old blog

When you are the only one in your unit with advanced computer skills, it is easy to be convinced that you are in a position of power and control. What better way to exercise the power than creating as many dependencies on your talents as possible and becoming indispensable?

But that is a very slippery slope, like all temptations of power. As you get carried away and take on more duties (run the server - update the server - install the CMS - update the CMS - run the web site - run another web site - and so on and on), the amount of time you can spend on each inevitably declines. Your time is spread thin, as is your knowledge and familiarity with the projects - a passing fix here, a quick patch there.

So when the things start breaking, you are absolutely screwed. Each demands more attention than you can spare and more knowledge than you have. It is a vicious circle - a pyramid scheme where you manage to cheat yourself out of all the advantages of your privileged knowledgeable position, and instead appear to your colleagues, at the end of all your failures, as an incompetent fraud who doesn't know how to handle the challenges and meet deadlines.

So draw the line early. If you are a one (wo)man team, take on just enough for one, not more. Focus on the projects where you know the most and delegate or kill the others. Play it like a chess game - look at every piece on the board, determine the strength of your position, and move all your pieces to strike in one place, not all over the board.

Spread yourself too thin, and you will never have enough time to focus on one thing long enough to become really good at it. And you will never truly enjoy your work if you are not good at what you do.

Not every book is based on good science rather than anecdotes or conjecture. When it is scientific, it is rarely well written. When well written, it is not always provocative and novel. And the rarest of all gifts, few provocative academic books pass the test of who-the-fuck-cares-besides-your-tenure-committee.

Paul Hawken's Blessed unrest is unique in that it is all of the above - factual, precise, fresh, meaningful, and timely. The main argument is delivered with precision, elegance and poise. The greatest social movement that is the focus of the book is the one with no name and no unifying ideology. It is a bottom-up movement that includes a variety of people, causes, and geographies - social rights, working rights, social equality, transparency, preservation, sustainability. My favorite element of the argument is that Hawken convincingly shows that social movements of the past and the environmental movements of today are two sides of the same coin. The less privileged strata of society are usually the people who suffer the most from pollution, deforestation, erosion and other forms of environmental degradation. The same ideology of exploitation is applied to people and nature.

The answer can be summarized in one word - sustainability (a word that, according to Hawken, Exxon Mobil at some moment explicitly prohibited in its printed materials, while sponsoring "skeptics for hire" to deny climate change). Growth that is couched in terms of greater creativity not in terms of ever-increasing consumerism requiring more and more natural resources. Change that is bottom-up rather than top-down. Local solutions to global problems.

The movement is not a rigid structure with a centre of command - it is a distributed global ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of organizations. The book ends with a meticulously organized taxonomy of these organizations that takes about a hundred pages. This is just the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg itself is online - a dynamic community with its own discussions boards, groups, and other tools expected of a modern social media network site. It is the finest and the most prominent example of an ever-growing endeavor that helps us move "from a world created by privilege to a world created by community".

In 2000, I wanted my own web page. Getting one felt like magic. Then I wanted my own site. Another magical experience. Then my own virtual server. More magic. Then a chunk of a real server that somebody else managed. Kind of magical. Finally, a server all to myself to administer. Today it is finally up and running, in all its 16-virtual-cores, 2-terabytes-of-online-storage, 90-gigaflops-of-computing-power glory.

So I am looking for an open-source CMS to run on it; and given Drupal's recent runaway success with kings and presidents alike, Drupal is my top choice. So I am reading e-books about Drupal; and I come across a description of Drupal's architecture and its place in the "software stack".

The Drupal code is written in PHP, a programming language designed to deliver dynamic content (rather than static HTML). The application relies on the data in the stack layer below it - the database layer, in Drupal's case MySQL. Deeper still below that is the web server layer, enabling both PHP and MySQL function over the Internet (in our case, the web server is running on Apache). At the very bottom, the web server is embedded in the operating system (we use Mac OS X Server, but it could be Windows, UNIX, or Linux). So all in all, four layers:

PHP > MySQL > Apache > Mac OS X

You could extend the stack both up and down. The content management administrator doesn't interact directly with the PHP code; he or she normally uses a graphic user interface (GUI) to access the application. The administrator sets up the experience for the end users, who interact with the system through their own GUI. On the other end, for the operating system to run, the server hardware must have some basic software (=firmware) that allows to install the operating system, and check the integrity of the hardware. So the extended stack is more like this:

End user GUI > Administrator GUI > Application > Database > Operating System > Firmware

The IT staff's goal is to make as much of the stack invisible to the end user. The goal of the advanced user is to understand how the stack functions as far down as possible. The deeper you can reach, the more power you have.

