Solipsism Gradient

Yesterday I worked on some more patches to the site’s code, but my provider had some sort of outage… supposedly they were updating to new versions of Apache, mySQL, php and whatnot. In any event, access slowed down to a crawl – or even dropped out completely – until very late in the night.

Anyway, I got up around 1 AM to get some water and couldn’t resist checking on my way back to bed; it was working again. That’s the downside of having “always-on” Internet and putting the computer to sleep instead of shutting down… it’s way too easy to get online!

Finally, someone came along and articulated my view that fearing gene-modified foods is silly. Richard Dawkins, noted geneticist and inventor of the “meme” meme, wrote this:

The genetic code, on the other hand, with a few very minor exceptions, is identical in every living creature on this planet, from sulphur bacteria to giant redwood trees, from mushrooms to men. All living creatures, on this planet at least, are the same “make”.

The consequences are amazing. It means that a software subroutine (that’s exactly what a gene is) can be carried over into another species. This is why the famous “antifreeze” gene, originally evolved by Antarctic fish, can save a tomato from frost damage. In the same way, a Nasa programmer who wants a neat square-root routine for his rocket guidance system might import one from a financial spreadsheet. A square root is a square root is a square root. A program to compute it will serve as well in a space rocket as in a financial projection.

…What this means is that there is a case to be made on both sides of the argument, and we need to exercise subtle judgment. The genetic engineers are right that we can save time and trouble by climbing on the back of the millions of years of R & D that Darwinian natural selection has put into developing biological antifreeze (or whatever we are seeking). But the doomsayers would also have a point if they softened their stance from emotional gut rejection to a rational plea for rigorous safety testing. No reputable scientist would oppose such a plea. It is rightly routine for all new products, not just genetically engineered ones.

Recommended by Mark Frauenfelder on boing boing.

Converting this forum into a weblog – and following the recent developments with trackbacks and comments on weblogs – convinced me that there’s a gray zone between forums and weblogs which just cries out to be filled.

For instance, Rael Dornfest just announced that he’s merged comments and trackbacks on his weblog. So his structure now is a reverse-chronological list of his posts, together with a chronological list of comments and trackbacks. The only actual difference is that comments are directly posted to his site (with no copy elsewhere), and trackbacks are excerpts of comments posted to somebody else’s site.

In a forum like this one, the structure is similar. I post stuff which appears in reverse-chronological order. People can post comments directly, or on their own weblog and ping me for a trackback. The major difference is that threads aren’t kept together in chronological order – but I’m working on that. Forum topics are equivalent to weblog categories.

So, a forum – based on phpBB or its competitors – can be viewed as a borderline weblog, with extremes of many collaborators and categories, and a weblog – based on Movable Type or its competitors – can be viewed as a borderline forum, with only one or a few collaborators.

Forum software often has many extra frills like avatars and private messaging, and necessarily invests heavily in collaborator control and moderation facilities. Weblog software is ahead in having trackbacks and RSS feed generation, and is more lightweight (less server-intensive). Both have similar facilities for archiving and searching posted stuff. Both can be seen to have evolved from 80s/90s BBS software – FirstClass, which I worked heavily with a decade ago, is one of the few still available.

Update: Sébastien Paquet is debating whether blogs really foster conversation:

Denham, Lilia and I are debating whether blogs are indeed suited for conversation or if, on the contrary, collective spaces are needed for true dialogue. Ton, you had something to say here, didn’t you?

I suppose when he says “collective spaces” he means forums…

Jeremy Zawodny worries about his input to output ratio:

I go through cycles of productivity like most hackers do. Some days I get a lot done while others are mostly wasted. Some of my productive days involve a lot of output like e-mail, code, discussion, debugging, and so on. Other times it’s a lof of input: reading, listening, etc. Once in while I manage to have a day in which the two seem to balance out and I go home feeling like I’ve accomplished three weeks wort of work.

Yes, these cycles happen to me too, and have in fact been getting more extreme. Before the Internet came up, I was buying 15 to 20 technical magazines per month, and would take every other day off to read all that stuff… even study the advertisements one by one, if you can believe that.

For the last years, information overload from the Internet has been increasing. I don’t buy any more magazines, but reading and responding to e-mail, browsing for news, and so forth has been expanding to fill most of my time. And now weblogging and reading RSS feeds is taking the place of e-mailing and browsing. (My advice: don’t subscribe to more than 150 feeds if you check them every hour, or you’ll never catch up ).

On the other hand, the amount of useful input – that can be converted into productive output – has also increased vastly, so it seems to boil down to a question of discipline. Inspiration doesn’t come by every day, so I usually slack off for periods that vary from an afternoon to a couple of weeks, and catch up again in frenzied bursts of creativity. Turning off the phone and ADSL – or making a trip to somewhere off-net – often works wonders.

Joel on Software also addresses this issue:

But it’s not the days when I “only” get two hours of work done that worry me. It’s the days when I can’t do anything.

…Maybe this is the key to productivity: just getting started. Maybe when pair programming works it works because when you schedule a pair programming session with your buddy, you force each other to get started.

Jason Kottke is asking people to link to (and ping) http://reversible.org/kottke . OK; let’s see what happens…

In case you’re wondering, here’s an explanation about what’s reversible. Looks like the beginning of something interesting…

Dori Smith kindly did a trackback ping test for me. Thanks again, Dori!

It didn’t work; it tried to ping the permalink instead of the corresponding trackback ping URL. I installed a test blog using Movable Type and didn’t find out how to activate the automatic trackback feature (at least, not without reading the manual ).

Manual pinging worked, however, and produced the entry you can see below. Tomorrow I’ll try RTFM and checking up on my autodiscovery RDF lines.

Posted by Guest:
RB’s Test Blog: (Re:#)

Here we go again

Yet another test of the new trackback system on Rainer’s weblog. This one with the MT bookmarklet – which, incidentally,

OK, I think trackbacks are working now. I’m generating the necessary RDF comments so others can autodetect my trackback ping URLs, and I’m posting the URLs themselves in the left margin of each post. These links aren’t meant to be clicked, but copied by whoever is pinging manually. Unlike many existing implementations, trackbacks are equal to comments and will be posted in-line with the normal comments.

I’m still working on automating part of my own pings to other sites, but it’s not a high priority thing… I’m using Movable Type‘s sample standalone implementation meanwhile.

By the way, installing this on Mac OS X (10.2.3) isn’t completely straightforward. The trackback code uses the optional LWP Perl module, which itself needs several other modules. As I’d never messed around with Perl before, it took me some time to find the modules on CPAN and learn the necessary Terminal commands.

I read several tips warning about the LWP installer overwriting /usr/bin/head. This didn’t happen in my case; apparently saying “no” when LWP asks if you want to install test programs skips that part.

Many thanks to Dori Smith for correcting some misconceptions I initially had about trackbacks, and e-mailing me several links about the subject.