note-for-note country-inflected cover of Loveless, My Bloody Valentine's seminal drone-rock record. Going further, German new music ensemble Zeitkratzer has played and recorded Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Tom McCarthy's excellent recent novel Remainder concerns a wealthy man who maniacally reenacts scenes; McCarthy springs from the art world, which has been interested in re-enactment for a while. Examples spiral on ad infinitum. But there seems to be something in us that wants to see or hear what we've seen or heard before again.

These are quickly composed thoughts, and I'm ignoring a great deal; parsing the difference between re-enactment and adaptation could be fiendishly complicated, as might be the role of copyright in all of this, etc. I'll simply tie this back to the Communist Manifesto problem. I think it's become apparent that we're no longer reading texts in isolation: now when we read Hamlet, digital media has made it possible to read any number of possible versions at the same time. The archive presents us with an embarrassment of riches, though I suspect that we still lack the tools to let us make sense of the pile: both to make sense of the growing number of versions of texts and to usefully compare versions. The Wooster Group's Hamlet can be seen as a close reading of the 1964 Hamlet. But such a one-to-one reading might just be the tip of the iceberg.

What made this particularly apposite for me is that I've been watching Kenneth Branagh's film version of Hamlet, and the sense of hearing a hundred other uses of Shakespeare's famous lines is very strong, and makes the film feel, indeed, like a re-enactment rather than a performance, brilliant as it is.

Asking Ashley

For those following the iPlayer debate, Groklaw has put up perhaps the best interview with Ashley Highfield so far:

the long-term alternative solution is a world beyond DRM and how we can work together, particularly with our rights holders, to get to a world beyond DRM.

Das ist Ja Doof!

Many years ago the last major British computer manufacturer ICL launched One Per Desk, one of the craziest early computers ever. It was based on the famous Sinclair QL - as used by one Linus Torvalds - and had small tapes instead of disc drives (no, they never worked). But what was most striking about this misbegotten device, was the name of one of the rebadged versions, which came from BT. It was called Tonto - Italian and Spanish for "stupid."

Well, the meme lives on:

Doof, a new London-based startup went into public beta at the beginning of October offering casual gaming wrapped-up with social networking in a good-looking package.

"Doof" is German for "stupid"....

Kindling a Conflagration

There's one of Steven Levy's finer big pieces in Newsweek about Amazon's new Kindle e-book device. It all sounds pretty cool, but for me the real showstopper is the following:

Publishers are resisting the idea of charging less for e-books. "I'm not going along with it," says Penguin's Peter Shanks of Amazon's low price for best sellers. (He seemed startled when I told him that the Alan Greenspan book he publishes is for sale at that price, since he offered no special discount.) Amazon is clearly taking a loss on such books. But Bezos says that he can sustain this scheme indefinitely. "We have a lot of experience in low-margin and high-volume sale—you just have to make sure the mix [between discounted and higher-priced items] works." Nonetheless the major publishers (all of whom are on the Kindle bandwagon) should loosen up. If you're about to get on a plane, you may buy the new Eric Clapton biography on a whim for $10—certainly for $5!—but if it costs more than $20, you may wind up scanning the magazine racks.

What planet are these people on? Amazon is shipping electrons - well known for being rather cheap (here, take a few trillion for free). When you buy a book, you're buying mashed-up trees that cost something (which in fact cost rather more than you pay). E-books will never take off until publishers are prepared to throw their analogue business models on the fire.

Update: Almost needless to say, Kindle is powered by GNU/Linux.

Poland: Not Just Plumbers

In the UK the Polish plumber has become a staple figure of merriment, if not fun (after all, nobody wants to make fun of someone as important as a plumber.) More generally, there are supposed to be around 600,000 recent Polish immigrants, more or less keeping the UK economy going. (As a corollary, the number of signs and job vacancies in Polish is also shooting up.)