But the beauty of today's situation is that one can have power even with just top-of-the-stack access. Modern servers come ready with the whole stack set up and ready to go. There is open source software for all the layers of the stack. Besides the depth, there is breadth - there are open source applications for almost everything under the sun. Which means the end user no longer needs to dive into the stack and get lost in heady geeky things. They can stay on top of the stack and focus on the task no one else can do: creating and organizing content.

Published on the old blog on December 23, 2009

Thirteen years ago I made my first trip abroad - three weeks at a language school in Brighton, UK. I had to obtain a British visa. It took two interviews and two visa officers to grant a visa. The second officer started the interview with a let's-get-to-the-heart-of-the-matter question: "Why did you give our visa officer a cookery book?"

It wasn't a cookery book. It was the project that I was working on - relating culinary traditions and culture, showing food as an integral part of history, culture, and ultimately language use. What better way to savor them than through food?

I was happy to find out that my two favorite things from Portugal - fado music and port wine - are related, too. Let me tell you how.

Fado is at least a couple of centuries old. It has its roots in Afro-Brazilian music (Brazil being a Portuguese colony at the time). It means fate or destiny in Portuguese. Fado develops in Lisbon and Coimbra in bars, taverns, and brothels - a folk tradition yet a distinctly urban one. Almost always performed in a minor key, it is a melancholic song with profound lyrics about life, love, and death.

Fado singers can be accompanied by various instruments, but almost always by two types of guitar - the familiar Spanish six string version (against the common wisdom of Northern Portugal that only bad wind and bad marriages come from Spain*) and then a more exotic twelve string Portuguese guitar. This instrument is a variation on the English lute - it comes to portugal via Porto, the port city at the mouth of river Douro, a trade center. Porto the city is known best for its eponymous staple - the port wine. The port wine growing region (a time-honored tradition, demarcated a century before Bordeaux) is the upper basin of Douro, in the mountains near the Spanish border. For centuries, Britain was the chief consumer of port wine; British merchants took great care to control not only wine trade, but wine production as well. The names of the major port houses bear witness to it to this day - Graham, Warre, Dow, Taylor Fladgate, Churchill, Sandeman, Smith Woodhouse.

Port deserves its own story - at least one, possibly many - best told by the port makers, such as the Symington family. Let's get back fado. There are many phenomenal fado singers, past and current; my favorite is Mariza. Her 2008 concert in Lisbon is superb. You can find it on iTunes, and have instant gratification; but it is best to have patience and get the CD version because it comes with a second disc - a DVD with a documentary called "Mariza and the story of fado".

The second visa officer understood the fun of relating food and culture. Before long, I had her laughing and smiling. When the ice was broken, I knew for sure my visa application would not be rejected.

*De Espanha, nem bom vento, nem bom casamento

In a famous piece titled On viewing rhetoric as epistemic, Robert Scott writes:

The attractiveness of the analytic ideal, ordinarily only dimly grasped but nonetheless active in the rhetoric of those who deem truth as prior and enabling, lies in the smuggling of the sense of certainty into human affairs

This is one of my favorite papers ever written on communication or on rhetoric; but that's beside the point. The point is about smuggling certainty into human affairs.

A lot of times we drag certainty in in the metaphors we use. What do we liken our lives to? A road. A path. Our lives do indeed have a beginning and end; but that's where the likeness ends. Our lives are not linear; nor are they marked clearly so one know where to proceed next. Maybe an old 2D arcade game is a more realistic metaphor - dodging enemies all the time, not knowing what's coming next, things getting nastier over time, getting slaughtered every now and then. Except of course you can't reload the game in real life (that's where this metaphor ends, too - they all do).

Some scientists somewhere once asked people if they see their lives as similar to a game of cards or a game of chess. Most picked chess, quite mistakenly. When was the last time you knew the location of all your opponents pieces? Even the game of cards analogy is overly optimistic: at least in cards a jack is a jack and is always below a queen. Real life is even more random.

Which finally brings me to my point: we have bad metaphors for education, too. We think of it as a building. Getting bigger and prettier over time. Growing from a foundation. Orderly with a top to bottom hierarchy - simple facts at the bottom, differential calculus at the top.

I don't feel like my education is like that. The foundation has crumbled away. What I learned when I was ten I could not recall now - at least no more than 10% of it. I used to be fluent in Spanish. I used to know trigonometry. I used to be able to write in hiragana. No more.

