It's Good To Know. It Feels Like Me.

Being unemployed is scary. Being unable to find work would be a lot scarier. Scary can be good though. I'm out finding gigs to play. So far, so good. It seems my kind of act is back in vogue. There are all of these little coffee shops and new classy joints opening in town, and they are all looking for the soiled smoky voice sound that too many years of screaming over the top of electric guitars produces, except they want it over the top of an acoustic guitar so they can talk.

They're conversing. That's good. It's a sign of the times. I've seen this before. This was the mood when I was 18 and first playing in the bars. There was an unpopular war on then, trust in the government was low, and there was the sense that maybe people should stop watching the news and start talking to each other. Culture is marvelously adaptive. Businesses and art somehow blend into the need for a place to talk, furnish the sounds, the coffee, the magazines and the comfortable chairs. This possibly scares the lunatic right wing fringe. It should. It means common sense is overcoming fear, one coffee at a time.

Here is something personally neat for me. I'll quote it and those of you with some understanding of the Southern music scene can relate:

From: Dbluebird@aol.com [mailto:Dbluebird@aol.com]
Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 2:51 PM
To: cbullard@hiwaay.net
Subject: Re: [BlueBirdCafe Calendar Request]

>>Do I need to audition again to be included in the rotation for Sunday Writer's Night?

Len,

Though it's been 10 years since you played on a Sunday Writers Night, you scored well enough not to have to audition again. Just call any Tuesday - Friday from 11 AM - 4 PM to rebook on a Sunday.

-Fran (Bluebird Cafe)

It's good to know. So, May 13, 7:30 CST, back to the Bluebird with three original songs and no chatter. It is the scariest gig in the world for reasons you'd have to be a solo songwriter/singer to understand. And one of the best.

Scary can be good. I may be unemployed, but I'm working, and yanno, it feels like me again and that feels good.

The Mean Drum

Most nightclub music pros can tell you about gigs where the crowd is large, the drinks are flowing, the dancers are frenzied and heat and humidity push them all to a sort of madness. At that point, a band can choose to mellow them down for the trip home, or push the beat harder and louder. I call that pumping the Mean Drum. The drummer snaps as hard on the snare as he can and we play sounds that are as raw and fierce as flesh and electronics can emit.

If we play the Mean Drum, fights break out either on the dance floor or in the parking lot afterwards. Experienced bands don't do it. They've paid the price for it in smashed gear, broken jaws, and occasionally sending a mate or friend to the hospital or the morgue. At the point of that kind of crazyiness, we play ballads, turn down, or end the performance. It's just smart.

In America, for the last eight years, we have been pumping the Mean Drum. Yes we were attacked on 9/11, but it started before that. It's been a dominant beat in American society for years.

If we continue to beat the Mean Drum, mean is all we will see and experience.

Look at the rise in social violence lately. Society resonates like a drum head and all of the other drums in the kit resonate with the snare if it is pounded hard enough. This pushes the edge cases closer to and off the edge.

Then students shoot principals, psychopaths shoot young students, and so on. We saw this same movie towards the end of the Vietnam era as the political rhetoric ratcheted up the 'us OR them' thinking. Accepting it as a norm of modern politics as both Cheney and Clinton suggest we do in the Washington Post article is not only dumb, it is social suicide with the innocents sacrificed first on the altars of egomania and the lust for power.

It is time to quit beating on the mean drum. As we learned from the early years where all we used were email lists, ignore trolls and they go elsewhere. Laughter is still the best medicine. That is why the most important political pundit for today's youth is Jon Stewart. That's a clue.

The More Stuff You Own

The more stuff you own, the more your stuff owns you.

It is the undeniable fact of modern life that we obsess over what we have, where we got it and how big a space we have to control to keep it. We work longer, harder and consume more than we thought we ever could when we were 12 years old and believed a well-read comic book collection was the ultimate expression of our mojo.

Cultures are classified by the stuff they throw away. Ask any archaeologist and they'll tell you their careers are made by digging through ancient garbage dumps. So your fame after this life is defined by the garbage you dispose of. Consider that the next time you and your significant other are arguing about keeping Great Grandma's piano that can no longer be tuned and therefore played. Maybe it is time to memorialize her in the museum of greatness: the local town landfill. At least then you could start on your own memorial by purchasing the spinet the family down the street is keeping in their minivan because they've run out of room in their four bedroom split level with the unattached garage and 3000 square foot basement.

I've read that an American Indian tribe had a custom where members would give away all of their stuff and start over. Today we call that a garage sale and get more money to get more stuff. Garage sales replace malling as one gets older in America. They say the richer we get the more we obsess over quality stuff but corporations have to spend billions every year tearing down malls that are less than ten years old and rebuilding them to keep us coming to shop there. Do you replace your garage in the same location that often? No. You have a garage sale but you rarely sell the garage so it can be hauled away and you definitely never give it away. Somewhere in the function of trading stuff for more stuff, real economics take over.

Except for the uber-wealthy in America. They are the biggest garage sale buyers in all history reflecting a culture that has found it can buy and sell anything except taste and a reasonable government.

If you can get to Christies' next week, you can buy original parts of the Star Trek set (original series) although Paul Allen already owns Captain Kirk's chair. Someday maybe Paul will have the world's highest quality garage sale.

And so it goes.

DealNews! You Rule!

I went to a fun job interview today. To understand why, you have to understand that unlike Silly Valley or Vain Vancouver, I live in one of the hearts of Eisenhower’s military industrial complex. Some interviewers and interviewees wear clothes that at their most liberal would be conservative-gotta-meet-a-client Monday in Silly Valley. Targeted selection questions modeled, scored and integrated into a politically-correct and technically empty script determine rat fir color to confirm that one is the right kind of rat fit to be on a team of rats who have spent more time obtaining degrees than time spent with their spouses or children.

Cheese, please?

Today, I was interviewed by a real web company. woooh... It reminds me of the first West Coast conference I went to after years of East Coast conferences. The differences are profound.

This was not a startup. These middle school buddies started in a garage ten years ago a few doors down from where my much older middle school buddies used to hang in their bedrooms hooking Christmas tree lights to a stereo and listening to the Allman Brothers while swapping the wisdom of the Furry Freak Brothers. These guys hooked up MACs, learned to code, and built web pages. They didn't go for venture capital. They budgeted, invested and published. They found a niche, survived the dot.bomb, stuck to their business plan, implemented LAMP not because it was cool but because it was everywhere they needed to be, and hired an accountant who doubles as an office admin.

They offer you a Diet Coke before they get around to brewing coffee, have machines sitting next to the office door and office furniture stacked against the wall because they need the space to spread out and work, and otherwise, remind me of garage bands that play their axes, sharpen their chops, record their originals and make it happen while having a helluva good time together. They build multi-platform web pages and enable their customers to buy office equipment cheaper and faster. In other words, without a deep sales teams, planning committees who write studies, scads of ads, moribund meetings and polyphonic professional e-mails, they provide a service and make a profit.

SWUUUUHHH! Take a deeeeeep breath....

It was humbling. I'm not web-ignorant and I certainly have been on the pioneering end of some stuff, but I've never had the moxie these kids have, and that is why they have a successful company interviewing me instead of the other way around. They are completely the opposite of the dour sour greedy little buggers I'd come to know in other circumstances. The guys who interviewed me today were ALMOST apologetic that they were still building their own tools, didn't have ASP.Net, didn't need it and had no intention of buying Ferraris with their first millions if they could buy more gear for their business. They laughed, carried on, swapped stories and all the while asked questions one needs to hear to know this is a serious business but not a religion, a pipe dream or an ego trip.

It was a breath of fresh air.

I may not get the gig but I hope I get to visit with them again. It's good to smell ambition mixed with sweat equity and hard headed practical programming chops instead of meetings drenched in lattes and sarcasm. I've seen a few bands like this web company. They were the ones who made it and kept it and enjoyed it. They take their angsts to the skateboard park rather than the shrink. They succeed the old fashioned way: turn, burn and return.

Hey DealNews! You rule! Thanks for a great morning and the Diet Coke and the cup of coffee!

Feeds and Seeds for Thoth

Tim Bray posts http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/09/21/Atomic

That is worth a read if any of my ex-company colleagues are keeping up with this blog. I suggest you follow his link to that review he cites by a US agency. It is a thorough piece of work and relevant to your product lines.

I promised a blog on targeted selection techniques. A good friend gave me some literature to review and I will post that blog when I finish the review. It's an easy system to game but interesting in what it sets out to achieve.

Getting Credit: Fight for It

Tim Bray writes that WikiPedia is trumping other more authoritative resources. I've noted this myself some time back and have been commenting on the effects of PageRank since it was introduced on XML-Dev and elsewhere. Inbound linking is a popularity contest. It doesn't confer authority. It confers perception. Perception is NOT reality. Reality requires sustainability. Let me give an example.

Kurt Cagle writes a blog on XML and eXist. He uses a comparison. Should he cite others or can one assume the idea, once out in the wild, can be claimed by anyone? Is it plagiarism? (I'm not accusing. Kurt is a friend. This is just an example.)

http://mailman.ic.ac.uk/pipermail/xml-dev/1998-August/005720.html

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/xml-dev/1397752

http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200602/msg00130.html

Those are three of a number of hits in order of idea emergence provided by Google and I suppose, PageRank. What does this mean?

