mverdone

I really like dead technology. Obsolete ideas are really interesting because there’s always a story behind them: why were they made, why were they maintained, and where were they killed?

I’m on record as an ironic fan of Swatch Internet Time, a bizarre invention of the early nineties that consisted of timezone-free time format that counted from zero to 999 every day. It looked like this:

@846

It was basically a marketing concept from Swatch based on the idea that we’d spend so much time online chatting with people from other timezones that synchronizing time would be a huge problem. It is a problem now, but not one to warrant the invention of an alternate, metric time format. Most online interactions have become asynchronous.

Every time I think about Swatch Internet Time I think about all the people who came up with and promoted that idea, their reasons for doing so, and the spectacular hubris of its failure and obsolescence.

A discussion at work about theoretically most pointless “fuck yeah” tumblr blogs inspired me to create one: fuckyeahwebsafecolors.tumblr.com. If you’re not an old school Internet nerd you probably won’t get it. Basically, back in the day computers were embarrassingly limited in that they could only display 256 colours on the screen at a time. When you tried to display more than that, you would get ugly hatch-mark patterns on the screen. (You can see this yet in animated GIFs which are also limited to 256 colours and are making some sort of ironic-retro-art comeback).

After some intense thinking the brains of the World Wide Web decided on a palette of 216 “web-safe colors.” The theory was that all websites in the world would agree to use only these 216 colours in order to prevent the horrors of dithering. The remaining 40 colours of the palette were left to the operating system to do as was its wont.

The plan never really worked, though, because any non-web application on the screen would also attempt to allocate some of the computer’s 256 colors, and stomp all over the web-safe palette, thus bringing on the unsightly hash marks. Not only that, the web-safe palette was made up of a lot of really ugly, bright, clashing colours.

The era of web-safe colours was over quickly. New display systems came on the market within a couple of years that were capable of displaying 16.7 million colours simultaneously. Websites using web-safe palettes suddenly looked hilariously out-of-date. The whole concept, now irrelevant, vanished.

At fuckeyeahwebsafecolors.tumblr.com we’ll be going through the web-safe colors, one at a time, with no commentary. I urge you to meditate on the colors. What do they say to you?

While procrastinating from vacuuming my apartment (which is tiny and can be vacuumed in ten minutes but yes I am that lazy) I made these backgrounds. I am quite pleased with them. Click to embiggen to 1680×1050 res.     I got the textures from a few places, like from Dioma on DeviantArt. (Another pack by Dioma). And Playingwithbrushes on flickr.

Actually, most of the stuff in Lion is really, really awesome and I’m glad I upgraded. However, here are some of the WTF’s that nobody is talking about:

• Built-in Emoji characters! If you had OS X Lion you would see that this glyph is a little smiling pile of poop: 💩
• You have to download Java as a separate installer, but once you do Minecraft performance is improved! (maybe)
• In the User Switcher menu, user icons are now inside circles. Because circles are awesome.
• Ships with Python 2.7.1 (though any sane person would disregard that and install an official package, or compile it via MacPorts the way God intended)
• Broken compatibility with RME professional audio interfaces so you can go to their forum and scream like a maniac until they fix it fix it fix it fix it fix it…
• It’s 64 bit! You don’t know what that means but more bits sounds great!
• Text autocorrector will correct your text or, failing that, transform German and French words into utterly wrong English words and mess up your tweets until you turn it off. (System Preferences -> Language & Text -> Text -> Correct spelling automatically (unckeck))
• Finder is vastly changed with awkward font sizing in UI elements, and complete failure to respond to Back, Forward, or Up trackpad gestures (I mean, why would you want to navigate back or up in your filesystem amirite?)
• By default new Finder windows open an All My Files view which sorts by file type and puts the most recently added photos of you totally wasted at a party at the top of the window in front of your boss because you’re doing a presentation and are connected to the projector aaaaaaaaaahhhh!
• Safari is improved or something I dunno you use Google Chrome, right? You don’t? What the heck is wrong with you?
• You know that Finder view with all the files on display and they flip in from left to right? I think it’s called Coverflow, only it’s for files. Dear Fileflow: why do you still exist?!