And yet I am surprisingly comfortable with my current level of knowledge. I think of myself as an icebreaker - ploughing through the unknown, with enough power to crunch through any problem, one at a time. Loose ice stays loose in my path for a while, then freezes over again. Over time, I gain skill in navigation, a knowledge of the terrain, and maybe even a more powerful engine to run faster and through thicker ice. But I know I will never crush all the ice. The goal is to never be locked in it, not to crush it all.

The icebreaker metaphor lets you forget without feeling guilty. Just keep moving and don't let the water freeze around you, and the rest will take care of itself.

Published on the old blog on June 22, 2009

Today I am going to revisit some of my basic How to be successful on the web mantras:

form is nothing. content is nothing. audience is everything
Meaning you could have the best graphic design layout, but with sucky content it doesn't matter. And then you can have spectacular content, but if readers can't access it nor contribute to it, it is a waste of time, too.

for every good idea, there is already an implementation
You want a photoblog? There are tons of open source PHP / MySQL (or Python / Ruby / Perl if you prefer) applications available. Want Flickr exports? There are already plugins that do that. Want to change the layout? Find a theme that would do it. Do not write new code unless you absolutely have to.

if your solution requires manual data entry, find another solution
This is really a variation on the previous rule of no custom code development. Unless you have some really unique data, the stuff that you need is already somewhere, typed up and ready to go. Find a way to acquire it.

the wider the user base, the better the product
Works this way with trails - come to a fork on a trail, not sure which one to take - always take the more trodden one (metaphorically of course the opposite is true, but that's a different story). If choosing between two platforms, pick the one with the larger user community - more people to report bugs, fix the code, write plugins, answer your questions on forums, and develop custom themes.

you gain by giving away
Putting your work online - not all of it, not in full resolution - but enough to give people a flavor of what you do and make them want to eat more - is the quickest, cheapest and the most flexible way to advertise your talents. Plus it makes you look cutting edge - and actually does make you cutting edge. Even if you do a little bit of it, you are still ahead of the game - even in 2009. An amazing number people still consider it unnecessary, too complicated, or worst of all, below them. Getty Images sneered at the microstock model when it appeared. Then they re-thought it and bought the most successful microstock agency. Now that business is pulling them through the crisis as the traditional macro stock market is dwindling and tightening.

Published on the old blog on June 12, 2009

I used to waste hours of my life playing The Batte of Wesnoth, a strategy conquest game. Some of the maps in the game are hidden: you start with a tiny part of the terrain open and visible, the rest covered in dense fog. Enemies jump out of the fog where you least expect them. As you move your troops, the explored terrain grows, more of the map becomes visible. Yet there are still too many unknowns to predict the flow and the position of new enemies. And then at some point - while a sizable part of the map is still covered in fog - you just know it all, and the enemy does not stand a chance. For practical purposes, a clear view of maybe three fourths of the terrain is as good as the complete view.

And that reminds me of the famous complexity theory thought experiment - imagine a thousand beads on the floor. They are disconnected. You take a piece of string, randomly select any two and connect them. Then you repeat the procedure again and again, until small clusters start forming - 2 beads here, 3 here, 4 over there... And then you reach a point when almost every bead is in a cluster, big or small; but there are still dozens of clusters. And finally with just a few more iterations everything coagulates into one giant cluster. You have not at all exhausted all the possible connections between the beads, far from it; yet everything is connected, albeit not necessarily directly, to everything else. That transition is not unlike the Eureka moment of playing the game and all of a sudden "knowing" the whole map.

So what kind of "knowing" are we talking about? What does it mean to say that somebody knows their stuff? Well, we only make knowledge claims about patterned phenomena. Nobody in their right mind would claim knowing a sandpile, a primarily chaotic system. Up in the Bezengi area of the Caucusus mountains is the 18 kilometer long Bezengi glacier, the longest in the Caucasus. To get to the base camps for many of the climbs, you have to walk up the glacier for about ten kilometers. It is very monotonous; everything looks the same the whole time, especially to a new comer. There is no discernible pattern. Part of the glacier may collapse overnight, shifting the optimal path a hundred yards to the left. It is hard to "know" the glacier.

But even there you can get to a point that you run up and down the glacier in dense fog without a compass and know exactly where you are going. You have learned to recognize the subtle patterns of the system, same as you would "know" a big city. You don't really "know" every street, every house, every station; but with enough knowledge about some of them (like the beads connections reaching a transition) you can predict the rest of them and find them with an almost 100% accuracy. It is almost like you have latent knowledge of every node in the system, based on the positions of some of the nodes and the overall structural principles of the system. This is what Confucius was talking about it when he said, only those who can imagine the three other corners of a quadrant when shown one corner are worthy of being a student.