Credit isn't just about 'showing up'. It is about checking sources. This is why PageRanking works and why it doesn't. In the end, you don't have to be 'given' credit; you have to fight for it. I mentioned some yerars ago on XML-Dev that a program that abstracted ideas from various sources and did a thorough comparison against all published resources would yield a different history of the sources of the ideas than are commonly accepted. Given the potentials in our ranked search systems and overreliance on the web, it's time the search vendors developed such a utility. It would answer a real need and might be a competitive discriminator if the definition of 'authoritative' rougly equals 'original'. It doesn't but that's a different discussion.

Credit is sustainability. Sustainability trumps authority.

A Good Week: The Job Hunt

I’ve had a good week. After the separation anxiety passes, a euphoric feeling of freedom emerges from the constraints of the past job, and an enthusiasm for the things to come. This is exciting even when the outcome is not yet known.

I haven’t been job hunting in over twenty years. That process has changed as have most business processes due to the web. Consolidated job sites enable one to submit a resume once to a series of forms then use job jars to search among the various client companies and submit to all of them. In some, you can set up ‘bots to track new listings and send email to inform you in case you want to add these to the jar. The same technology that powers shopping enables us to shop ourselves. This evolves toward a means to continuously shop one’s services to find the highest bidder, I suppose. Pretty neat, really.

At other sites one discovers the practice of web design is still done by inexperienced programmers. The most common mistake I’ve seen is phone number entry fields that need a specific format and error out without informing the user what the correct format is. The best sites enable one to load in the digital resume one has carefully constructed using the templates provided by word processors. Otherwise, it is a cut and paste process.

The web is fast between the hours of 4AM and 6AM. Since you may have the time to nap in the afternoon, getting up early and doing the online work during these hours is a good idea. The house is quieter too and if you are using a dial up line, you aren’t holding the phone hostage during the day when prospective employers call to arrange interviews.

Interviewing techniques have evolved but I’m not too sure if these have improved. There is less emphasis on discovering the job skills and more questions aimed at discovering the fit of the potential employee. Some of this is amateur psychology but it cuts both ways because one learns a lot about the potential employer. They seem to come in groups of three playing good cop/bad cop with one silent observer. It’s worth going on interviews just to practice this game. Nervousness is normal. I do suggest that when you are called for the interview, you get the job posting number and find the web listing. It usually has enough information to start a web search that reveals enough information to prepare answers and questions. Since practically all of the interviews end with an opportunity to ask questions, you should prepare. Where I feel like I’ve not done a good job are the “Do you have questions for us?” and “Here’s a chance for you to tell us why we should hire you.” Most of us don’t think about selling ourselves, aren’t that practiced, probably have developed a distaste for people who do that as a habit, and may feel that it is too easy to scare people. Get over that but this is why it is a good idea to prepare.

Because of the consolidation of software around web services, there are a lot of jobs where the languages and experience are virtually identical. ASP.Net is the big winner here. I’ve seen one listing for ADA and one can easily predict what that job is about. There are still plenty of Java and C++ jobs but in the area where I live, Microsoft rules. If you know a bit about my hometown, there is an emerging and obvious trend there. If you are someone who got stranded in a legacy language (say Foxpro, C, and even C++) it is time to move on with the training, and if the job situation at your current employer is still legacy work, move on from there.

As the insurance ad says, life comes at you fast. Life is not about sitting around; it’s about getting around.

On Innovation

Tim and Nick Carr are having a shootout on innovation.

Tim says: fortunes are made, and industry titans are built, where management isn’t really looking, almost always. The big pieces of innovation come out of garages and low-rent offices in lousy locations, and they’re produced by small groups without much management backing. It can be done at big companies (the business personal computer at IBM, Java at Sun) but then it’s always in an off-the-mainstream skunkworks. Nobody—I repeat, nobody—is smart enough to predict where the next big strategic innovation is going to come from...

Wrong. Planners do this sort of stuff every day.

I don't quarrel with Nick's 'merely competent' argument, but

this bit
is off target:

Nick says: companies should narrow their sights when it comes to innovation: "You need to bring the same kind of discipline to deciding where you innovate as you'd bring to any other kind of management question. You want to make sure that you innovate in those few areas where innovation can really pay off and create a competitive advantage and not innovate in other areas where it won't pay off.

They should narrow where they will invest, not what they should be thinking about.

They both miss the target because what they are really arguing about is not the processes of innovation but who should get credit and who should pay. The first is about face management and the second is about resource management. They are both right from those related but distinct points of view.

Anyone who is really involved in advanced research such as DARPA can tell you that you don't invent strategic change, or buy strategic innovation: you breed it.

That takes time, some loose planning and a number of generations. You will get both crops that do what you required and some happy accidents. Readiness is everything and that is absolutely a Zen-like experience because you have to confront your own prejudices about what is successful and what is utilitarian.

DARPA doesn't want the crops. They want the seeds.

It's A Dog's Life

I've been asked why I quit my job. It's a reasonable question, so here goes.

It's a dog's life. I stuck my neck out for a fence jumping German Shepherd and a French Poodle. The Shepherd rolled over but the Poodle went for my throat. So even if it is expensive and hard on my family, I went home to hang out with my trustworthy Sheltie because otherwise, the Poodle would have lost her dog house and the Shepherd will still be jumping fences.

Dogs will be dogs.

Why The Top of the Long Tail Fails

Tim Bray opines

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/09/11/Nine-Eleven

linking to Bruce and saying what some way out of the top of the long tail curve have been saying for five years: terrorism is mainly a law enforcement problem. I'm glad to see the top of the tail finally gets it, particularly some that were rooting for the US to go stomping into Iraq, guns blazing, while their citizens sat safely at home blogging.

It really doesn't surprise me that the so called top bloggers tend to be the slowest at actually 'getting it' on almost any topic. That is what a inbound-link based system does: it popularizes an idead the same way a media machine does it and it creates the same fisheye lens effect that distorts even as it appears to cover more information. The long tail is a negative power law when it comes to early detection of important emergent effects. The curve is inverted.

Emergent effect comes from the edges of the network, but that means in the beginning, it is a very weak signal and if the effect of the fisheye is to marginalize and distort, it prevents it from being noticed until it moves to the center, to wit, into a top blogger's blog.

So it keeps us from doing the smart thing early because the center is by effect and definition, slow and often mediocre thinking. After so many years of studying information systems and their en masse effect, I repeat what I've said before: the values of one's values are all that is really important because judgement and justice are individual contributions into a system that by its very nature has neither of these as native qualities.

Take a position, take a chance, pick up the prize or the consolation of knowing you are giving it your personal best, and not just following the herd over the cliff.

The Path From 9/11: Respect for the Law

Today we remember the terrible morning of the planes and the towers. We remember where we were and whom we talked with, what was said, what was felt and with wisdom, what has come of all that. Perhaps we watched the misguided "Path to 9/11" last night, or perhaps as I did with my son, we watched the Ted Koppel's Discovery Channel program of a live debate with some of the decision makers and the families of the victims.

At a point in that program, a man who was a co-author of the Patriot Act stepped forward to say that President Bush has wisely used power not granted under US law and when challenged, has demanded that Congress give him such power. The man said that this was right, that the commander-in-chief should always be given such power under such circumstances. The Republicans in the group could be heard saying "Strong! Very strong." I commented to my son that this was the 'Strong Man' argument often heard in such historical crises. I told him that such cries have led to three strong men being granted unprecedented power, in recent memory, Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, but also in historical memory, George Washington.

I asked him what the difference among these men was. He said immediately, the first two wanted the power and Washington didn't because he knew it was wrong. I asked him if there were other differences and we talked about that.

We surmised that Washington not only knew it was wrong, he understood that he had the time to work by other means. While Hitler and Mussolini gained that power citing external existential threats just as we hear from the Republican Party today, Washington knew the external threats were an ocean away and in that time, it may as well have been the Moon because though it was possible to be threatened, that threat took enormous resources to make good. Today, that threat can be within our borders in hours, but that does not change the nature of the difference among these men who were granted great power in a time of crisis. The difference though is still the immediate and strongest threat, as the Republicans say, the existential threat.

Washington saw a different existential threat: the threat from within.

Though the British would come back, Washington, as military leader knew it would take time and if during that time, the young nation destroyed itself from within with bickering and competition between the States and the powers of the central government, if the military did not yield to the Congress and the will of the people, if we became a nation of power but not law out of fear of each other, then everything the Revolutionaries had fought for would be lost, and deservedly lost. So Washington used his power to build the nation, to prepare the nation and when the British did return as he knew they would, the leaders of the nation and the nation itself could withstand the losses and repel the invasion. America became a great nation by working within the law thus enabling the law to be the dissolver of fear from without and more importantly, fear from within.

As we approach the midterms, we will be exercising the right passed down from Washington's generation, the right to choose our leaders and not to inherit them or be inherited by them. As we make that choice, look to the men and women who as Washington did, respect and are bound by the law, and are not proclaiming themselves to be the law. For only as we make that choice wisely will be preserve the good that has made of us a great nation respected throughout the world and feared by the enemies of goodness; a nation of laws and not of men.

