ic_temp

I'm a longtime LaunchBar user. It changed the way I used my Mac. But really all I used it for consistently was app launching and switching (and getting my saved terminal sessions).

Then not too long ago everyone started raving about QuickSilver. There's a tutorial and some screenshots.

Same idea (hit command-space and type key combos to start actions; it adapts to your behaviour), but plusplus. Chain choosing a document to an action to an application. Browse your music. Pictures of people from your addressbook. Nice! And a really pretty interface too (kinda).

Except... I didn't really get on with it. I don't know why. I think it was because LaunchBar was just so perfectly trained to my keystrokes that anything that knocked me off my stride was annoying. So I uninstalled it.

Until this morning. Or was it yesterday? [work collegue] was demoing the QuickSilver features I'd never bothered to dig out, and yes it was really impressive. I was tempted by being able to choose my music as easily as I selected an app. So I thought I'd make a concerted effort: no pain no gain. I trained QuickSilver to open my terminal sessions and acknowledge my muscle memorised keystrokes, started using it for stuff. And I've had it installed, and been using it, for about a day I guess.

I'm noticing things now about why it bugs me, slightly. It's a fraction of a second too slow, and my smooth command-space-key1-key2 foxes it, and drops a couple of keystrokes along to way. So I have to pause, which speedbumps me. The interface is too variable, I've no idea how to get a handle on anything. Training it is a lot of effort. Say anything you like about LaunchBar, but they've worked really hard on making the adaptive behaviour utterly perfect. It simultaneously adapts slowly (so you can see apps you *might* want in the dropdown) and adapts quickly (so you can budge it into a new behaviour with 2 consecutive choices) -- your choices don't get calcified, it's able to refresh itself. They've spent years getting this exactly right, and it really shows.

The thing is, we're mucking around with really nuanced human behaviour here. It's a really subtle interface difference that causes you to let an application drop into the background or have to *use* it, like you *use* iTunes say.

It's a similar difference between Apple's Finder of OS 9 days and the Mac OS X Finder. OS 9 Finder was simplicity and slickness itself. Fast, reliable, consistent (it didn't alter behind your back, *ever*) but trainable. Compare this with the OS X Finder: the folder info is stored in the parent folder, so if I make an alias, the folder I open from the alias looks *different* to the folder I open from the original. Windows move around. I try carefully to train it into a spatial finder, but how can I whiz through directories (holding option to close windows as I go) if they appear in slightly different places (or *might* appear in slightly different places) each time? It takes a little longer for each window to open up. I can get multiple windows open to the same folder.

Because I'm rigorous and make sure my windows are snug to the file contents and spatial, I don't really know or care what any of my documents are called. Well, kind of. I have to care more now I use Mac OS X.

That's how easy it is to spoil things.

And just as I switched to Mac OS X, it looked like I was switching to QuickSilver. More features tempting me over.

And then. And then. Just now. I get an email:

LaunchBar 4 Beta 1 has been released.

A major version release. Check out the feature list!

I install, I run it, train it a little, and... beautiful. An oiled, silent machine. It slides into the background. I don't even notice it's there. It's fast, responsive. I can feel my muscle memory coming back. Smooooth.

And the features! No awkward chaining of actions to search the web, no weird windows popping up: consistency. A couple of keystrokes, I'm doing searches, browsing my music, popping up AIM sessions to people. A consistent, responsive interface is a joy to behold. Sure there are features there, but they're hidden until I want them, and it hides in the corner of my computer: no extraneous functionality. Because it doesn't stick out with features flashing all over it, it feels like a Raskin-esque purchase-of-functionality rather than an application.

I must say, it's *gorgeous*. And you can really see the difference that a boat load of interaction design experience makes to an app. Wow.

Now. If we can somehow get the UI people at Apple to have this epiphany, maybe there's hope for the Finder, too.

Things happening, #2 in an occasional series:

With Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Mark Bernstein, we're doing a tutorial on weblogs for the hypertext community at Hypertext 2004. When? August this year. Where? Santa Cruz.

