broadband, moving, and comments

Few quick notes.

Apparently there's a cable splitter somewhere in the building which has gone bad. My access to the 'Net care of Comcast dropped out on Saturday. On Monday the technician couldn't find the splitter. Since I'm moving this weekend I just left it at that and have stepped down to dial-up. Broadband in the new place will take about 10 days to sort itself out too. Sigh.

I'm most of the way through opening the comments on my older posts. This is a pretty tedious process and I probably won't get to the oldest ones until after the move.

Network mediated group dynamics

Just read Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy . Thanks to Dan Steinberg" for pointing to it on Java Today . Earlier today I read A social network caught in the Web with thanks to Sébastien Paquet for pointing to it . What a great pair of articles to have read in the same day.

I have an an ongoing conversation with several of my very best friends about group vs. individual dynamics. Clay's piece will add a few beautiful facets to consider. Really great stuff.

Please use a better browser

Dear Web Surfer,

Many web developers work hard to ensure that their sites function properly and look dynamite in a variety of browsers. Unfortunately, some web browsers make the job much more difficult. When sub-standard web browsers dominate the market, the whole web suffers. Those who create web pages and applications must confine their designs to the weakest but most dominant browser.

You can help improve the situation immediately by simply choosing to use a web browser that provides better support for web standards. Please help to re-create a competitive environment for the web.

Windows, Linux, MacOS X: Mozilla and Opera
MacOS X: Safari
Linux: Konqueror

Here are a couple other links to variations on this request:
The door is ajar

update: As of November 11, 2003, The Web Standards Project has a different view about how to make the web a better place. They recommend reporting browser bugs to the creators and suggest we move beyond the browser upgrade campaign.

Now that the playing field is more level, it is time for site builders to make more of an effort to educate themselves on ways to take advantage of the gains that have been made.

I find their case fairly compelling, and share their encouragement that web designers raise the bar on their design. Nevertheless I still maintain that you, dear web surfer, can improve matters by switching browsers today.

Thanks,
-Eric

ps. If you're a fellow web designer, please take the time to learn some new tricks from The Web Standards Project. But please also consider adding an auto-detecting link on your pages to spread the word. Details are described in the Great Browser Upgrade Campaign.

The Great Browser Upgrade Campaign

I started this project on July 3rd and then stalled on a little bit of scope creep. I've been kicked into gear now that Tim Bray has publicly observed that there's an opportunity to side-step the limitations of Internet Explorer. We just have to figure out how to get the alternatives in front of enough of the right people

I have an idea about how to notify the masses of the better web browser options that exist. But it will only work if the idea caches on.

Update 11/11/2003: It hasn't. WaSP recommends moving beyond the browser upgrade campain. They seem to have shifted their focus to getting web developers to educate themselves which seems sensible enough. I still think this idea has merit.

Exploit the deviations from standards to expose the deviant browsers. For example, according to this table of hiding CSS tricks the following html snippet should catch most of the browsers that generally make web development painful.

<style type="text/css">
  #campaign .thanks        {display: none;}
  #campaign [class=thanks] {display: inline;}
  #campaign .please        {display: inline; font-weight: bold; color: red;}
  #campaign [class=please] {display: none;}
</style>
<p id="campaign">
<a href="http://dobbse.net/thinair/2003/07/000123.html">
<span class="thanks">Thanks for surfing with a better browser.</span>
<span class="please">Please consider changing your web browser.</span>
</a>
</p>

Here it is in action:

Thanks for surfing with a better browser. Please consider changing your web browser.

Update 11/11/2003 simplified the HTML and CSS for clarity.

There are some ingredients which could help the idea spread more easily. There is some existing buzz to fill the sails a bit: Tim's post mentioned earlier and Simon's discussion about marketing Firebird. My example is pretty simple and follows Tim's view source lesson. Could the idea catch on? Would you add an adaptive link like this one to your blog?