As one gentleman quoted during the program from deToqueville, "America is great because America is good. When America is no longer good, it will no longer be great."

August Is Brutal

August is a brutal month. In one month, I’ve left a job, my band mate has contracted lung cancer, my former colleague, Rebecca Addams, dies in a plane crash in Kentucky, and I’ve contracted one very nasty cold. It is definitely time to count my blessings and work on a new attitude.

I can’t believe the news about Rebecca. She was a kind, funny, good soul. One of the last projects I worked on was for her. We never know, do we?

Hug your loved ones and remember what the Good Book says: tomorrow is promised to no one.

Universal Web Access

The promise of a New South (as in the United States) has long been bedeviled by the very concentrations of wealth that spawned the term. In short form, the complete takeover of Southern politics by the combined forces of the noveau riche and the evangelical right wing which finds such fertile ground in the native traditional culture stymies progress in providing the very means by which a democratic society is created: exchange of information. While declaring surpluses and tax cuts, the areas of the South that could benefit most immediately from access to the Internet are twenty-five miles from a browser.

Internet access and skills today define literacy. Those left behind in this information revolution cannot succeed in today's job market or even their own culture. To be uninformed is to be dispossessed.

The information revolution that we speak of so powerfully as a transformative force for other countries such as China isn't available to the rural South without investments from State government and far sighted planning. It is achievable but that requires policy and leadership.

I had a chance to chat with Lieutenant Governor Lucy Baxley yesterday. She is the Democratic Party candidate for Governor in a State where all of the money is betting on the Republican candidate. I was very impressed with Mrs Baxley. The initiatives she proposes look to the future of the State of Alabama. While the Republicans are continuing their tired tactics of isms and distortion, Lucy Baxley is providing a clear-minded and bold but practical approach to the challenges we face at the dawn ofthe 21st century.

I was particularly impressed with her eagerness to begin enabling Internet access to the rural residents so that their children wil lbe better prepared for the 21st century economy. If information exchange is the definition of democracy, such an initiative brings both knowledge and democracy to every citizen as a right sustained by good government.

I admired her character and ethics in saying she did not have all the answers for getting this done,but insisting that just as we had to wire the rural South for electricity not that long ago, we had to bring the information highway by starting now and solving the problem one step at a time.

While this a State election probably of not much concern to the web community, I wonder if candidacies such as hers are not golden opportunities for the open source community to advance its own economic model with ideas for how such rural literacy and senior citizen access can be achieved.

What can open source provide to make such a promise achievable and sustainable? What must we do to make it open to all who wish to learn and achieve? Inclusiveness and transparency are the twin horses of open source. Inclusiveness and transparency are the twin goals of the Baxley campaign. Whatever the political pundits say, we who have the brains and the knowledge have left the choices for the future of our communities for too long in the hands of those who believe that proprietary control preserves their wealth even if at the cost of our future. It's good to win in Boston, but American political power is in the South and so is the red state base of ignorance.

While nothing will change that tomorrow, only education has a chance of changing that at all. I would appreciate your insights into the challenges of bringing the Internet into the rural South where driving to a library every day as a means for a child to do their homework isn't a practical answer.

Perhaps the Googles, Red Hats, Suns and IBMs of the world have an answer. Perhaps the Gates Foundation will help as well. Meanwhile, perhaps the collective brain power of the web can help with ideas as to how this can be achieved.

What will it take to create a model for universal access that is realizable, scalable, sustainable and replicable to other parts of the world?

The Point of Uncertainty

A friend sent me this link

http://www.aish.com/movies/PhotoFraud.asp

to a video that purports to expose fraud on the part of Reuters and other national news organizations. Because I have no way to vette these, I leave it to the reader to form their own conclusions. I have opinions about the means.

Manipulation of the media, spinning the message, denying the obvious, affirming the absurd leads one to trust nothing, and believe no one. Maximum ambiguity creates maximum uncertainty and that is the precise goal of demagoguery, because then only a small truth is needed to create an amplified and incendiary effect.

In orbital mechanics there is a phenomenon known as a lagrange point. In a lagrange point, all of the gravitational forces of different bodies in the system are cancelled out. A lagrange point is a location for a parking orbit that enables telecommunications satellites to remain ‘geostationary’ if no extra force acts to move them. Tiny perturbations are cancelled out with tiny forces. On the other hand, it is the point of maximum uncertainty because the tiniest force can be used to push any object in the lagrange point to favor one of the opposing forces. This is the principal for deep space probe navigation known as low energy transport. It is the phenomenon that characterizes commodity products in economics, and the means to sell the unsellable.

It is also the means to create permanent conflict. No rational self-interested people will pursue their own destruction for multiple generations unless subtle and continuous means are applied to shape the patterns by which they observe and react to that end. The push comes from all sides and keeps them in a continuous uncertainty until a tiny force, a tiny moment of momentum pushes them toward one of the local attractors.

Why is it that peace is the least certain position of the opposing forces in the mideast?

The solution will be to put international forces on the ground between the combatants and as a policeman going to a domestic violence call, the probability that both sides will fire on the policeman is quite high. Then ever greater forces will be put into the region with an ever widening conflict, or the international forces will withdraw and the violence will go on locally until all are dead or exhausted. It is reasonable to assume that as long as the US provides armaments to Israel and Syria and Iran provide armaments to Hezbollah or the latest flavor of Arab violence, the killing will continue. At some point, the Iranians or an outside source will provide Arabs with their own nuclear weapons to match the ones already in the Israeli arsenal.

Will they risk what follows? Will they destroy the holy land once and for all?

I don’t know because I can’t conceive of any Heaven worth going to through a garden of nuclear devastation that destroys the holy places of three world religions. What God greets one as a hero if one has destroyed eternal Jerusalem for eternity?

Open Source: The Plan

A comment on the adoption of open source by governments and the military:

That process has been underway for almost 16 years. US DoD and allies have been sponsoring internal development via contractors for many years. One of the first SGML hypertext system code bases was purchased by the US Army at that time and is still managed, maintained and developed by USAMICOM and contractors. The reason was simple: transparency of the code base ensures that features are continuously improved and secured against IP threats or malicious code. Transparency is a survival trait. It occurs naturally in certain kinds of systems in certain kinds of ecosystems, but not all.

Cultivation of ecosystems and low-energy transport models are both models of non-linear systems with common evolutionary control types. A cluster of traits acts similarly to attractor basins with an evolution towards different semantic/functional clusters as energy is applied continuously or discretely. The cycles can be changed by local energy applied at strength (eg, a Hohman transfer) or by applying smaller bursts and using force vectors of multiple basins to amplify the change where the force vectors attract, push, or cancel. Maps across such basins model the evolving orbits of any situation-aware system that self-directs. This is a model for trading on time and energy to direct evolution via intelligent choice.

Although the hosting systems (eg, operating systems) could not be secured, reasonable assurance could be provided that this would not be a threat source and in any case, the host systems would not open fast enough to scale, so the persistence of the monopoly systems of the time provided the stable base. The opening effect in these would take a longer cycle but would eventually evolve toward the same attractors that create commodity lagrange points.

Once the switching costs (cost of basin change) begin to orbit closer to markets where commoditization creates lagrange points (minimal switching costs), transparency emerges naturally as the monopolies face the linearly increasing costs of loss leader research. As the logistic curve narrows, so does the available talent. Ideas and costs are inversely proportional. Monopolistic basins begin to lose force in commoditized markets unless they control distribution. The Internet by its very design and therefore, cultivar traits, would enable smaller systems (think messages) to become very difficult to control with respect to impeding distribution. as long as the necessary ideas are available (the flaw of abundance economics, btw).

Like life, the contest is not fair but everyone gets to enter.

If you know your hypermedia history, you know that military applications were the earliest sponsorship source and particularly with regard to markup applications. While there were more public projects such as the Oxford Dictionary work, these were small by comparison. Modern hypermedia emerges for the most part from the deep pockets of the military-industrial complex guided by the deft hand of DARPA, ONR, USAF and US Army research investments.

The Web got the touchdown but the drive down the field was government work.

And that's the problem. Government work is expensive, slow and requires too much planning, management and incentive to be cost effective except in the incubation stages of technologies. Scale achieves simplification and reduction in costs while improving economic conditions. In the beginning of a technology while it holds a defensive/offensive advantage, it is kept close to the emergent economy. When it must scale, it must go commercial.

At the point the Internet was taken out of military logistics stockpiles and made available for commercial exploitation, its function as a command, control and communications was understood to be ineffective in that form. To become effective, it needed to be world wide, integrated, interoperable, and responsive to OSSINT technologies. As the satellite systems had shown, transparency is a key element of peaceful or offensive diplomacy. The technologies for warfare of the late 20th century had become so complex and decisive that only transparency provided a chance of avoiding the inevitable mistake or madness that leads to their application.

There is no perfect solution to technologies evolving faster than the understanding of their application. Technology evolves on a short cycle relative to the evolution of the understanding of strategic deployment and political will. In metaphor, there is a new car every year, but there hasn't been a new model of the user for 6000 years. Like the car, the fastest understanding emerges when the types of application increase (scope is a diverse population) and the reach scales exponentially. That is the basin behavior of commercial systems: it trades on functions for survival. This is a growth strategy; it increases the population but is not necessarily a fitness trait. With function comes complexity and this can weaken sustainability by narrowing choice. Every feature added perturbs the orbit with respect to the distribution.