There's more about the conference (and the tutorials) in this interview with Jim Whitehead (general chair). More details coming soon.

I must say, I went to Hypertext 2003 in Nottingham last year. My notes are all online. It's a great conference: both hard-core build, and philosophy, and mixing together really nicely too. A really good mix. The thing about hypertext is... there's a whole community here that has been thinking about issues for the past 30 years, issues that the www is really only now tackling on a wide scale. And that's especially the case for the weblog world (cough blogosphere cough). I mean, talk about an instantiation of the text of texts, the reader/writer. And the tools to navigate it, find knowledge, keep found things found, adapt it and so on. Now the thing is, how to turn minds that have been thinking about hypertext for aaaages to the design contraints of the www (bottom-up, degradable, view-sourceable etc)? To be honest I think the weblog world has more to learn from the hypertext world than vice versa (I'm saying that as if they're different, which they're not, but more communication is always good), but we'll see.

Anyway, it should be an exciting tutorial. More another time.

Things happening, #1 in an occasional series:

I'm speaking at AIGA Experience Design in London tonight (Monday 29th). Bit late to say, but yknow. Anyway, I'll be covering the motivations and design ideas behind Glancing. Not so much nature-of-cyberspace this time.

Story idea.

Following reading The Symbolic Species where Deacon talks about two kinds of reference process in the brain. We generalise experience by association (a particular instance of the sense of a dog is associated with the sense of a more general dog). The remembered objects are also icons for the actual objects, and this is where our association meshwork maps onto the real world.

The association meshwork in our brains is like spacetime for gravity. Just as there's a graviton wavefront that expands outwards from the source (or a dent in the fabric, you might say), the associations are strongest near the source and then dilute further they spread out.

Associations leak, unfortunately. Again it's like gravity: We live on a 3 dimensional fracture in an 11 dimensional universe. Gravitons mostly travel along the 3 dimensional plane, but occassionally they leak out into the greater, wider cosmos.

The brain is a flattened slice of the conceptual world. Associations ripple through it, but sometimes they leak out into the higher dimensional, complex world. We do this ourselves of course, by jumping the association across an icon boundary. That's how we recognise objects in the physical world, and of course the association meshwork isn't space-limited by the skull -- there's extelligence too. But I'm talking about an accidental leak.

The association cursor (firefly!) travels from the sensory object to associated sensory objects, to symbols etc in the brain, but very occassionally and accidentally makes the jump to physical world objects and continues propagating there. Assocations, now divorced from conscious control, flow through real world associations, down karmic channels -- a leaked association to a letterbox will propagate into postal workers, french letters, anything red.

Leaked charge. Charge separation. A circulation.

There are whirlpools because the associations fall out at strange angles and carry momentum (recognition is a force, with magnitude and direction and pushback, it's not passive) and that gives the flow current. There are strange attractors and citadels. I could spend a hundred years on the complex topology of the association current leaked into the first, physical, world.

But all I really want to say is that the semiotical charge builds up in whales. Hey, there has to be some object or another at the centre of the attractor, why shouldn't it accumulate here?

It builds up and builds up. It feels like a storm, like charge separation across the atmosphere, between the land and the clouds. Whales are plum-black clouds most of the time. If you swim with them, you can feel the world *fizzing*.

When it builds up too much, the whales become hyperreal. The water around them becomes vivid, a lemonade of naming, sparks of recognition leaping off them and discharging.

And then of course, the semiotical charge arcs, lightning, the whale earths: the built-up recognition comes out as whale song, a superdense, superstrong, deafening condensation of naming, a torrential downpour of symbols and nouns and ontological entities, the combined effect of humanity's leaky associations.

The whale deflates; the song is over; the naming is done. Somewhere, something that wasn't delimited before has been objectified.

Darren is tracking the national press' continual unmasking of Belle de Jour over at LinkMachineGo: The Times say Belle isn't Toby Young; The Sunday Times say Belle is Christopher Hart; The Times claims it's Sarah Champion; Champion and Orlowski in The Times; The Independent says it's Andrew Orlowski (friend of Champion) and The Times says of course Belle's a fake; Sarah Champion in the Observer on what it's like to be mistakenly tagged at Belle de Jour.