Now it seems that Polish programmers are just as important globally:

Recently, I moderated an interesting panel held at Stanford university at the Hoover Insititution, on the subject of Poland's growing role in the global tech community. Over the past few years Dell, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Motorola, Siemens, and others have opened engineering offices in Poland.

Internalising Externalities

One of the problems with most everyday economics is that pollution tends to be regarded as an externality:

An externality occurs when a decision causes costs or benefits to third party stakeholders, often, although not necessarily, from the use of a public good. In other words, the participants in an economic transaction do not necessarily bear all of the costs or reap all of the benefits of the transaction. For example, manufacturing that causes air pollution imposes costs on others when making use of public air.

But externalities have a habit of coming home to roost:

China's rising energy demand isn't just leaving its mark on the country's heritage. Every 30 seconds, an infant with birth defects is born in China, according to Jiang Fan, deputy head of the country's National Population and Family Planning Commission. The rate of birth defects nationwide has soared 40 percent in the past five years, from 105 defects per 10,000 births in 2001 to nearly 146 in 2006. The problem now affects nearly 1 in 10 Chinese families, the Commission stated in a recent report .

Birth defect rates are highest in the northern province of Shanxi, an area that is also home to some of China's richest coal resources. "The incidence of birth defects is related to environmental pollution," An Huanxiao, director of Shanxi's provincial family planning agency, told Xinhua News. "The survey's statistics show that birth defects in Shanxi's eight large coal-mining regions are far above the national average."

Tragedy and Travesty of the Commons

One of the key features of digital commons - like free software or science - is that there is no tragedy in the classical sense: it is impossible for users to "overgraze" a digital commons in the way they can a physical one.

That analogue tragedy can even by caused by the selfish actions of just one player. A case in point is the cetacean commons, which a few decades ago came perilously close to the ultimate tragedy: total destruction. That, happily, was avoided, but there are still a few benighted groups who insist on taking for themselves what belongs to all.

Worse, that selfishness is escalating:

A Japanese whaling fleet has set sail aiming to harpoon humpback whales for the first time in decades.

The fleet is conducting its largest hunt in the South Pacific - it has instructions to kill up to 1,000 whales, including 50 humpbacks.

This extraordinary display of contempt for the global community is compounded by a further insult. The "justification" for this pointless slaughter is given as:

killing whales allowed marine biologists to study their internal organs

What, you mean to find out if they have a brain, unlike the whalers who insist on hunting endangered species back to the brink of extinction?

Not so much a tragedy of the science commons as a travesty.

Some is Rotten in the State of Copyright

Nicely put:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).50 There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Creative Commons Discovers Dual Licensing

I missed this before:

This is the CC+ project. An artist, for example, can release her work under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial license, but then, using the CC+ infrastructure, enable those who want commercial rights (or anything else beyond the freedoms granted in the license) to link to a site that can provide those other rights. In this way, CC now helps support a hybrid economy of creativity. We provide a simple platform to protect and enable those who want to share; and we’ve built a simple way to cross over from that sharing economy for those who want to profit from their creativity.

Er, yes, this is called dual licensing in the open source world....

Modular Books

Modularisation is one of the key elements of open processes: so why can't we have modular books? Well, we can, up to a point:

On Wednesday, the Arizona community college announced a partnership with Pearson Custom Publishing to allow Rio Salado professors to piece together single individualized textbooks from multiple sources. The result, in what could be the first institution-wide initiative of its kind, will be a savings to students of up to 50 percent, the college estimates, as well as a savings of time to faculty, who often find themselves revising course materials to keep pace with continuously updated editions.

However, this is only with texts from one source: imagine if you could do this with *any* text. (Via if:book.)

Carmen, the Blog

Further proof, if any were needed, that blogs have entered the mainstream:

When the curtain falls on the final performance of English National Opera’s Carmen on Friday it will also end a groundbreaking experiment in connecting artists with their audience.