In commercial systems, the competitive advantage required for survival is holding close control over resources for resources, not the implementations, but the ideas. This leads to IP and to incentives to retain and manage productive talented staffs. This is capitalism. It works as a means to create scaling effects because it evolves competitive traits for creating markets and acquiring market share. The feedback of reward for value is the engine of commercial scale at every level. It has disadvantages because securing competitive advantage reduces transparency required for scaling systems with diverse populations. To offset this disadvantage where it occurs, it is necessary to use the emergent budgets to stimulate cultivar that do exhibit the desirable trait and breed these with suppliers from the wild that have the necessary survival traits.

As hoped, the release of the Internet for public use has achieved that in the emergence of open source systems: a development and business model that mirrors the original goals of Internet communications, survivable communications systems where the locus of control can shift axiomatically if any part of the system is damaged or destroyed emerged to ensure the replication of that system at a rate that ensures an evolutionary stable strategy for sustainability. Open source emerges from an ESS with survivability as its goal. This resonates on the other emergent basin: the user populations.

Transparency across populations invites understanding but it cannot guarantee it. The understanding that diversity is the key to surviving and growing must be as well scaled and reached. Our tools cannot do this for us, but if these systems are as Doug Englebart described them, a means to augment human intellect, they are our tool to apply for growth or destruction. Choose wisely. Fitness is not what is most elite. The elite cultivar does not scale because it does not survive. A surviving system combines the weak traits from the edges of the network continuously. This is why simpler less complex products often evolve by means that are healthier for the ecosystem itself. It is responsive, agile, and adept.

Open source: at this point in history, it is not only logical to do this, it's the plan.

Hard Things

Some things are hard. When the time comes to make the really hard decisions, one has to admit one is never free of the bias that is mammal, human, individual, and alone. These are the decisions that build, bind, activate and destroy. And they are lonely to make.

Two bits of wisdom, one bitter, one sweet:

o When the rules aren't the same for everyone, there are no rules. There is only fear. Fear kills the mind. When the mind is gone, one is animal. To overcome the animal, overcome fear.

o When one loves one does the right thing to the last thing, and if that does not succeed, one leaves for one has failed, but there is no shame for lovc.

I Need A Job

The title says it. I need a job.

Can travel but cannot relocate. Please reply to cbullard@hiwaay.net

My coding skills are rusty but my knowledge of XML, X3D/VRML, are excellent. I am a skilled analyst and writer. I have spent the last 10 years doing business development work in the public safety industry for the Intergraph Corporation.

Is Sustainability More Important Than Authority?

In a network of reputation management systems, one assumes that authority is the dominant metric for choosing a service. Yet over time, there is a tendancy for all services to reach a rough equilibrium in terms of information goodness (validatible and high correctness scores). It is akin to the problem of picking a news cast in any media. If all reputations for correctness are roughly equal, likability plays a strong role in reputation management.

But if mashups are the brave new application world, then the dominant metric is sustainability of the service over some lifecycle of use by similar and different applications. The tendancy of the system to evolve orbits around deep attractors (as in deep pockets) has not changed, thus the naïve but rough long tail economics continues unabated.

Note that while XML is agnostic to these dimensions of the hyperspaces of web information domains, it becomes doubly difficult for any specific-domain language to emerge unless it has high scores for sustainability. I suspect that this is a contributor to the failures of domain specific browsers that include all semantics in a strongly-coupled package of components. Their niche is self-limiting and not ESS-immune given the infecting nature of the loosely-coupled confabulations that attack from the edges of the information ecology. This explains why many weak semantics and apparently flawed strategies for creating applications can thrive in the face of better constructed and well-funded projects initially. If the locals have a rapid replacement rate, they cannot be unhosted.

Intelligence doesn't scale. Yet as a service, if it is tightly focused and sustainable, it cannot be unhosted until commoditized. At that point, its orbit crosses Lagrange points where small perturbations can drive the connection to other systems.

Savvy systems defend resources for resources until they become loss leaders.

Metta

"I metta man? What man? The man with the power? What power? Hoodoo! Hoodoo? You do? Do what? Metta man! What man? The man with the power!"

The world writhes in agony tonight. Some for the images they see. Some for being those images. One may look in the mirror to find the fault, or one may ask of the receiver that which makes them happy without fault. However we choose, the agony is of our making, so we make a hell for ourselves. Still, hell is a place we make for our torment and if we wish to be peaceful, we must begin the path away from hell.

Here are helpful means to navigate a path out of hell:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/buddharakkhita/wheel365.html

Note well: all the qualities of metta are the qualities of inbound links because they can only be validated by the receiver. To receive, others must care; to give, one is not other.

At The Point Of Value

Tim Bray says:

"But Simon’s right, too, that a lot of money is swirling around; and in particular he’s right that the money happens when the software goes into production."

At the point of value: the software market is replicating the evolution of the music market at the advent of cheap home recording. Prior to that, distribution in the form of fixed media (paper and vinyl), was controlled from point of creative act to point of sale. Once replication or copying technology is in the hands of the purchaser, control by distribution morphs in to control of release value.

The cost is the cost of innovation. In community efforts, this cost is inexpensive by comparison to closed efforts. Open source is still a loss-leader but that is insignificant to the cost of a closed system loss-leader.

The cost of content is less for the complexity of the product, but in an ad based revenue system, quality still requires professional work. The cost of content falls but the competitive edge is best tools. For content, the competition has not changed; the scale of production required has. More can do but it is a market based on small differentiation of the same styles with a slow evolution from cross-breeding styles and saving serendipity. Small teams can do mighty works, but cool counts.

A software market like the music market thrives on Hits. The problem for the very large companies is they need too many to feed the kids and don't really get a subscription model: it requires a high rate of change to get more from less. The closer the software is to the core of the platform, the lower the rate of change. A subscription model is still an expensive subscription. To make this work, the tools built on top must diversify and become smaller and more adaptible. In music, VST improved the lot of all of the follow-on producers of plugins.

Unless the core is common.

So far, the software market won't step up to this except in the domain of open source. Sun makes too much core and not enough plugins. It carries too much community overhead and not enough follow on software.

Planet Quest Website: Brilliant!

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab's PlanetQuest website is brilliant. This is a stunning proof of the power of X3D as an educational format that is beautifully surreal presenting complex information compactly. The techniques applied are ingenious but easy to use and comprehend. This is the professional level of multimedia web content production that X3D needs.

The Wirefusion production approach to integrating text, 2D and 3D is straightforward. They build one dominant object and explain it in the style of a product presentation. Each topic is presented in a mode perfectly suited to it so navigating it is childishly simple and enrapturing.

My only nit here is the sound is noisy. Streaming sound is still the biggest quality gap in the X3D. Multitrack sound streams that enable the spatial capabilities of real-time 3D such as proximity based mixing and soundFollowers aren't here. On the other hand, this sound is a vast improvement over what we had to use ten years ago so I am still blown away. Personally, loops bore me unless other sound nodes are used with them, for example, an option to have the text entries read by a human voice (not a synth). It only takes a little work to record the voices. I understand the bandwidth vs click through problems, but as a musician/actor, you can blame a guy for wanting. :-)

With only that nit, I recommend this site to anyone, but particularly to X3D authors and site designers as a to-be-studied example of doing it right.

Anywhere I'm Not

Some say love is when two people want to be together and do what they must to make that happen. That's the good stuff but not the only stuff. Sometimes love is when you desperately want to be with someone but you know that it has zero chance of working out. Desperation becomes frustration. You will hurt them and by bitter experience, you know you can't stop this from happening. It is a terrible dark thing to know about oneself, a cold confrontation with the uglyness that desire becomes, a disease of the blood and then the soul.

So you take any measures to be sure that she is somewhere you're not, and pray for the Faerie Queen to release you from the tree.

X3D: Real Time Contexts As Emergent Event Sets

Real time contexts are event sets. Events are strictly ordered given a simple locale but may overlap given multiple locales so event order is not the only signature. When identifying a situation semantic in an emerging phase, event order is very important but so is proximity of multiple instances of event types. Say you have a system of sensors, you may be tracking the order that these send alerts to determine time and speed of some object. You may be monitoring multiple sensor clusters and correlating these values in a higher dimensional space.

To identify an emergent event and dispatch on warning (roughly analogous to launch on warning), you have to be able to assign force values to the events because the emergence of a situation may be presaged by weak signals in combination with strong signals. Proximity is a scalar for weak-to-strong events.

Proximity is one of the signals that you monitor given a locale ontology to make a threat assessment. In an intelligence assessment, you may have multiple intelligence types and fusing these into actionable information where the responder assets are limited is the key to effective dispatch. Otherwise, all you are doing is running to false alarms although false alarms are also a key piece of information. Eventually, all of these signals coalesce and are assigned a value from a code list.

The tricky bit here is learning to get all of this information from multiple XML streams emanating from different information source types (think HUMINT, OSSINT, SIGINT, etc). If the control is emergent, then it may just be an Xlink type, at least, that is one way to do it. Metadata can be emergent information, in fact, likely is.