Last weekend we pretended to be über-tourists and went to the Berlin Beer Festival. Here are pictures to prove it. Here is our drinking team. The way this works is when you enter the Bier Meile (which is a mile-long stretch of beer tents and bars) you buy a glass. It costs you 3.50 EUR. Then you get that glass filled as many times as you are able as you walk down the Bier Meile. If you get out the other end, you win. They also had a lot of good, greasy foodstuffs. I took a lot of pictures of that. Here is a gigantic barbeque. Two kinds of sausage, boulette (meatballs), and steaks are all frying up. You buy whatever you want and they give it to you in a bun. Here a woman is serving beer out of a giant novelty barrel. This beer was great. It was a Kellerbier, meaning a beer that was left in the cellar for too long as has started to get a bit crazy tasting. It’s from an unpronounceable place in Poland. This poor monk got lost in the giant crowds of drinkers. He just wanted to hock his strawberry beer. (It was too sweet, but alright.) This is lard on bread. It’s some kind of Polish thing. Nobody tried to eat it. This sausage was made with horse meat. It did not look or taste noticeably different from regular pig-based sausage. Best hat award. Deep fried battered cauliflower in mustard sauce. I recall my grandmother making this, which is odd because she was Italian, not German. This tasted as good as anything battered and deep fried tastes, which is pretty damn good. So much meat. I’ve never seen steaks cooked on a rotisserie. This is apparently a Thüringer thing. Those crazy Thüringers! Here’s me with a pickle I bought because you can just do that. The women behind me were selling pickles from barrels. The pickle was amazing and was a great match with all the beer. Overall: the Berlin Beer Festival is a lot of fun. Plan to go in the early afternoon and get your drinking done early, before the Schlager DJs really get in gear, and the crowd of Bavarian tourists gets out-of-hand drunk. At that point things are just too weird.

I paid almost 30 Euro for this book when it was new (in hardcover!) and never have I felt so cheated by so-called serious literature. Žižek may be even worse than Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which has been my perenial example of serious literature that is actually trite garbage.

Basically, Žižek is a philosopher guy who studied a lot of Lacan and is basically so sure that Lacan was right about everything, he can develop a Lacanian argument about anything.

But, see, Žižek is an aesthetic philosopher (at least that’s what my more-learned, philosophy-reading, PhD-having friend told me), meaning that he doesn’t actually have to develop arguments. If an argument feels right, then it is right. Because beauty is truth.

I call it shotgun philosophy: fire your poorly-conceived thoughts randomly at anything that moves hoping to wound your opponents’ ideas (and have your petulant followers gut it and skin the carcass next week).

And such wonderful shot fills Žižek’s cannon! The man can’t go a sentence without dropping a six-syllable bomb, or contrasting a word against an italicized version of itself. The quotes go on for pages at a time, all seemingly out of context. And the footnotes. Oh God, the footnotes.

What is Žižek actually saying? It’s hard to tell but the general themes that I can deduce are as follows:

• politicians are bad
• democracy is bad
• modern art is bad
• Ghandi was an idiot
• Christianity is… something, hard to tell if it’s good or bad
• Christian atheism is good (don’t ask me to explain it)
• cinema is bad
• Marxism and communism are unequivocably good

Interestingly enough, Zizek does not talk about how miserably communism failed in this book.

Once in a while Žižek’s dose of amphetamines wears off and he approaches some degree of lucidity. At one of these points he embarks on a full-scale philosophic takedown of Kung-Fu Panda. Žižek puts this fun little kids’ movie into the centre of a critical barrage that somehow aligns the eponymous panda in the movie with George W. Bush and the dearth of spiritual belief in modern society. This is sad because I hear that Kung-Fu Panda was actually a pretty great movie.

It’s bad. It’s bad bad bad. It’s navel-gazing, head-up-the-ass philosophy. It’s impenetrable and willfully obscure. It’s ideological (a word that Žižek loves). It’s cynical and glum.

This book’s best use is to hammer in nails. I have used it so. The dents in the book’s spine look quite nice. The book, thus, has found its purpose.

I am proud to announce Python Twitter Tools 1.6, with awesome new features:

• twitter-log: a new command-line tool to dump all of the tweets you ever tweeted to a text file for storage and archiving
• stream support: with the new TwitterStream class you can write Python applications that make use of the Twitter Stream API for realtime updates. Try the twitter-stream-example program to dump all the tweets in the “sample” stream to your terminal. Neat!
• Python 3 support: The twitter distribution in PyPI now supports Python 2.6+ and Python 3.2+ using the same codebase. You don’t have to use the “twitter3″ package anymore. Python Twitter Tools is now future-proof.

As always this is available on the Python Twitter Tools homepage or in PyPI.

Is that all (folks?)

You might have noticed my last post/rant “Screw Twitter”. Yeah. Truth is, the Twitter API is still awesome and I had a lot of fun working with it. However, I disagree with Twitter’s decisions and recent policy changes over their use of the API and with the data that flows through Twitter. It seems to me that we cannot allow such a powerful communications channel to reside in the hands of one company. And that isn’t even Twitter as a corporation’s fault. It’s just… corporations like money, and information companies will naturally control information flow to make money. That’s normal. So: Python Twitter Tools may have bugfix releases (and I may be tempted to add features here and there) but I think I will spend my time on other projects. (No, not Minecraft.)

Okay right, let’s go.

So I make this Python Twitter Tools library which, for the layman, is a piece of software that lets other people write programs that interface with Twitter more easily. I’m quite proud of it.