It would probably be better if the link pointed to a wiki so that the web design community as a whole could maintain the message to J. Random Surfer over time. That is precisely the self-imposed scope creep that kept me from posting this earlier. I thought I would host a wiki just for that purpose. I may still, if the idea catches on, unless someone else beats me to it. I'm not particular about exactly what words are used in the message to the user, just that it be polite and use standard CSS (or whatever) to auto-detect lame browsers. I also think it will bet better accepted by J. Random if it doesn't single out Internet Explorer.

Spread the word or tell me why you think it won't work

Update 11/11/2003: WaSP mentions one key complaint about where their browser upgrade campaign fell short: earlier campaign techniques "became an easy out for site builders who didn't want to bother with testing their sites in browsers like Netscape 4, even if they were not concerned with the use of standards based markup." There's also some well-deserved and fairly widespread distain for the "best viewed in Browser X" badges which litter the 'Net.

My suggestion probably isn't much of an improvement over the browser badges. But it does have the virtue of thanking those who are using better browsers. One could remove the 'thanks' part have self-concealing web litter only visible for those using lame browsers. I especially like that there is nothing fancy going on. No browser sniffing nor redirection, just leveraging some CSS support to encourage better CSS support. CSS2 selectors hide the 'thanks' message and reveal the 'please' message. CSS3 selectors reverse that. Compliant browsers will prefer the CSS3 settings. Painfully simple and view-source friendly. Ah, well. Tough to push a tipping point alone.

EJB 2 and J2EE Packaging

I definitely don't want to loose this link, because I'll be surprised if I remember this trick next time I need to. Although Google got me there today, I've been missing more than I've been hitting with Google in the past month or so.

EJB 2 and J2EE Packaging

How does the extension mechanism work with EJB applications? A JAR file can reference a dependent JAR file by adding a Class-Path manifest attribute. The Class-Path manifest attribute lists the relative URLs to search for utility libraries. Multiple URLs can be specified in a single Class-Path entry and a single JAR file can contain multiple Class-Path entries. For example, a JAR file might have: Class-Path: log4j.jar xmlx.jar foo/bar/util.jar

War and Fear

War is an emergent phenomenon which depends on rampant spread of fear. For example, consider the recent invasion of Iraq. For more than a decade we Americans knew that Saddam Hussein was a despotic ruler oppressing the Iraqi people with all sorts of brutality and nastiness. But we weren't afraid of him. He represented no threat to us. And as a nation we didn't exhibit much concern for the Iraqi's all those years. We certainly didn't show any signs of sending in armored divisions. By contrast in the past two years weapons of mass destruction entered the American consciousness and suddenly we were terrified. An epidemic of fear spread through this country and it became urgent that Saddam be removed from power by whatever means necessary. We couldn't wait for weapons inspections. Individual US citizens were scared of a leader of a third world country -- more scared of Saddam and unseen weapons than of loosing the lives of American soldiers in armed conflict. War emerged as a plausible option only after a majority of the American people were more afraid of Saddam remaining in power than we were of loosing American lives in war. How on Earth did we get there?

To whom it may concern

This kind of fear was most clearly articulated to me by a Washington D.C. cab driver probably more than twenty years ago.

I'm not worried about the bullet that has my name on it. It's the one addressed "To whom it may concern" that scares me. You know what I mean? Like some crazy middle-eastern dictator with The Bomb. 'Cos if I was a ruler of a third world country with only one plane and one bomb, I'd fly it directly to D.C. and bomb the White House. And then I'd surrender. 'Cos it worked pretty well for Japan and Germany to go to war with the US. You know what I mean?

War is Hell

War is frightening. What most of us know about war we learned from movies. The few who have first hand experience of war generally don't talk about it, and the rest of us don't ask. We know our soldiers will die when the US goes to war. We know they will also have to kill. But war has all sorts of social rationalization around it. We believe deep down that the soldiers will kill judiciously and die heroically, regardless of what we have learned from Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Born on the Forth of July, Good Morning, Vietnam, Saving Private Ryan, and countless other war movies. We want to believe that no one will die in vain. We want to believe that no young soldier will return psychically broken by morally ambiguous killing. And our culture goes to great lengths to preserve the heroic image of the soldier who dies defending their country, even though the last time American soldiers died defending American soil from invasion was in Pearl Harbor.