To Find Peace

I have everything I ever wanted. If that is not the same as what I deserve, then that is good because I am sure there are many punishments for those who get ALL they deserve. I pursued justice as I see it, not as I have been told to see it. I pursued pleasure as I could afford it, not merely as I have desired it. In this combination, I have done my duty. Is that not the way of the temple?

Such wonderful things I have seen and known. Is it not enough to drink from the river, to bathe in the river, to watch it fill the ocean? What good comes from trying to hold it or claim it as one's own? None. Knowing this and accepting it is a way to peace. In peace, one may eventually know enlightenment and there is no higher good than that for a human.

Om shanti. Hari om.

The Second Best Revenge

They say that success is the best revenge. It is no doubt true, but if it is not to be personal success, then the second best revenge is to help one who has wronged you attain their most precious desire where that is something they are not prepared to have or do.

The State of Denial

Here in the heart of the Red states, there is only one word for the right wing noveau riche Republicans that make up the majority:

Denial.

Last month we had a Statewide election with an anti-gay marriage ammendment on it. Keep in mind, same sex marriage is already illegal in Alabama so this ammendment was as redundant as G.W. Bush's left ear. Why was it on the ballot? I think it was the usual politics of distraction, but it was also a way to rally the faithful. How did it do?

It passed with an 89% approval. Yep, nine out of ten voters approved the measure.

These same people are holding rallies to show their support for G.W.s war record and still trying to keep the Dixie Chicks off the local radio.

On the other hand, the free rangers are getting louder. I was on jury duty last week sitting in the holding pen (the venire room) when the announcement of G.W.'s grandstand visit to Iraq came on CNN. A lady in front of me guffawed and the man in front of her called her unpatriotic. Can you say, screwed up? The man, in this case. The woman, it turned out, was a soldier fresh from Afghanistan and she chewed a hole in that man that he couldn't cover with his flag. According to her the troops' morale doesn't improve when politicians come for their photo ops using Amercian soldiers as props. She said it makes them angry because of everything they have to do to protect them and it takes them away from their jobs of keeping each other alive.

He moved to another chair. I thanked her for going.

Still, the denial brigade is far from done and desperation in the face of the inevitable collapse of their worldview which at this point I can only describe as willfully dumb and naively evil, they will become mean. I've seen this movie before. The same people who believed in Nixon waited for a chance to resurrect their egos and their ideologies. These people will too. Stupid people aren't smart enough to admit a mistake in their worldview, and too worldly to give it up for others.

If the nation continues to elect this crew, we may deserve them. There are no excuses left and the State of Denial is full of immigrants from the rest of the red states. I don't see any Statesmen on the horizon except Colin Powell, and he is too smart to want their jobs.

X3D And Ontological Space

X3D and Ontological Space

In an X3D world, the emergent engine is the proximity sensor
because it is a scalar identity of a location and locations
organize the semantic tensor: the objects and methods of the
spaces and the objects they contain.

The location organizes the ontology of the space. The distance
organizes the relationships and force per related set. The
distance is scalar by position and velocity. These values in
a mapped space self-organize by the force per related set as
afforded by the norms of the tensor set, or situation semantic:
a spatio/temporally identified norm.

In an X3D world, events find you.

Growing Up Buttermilk

I grew up in a neighborhood that became a black neighborhood as the 60s social experiment known as Model Cities tore down the ramshackle downtown and moved the blacks that lived there into the better poorer neighborhoods to the north of the city. Slowly but surely, we became the minority living in a minority neighborhood. Some fanciful Hollywood movies attempt to portray the American South during this period, but most concentrate on portrayals of the black side of that experience and many miss the real experience of both sides. It was tough at times but seldom as violent or strained as the movies make it out to be. It was the slow begruding acceptance of each other and the coming to lose our fears and our anger. It was sometimes very funny.

Blacks have a word for a white kid growing up in a black neighborhood: Buttermilk. I grew up Buttermilk. No regrets. I don't think that will be understood by some historical plumbers, but I don't care much. It was a time of stories. Here is one.

While I was in college, my younger brother decided to engage in a horticulture experiment by putting marijuana seeds in my Mother’s wooden flower pot on the front porch of our house. My father made the flower pot for my Mom. Night after night I would come home from class and see it growing there, large and healthy by dint of my Mother’s talented but naïve skills. In such a neighborhood, that shade of green does not go unnoticed but it did go unmolested as my Dad was not someone to trifle with. One night, I decided it was just too risky so at 2AM, I picked up the flower pot and took it into the backyard.

When I came home the next afternoon from class, my Mother greeted me at the door and asked if I knew where her flower was. I hemmed and hawed and finally confessed that it was in the backyard. She asked me why and I told her. She immediately collapsed on the couch in a fit of hysterical laughter. This was not the expected reaction so when she calmed down, I asked why she wasn’t mad. She said she should be but that at that moment my Dad was walking up and down the street asking the neighbors if they knew who had stolen her ‘pot’. I imagine the conversations when he left were quite interesting.

Geishas

Every business has them. The titles vary but the job is the same: they are the donut-dollies of business. They are detailed to ensure that meetings go smoothly, shows are well organized, or lunch with the boss has the right kinds of food depending on who the boss is lunching with. They know who the power players are and who to keep out of the executive suite. Sometimes they are highly paid but most of the times they aren’t. They are overbooked, over promised, underappreciated and if not smart or too young, under something or someone. They are always pretty and ambitious and think that this job that let’s them network at the highest levels of a company ensures them a bright future.

The future?

Geishas are seldom promoted into real management positions of authority even if they are delegated to roles that give them resources to command. The reasons are simple. The geisha by practice is a hostess. Politely handling situations and people is their primary skill set as far as business is concerned. Those years spent in business classes getting advanced degrees don’t mean anything. Like the person skilled in English and editing, those rare gifts outweigh their training and background ensuring they stay in the service industry of business management. In all the time I’ve spent in business, I’ve never seen a geisha promoted to management. That which makes them skilled as hostesses or the perception of their skills cripples them as managers. The aggressive ruthless cunning that must be displayed by the so-called ‘high potential’ candidate is hidden beneath the politeness and allure. Worse, too often, like the donut-dollies in the military, they become the property of the officers.

The good news is a smart geisha learns much from the upper management class about business, and makes friends with their subordinates. If they are really strong, they start their own business and by their own hand become the power player they believe they can be. Yet all too often they remain geishas, and in a job that values their allure, their career begins to wane in their late thirties as age takes away their power. They fight it in the gym, with diets, with makeup, with dresses ten years too young, or with the thousand indignities that accompany submission, but unless they have created a new source of power, they lose.

The aging geisha is the saddest of the sad in a world of values that only knows winners or losers. On the other hand, in a world that prizes the sharp wife, Mom or companion who’s eyes see all, appreciate the gifts of knowledge and fidelity, they can be quite powerful. As in all arts, and the geisha is an artist, the best loss is the loss of desperation that comes when the mirror is not the model. The world is.

Practice and maturity can produce the most sublime works.

tensorWorlds

The proximity sensor is the emergent engine of the virtual space.

The difference between a scene and a situation is proximate space in motion.

The intensions of the space are operations of the object mapped to it.

Say, avatars + proximity sensors in motion.

An avatar has types and operations, eg, norms and affordances as some pragmatists would say.

Proximate space vectors are the situation semantic as scalar relationships among proximate spaces in motion limited by the norms and affordances of the objects mapped to that proximate space and proximate spaces within it.

Reciprocity among objects in motion in proximate space coevolves the norms and affordances of objects and the containing space: tensorWorlds. In a tensorWorld, everything is a stream of events in motion.

"Row Row Row Your Boat..."

The XeCond Life of X3D

Hi Rita

It is still too hard to build, but we are clever lads and gals.

As good as it is to build social games, a WikiPedia3D can also be a game.

1. There are only a handful of basic sensor types. As the core GUI, these are semiotic engines. They respond to events and emit signs where those signs are the events in 3D. An avatar pragma + scene events == situation. Situations have semantics. See SemWeb.

Because the avatar is under real time control of the user, it has pragmatics: the rules of intension.

2. Clica (gestures as sensor events) can entertain, attract, repel, restore, whatever. They can also teach.

3. The advantage to a WikiPedia3D is it can use situation semantics to conduct events, therefore, instruct in context.

A buildable world teaches the pragmatics of building.

Online worlds are as good as the personalities of the inhabitants are strong in the media. People build to their tastes so all the world adds is amplification if that is all one does with a world. The games should emerge out of the environment itself because in the virtual world, the environment is an ambient/semiotic server.

The key is to use the sensors to collect data that enables the cultural models to be harvestable by the server itself. It analyzes the models selected, the text descriptions of the world, the behaviors selected by metatypes and feedsback those dynamics to the scene itself as backgrounds, terrain, avatarBots, botHumans, and so on... express that metadata in a common ontological dataset. Standardize it.

Different terms such as virtual ambience or server-ubiquity or sensate world apply. Some just call it virtual reality, a term out of vogue but still applied.

Imagine a server site that instructs in practices because the building tools enable a simple triples engine for declaring semantics, and easy assembly of semantically enabled models where the ontological root is religion... or math.

No magic here. It is an ontology built into a real time 3D rendering so the use of it modifies its rendering.

Affordances are given to conformance with norms but affordances are the means to change the norms. In gamespeak, you get powers for figuring out the puzzles, but the puzzles include the kind of world you build.