For years and years and years I have been pushing myself to learn more about information technology. It always seemed like a giant map covered in fog, with me standing in some corner of it blabbering about PHP and CSS. Yet yesterday I realized how far I have come already. I had my "beads-in-a-cluster" / "this glacier has a pattern" moment.

I don't need to see the whole map. I feel (=know) the rest of it already, without having ever seen every element of it.

Published on the old blog on May 13, 2009

I have had a web site since 2000. For most of the time, my web efforts have been unnoticed by the web community. Nobody gave a damn. Nobody read my stuff. Nobody looked at my pictures. There were a few hits here and there, but it was still painfully close to an ego-crushing nobody.

So this whole time I was thinking - what does it take to be noticed? Over time, I have come up with three solutions - each new one better and more accurate than the previous one.

First I thought it was all about form - good design, readability, use of color, fancy web technology. Nobody wants to see a site that looks like it was made in the ancient times when people used Netscape and Pentiums running at 100MHz were scary fast. No one wants to see yellow text on an orange background.

Then I figured out that form was nothing - content is everything. Without good content, even the best design only gets viewed once for its artistic value and people never come back to it. Good content means having unique information - or not so unique information grouped in a unique way, adding value to the commonly available resources that are not so easy to use in other places.

Now I am thinking that content is nothing, too. You are only as good as your audience. You can't hope to create enough cool content yourself - you have to have audience feedback built in. That way the resource will grow faster and it will reflect the readers' needs. Without comments, ratings, user submissions, discussions, etc., the best content in the best form is as dead as a doornail. You might get linked to from facebook or another place where people can actually refer to your content and discuss it.

The final solution - unique content presented in a readable form in a way that would generate audience feedback. That's why sometimes the most obnoxious bloggers that make no damn sense attract tons of readers eager to point out their shortcomings and perfectly rational bloggers with mathematically precise arguments, beautiful metaphors, and the highest respect for other people's opinions get a yawn at best - or nothing at all.

Published on the old blog on April 10, 2009

Here comes a poem from my best friend R.E. Davis, in which we find that despite being voted one of the best small towns in the US to live in, Norman is not without its shortcomings.

there are no good
places
to dance in this city
If I wanted to
rub my dick against
someone
I would hire a whore
or call your sister
Where are the mariachis?
where can I
go and find
not the pulse of industry
but the pulse
of
love and laughter
the beat of hearts
and souls
inflamed
with rhythm
and salsa

Published on the old blog on August 27. 2008

The transparency of codes is an illusion. No system of expression is accurate, unbiased, objective - everything comes with its unique flavor, a unique mold, a unique set of opportunities and restrictions. Just like SQL rules structure relational databases so do relational databases structure the way data is processed and presented on the Internet.

Another example of a non-transparent code is APA style. Charles Bazerman, writing for a collection of papers on the rhetoric of inquiry, presents a beautiful argument about how this works. His ideas explain a lot about the lives of wannabe psychologists (which are quite abundant in communication departments) - and about the reality of publishing and perishing. He traces the prescriptions embedded in the APA manual to the behaviorist tradition in psychology:

Instead of a reasoner about the mind, the author is a doer of experiments, maker of calculations, and presenter of results. The author does not need to reason through an intellectual or theoretical problem to justify or design an experiment, nor in most cases does he or she need to identify and take positions on arguments in literature. To produce new results, the author must identify behavior that has been inadequately described and design an experiment to exhibit it (p. 138).

With the article primarily presenting results, constrained and formatted prescription, authors become followers of rules to gain the reward of acceptance and to avoid the punishment of nonpublication (p. 139).

Finally, readers are no longer cast in the role of people trying to understand or solve some problem. Rather, they are presumed to be looking for additional bits of knowledge to fit in with their previous bits (p. 140).

Within this rhetorical world, the chaos of intellectual difference is eliminated. Individuals accumulate bits, follow rules, check each other out, and add their bits to an encyclopedia of the behavior of the subjects without subjectivity. There is not much room for thinking or venturing here, but much for behaving and adhering to prescriptions (p. 141).

Here's a reference to the source from which these came - in no other format than proper APA, of course (well, almost - I always violate APA style by listing full first names instead of initials - otherwise there is no way to convert to MLA later):

Bazerman, Charles. (1987). Codifying the social scientific style: The APA Publication Manual as a behaviorist rhetoric. In John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, & Donald N. McCloskey (Eds.), The rhetoric of the human sciences: Language and argument in scholarship and public affairs (pp. 125-144). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Published on the old blog on June 18. 2008