Madness and Mutually Assured Destruction

The Cold War embedded the logic of mutually assured destruction in the American psyche. But that logic only works if you can assume the opponent is rational and fundamentally interested in living. Suicide attacks are terrifying precisely because they defy reason, and they have the "to whom it may concern" quality.

Suicide attacks became terrifyingly and immediately real for Americans when suicide pilots flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Just over four years ago the media was awash with news of another suicide attack: the killing spree at Columbine High School. Vanishingly few of us have any other experience of suicide attacks. But long before September 11, 2001 and long before April 20, 1999 we learned the depth of our fear of madness from psychodramas. Psycho, The Shining, Silence of the Lambs, and many others play on and feed the deep fears we have of insanity and irrational violence. War movies show us horrifying and awful images, and expose how brutal we humans can be to one another, but they don't scare us the way psychodramas do. These examples from popular culture are anecdotal evidence that we Americans are more scared by violent madness than we are of war. The bullet addressed "To whom it may concern" is more frightening.

Invasion of Iraq

With that backdrop consider the build-up that lead to US invasion of Iraq. We heard time and again about Saddam's irrational cruelty to his own people. We heard about twelve years of UN resolutions and about a leader who could not be reasoned with. We heard about an insane lust for weapons of mass destruction. We heard about how Saddam actually used biological and chemical weapons against the Kurds -- something surely no rational leader would ever do. We heard repeated mentions of Saddam's name among various references to September 11th, though we never heard of any evidence of direct connections. In short, everything we heard drew mental associations between our preexisting fears and Saddam Hussein. However wicked Saddam may be, that tapestry of associations was carefully designed specifically to connect Saddam to our existing fears.

Our leaders wove Iraq into our existing fears of irrational violence and into our existing Cold War fears of weapons of mass destruction. Through these fears the American leadership manipulated the American people into supporting a preemptive invasion of Iraq and what is now projected to become five years of occupation. I'm deeply tempted to descend into a tirade about our leaders. But I want to remain focused on the larger pattern of war and fear. For now let me repeat: War emerges from the rampant spread of fear.

Fear limits our options

Biologically there are three strategies when survival is at stake. These are the classic fight, flight or freeze. Maybe you can scare the predator off. Maybe you can outrun it. Or maybe if you don't move, the predator won't see you and you'll be safe. For immediate threats to life and limb, it's helpful that there are only three options to choose from. When life or death is a split second away there isn't time time to debate the relative merits of a long menu of options. After millennia of evolution our survival instincts are refined to these three most basic tactics.

When we are not afraid our minds are open to all sorts of creative possibilities. But when fear is present our options become limited. The more intense the fear, the fewer the options available to us. If our immediate survival is in danger we're stuck with only three.

These instincts make humans pretty easy to manipulate. If you can scare someone then you can predict some variation of only three reactions. Fear isn't the only button that can be pushed, but it is unquestionably one of the most effective. Almost all mechanisms of social control depend on the manipulation of human fears.

Problems with opposition to war

I'll analyze my opposition to the invasion of Iraq. I attempted to manipulate the decisions of several elected leaders and I used fear as my mechanism to try to control those decisions. I raised the frightening possibility that weapons of mass destruction could slip out of Iraq under cover of the chaos of war and find their way into terrorist hands. In fact I was fighting fire with fire. I relied on exactly the same fear to oppose invasion that the White House used to to promote invasion: the combination of Cold War fears of weapons of mass destruction and the fears of irrational violence of terrorists. I summoned that bullet addressed "To whom it may concern."