I've been around web3D a long time. Vendor worlds are about systems. User worlds are about content because content *is* about people.

The problem of VRML is it was too early; the problem of X3D is that it is VRML.

OTW, this works well and if the authors stick to good authoring techniques, it works acceptably well. Geekdom aside, VRML and X3D are still the HTML of web3D. The bet of X3D is that ownable content is a better investment for the customer. By that I mean, fully ownable down to the syntax. X3D is a bet that standards always achieve that goal better than proprietary systems. Proprietary systems don't have to negotiate with competitors, and that my friend, is the rub.

But the BEST deal for the content builder on the web is still X3D. It is the best bet for your customer too. Why?

OWNING THE CONTENT WHEN YOU ARE DONE.

Let the software vendors debate open source, the profit in it for the content builder and the customer of the content builder is to OWN THE CONTENT.

Ownership is ultimate resale. Ultimate reapplication. Freedom to build an avatar that you can show off on any X3D server operated by ANY X3D company. Your potential set of worlds only gets bigger and bigger and will not go away if a server company folds and friends, LOTS OF THEM HAVE. Think of it as your blog disappearing one day, oopsie...

... but until the freakin' X3D browsers and conforming X3D are interoperable, and the servers are stable, it's just a bet that what you are building works with other 3D worlds, unless of course, you pay competent 3D artists to do their voodoo. Yes, customers build but professionals can build better and get it up faster and keep it up longer. The prize is there for the taking if X3D is adopted by a community of content builders.

<RudeButTheModelIsObvious>
The difference between a call girl and a hooker for the same product is quality.
</RudeButTheModelIsObvious>

Gesthemane: The Video

For the Easter holiday, I wrote the song blogged earlier. I made the video over the weekend. You can download it here: (approx 6mb).

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/video/Gesthemane.wmv

Windows Movie Maker proves to be a good utility for this kind of work. Now that many churches have big audio-visual systems, there is a ready venue for it, so between the video-enabled iPods, the web in general, and the big systems, this is fun stuff to do.

Messages of Mutual Exclusion

For Staff:

Everyone is counting on you.
Good attitudes make good teams.
Teams make sacrifices.
When the team wins, we all win.
Keep up the good work.

For Executives:

Hire proven performers.
Eliminate doubt.
Fresh blood makes fresh ideas.
When stockholders win, options vest.
Keep up the good work.

I'm not disgruntled. I like to think of myself as the last of the original class of "nattering nabobs of negativism".

Gethesemane: A Song

Anyone who knows me or downloads my songs knows I write pop and not for the sanctuary. I was asked to do a solo for Good Friday by our choir mistress. This is the piece.

Gethesemane

The image of Christ praying in the garden is compelling to me because I believe this is when He is the most human. Confronting the hours of betrayal, humiliation, torture and execution, Jesus knows the real nature of original sin: to love life more than Heaven. So he prays to be released, and in this, he understands why He came: to pray for forgiveness for all humanity, Himself included.

Some songs come so easily, it feels as it they are breathed into me and all I did was write them down. This is one of those. If you enjoy it, credit the source and not the emanuensis.

Office Affairs

Office affairs are always among parties where at least one is married and not to another party to the affair. Otherwise, they would be office romances and while those can lead to problems or a better life, they don't break covenants so don't fall into all of the problems of the office affair.

The dynamics of office romances or affairs are such that in the beginning, the male is at the greatest risk because he typically initiates and until the female says yes, the male can always be gotten rid of with harassment charges. At the point at which the female says yes and the affair is consummated, the female assumes almost all of the risks. While both may have risks associated with their spouses, those are outcomes outside the office.

The unfair part of the office affair is that when concluded by consent or command, the most severe consequences usually are to the female. The worst that happens to males in the majority of cases is they are reassigned, warned, or can lose a security clearance, but little else economically or socially within the workplace unless the female is pregnant, and then the pregnancy is politely ascribed to the marriage. If all parties remain polite, life goes on.

When exposed, and the majority of office affairs are because these are transparent to colleagues, the female can lose her career and possibly her marriage. The male may lose the marriage but seldom if ever the career. There is something Western here, but it seems the modern opinion is that it is the female who is most at fault for accepting and loses the most trust among her colleagues and that is what devastates the career.

Men who are politically compromised may suffer a setback in upward career momentum, but it is typically short-lived if other skills are valued.

For a female to recover, she typically moves to another company and away from any social connections to the former company, often to a new town to ensure this. If there are spousal objections, the problem becomes much more complicated and often, the deceit, much deeper and difficult to manage. So the risks grow exponentially unless she and her spouse can cope with the infidelity openly or at least in private.

The male may have similar issues but they aren't as severe.

It is not uncommon for the male, having seen that the consequences are few, to engage in multiple office affairs serially or even in parallel. While the risks of parallel affairs are great, the risks for serial affairs are little as long as he can maintain the social arrangements of the marriage. In some networks and cultures, affairs by men are tolerated without approval, with little consequence to the marriage which is viewed socially as an economic and parenting arrangement. The primary mistake the male can make is to subject the spouse to social humiliation by publicly flaunting his other liaisons; so in these cultures, keeping the mistress or office girl at a distance from his social world is considered polite even if having her close at the office is not considered impolite but risky. Because a male gains status from risk taking and managing risk, the office affair can be a plus to his advancement.

This is never true for females.

None of this is fair. Fairness and justice are concepts of legitimacy and there is no framework in which the office affair is considered legitimate. They are part of the fabric of desire that drives the humans at the emotional and sometimes economic levels. That they are unbalanced as to consequences appears to be a cultural problem of perceptions, not a problem of right or morality. If they were right or moral, people wouldn't hide them, make up stories when confronted, or otherwise be 'keeping it on the side'. It is what it is: risky behavior.

How risk is managed and rewarded is the crux. Caveat emptor.

Gethesemane

Father, take this cup from me
Swap it for a cooling rain
For a dream we share
By the river there
Cover your face from my shame.

Oh Father, take this cup from me
Take back this drink of despair
For the feelings that harden
So far from the garden
Gethesemane here ensnared.

I came to love them, Father
Share their joyfulness and pain
When our deaths were so far away
But now I share their hunger
For the breath of inspiration
Breathed into me, Father, Life!
It ends today.

Father take this cup from me.
Human, have you made me and frail.
Though your face I see,
Will I still be me
Remembering all beyond the pale?

Oh Father, forgive me, this sin I bare
For the love that you have for your child
From the garden of Eden
To the ending of the world
For forgiveness, merciful mild.

Oh Father, forgive.

len bullard 03/13/06

Pirates and Innovation

It's been calculated that money spent on R&D is not correlated to innovation. Believe it or not. If you don't spend any money on R&D, you lose, but if you spend too much, the stockholders lose. Since most management plans are couched in terms of shareholder value, one can pretty much forget pleading for R&D money without a solid short term turnaround return on investment.

So you still need an innovative staff, you still have to manage to get them across technology chasms requiring lots of homework, and you want them to be happy about that?

Children won't learn arithmetic writing numbers on a board. They will count the numbers of toy pirates they have and how many they lost in a sea battle with a friend. Occasionally, they will fill a ship model with firecrackers and gas and blow it up just to watch together and tell their chums.

Keeping the little buggers entertained is 80% of teaching hard lessons. There is no agenda on a playground but the one in a child's heart just before recess.

We can't spend money, but we can have fun.

ARRGGG! MATEY!!

... and they wonder why the development staff is so silly.

XML Was Invented By The Losers: Part II

Point is, XML was a coup, Mike, over fish and bigger fish. ... and it was the right thing to do, implicature and inference. I don't want to reel off the names because that is an assessment based on the sales I saw at the time and who they were selling too. SGML systems were very expensive.

The bigger fish don't always win. It doesn't mean they are evil. Some are being eaten/herded by even bigger fish. But put enough losers on the street and they figure out how to beat the winning fish to the bigger fish. No legacy. Nothing to lose. Everything to win and software requires no more than household costs to develop to prototypes.

Were I The Evil Coyote at the Evil Empire:

Cut the loss leaders off into open source. Spread the risk and cost of development out. As the hardware costs come down, software is a bundled component and it is shipped that way. To reduce costs, reduce non-standard bundling of software and hardware. See Macintosh 1986.

A standard bundling of hardware/software collapses the licensing costs, sales costs and dilutes the threats of patents and patent trolls without removing the competitive edge of quality.

Solve the problems of versioning and identity management. The problems of the second are social in that they are the history of systems like those based on SSN beating against the new web based systems that are quick to grant rights and slow to revoke them.

The application of identity tokens such as Social Security numbers, that is, tokens which are printed and therefore easily lost are insufficient for a digital society. Because the rate of interconnection, relations, and types in the system have increased, the speed and size of damage is fast and hard to undo with current mixed human/machine schedules (eg, what user can contract with the server and what a human has to review/approve). Not relaxing the constraints on registration of transaction where the business logic is adequate to approve a transaction is costly and paranoid.

Portals must integrate notification services based on legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy.

Identity theft is discovered only when the first collection agency calls. That is too late.

Services to stop all transactions on the lost id are closed on weekends. That is too slow.

Services can be insensitive. That is rude.