Can I just say: ffs.

Can I just say: does it really matter? It would be better, I think, if Belle de Jour is real. I like real things. There's something about real things that points at, I don't know, a better world. A world in which people who don't necessary live online are none-the-less able to express themselves online, rather than cleverclever writer types indulging in pretending to be those people who don't usually express themselves online.

Because really, if Belle is fake, I don't really care. Unless (and this is the big unless) whoever's behind it comes out and says Ooh! Fooled you all! Ho Ho! Oooh! I've been playing around with the nature of identity online! Nobody knows who you are! Look at me! Nature of identity and all that! Like being human, isn't it? Isn't it? Just like life? Isn't it? Gosh, aren't I clever? Nature of identity? See? See?

In that case I shall be very upset indeed.

Of course we know the nature of identity and so on and so forth is mucked up online. In fact I would go so far to say as the confusion of real world identity is the defining characteristic of being online, and the thing we all first play with. We've been playing with it for the past 30 years.

cf. Joan, a psychologist (named Alex) who pretended to be a mute and crippled woman, spending time on Usenet women's groups (account from 1991). Mentioned here, along with earlier MUD identity-play stories from the 1980s.

cf. our own Kaycee Nicole Swenson (MeFi thread) of 2001, who brought identity-play to the weblog world

Among the first things we ever did at the computer lab at school was use the Econet commands to write stuff, anonymously, to people's screens.

Kids sit in chatrooms under assumed names and experiment with who they are, what sex they are, how old they are, how outgoing there are, what they've done. Kids.

Isn't it then kind of unseemly for grown adults working for national newspapers to be getting surprised about the very thing that children realise the first time they encounter cyberspace. Stop the presses! If I drop something, it falls down! Down I tell you! Good grief, if you stand closer it's easier to see you! And! And! And if you go to Beirut and I stay here in London, I'm telling you man, I can't see a hair on your head! My goodness, this affordance of embodiedness and physical nature will startle the chattering classes!

Can I just say again: ffs.

If Belle de Jour turns around, hoiks her knickers up and says (in a wonderfully literary way that I'm sorry I can't imitate), no she's not a London callgirl, but wasn't it iiiiiiiinteresting the whole nature of identity online, that in a sense the head of a glistening cock shines light onto the nature of human truthfulness and who we all are and fucking cetera, then she doesn't deserve a penny of that book deal. If on the other hand she says Yes I pretended to be a prostitute, because I wanted to pretend people paid money to squirt juice on my tits. Then fine. Actually, not just fine, great. Brilliant. Brilliant. That's what the internet's there for. Not for tits and squirting cocks. For people to express themselves, for us all to get the benefit of people's good writing without it being mediated by the press, and for us all to not take the nature of identity too seriously.

(Actually yes, for tits and squirting cocks too. Very important that bit.)

But definitely not to say that pretending to be something that you're not is a huge insight into human nature.

Aside from Belle's writing, possibly the best thing to come out of this is being able to watch The Times and the Independent competing to systematically unmask every single individual in Anglophone world until at last one of them says "fair cop guv you got me". How better to illustrate the utter ignorance of the press than to have them, without any pressure from us, confidently announce something as "news" one day only to renounce it the next, along with a story created by the mistake two days before? If it's become a competition, they've already lost. And how can we ever trust them on any other matter? When we hear who said what about Iraq? When they say whose fault a leak was? When they speculate about an affair?

The journalists are as stupid, as ill-informed, as not fact-checked, as spectulative and as free and easy with facts and lies as me and my friends in the pub (and believe me, I take pleasure in lying as much as possible). The difference is that these journalists pretend they're telling the truth, have a platform to pretend on, claim they're fact-checked when they're not, and are paid money to spectulate.