The production, staged by the film director Sally Potter, has been a commercial hit but was mauled by the critics, who called it “woefully tedious”, “an ugly, misbegotten aberration” and “a suicide note to the Arts Council”.

However, through a series of blogs written by members of the cast and crew, including Potter, the ENO believes it defused some of the power of the reviews by reaching out to the paying public.

A Second Chance for Second Life

I haven't been using Second Life much recently, but I wasn't sure why. Now I know. I've just tried the WindLight First Look Viewer, and its atmospheric effects - sunsets, clouds, water etc. - really transform the Second Life experience.

The problem before, I now see, was that Second Life was just too lacking in visual richness. With the WindLight First Look Viewer, Second Life is closer to real life in the sense that you can now just be, and watch the world go by. Time to give Second Life a second chance, perhaps.

Spreading the News About SpreadFirefox 2.0

One of the most innovative and successful aspects of Firefox has been its distributed marketing approach centred on the SpreadFirefox site. This has had a facelift, and is now full of bold reds, oranges and, er, reds. I expect I'll get used to it. (Via Linux and Open Source blog.)

Systematising Systems Management

Last year I wrote a review of the open source systems management sector. At that time, it was highly fragmented, symptomatic of the very early days of this area. The market is still fragmented, but there are some clear tectonic movements going on that hint at important consolidations to come.

First we had Hyperic cosying up to Red Hat:

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and Hyperic Inc., the leader in multi-platform, open source systems management, today announced that they have extended their agreement to collaborate on the development of a common systems management platform. Development will continue under an open source model.

For years, the JBoss Operations Network team has been developing code on the Hyperic platform. Red Hat will be contributing its updates and enhancements to this new open source project. Both companies will work to maintain, govern and extend management capabilities within the new open source systems management platform project. Additionally, Hyperic and Red Hat will work jointly to include this base in both future Hyperic and Red Hat systems management products.

Now we have Nagios Enterprises and GroundWork getting luvvy-duvvy:

Nagios Enterprises (www.nagios.com), the commercial arm of Nagios, the world’s most popular open source host, service and network monitoring program, and GroundWork Open Source, Inc. (www.groundworkopensource.com), the leader in open source IT management software, today announced a joint partnership focused on joint market development and shared delivery of services around open source IT monitoring and management.

...

Under the terms of the joint partnership, Nagios Enterprises will soon offer tier three support for Nagios-related aspects of Groundwork Open Source. In addition, GroundWork Open Source and Nagios Enterprises will engage in various market development activities including cross-promotion via advertising, joint marketing efforts, and business referral opportunities.

It's not really clear how all this going to pan out, but it's seems likely that there will only be one or two main players left in a year or two. My bet is that Red Hat will simply buy up all the companies it needs. As Matthew Aslett pointed out recently, Red Hat is pretty voracious when it comes to swallowing other open source companies.

And whatever happens, I do wonder where this leaves the rather, er, quiescent Open Management Consortium, whose blog last had a posting on 21 May of this year....

Proprietary Software Does Not Scale

It used to be said that open source software does not scale - a reflection of both its immaturity at the time, and of the pious hopes of the proprietary world. Today, the reverse is true: it is proprietary software that does not scale, but in a slightly different sense.

This was brought home to me by IBM's fashionable Blue Cloud announcement:

Blue Cloud – based on IBM’s Almaden Research Center cloud infrastructure -- will include Xen and PowerVM virtualized Linux operating system images and Hadoop parallel workload scheduling. Blue Cloud is supported by IBM Tivoli software that manages servers to ensure optimal performance based on demand. This includes software that is capable of instantly provisioning resources across multiple servers to provide users with a seamless experience that speeds performance and ensures reliability even under the most demanding situations. Tivoli monitoring checks the health of the provisioned servers and makes sure they meet service level agreements.

The whole point about cloud computing is that it has to be effectively infinite - the more people want, the more they get. You can't do that with software that requires some kind of licensing payment, unless it's flat-fee. You either have to write the software yourself, or - much easier - you use free software (or, as with Google and now IBM, you do both.)