This lack of orchestration/choreography/event systems for building implicature and inference from events over data increases costs and reduces reliability. BI systems ARE the next hot emergence zone.

Reliability is a problem of undercertified systems. Undercertified systems require tests and tests must be transparent. Mapping specifications to open testing is still the best means to certify.

This requires all the big fish to put down their guns and see the desktop market equilibrium for what it can be: a cost cutting system that doesn't sacrifice the quality of the product to increase the rate of sales. Make sure this piece is a rock-solid indisputably patent neutral system.

Any time a component rises to commodity status, buy the rights and put it in the standard system. Buy the patents and put them in the public domain. Innovate and standardize by providing profits to the owner from the profits made of selling the system to public domain. Let the market economy do the rest.

Pretty much what The Losers do. Lose the least profitable risks by sharing the costs of the most profitable ones. In that way, economic gains are sustained by social benefits.

Then it's norms and affordances, or culture and rights. With these come national interests. We speak of society as if it were homogenous and that is observably not so. But given the power of nations, culture is where our standard systems and marketplaces interlock, where social benefits and economic gains are made uncertain by the unreliability of those relationships in the human context. Cultural interfaces mean system filters. System filters mean autonomy.

The conflict is here between human and virtual systems.That is the hard problem of the emerging generation of digital systems designers and strategists: to couple social benefits to economic needs through the dimensions of legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy of the virtual systems with respect to the norms and affordances of the human systems. Where we cannot, we risk the nationalist agenda oscillating against our global conversations. But the rule of autonomy says that we cannot continue simply by system fiat: we must desire this. That is the crucible sensitivity over autonomy in the rights of the human over the virtual, and the virtual over the human, and by representation, human over human.

I have hope.

Last week I received an email from a fan who shares my music with his friends in China. My wife warns me people in China have a thriving business duplicating western music and selling it and might steal mine. I told her, "I hope so."

A bit of memory from my generation: the music of Motown made for peace in an integrating racist Southern America. If there is to be peace, it is to be found in our shared languages, and of these, music speaks to the heart. When we hear this, we listen. Then no one loses.

"Leave gentle fingerprints on the Soul of another for the Angels to read"..- Proverb

What Do You Do Here?

What do you do here?

Pick any two.

2. Resume Version: Senior Technical Consultant. The duties are to make sure Process Requests get answered promptly..

2. Email Signature Version:

Wyle E Coyote Society : Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow.

2. Blog Version:

I herd fish for the other predators.

A day without scaring a senior manager is a day without perspiration.

Being bad is easy; being evil takes practice, study, and planning.

2. Podcast Version:

"Speak of the Devil!"
"It's not my turn to be the Devil."
"Oh right.... it's my turn, but I've studied."

2. Zen version:

They ask you to move a mountain but will not buy you equipment or explosives. You notice a stream runs past the base of the mountain, buy a small house, and spend your mornings picking up sand off the bottom of the stream and dropping it back in the water to watch it flow toward the mountain. You grow old but you attain your goal and the water does all the heavy lifting.

XML Was Invented By Losers

Here's something to ponder. Winners may write histories but evolution is determined by the losers.

How many of the XML designers and primary supporters had, owned or worked for companies that were losers in the SGML market or standards fights? Most of them (the exception being James Clark but he was independently wealthy and has his own reasons). XML wasn't the Revenge of the Forty-somethings as it was once described, but the victory of the SGML losers over the SGML winners.

The trick here is pragmatic (as in linguistic pragmatics): the sentence may be true and the implicature false. Implication is in the utterance, not the sentence.

Can you think of cases where the sentence is true? In possibly more cases than we like to admit, losers determine the direction of the next generation. Why? Motivated to change. That's why BigCos are seldom the place to look for progress. The cost of ditching legacy is not something short-term profit project managers want to account for. It's cheaper to offshore the old, delay the new, and melt down the competence capital of the engineering departments. Then you sell the company to your wealthier competitors or even to the offshore companies you have been sending work to. After that, losers take the next steps.

Happy Mind Melting.

What happens as the cost of computer hardware continues to fall? Traditionally, it has been cheaper to replace or upgrade software because hardware changes were orders of magnitude more expensive given a system of some size? If both costs are falling, isn't there a point at which it is cheaper to FexEx the entire system? Is it true that the only future profits for information technologies will be in local customization?

I don't believe any of that, but the implications are fun. Those buying those companies, for example, may win by acquisition and lose by possession of the obligations because the losers in the last round of competition are waiting and weren't loafing while all of the buying and selling was paralyzing the engineers like deers caught in the headlights.

And now that they have lost, they have nothing else to do but work on winning.

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Kris Kristofferson

Fishbrains

Ever go to a meeting and while you are trying to work out terms and conditions, your customer or the consultant are regaling you with a story about a neat new box that let's them provide themselves and five strangers within two hundred feet Internet Access over their cellphone?

Has your next door neighbor who has yet to buy a life insurance policy for himself to cover his seven children from his first and second marriage and his new girlfriend's three shown you his 1975 Rolex that he bought at the flea market?

Did your brother in law have a yard sale that included a first edition copy of "Are You Experienced?" while keeping a copy of his Morris Albert album that includes the megahit "Feelings" because that was his song when he was dating you know who before she left him for you don't care?

More often than not, you are dealing with FishBrains. Fish don't stop to think when they swim toward bright and shiny objects in the water that the object may have a hook inside. Fish only care that something is bright and shiny and they'll swallow it.

It is always interesting at any social event to figure out who the FishBrains are and who are sharks pretending to be fish. The clue is that predators steer prey and if they hunt in groups, they steer them toward the other predators by distraction. Remember: bright and shiny. While your lawyer is showing your wife his new Jag, his wife is showing you her new tits. And you're listening? Right.....

I don't know why but in America, more women are eager to demonstrate their Fishbrains. It may be that American men are equally inclined to live in the space between their opposing eyes, but American women are faster. It may be that American men are just slow in general. A Fishbrain prefers Britney Spears to Lisa Loeb and maybe that is why fish survive long winters in cold water frozen to the bottom of lakes. They don't rise to ugly bait. Remember, bright and shiny aren't the same as smart and whiny.

Fishbrains still believe conversion to the metric system is inevitable in America. Why? The French say so. Fishbrains believe the Arabs are causing all of the world's woes because we get so much oil from them. Of course anyone who reads Wired or watches West Wing knows we get most of our oil from Canada. If we dig deep enough, we'll find out Canadian Fishbrains blew up the Iraqui mosque. Cui bono? And it was bright and shiny... "like a Rhinestone Cowboy".
Fishbrains still have their Mood Rings and keep them next to their favorite Pet Rock. They euthanized their last Pet Rock because it pissed on the couch and they know the cat is too smart to do that.

Fishbrains tie yellow ribbons to trees to welcome home veterans in honor of a song about a guy coming home from prison... on a bus.

Fishbrains think the Chronicles of Narnia is a serious philosophical movie, applaud Sean Hannity for his deep grasp of the truth, and laugh when told that NASA surpressed evidence of global warning because they know the Rapture is coming soon so consume.

When George W. Bush says Osama Bin Laden helped him get elected by issuing threats, wiley Fishbrains nod in agreement knowing it was a ruse to get them to vote for Kerry because Bush is bad for Bin Ladin and the terrorists' cause.

Fishbrains tell you that the next generation of the Web is here because they can interact with their best friends who live down the street over the wire by typing messages into a telephone keyboard with a pen.

Fish aren't all bad. Fish make great bait. Fish can be used to hunt other fish. Fish are brain food. In one of the weird results of life seeking higher intelligence, lower lifeforms trying with all their mighty might are just filled with GottaEvolveAnxiety and yes, that is the life force. You can eat that and become smarter. In world of eat or be eaten, timing and position matter.

Fishbrains rule. Why? The more eggs you lay the better the chances of accidental fertilization.

To mix metaphors, as I said to Kurt Cagle, the difference between a bag of helium and a bag of gold is the bag of helium will float away, but if you let go of the string, either will disappear just as fast.

Searching for Signal: Part II

Last night I turned the comments on. It only took a few minutes before the first spam message appeared in my inbox from the blog. Gad. The web predators certainly are evolving fast. One wonders. We want to have these participative conversations but as soon as we open up, the opportunists begin to piss in the soup.

I had a long conversation with the owner of a popular 3D chat room. She related an interesting bit. 3D rooms that don't have multi-user chat don't last. She said, "They're lonely places." That implies that many of the experiments in 3D enabling interactive but non-multi-user 3D apps don't have a promising shelf life. When I think of all the failed experiments in search engines, shopping malls and visualization that tried the sex of 3D and flopped, or the 3D cartoons that while fun to watch were really linear 3D and therefore could just as well have been 2D Flash or machinima, evidence builds that what we've always said is more true than ever: the killer apps are always presence apps where people can make contact with each other. Social worlds do better. Not exactly news but once again, we are reminded the users are mammals and mammals are social critters constantly searching for signal. The smart money develops apps to hook them up.

Searching for signal: it's a meme I guess.

Next week, we'll look into combative pragmatics. Being a contrarian, if the pundits and heros are going to proseletyze for Web 2.0 being pragmatically enabled for negotiation, I'll take the other side and discuss how to use pragmatics in combat with the other chimps on the hunt for bangmates and domination of the monkey tree.