It's bollocks. All of it. An utter joke. If it's not bollocks and it's not a joke, it's downright dangerous. The nature of the press must change. I have an idea what it must change to, but that'll have to keep for another day.

I like the idea of LOAF. It's a neat concept. A way of saying: Out of all the people in my addressbook, do any of them claim this person who sent me email as someone they're corresponded with? This without actually giving away a list of who's in your addressbook.

Okay, so I love this (although it took me a few minutes to understand).

The first thing I like is that it's all local and private, and that's a benefit. I control my own list of who I trust to tell me who to trust. That list is not the same as my addressbook. It's smaller. What's neat about this system is that the list I make is the very same list that I send out. So we don't have just the addressbook sent out, but the trusted portion of it. Work I do to make my own life better automatically makes other people's lives better too.

The second thing I like is that it acknowledges that email happens over time. It's a dynamic. People's addressbooks change, but if I correspond a lot with someone I'll pretty much always have a recent and up-to-date version of their trusted list. There's no need to have a centralised service that is automatically pinged every time I decide to trust a new person. It just doesn't need to be that quick.

Wicked.

So, two further things. Can similar ideas be used against comment spam? TypeKey is one way, a centralised authentication service. Not identical ideas, because there are readers and weblogs, and more anonymous communication in comments. But similar levels of insight.

Second, I think to maintain a LOAF kind of system we need better interfaces in our clients to maintain whitelists implicitly. I already have a spam folder and an inbox. How about a quarantine folder too? All the emails that don't look like spam but are on my whitelist? (And an interface to move emails and senders between them.)

I think I might have a stalker. I just had another phone call on my mobile, from Private Number, and when I pick it up there's nothing there. After about 5-10 seconds, they put the phone down. This has happened twice before within the last week, and a voicemail too (silent, longer).

I would say obscene calls, but to be honest I just can't tell. The sound resolution is so bad that I can't tell what's happening in the background. It sounds like silence, but it could be heavy breathing behind the static. I dunno, what frequency is heavy breathing? How well does it compress? Can you hear it over mobiles?

Ah. I just happened again, as I was writing the last sentence, but they hung up immediately.

Do they get a kick out of me saying "Matt speaking?". A friend of mine used to dial random numbers in Tokyo using the school phonebox. It was free for us for the first 30 seconds, so long as we didn't press the 'the other person has answered button'. They couldn't hear us, but that wasn't the point. My friend got a kick out of hearing how Japanese people answered the phone sometime after midnight.

What gets me is that it's silent and the calls are so short. So it's not like I've got a friend sitting on their mobile in their pocket and accidentally dialing. Maybe somebody's trying to cold call me and it's not working.

I think it's a computer somewhere, gone wrong. Or maybe not gone wrong, trying to ask to help. It's the Beagle 2. Crashed on Mars, unable to use its normal channels, it's trying to make contact. All it can do is send radio to earth and spoof mobile calls by bouncing data off the satellites. If only I could understand it. If only Beagle could speak.

Oh yeah, I got my laptop back. Very quick, very nice. All works. Next is to get backups working properly on the server and I'll be happy to return things to how they were.

Something interesting about the 1975 film One of our dinosaurs is missing is that the entire dialogue of the movie is a palindrome.

The next thing that'll happen is that 3 minutes from now you'll discover an omission in IMDB.

(BDMI ni noissimo na revocsid ll'uoy won morf setunim 3 taht si neppah ll'taht gniht txen ehT. emordnilap a si eivom eht fo eugolaid eritne eht taht si gnissim si sruasonid ruo fo enO mlif 5791 eht tuoba gnitseretni gnihtemoS.)

When this started, last December, I called it a pause. That's where all my email's been going, during this interregnum, into a folder called pause, and everything I've needed to host temporarily, into a folder on my webserver of the same name. I figured you've got to be optimistic, right?, calling it a pause implies it's coming to an end at some point.

The hard drive, or at least the old data on the new hard drive, recovered, is mounted on the server in a filesystem rooted at /other. The other. The self.

