jr conlin's ink stained banana

In mining, there's a problem if the canary stops singing.

In the tech industry, oddly, it's quite the opposite.

In both industries, it's a damn good idea to pay attention to the canaries.

For a little over a month now, every Friday evening, my neighbors and i collect on our respective front yards for a "Happy Hour". There's beer, wine, snacks, plenty of seating and laughs.

Every Friday afternoon, people drive or walk by, occasionally glance our way, and continue on. Nobody is ever curious enough to want to stop by.

Granted, we started out doing this because we wanted to meet more of the folks who we happen to share this part of San Jose with, and we've all been fairly surprised by the lack of response. Some claim different cultures, others snobbery, still others have their reason. Personally, i think it's just that folks have forgotten how to be friendly.

When was the last time you struck up a conversation with someone in an elevator, or in line at the store? It could be something simple like, "Ooh, i don't think i ever tried that brand of cereal. Is it any good?" or even about the weather. You're only going to be in contact with that person for a few seconds, why not try and make them smile?

Thing is, we don't. We're all generally on cellphones or plugged into iPods or otherwise diligently trying to avoid contact with our fellow humans. We strive to be utterly oblivious to what exists outside of the small bubble we feel safe in, and that's leading to a lot of crap that folks aren't going to know how to deal with. If there was a major incident in your area (earthquake, volcano, tornado, airplane crash in your backyard, etc), who could you count on helping you? Who would know to look for all the members of your family? Who might have food and water and be willing to share for a few days? Reverse the situation and can you honestly say that if said bad thing happened to the house half a block away, would you be able to do the same?

i'm friendly with the folks in my neighborhood for pretty much selfish reasons. i want to be able to use them as a backup should anything horrible happen here. To pay for that selfish goal, i try to take measures to answer as many of those questions as i can about them. Heck, it even helps me figure out how to ration accordingly by figuring out who on the block are assholes who i shouldn't deal with. "Wow, your Hummer is out of gas? That's too bad. Well, you can probably use the battery from it to charge your iPhone at least. Maybe you can call out for a pizza then."

i guess this all fits in with how folks just don't want to be responsible anymore, but that's another rant entirely.

Tonight, i got waxed playing on the Wii against the neighbor kid,
who's four.

i'm old.

i'm a fairly paranoid person.

One of the things that i kind of find important in this era of open and cloud computing is "Do you trust the could?" This kind of explains why i only use things like Del.icio.us and Flickr for things that i want to push out into the public domain. There can be all sorts of reasons not to trust the cloud. For one, you have no idea how really secure said cloud is. Also, you have no idea when said cloud might go away.

Of course, battling with this endless paranoia of mine is the fact that there are some things i REALLY want to do, like be able to sync info between my desktop and my "portable brain" (my laptop). Naturally, i don't want that info just out "there" somewhere, i want to be able to control it. Thus, the joy that i've discovered, Mozilla Weave.

This is a plugin for FireFox 3 that's still in the early stages, but damn is it useful. The stock version allows you to create a free account on mozilla servers (use an email account and password) along with an "encryption key" that i presume is used in combination with a public key in the code. That makes me happy for some reasons, but the idea of loading my passwords and form data to a random spot on the web isn't really such a compelling idea. Poking at the options, however, i see that i can specify what server i want to use as my backend. Oh-HO! That means that i could run it off of one of my domains!

Digging around a bit more i find out that the only backend server you need is WebDAV. cha-CHING! We have a winner! Being properly paranoid, i quickly construct a WebDAV instance point my copy of Weave at it, log in and Vi-ola! things get written as JSON objects with encrypted data blocks. What's more, installing it on the laptop gets me syncing my bookmarks and other bits! Yay!

Again, weave isn't perfect, and does exactly what you tell it to, so don't be surprised if you wind up with a bunch of duplicate bookmarks littering things up. You can clean them out and resync to solve that. Also, while you control your WebDav directory, you're obviously still subject to the sort of snooping that can occur if you're on a shared host, so be smart about things. The fact that things are encrypted does make me more comfortable about storing things on the default Mozilla servers.

Still, if you're looking for a sync tool, it's DAMN attractive.

(Oh, and PS to Mozilla Developers: Putting "Options" Under Tools in Windows, but "Preferences" under Edit in Linux is nearly as horrible an idea as putting the "Clear Private Data" link directly above "Options…" Standards are Good. Flip a coin and make the decision. )

i feel like i need to apologize to future generations.

The Digital Tipping Point is a project with the stated goal that they're studying and documenting how Free Open Source Software is changing culture. They're using Open Software for everything from running the site, to editing the content to eventually delivering the final product. Everything is being put under Creative Commons and will be available via the Internet Archive. They've interviewed myraids of luminaries like Richard Stalman (sans ninjas), Dan Gilmore, Caitlin Hill who speak both with great knowledge and insight about the wonders of Open Source.

And then there's me.

For about four hours i was taped at the KIPP San Francisco Academy (a damn spiffy program that seriously needs your old servers) where i think i will serve as comedy relief or possibly that guy. (You know That Guy. The one that got cornered into the Daily Show interview who is way out of his league and completely and unerringly wrong.)

Don't get me wrong, it's not like i hate Open Source. i loves me some FOSS. It's just that i'm a pragmatist and realize that while it's going to get there, it's not going to happen soon. It's a bit like how i wonder about the entire concept of a "Tipping Point" where OSS overcomes commercial. i'm not sure there ever will be. OSS is a different option than commercial. There may be real, valid reasons to continue to choose a commercial, non-open option for something where OSS may simply never make sense because you can't get enough folks interested in supporting some obscure option or function you may need. You may have to literally pay someone to build it. Likewise, there are going to be times when a commercial app will out-perform an OSS solution because there's a different incentive model. People have iPods. How many run RockBox on them? It's not so much a tipping point as a period of slow evolution.

Still, i'm thankful that someone felt my opinions were worth preserving in some form. i'm also going to try to help out the KIPP folks and see if i can wrangle up some gear they can use (Considering the kind of gear that gets hauled off to the recyclers, i can think of a far better use for it.)

i fully expect that even though it will all be transcribed and digitally stored, my remarks will not make the final edit. If i'm lucky, someone will turn my penchant for rambling use of pronouns into a dance remix and i'll become the next NumaNuma guy.