Searching For Signal

Queens follow kings. Kings follow danger
Seeking advice from a beckoning stranger.
Truth isn't easily found in your dreams.
It's nothing from nothing whatever it seems.

You crawl to the top. Ambition is calling.
The moment you stand, you're already falling.
Love's not a prize for a victory won.
Love's how you feel when the loving is done.

What taste do you think is more bitter than this:
The lie on your lips or her passionless kiss?
A gift without knowing the reason for giving
Is rotten as flesh when it's no longer living.

Heartless and void, merciless cold
You humbled yourself as the cameras rolled.
Now that its over while sycophants sigh,
You're searching for signal from an ebony sky,

len - 2/21/06

Red Neck Valentine

My wife told me not to buy her candy for Valentines Day. So I bought her a two inch thick steak in the shape of a heart for her Valentine. For mine, she will cook it. It must be a good idea. Last time I saw her she was pounding on it with a wooden mallet and repeating my name.

Connecting The Right Dots: The Legal Use of Surveillance

President Bush claims that had the NSA surveillance of American citizens been in place prior to 9/11, the terrorists could have been intercepted. He says we have to be able to 'connect the dots'. He is possibly right.

On the other hand, had a perfectly legal message switch connected the police records systems of South Florida, the same result would have occurred because Mohammed Atta in a perfectly legal traffic stop was subject to a perfectly legal name query that would have returned information sufficient to detain him.

It isn't that we need to connect the dots. That is too simplistic. We need to connect the right dots legally, then I believe we would have all the connections we need.

The Executive Branch of the government is attempting to persuade us that in times of war, laws don't matter. When laws don't matter, we are a government of men, not laws. While I have no evidence that the information gathered by the NSA is or has been used for some purpose other than those claimed, the fact of law is that it is illegal to have done so. If the only reason for breaking the law is 'wouldacoulda', then one that is speculation, and two that is not the only 'woulda coulda' so it is loose speculation. The second coulda is also legal.

Law is sometimes imprecise and in need of rewriting to meet the changing technology and times, but it is not speculative. We are now confronted with evidence both of outing a covert officer and of using the covert systems to commit possible high crimes from the same Executive Branch. The Executive Branch must be held to account for the commission of acts that may on inspection provide evidence of high crimes, If we are to remain a nation of laws, not men, then this evidence must be discovered and deliberated to determine grounds for prosecution if indeed these grounds are supported by the evidence.

... even if the acts were mostly just stupid.

Cosmic Evolution

Open source is both politic and software model applied to the business model.

Is it a business model? No. I agree with Tim Bray. It isn't.

IMHO, it is shared values. Not ideology, but values.

I won't enumerate those but for one by example:

Many turtle graphic systems have been developed, but
<canvas/> works because there is one language we all speak:

HTML.

HTML's ubiquity is not based on a business model but on a model of how software should evolve for the betterment of those who use it: by always being there. That was the choice of those that built it. Read their books, read their blogs, read their lists, love their flames, style, mendacity, eagerness to challenge and eagerness to learn and eagerness to explore.

... but most importantly, to share.

For that reason, HTML is the language we all speak.

That did not come of business, it came because of what we wished for and worked for for each other: to communicate across the boundaries, to seek each other out, to want to know the differences, and to discover in all of that those things by which we are the same embracing those we choose as we choose. Freedom to know ourselves and each other isn't a business model. It is yearning for each other.

It is the mammal in you. The human.

The older I get the more I find I only really believe in two things: music and love for these reliably bring us together in yearning. The web is that desire made very large. While governments watch nervously, we have opened up the world to each other.

Cosmic evolution is choosing the means to find each other. That's all. That's enough. But if in all of that you feel an even higher power, know that it is not an uncommon feeling among the humans. If the wisdom of crowds is usually reliable, then it is wise to yearn for each other for it is something we all want to do. And if we feel in that or life in numbers there is a greater power of yearning that touches all, it is possibly true.

Self-directed evolution is cosmic evolution. You choose and become.

As ye olde Hippie bands sang, "Who Do You Love?"

Roll The Dice On Likable Choices: A Left Wing Lunatic Set of Amoral and Completely Unworkable Ideas Because No One Likes Me

Extremist Jihad Osama Bin Ladin Allah Muslim MightLikeNakedWomen... is that enough keywords to get the attention of the attention-obsessed with their hands on the dials?

You know who you are. And now, so does the rest of the world.

Now that I have your attention:

Re-elect Jimmy Carter for President

He is experienced, above moral reproach, hard working, well-educated, fiscally conservative, well-liked internationally and ... eligible. He can't be bribed because at his age, he doesn't need anything. He is an evangelical but not a neo-con. He is the perfect spoiler and has good hair. He can pronounce 'nuclear'. He is on a first name basis with most of the world's leaders and as far as we know, no one wants to assassinate him. With a solid staff and an eminent but trustworthy VP, he can do this. It would be fun to watch the attack dogs set on him because he could turn and say, "Now, there you go again." Priceless.

We elected him last time because we were tired of crooks and meanies. Anyone really happy about the current choices? Let's roll the dice on a person we all like.

Make Open Source Code Development Tax Deductible

Fess up to reality. The illusion of a frictionless community of zero cost code is made of models of the code itself, not models of the cost of owning the code. To improve that, reduce the amount of it you need, increase the quality of what you use and don't waste all of your time trying to measure that and control it. It is a ecosystem of cooperators who share costs for code evolution. Just stimulate it. It already knows how to do the rest.

I realize it's not in the nature of sales to espouse a commissionless system, but it may not be their choice. Software ecosystems don't require sales. They require non-negotiable price lists.

Services, of course, are negotiated. However...

Understand The Middle

If the top and bottom of the stack are free to use, all the IP and non-open source software is in the middle. That's a cosmic d'oh in the software development community, but I'm not quite sure the businessHeads get this. To control costs, you either

Accept a business model where the middle is commoditized (translation: no legacy interfaces, all standard business documents and forms, single roots for the ontologies, standard contracting and licensing, in short, very few negotiated options in the software costs, or

You measure and cut and name and send out an RFP with the best wishlist the organization or your consultant can produce. RFP authors take note: you have champagne tastes, you pay champage prices. If you can party on beer, prices are better.

Model one is cheaper. It means change for the organization but the mammals are quite adaptible. Be aware that the perceived value of local code is better costed as frequency of use/cost of use across some organizational boundary. The second term provides for the fact that low frequency cost hits even at higher costs are unavoidable because of the value proposition of the service. Software costs are not the source of the highest costs: the cost of use is.

Make Internet Legal Services A Tax Deductible Purchase

The problem of the middle is local variations on common processes. Accelerate the purchase of XBRL and other standard contracting systems. Gains here scale all the way through the economic model of in both government and business operations. Provide grants for government systems that provably conform to the open standards.

Real In Alabama

When Dr. Martin Luther King said,

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

my generation was embroiled in the painful integration of the schools. We were the guineas, the living material of a Petri dish of social change. For all said on both sides, it was our daily routines, our social interests that had to adapt to the strangers put among us by law and not always out of choice. For all the praises now of that time, it was a hard slog to get past stereotypes and baiting, but most hard to get past the fear bred into us. Fear was our inheritance, a legacy of separate worlds, separate cultures and separate destinies. With every riot in the halls, every protest, every fight behind the gym, every kid held up to a wall for money, or threatened with bricks, or threatened with worse, we thought it a terrible time and a wonderful time, so great were our differences. It would take generations to make Dr. King's dream real. So we thought.

When my daughter asked me last weekend what she should write for her school assignment for the holiday my generation had celebrated as Robert E. Lee Day, I told her that she should remember her black friends and that part of Dr. King's speech. She should understand that some dreams are realized, if imperfectly, if late, if only in part, but that part realized is to be celebrated. Here in 2006, almost 40 years and most of my life later, it isn't a dream. It is real. My son and my daughter are that dream.

For justice' sake, for the sake of our children, for the sake of all children, be hopeful, be patient, be determined. What is dreamed can become real. Fear may live on, but a generation of praiseworthy parents can choose not to will it to their children.

As Dr. King said rightly, "Thank God almighty."

Famous On the Internet

I see some are comparing the haves and have-nots of Wikipedia. Last time it was Google numbers. Yes, friends, the vanity of the web's super heroes is showing. Of course, being mammals and web geeks, we their fans, turn that into hierarchy:

"You aren't listed in WikiPedia? How CAN I be related to YOU???"

Tough life for sidekicks, too.

"Well, yeah, you sorta came up with the idea, but I WROTE THE CODE!!!"

There are two distinct forms of fame on the internet:

o Wikipedia famous: has a distinct wikipedia entry containing approved facts about the person of note. This is bounded fame. It's value proposition is location. In this sense, the fame is bounded within an ambient: typically, professional contributions establishing authority.

o Google famous: has no Wikipedia entries but many entries in various sites such that the person is often referenced in conversations. This fame confers no authority yet is unlimited. The fame cannot be bounded within an ambient as this form of fame has no operational boundary. This is folk fame, aka, legend.

Examples of either form of fame are easy to find. Since folk fame could become WikiPedia fame, the Wikipedia entry is a star on the walk of fame, not the restaurant at the end of the walk.