My laptop, my main computer that I use for everything, that is set up to work in a way that keeps me moving quickly with everything I need around me, is called Rafiki. Rafiki means friend. Rafiki is also the name of the younger of my dogs (really Mother's dogs, but who's counting). Rafiki's major characteristic, other than being a dog, is that he runs in circles rather than actually going anywhere, spending large amounts of time herding the kitchen table.

We know it's herding, and he knows it's working. The table hasn't gone anywhere.

My laptop's off being fixed right now. The screen started flickering, a wire in the hinge getting distressed or something. Fatigue. The backlight losing control. Ghosts playing with the brightness control keys many times a second. I couldn't concentrate, and when the screen went black I couldn't see. That's no good, I said, and off it went. Not bad really, first problem in two years, but it's not terribly good timing. The pause continues. We're still here.

Before Newton there was always the chance we'd see a rainbow with the colours out of order. Not now. Our magic has to be a hundred times more subtle.

19.42

I'm just looking through the recovered data to see if I can notice anything missing. In the lost+found directory, which is where directories that have become detatched from the inode table go, there's a monster load of data (in /other/usr/lost+found/#1293568). Well, that turns out to be the old /usr/local directory, all the site-wide stuff the machine really needs to be able to run at all. That explains a few things, that's pretty significant damage.

Not sure how much else is gone. The user's home directories seem pretty intact, but to be honest I've completely forgotten what I'm supposed to be looking for. It all looks pretty promising anyway.

Phew.

It's weird. I'm sitting at the other side of the same table I was sitting at when I was putting the replacement server together. A completely different mood. A little lighter in the pocket, but otherwise much cheerier all round.

Putting the data back in place is going to take a not insignificant amount of time. But I think that's a job for another day -- when I reboot, the box and both drives come up fine. Time to head home.

19.26

These two lines in /etc/fstab

/dev/ad1s1c /other ufs rw 2 3
/dev/ad1s1e /other/usr ufs rw 2 3

and it's back. We're there. I can see it all. Almost in tears, it's all back.

Now playing: Homeless (Paul Simon, Graceland). And now Crazy Love, Vol II.

19.11

ad0: 78167MB [158816/16/63] at ata0-master UDMA100
ad1: 57277MB [116374/16/63] at ata0-slave UDMA100

Wicked.

I'm following the handbook:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disks-adding.html
(to add the physical disk)

and

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mount-unmount.html
(to get it to mount)

Oh, and

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/disk-organization.html

(I don't really understand what I'm doing.)

19.05

The worst thing about having no monitor plugged into the server is I've no idea whether it's working or not. There could be messages coming out saying it's happily chewing up both drives for all I know. I just have to wait a few minutes and see if I can ssh in. Assuming ssh comes up.

And... I'M IN!

Right, sod this sitting on the floor. I'm going to grab a coke and a comfy chair and mount the drive from there.

19.04

Boot time.

18.50

Drives in, wired up. Suddenly think, didn't one of those articles mention master and slave? What the hell are master and slave? Read more. What the hell is cable select? Take the drives out. Cable select means cable special stuff. I only have one cable with two plugs on it. Um. Okay, change the jumpers. The first drive, the historicalfact one I bought to replace the dead drive, has jumpers I can get out, a groove round the edge of the tiny plastic sheath that fits over the pins.

I drop it.

I can't find it. There are holes all over the floor (I'm working on my coat to avoid losing any screws). A quick panic, then I find it and slip it over the 'master' pins.

Now the other drive, which is currently set as master and needs this tiny piece of plastic moved if it's going to become a slave. This piece doesn't have the groove. And I cut my finger nails this morning. And I've been fighting with it for five minutes now.

Now playing The Boy in the Bubble. Perhaps that'll help.

A minute later: It worked. Of course I now have to look after the jumper in my fantastic filing system until such time in a year I need this drive to be a master again. Well, that'll happen.

18.21

bash$ sudo su -
Password:
www# halt
Connection to www.historicalfact.com closed by remote host.
Connection to www.historicalfact.com closed.
[Process exited - exit code 255]

18.18

Arrived. The drive arrived this morning, special delivery.