If cloud computing takes off, Microsoft is going to be faced with a difficult choice: see everyone migrate to open source, or offer its operating systems for a flat fee. Given its recent behaviour in places like China and Russia, where it has effectively given away its software just to stop open source, I think it will opt for the latter.

Lecture Search Engine

Given the centrality of search to the way we use the Internet, it's surprising that we're still stuck with a few file-types - essentially text, with a few tags for images and video thrown in if you're lucky. I've written before about picture searching, and now here's lecture searching:

The Lecture Browser is a web interface to video recordings of lectures and seminars that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology. You can search for topics, much like a regular web search engine. If any results look relevant, you can play the video starting at the relevant point and see the synchronized transcript.

Even better, the lectures this is indexing are from MIT's OpenCourseWare:

More than 200 MIT lectures are currently available on the site (web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/). So far, most of the users are international students who access the lectures through MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which makes curriculum materials for most MIT courses available to anyone with Internet access. Although the lecture-browsing system is still in the early development stages, a recent announcement in OCW's newsletter has drawn increased traffic to the site.

Barzilay and Glass expect the system will be most useful for OCW users and for MIT students who want to review lecture material. MIT World, a web site that provides video of significant MIT events such as lectures by speakers from MIT and around the world, is also participating in the project.

(Via Open Access News.)

Yummy Yamli

Although my Arabic is, shall we say, jejune, there have been rare occasions when I've wanted to search for Arabic words in Arabic script. Now I can, thanks to the clever Yamli site:

Yamli allows you to type Arabic using roman characters. For example you can enter the roman letter "f" for "ف". You can also use the Arabic chat characters. For example "3" for "ع", "2" for "ء", "7" for "ح", etc ...

Type it the way you say it. Try it out !

Couldn't be simpler. Now I just have to learn a few thousand Arabic words and I'm away. (Via The Inquirer.)

W(h)ither Blogging?

Here's a thoughtful post:

Somehow it seemed that blogging just isn't that hot anymore. The feeling has been exacerbated by the latest slow down in news. My feeds just do not update that often these days. Can it be that the digestion phase applies to blogs just as it applies to startups? In this post we'll investigate whether the blogosphere is going through a digestion phase.

I find this particularly interesting because my impression is exactly the reverse: I find more and more interesting stuff in my feeds. Not only that, but I find this humble little blog is also attracting more attention, particularly among the PR crowd. I've noticed a distinct change in attitude among the latter - unspoken, but clearly there - from regarding blogs as vaguely interesting but not very influential, to seeing them as just as important as traditional media.

I'd go further: the blogs seem to be taking over. At a time when more and more (dead-tree) newspapers and magazines are closing down, or going purely online, and when more and more online titles are starting to run bloggers as part of the mix, it seems to me that the barycentre of digital publishing is mostly certainly moving deep into the heart of the blogosphere.

Of course, the acid test will be during the next downturn, but I'm optimistic. Unlike the publishing excesses of dotcom 1.0, where magazines blossomed with the manic marketing of no-hoper startups, only to wilt themselves when that, er, fertiliser dried up, blogs are predicated on lean and mean. The only ones that will suffer seriously are those that are beginning to bloat towards the condition of traditional, inefficient publications. No names, no packdrill.

Sony Reads the e-Leaves

I have to admit that I hate Sony computers. I bought a Vaio portable once, and it was awful in just about every respect - overpriced, weird backup discs, and a battery that soon died on me, with no sensibly-priced option of getting a replacement. So I don't come with many positive feelings towards its new e-book device, the PRS-505. But apparently it does a couple of things right:

the Reader is powered by Montavista Linux and uses code from projects like OpenSSL and Freetype

There again, you'd be mad not to use GNU/Linux on a system like this. Now all Sony needs to do is reduce the price by a factor of about ten and I might be vaguely interested.

Or maybe not.