Solipsism Gradient

Dave Pollard uses Steven Covey‘s Time Management Matrix to show why you never get anything important done… and why less important issues often get undue priority.

As soon as I find the time I’ll have to set up a matrix for my own stuff… especially since the Brazilian business year supposedly starts today, just after Carnaval. 😉

A sidenote: while looking at Covey’s site, I was very amused by the last paragraphs on his main page:

WARNING: Privacy Protection Software NOT DETECTED

Your Internet habits are being recorded.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PRIVACY PROTECTION SOFTWARE

Your ID: 2Cust108.tnt9.tco2.da.uu.net

Your computer: x86 family 6 Model 8 AT/AT compatible

Privacy Protection Software: NOT DETECTED

…as I’m definitely not on uu.net, and am writing this on an Apple iBook/600 – which I’m reasonably sure is not x86 AT compatible – it seems my built-in “privacy protection software” is already powerful enough.

In the neverending quest for whuffie (see also this), I was checking who’s linking to me according to TechnoRati. I was surprised to find the most recent link coming from the blogging ecosystem, listing me at rank #108 (of 501) in “Most Prolific Linkers”. Not sure yet whether to cry, commemorate, or ignore it… 😯

Update: not too coincidentally, this happened just after I posted the Links&Subscriptions column to the left… but I’ve seen people with larger blogrolls around… more things to ponder, all right.

Doc Searls ponders the metaphors of spectrum:

My hmm for the day is a bit of wondering about the term “spectrum.” Maybe what we’re talking about here – those qualities the Net takes on when users spill it out of the wires and out into the waves – isn’t spectrum at all. Maybe it’s more like an older noun: Ether.

…Anyway, what if Net’s wires and local ethers – what Bob Frankston perfectly calls “the first mile” – were most constructively conceived as nonmatters of infinite abundance? What then? And why not? Just because we’re accustomed to the conceptual crutchwork of transport and property? Hey, even if we are, why not try on another concept for size?

This is very important. The old metaphors of spectrum and the consequent “spectrum allocations”, bringing with them endless wrangling over what was thus declared a scarce and finite resource, must be reexamined. Modern UWB communications use a very wide swath of “spectrum” in a non-interfering, shareable manner.

At the end, Doc links to an even more interesting article: Dim Copper, by Bob Frankston.

We didn’t create the automobile by lashing a carriage to a mechanical horse but we were able to repurpose the roads designed for horses by paving them to create a smooth surface. The Internet isn’t just an upgrade to the phone network. It needs its own path. The existing copper infrastructure is a valuable resource that can be used as a native medium for Internet connectivity. We must take advantage of the opportunity to provide universal connectivity very quickly at a low cost, we get vastly improved telephony as a free bonus.

…Of course, there are many additional services that provide immediate economic value. These services are currently stymied by the ancient telephony paradigm which is built upon circuits that require exclusive use of a particular pair of copper wires while providing connectivity between only two end points at a time. The Internet shares these resources and connects everything to everything.

Just as we don’t treat the car as a horseless carriage, we should stop thinking of our copper infrastructure as the telephone network. It’s just a dimly lit neighborhood off the Internet waiting for the light to shine.

This is in line with the dumb network paradigm which has been discussed for years. Phone companies, cable networks, even some ISPs – all try to hang onto an obsolete finite-resource, controlled services metaphor, and they’ll suffer for that in the near future. The rising use of Voice over IP will (hopefully) put traditional telcos out of business before the decade is out.

Once everybody accepts that the smart thing is to build dumb networks, using the huge amount of dark fiber already installed, and let the market and the tinkerers discover what they can be used for, the Internet will finally fulfill its promises.

Hi Michael, thanks for dropping by!
Michael Tsai wrote:

My guess is that Feynman’s Samba School comments can be found in Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman.

You’re right, I found my copy yesterday while reorganizing my library, and there it was on page 185 (the Bantam Books ’86 edition). I could find no reference to this on the web, though.

Posted by Michael Tsai:
My guess is that Feynman’s Samba School comments can be found in Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman.

Suddenly, several people started linking to Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch‘ new weblog. At least new to me… welcome to the weblog world! I’ve met Jon at previous MacHack conferences, he’s very friendly and an up-and-coming WebObjects expert… and we’re about tied in number of published MacHack papers . This year he may get ahead of me, as I’ll probably won’t be able neither to write a paper nor to go to the conference.