There aren't any keyboard+monitors (I begin to typo 'minotaurs') available. I'll have to do this blind, and over the free wireless.

I open my laptop and the screen is failing, flickering again. It takes a few seconds and a shake for the wires to fall into place and start worked again.

(I can never use the damn combination locks. I had to ask again which way to turn. I'll go back and try now.)

Now playing: The Boy With The Arab Strap, to close the loop. Album just started.

East London, as always, feels like a pilgrimage. Walking here from the DLR round the 30ft resolution corners by the 30ft resolution railway-in-the-sky I listened to Alone in Kyoto (Air) from Lost in Translation.

The journey is the destination.

(I have wireless connectivity from the datafloor today, so I'll post my comments semi-live. There's a backlog first however.)

The drive with recovered data should arrive tomorrow, before noon. I'll be able to go down and put it in the server tomorrow night. After that, it's a matter of sorting through the data and figuring out what's important and where it goes. (Apparently there's a lot of unattached, unnamed data in lost+found.)

The original drive failed on 21 December 2003, over ten weeks ago.

Pretty often I transfer files between my Mac (personal computer, not connected to the work network) and my work PC using a usb key. Quite reasonably I'm not allowed to connect my Mac to the network because it's not managed by corporate folk, and using the little usb drive thing isn't too tedious.

But this must be a pretty common use, right? Transferring between two computers by sneakernet.

The problem is, networking is difficult and annoying to set up. Mapping drives, mounting drives, sharing things, all quite hard. So here are two ways that would be better.

1. A kind of hardware Apple Rendezvous thing that sets an ad hoc wireless network that lets you drag files from computer to computer. That kinda okay, but still old-paradigm: we're still thinking about conduits and moving from machine to machine. Rubbish. So instead:

2. Ad hoc shared drive. Two usb keys connected by Bluetooth or maybe even IrDA. They're just like normal usb drives except - get this - they're conceptually the same drive. The exact same data is on both. So drag a file onto the drive onto computer A and it's immediately available on the mounted usb drive on computer B.

The advantage of system 2 is there's no networking of the computers involved, there's no security breach (the drive acts like a quarantine), and drivers for usb drives is a solved problem, so joining the two things together is completely transparent.

Who can make this for me?

Good news from the data recovery company -- we're going to get it all back. All of it.

Well, almost all of it. I've been given a list of files they think they can recover. The damage to those files should be slight, less than 0.01% (ie they don't have guaranteed integrity). Any jpegs are fine because they're verified, and the text files have all been converted to ascii, but that's fine too. There's also a list of files that can't be recovered, but that's only 20kb versus the 45Mb file of recoverable stuff. Of course what we *don't* know is if there are any directories or files there that don't show up and have been lost completely. From what they say there probably aren't any (many), but I didn't understand that bit too well. Certainly wherever I jump to in the list of recoverable files then what I expect to see there is indeed there.

So it's been quite a weird few weeks with this data recovery. It all looked okay, then it looked terrible when they said it was probably completely screwed and I'd only get a little back. Then each time I talk to them it gets better and better, and there'll be a drive in the post in the next few days. Crikey. Well, after I pay them.

The data recovery company are currently uploading to my FTP server a list of files they think can be recovered from my defunct hard drive.

List includes ghost files (files that were recently deleted) and files with unknown integrity. Fortunately most things are in plain text so it should be fairly easy to check whether anything's dangerously broken.

I'm still not sure what proportion of files we'll get back, or even what proportion of those recovered will be intact. We'll see, we'll see. (It's been about 10 weeks. I can wait another few days.)

God damn! Excellent! Now this is the net changing politics. Downing Street Says: UK gov lobby briefings disintermediated and put straight online. Government transparency taken there by the citizen. This is why we're not customers or consumers of government, because people can participate in the conversation itself by acting to improve the conduit, and it's good for everyone. Citizens. Read the about page. Days like this I'm proud to live in the UK. Well done people.