I was betting on the "freeze" option. I argued that we would be in greater danger from nasty weapons by breaking Saddam's control of Iraq than by leaving him in power. I tried to create a more compelling fear that would make our leaders think twice about invasion, make them freeze and consider other options. That was a big miscalculation. The United States is the biggest dog on the block. We don't need to flee and we don't need to freeze. If it comes down to a fight, our instincts tell us we can hold our own against anyone. In my opposition, I contributed to the rampant spread of fear.

I wasn't alone in this. Most of the arguments I read against war argued different points, but employed the same tactics. Everyone tried summoning a more compelling fear. I actually saw this coming at least as far back as February. But even with my own foresight I failed to stop myself from feeding the fear. Aikido teaches this lesson every time I practice and still I failed to apply that wisdom. Opposition escalates conflict.

As the fear grew more intense, the options grew more limited, and the mighty USA chose to fight.

We must ask not how to more effectively oppose war lest we become more effective in escalating conflicts. Rather we must change the direction of our question.

How can we create peace?

The crucial answer to that question is hidden exactly in the relationship between fear and war.

Artists going independent

I enjoyed the following Denver Post article which was sent to the COMUG Misc mailing list. Artists turn tables on the major labels by going indie. It looks like the artists won't need iTunes and the Apple Store after all.

A brief summary of the article follows, 'cos I understand that the Post articles drop behind a paywall like the New York Times.

Tangent: I wonder if the permalinks meme will enter the consciousness of the journalism industry. It seems likely that journalists will begin to go independent like the musicians mentioned in the Post article, rather than depend on newspapers to market their content. Will they implement pay walls in their web logs, or will some other payment scheme emerge? Am I'm confusing free content with permanent links, or is there something important about making the content available freely? I kinda like the model Salon uses for premium content -- leave a lengthy first page freely available behind a permanent link, and ask readers to subscribe, pay-per-view, or watch an ad.

The article mentions several artists whose names you probably know and quotes several others directly. The gist of it is that the big five music publishers shafted some veteran artists who weren't selling in large enough volume, so they've chosen to create their own labels or release their music through smaller labels. In the case of the Eagles, it sounds like they just decided it was in their economic interest to remove the middle man. Their case is thematic for the article: musicians don't really need a big label to market their music anymore. They can establish their own small market through a web site and maybe through some internet radio stations, and they can produce their own disks and keep their masters to themselves.

Artists mentioned: Pearl Jam, Natalie Merchant, Jimmy Buffett, the Eagles, Boston, Richard Thompson, Fairport Convention, David Lindley, Kaleidoscope, El Rayo-X, Prince, and Boz Scaggs.

My little summary probably doesn't do the article justice. There are lots of fun quotes in there from the artists. It's worth a read, but I also wanted to insulate my own post from potential link-rot.

Blogroll

Here's my little and late contribution to the link economy. I finally made time to publish my blogroll. I feel like I should have done it long ago.

iTunes, AppleStore, independent art

I've been sitting on this thought for weeks now. I find the idea of iTunes and the AppleStore exciting. I have been considering the potential links between .mac, iTunes, and the AppleStore. I see the seeds of a market place for independent art. Many creative professionals are already Apple enthusiasts. It's insanely easy to publish digital creations with .mac: just drag it to your iDisk, connect it to your web page. iTunes points the way to connecting a media player to a media source allowing money to exchange hands. Just connect a few more dots.

Let all the media players be connected to the AppleStore in some fashion. Let .mac subscribers move their creations into a ForSale folder on their iDisk. Let those ForSale items be purchased and downloaded through the AppleStore, and directly through the media applications included on all Apple computers. Somehow the money collected at the AppleStore needs to find its way into the artist's hands.

On the surface it sounds like a great democratization of artistic creation. That comes with all sorts of pros and cons, but on balance I think it will be excellent. Looking a little more deeply, does it scare you to think of Apple (or any corporation) at the center of that kind of market place? If Microsoft were to beat Apple to it, would it scare you to think of Microsoft at the center?

In the long run, most of those connections are trivially easy. But there are all sorts of nasty legal and political issues to slow our progress from here to there. We are in for an interesting ride.