Twitter is nice because they provide an API: a way for programs to access data about twitter messages and users. They don’t have to do this, but they do, and the various Twitter-enabled applications are one key that made Twitter so successful.

One killer thing about Twitter is that you can use it on your iPhone or Android phone. Back in the day the best way to do that was with Twitter client programs. Other companies built programs just for interfacing with Twitter, and because they were competing with each other, the clients got better and better. All of these clients are dependent on the Twitter API to send and receive messages.

Recently Twitter bought the best third-party Twitter client company and released a new version as the “official” Twitter desktop and iPhone client. That’s fine. It will help them get more users.

What’s less cool is that they have started saying worrying things about the use of their API. Amongst other things they don’t want other companies making Twitter clients anymore.

Their reasoning is simple: User Experience. They want their official clients to be the only gateway to the Twitter ecosystem. Other programs are free to interact with the API but their functions must be different than merely displaying and posting messages.

Twitter controls which applications are allowed to connect with their API, and they can shut off a “master switch” and deny an application access outright.

This stinks.

I’ve just finished reading Tim Wu’s book “The Master Switch” which deals with the history and future of communcations mediums. In virtually all cases, systems start out as open, and then become closed monopolies over time. Closed monopolies then stifle innovation and limit service to increase profit.

Terrifying things have been done in the name of User Experience.

It used to be that there were no telephone jacks. All telephones in the United States were built and installed by AT&T. You simply could not connect any other devices to the telephone line.

The American government, of course, suspected this was not very fair and confronted AT&T, but AT&T’s reasoning was simple: they could not guarantee a decent User Experience if the telephone device was not built by AT&T. Users would get angry at their shoddily-made telephones and blame the network! Callers to those with badly constructed phones would also think badly of the AT&T system.

Did this stop innovation? Yes. For example, Bell Labs had built a telephone answering machine as early as the 1950′s, but AT&T decided they were not interested in selling it. Nobody else could build one because it would be illegal to connect the device. Similarly, modems: those devices that started the home-Internet revolution could never be used in a monopolistic AT&T system.

It was only when AT&T was forcibly dismembered in anti-trust hearings that the telecommunications market exploded with innovation. Innovation that lead in many ways to the Internet.

So then we have Twitter.

Twitter was always closed. There was always one company at the core of the service, and so we can’t claim it was ever truly open. However, Twitter users and Twitter client developers trusted that the Twitter network would stay benevolent. Somehow it would allow “common carriage”: to allow any type of short message to travel its networks and any type of software to send and consume messages. This is no longer the case.

Twitter is closing inward to make money.

They are legally allowed to do this, but that doesn’t make it ethical.

What does this mean? Well, personally it means I don’t have much taste to further develop my Twitter library and applications because I don’t want to support an enterprise closing in on itself. (My code is open source so I trust others will take it and extend it for their own uses).

The last Twitter application I built was an exporter. With a single command you can dump all of your twitter messages to a text file. This can be technically done though there are some statements in the API “Rules of the Road” which suggest this might not be allowed. Which begs the question, do your own your own tweets? I’d say copy them out now while you still can.

Hopefully, someday, there will be an open and distributed short messaging system that one can then import their messages into. But that’s a much larger project I’m still thinking about…

You thought it was dead, didn’t you? Well, I finally got around to fixing a few really annoying and obscure bugs, and integrating some outstanding patches. After an eight-month wait, Python Twitter Tools 1.5 has been released. New feature:

• New list and mylist commands let you query and view Twitter lists (patch by Anton P. Linevich)

I’m also happy to announce that Python Twitter Tools is heavily used by a recent O’Reilly book: Mining the Social Web. Looks like a really cool title, too. Python Twitter Tools is, as always, available in PyPI or from the project homepage.

Picture: Harajuku fashion from the totally insane Ridsnap. So I was in a café in Berlin, drinking an Americano, reading in Le Monde (en français) about the indiscretions of the Italian prime minister and I had an epiphantic flash-view of myself from the outside. I realized I have never been so fucking Eurotrash in my life. Putting it in words like that makes me feel like I’ve just rolled out of a later William Gibson novel. That’s me: a post-national. An upper-middle-class geekling having achieved socio-cultural escape velocity. And why not? I’ve always felt out of touch with every scene I’ve rolled into. Might as well roll them all together. Be your own scene, right? Later I’ll eat Vietnamese food and maybe drink Turkish liquor and read manga to cement my post-cultural status. Let’s implode culture until it births something new and unintelligible.

I made a mix for my friend Jeremy’s mix tumblr blog thing “Slackula Radio“. Given that most of the mixes so far have been indie rock, drone, and experimental, I decided to buck the trend and submit an electronic music mix full of rave horns, dreamy pads, and heavy beats. Because bucking the trend is how I do. Listen to my mix: Post Raver on Slackula Radio