Moving

Just in case any body’s reading this, I moved to http://www.decreasedsales.com/blog. This is the last move, I promise.

D&D 4E

For the hardcore: There’s a great (and I mean great) review of the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons on AICN right now. (Assuming you’re not at the D&D Experience right now.)

More on Operating Systems, Choices, and on and on…

On Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood had a nice rant up yesterday - funny stuff. Reading it, my anti-Mac feelings swelled, all the while twinging with regret at the rant being written by…a Windows user.

Over at Red Monk, James Governor’s response to Atwood’s rant deepened my thoughts by pointing out how design choices reflect philosophical approaches (at least, that’s my misreading). While reading Governor’s piece, I was struck by how much my behavior in regards to operating systems reflects common consumer attitudes.

Governor’s argument reminds of The Paradox of Choice, which argues that too many choices leave people stressed and unsatisfied, whereas when people have a limited number of choices they feel like they have some freedom while also not feeling overwhelmed. So, am I making a philosophical argument for Apple? (Since Microsoft clearly isn’t in the operating system game anymore.)

A more personal question: Why do I have these OS-guilt issues?

Blogs I Like

One of the things that struck me in a piece in Wired by Jorn Barger from last December was his insistence that blogging means URLs (”A true weblog is a log of all the URLs you want to save or share. (So del.icio.us is actually better for blogging than blogger.com.)).” (Take a look at his weblog to see what he means.)

While that’s soooo Web1.0 (as if that means anything), I like it. Part of this whole sharing information thing is pointing people to other new sites and points of view. I get all excited and giddy when someone links to a site I’ve never been to before, and that’s how I’ve discovered some of my favorites sites.

So, in an effort to document this archeology of semantics, I’m going to, periodically, post about a site I like. In addition to saying a few things about why I like the site, I’m going to try and remember how I got there.

This week, it’s Dancho Danchev’s blog. I only stumbled here recently, where it was linked off Bruce Schneier’s blog entry about the Storm Worm. What strikes me about Dancho’s site (and why I keep going back) is the rigorousness of his research, his presentation, and his focus. He does one thing (information security - particularly tools, worms, and malware), and he does it well.

A few of my favorite posts: “Riders on the Storm Worm,” “Mujahideen Secrets 2 Encryption Tool Released,” and “Cyber Jihadist Hacking Teams.”

Microsoft

With all this talk about interoperability, let us not forget Microsoft’s background philosophy (say it with me, kids): embrace, extend, extinguish.

Nabokov, Joyce, and Shakespeare’s Second Best Bed

Subtitle: Burn, Nabokov, Burn!

The current discussion of what to do with Nabokov’s posthumous work, which he wanted burned (Tom Stoppard says to burn it. John Banville says save it), reminds me of a New Yorker piece from 2006 on James Joyce’s grandson and his battle with the literary critics pulling Joyce’s work apart.

These battles get to the very heart of what’s important, to me, about the books and writing I enjoy. There are aesthetic questions, familial ones, questions of authorial intent, and, to be honest, questions regarding genius and taste. It’s all there tangled in these questions: why we write, why we read, what we think of as art, and what we think of as trash (Uhh, how do you call your loverboy?) The cult of personality that fuels literary criticism sits center as well as the most personal aspects of these people. Joyce is defended as grandfather (Nabokov as father) while he’s simultaneously defended as the dominant 20th-century writer.

As the title suggests, it reminds me of Shakespeare’s will and his gift of his “second best bed” to his wife. I haven’t read the debates regarding what he meant, but I can’t help but read it as a joke. Wherever it was meant to lay, there we are again, dealing with Shakespeare the human, perhaps funny (maybe petty), a man who might not have spent all that much time with his wife, might have cheated on his wife, or not all, and attempting to reconcile him with Him.

But, really, it’s all Roland Barthes’s fault.

I am overwhelmed.

Orwell, Kipling, NYTimes, William Kristol (this is the link to the piece)...I slump in amazement.

And wouldn’t you say Obama’s read Kipling? (”If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch” (Isn’t that the rhetorical feat he’s perfected?).)

On Blogging

I’ve blogged (I had it in quotes, but it’s not a dirty word) on and off for a number of years now, although never with the intention of having other people read what I’ve written.

For a long time, I thought of blogging with an audience in mind as egotistical, so I would use the blog I had (with LiveJournal) to post information relating to whatever I was working on in regards to school or work. Most of the time, those posts would be published privately, making the blog a repository for information I needed sorted and search-able.

The more blogs I read, though, the more I realize that the format is useful (its use-value), in part, based on its social aspects. There are some blogs, like Rudy Rucker’s blog, Anecdotal Evidence, Rigorous Intuition, and Momus’s LiveJournal that are downright essential for me. I read them daily and look forward to new posts.

I’ve also thought about how a blog forces me to focus myself - there’s not the rambling I might do in my unicorn-bedazzled diary, but instead, like I learned in Freshman Composition, there’s the focus of an audience. (At least I try to make sure there’s some focus.)

I’m relatively new to the whole thing (from a public point of view), and I still have issues (more than just a fear of blogging - I’m afraid). There are layers of anonymity built into this site, although a whois search would strip that away. Yet, I still don’t use my own name on the site (part of that is the whole public/egotism thing while part of it is due to my love of the web and its built-in playfulness with identity). Is this American seriousness (wherein I speak softly (or not at all), and then, well, you know)? Southern? Just me?

And, of course, I wouldn’t be a good Bataillean if I didn’t think that my obsession with justifying my blogging based on its utility is a bit worrisome. I can’t just relax and blog because I like it? (And I do.) It reminds me of one of Momus’s posts that felt like a challenge to me (which, of course, I can’t find ( although there’s an interesting one on blogging here)), hiding behind my LiveJournal site, posting on science fiction and online communities.

There’s no way to conclude. I’m conflicted. Consolation: “I am large. I contain multitudes.“

Who needs Zero-Day…

When exploits go unpatched for years and years?

Scoble on Microsoft

I find the debate pitting innovation and the individual programmer interesting, and Scoble makes another foray with his post today on why Microsoft makes him cry (I cry over Microsoft, too, but it’s usually things like this).

Anyway (and I really don’t hate Microsoft - I grew up with Macs and Windows PCs in the house, so I have a certain nostalgia for both), it’s got the usual things about innovation and money (”Could they have done this at a Silicon Valley startup?” Scoble asks “I doubt it” he answers). Nevermind that Linux, to be more specific, Linus’s kernel that became Linus’s Unix, had no money in the beginning. There was no traveling to exotic locales and creativity meetings with creativity people. Yet innovative it is, as well as good old Richard Stallman’s GPL, which gave Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens the whole idea for open source, which seems to be working out pretty well.

Not to sound too defensive, but I do think that there’s a certain Wired-type gadget fetish going on with these types of arguments, where one (Scoble, for instance) talks about crying over a technology and then teases it and says how revolutionary it’s going to be (mentioning the MS Surface, which is just a table with a touchscreen - something we should’ve had years ago), and it’s really going to be something extremely expensive and unattainable (not that that’s always bad) and will end up in the pages of Wired and Robb Report as something that every millionaire should own. Great. Grand. Whatever. (And I’ll certainly revisit this post when Scoble (or MS) unveils this grand, tear-jerking invention, the hard work of two guys battling it out in the big company, just trying to change the world. *cough*)

Update: Scoble has pictures from his visit. A nice building and all.

Another update: TechCrunch on Scoble’s post, and Scoble on TechCrunch.