Anyway, the first important article I saw on his site was the interview with Peter Sichel of Sustainable Softworks. Required reading for any software author. Coincidentally, “Sichel” means “crescent” in German, and “Rentzsch” is pronounced “wrench”… hence the title of this post. Haha. OK, I promise not to do that again soon.

Now it gets interesting. Jon wrote about a serious difference between the Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X Finders:

Finder X, unlike Finder 9, allows the user to overwrite a folder with a file and vice-versa. You can reproduce this:

* Create a new folder named “test”

* Elsewhere, create a file named “test”

* Drag file “test” over into folder “test”‘s container.

* Finder X will warn “A newer item named “test” already exists in this location. Do you want to replace it with the older one you are moving?” with [Stop] [Replace] buttons.

Finder 9 correctly would not allow the action at all. That is, it would put up a “stop” alert with one unconditional button: [OK].

He also filed a bug with Apple.

Subsequently, several people posted their opinions. Bill Bumgarner disagrees that this is a bug. So does Erik Barzeski. Olof Hellman agrees with Jon. John Gruber gives a great summary of the problem, and agrees somewhat with both sides, suggesting that the overwritten folder be moved to the Trash instead of being deleted outright. While I was pondering my own position, Michael Tsai agreed with Bill.

Everybody now agrees that the real bug is that, after the folder is overwritten, the Finder’s “Undo” command moves the overwriting file back to its old location but fails to restore to overwritten folder. Michael also writes:

I’m not an expert on this stuff, but it appears that the Finder could exchange the file references so that aliases point to the new item, not the one in the trash…

All this said, I’m not sure I’d like the Undo command to bring the original item out of the trash, because I doubt the Finder can guarantee that the restored item will be identical to the original.

No, that wouldn’t be a problem; indeed, if you move a folder to the Trash and then “Undo”, the folder is moved back with no untoward side-effects, since this also is done by swapping file-references. Also, no extra disk space is needed for this, as long as both items were on the same volume.

I find myself agreeing with Bill and Michael. Overwriting an item with another should move the first one to the Trash, in such a way to make this fully undoable. If the new item is copied from another volume, and space is so crowded as to make it necessary to remove the first item before copying, the Finder should put up a very carefully worded alert explaining this.

It’s Carnaval, a major holiday hereabouts. (Warnings: some links may not be work-safe, whatever that means, in fundamentalist countries. Also, Safari seems to choke on the JavaScript pop-ups.) Although only Tuesday and Wednesday morning are official holidays, many people take the whole week off…

The Hairy Eyeball has photos and comments; so does The Enigmatic Mermaid. Linguistic note: I’d translate “Escola de Samba” literally as “Samba School”, since “school” is used here in the sense of “school of fish”. I seem to remember Richard Feynman commenting on this, but was unable to find a reference.

Although I’m steadfastly refusing to turn the TV on, the heat makes working at home less attractive, and production has been very low… I’ll try to work some more at internal weblogging stuff, like referrer logs and automating trackback pings.

Update: Düsseldorf, where I was born, also has a very traditional Karneval holiday.

Andy Ihnatko’s Colossal Waste of Bandwidth points at Paul Hoffman’s site about Paul Erd?s, the Hungarian number theorist, who said about himself:

A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Paul Hoffman wrote an excellent biography of Erd?s, “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers” – which I coincidentally reread last month. The site itself is also interesting, with lots of number-theory stuff casually strewn about, and certainly the oddest site navigation bar I’ve ever seen.

Highly recommended.

Update: Oops. Forgot to link to the Paul Erd?s Information page, which has N additional links, and to the Erd?s Number Project, which attempts to track collaboration between mathematicians. The “Erd?s Number” is an integer that measures the link of collaborations between Erd?s and some other author.

I recall that Stan Kelly-Bootle, senior computerist and columnist extraordinaire (“more columns than the @#$%ing Parthenon”), once offered to co-write a paper with me, thus assigning me an Erd?s Number of 4 (or was it 5?); but it didn’t work out. I just read Stan’s recent SODA and was shocked to hear about his heart attack; hopefully he’ll be okay…