Gimlé

Some might have noticed that I’ve been doing small sort of design tweaks over the last couple of weeks.

Those who noticed probably did so because this site did something violently nasty to their computer. I had a crasher bug going on Safari for a couple of days on the individual post pages.

It had something to do with FORM CSS code—couldn’t isolate it because it didn’t appear when pages were displayed from file and working on a server from college (where I have access to OS X machines) is a pain.

Also, some of the :hover code (got the idea from Design Meme, found via Zeldman only works on kthml- or Gecko-based browsers.

The reason why I applied it is that it is “the right thing to do” hypertextually speaking. Pick up any old book on hypertext theory and design, preferably one that that predates the web (they did a lot of research on the subject, y’know) and you’ll find out that using constant typographic distinctions for links leads to added emphasis at inappropriate places, as well as a whole host of other unwanted side-effects.

This would be alright if you are doing an “outline-style” weblog, where you post your short and fairly succinct bullet-pointed thoughts on a regular basis. But it’s not quite what you want when you’re writing longer passages.

Mark Bernstein’s and Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace has, if memory serves me, a state switch thing. Normally you read the posts without any typographic distinctions for links. Then you hold down a key on your keyboard and all the links appear in the post (I hope that I’m not making this up, been ages since I last read a Storyspace hypertext).

This :hover business, when it works, makes sure that links you haven’t followed are only subtly distinguished when you’re reading and that they pop out, underlined and obvious, when you hover your mouse pointer over the text’s body.

It’s an experiment, we’ll see how it goes.

I might start working on a project next week that just possibly might get half a dozen interesting non-techy people weblogging on a regular basis.

Again, we’ll see how that goes.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

A few links I haven’t seen on other journals:

• Tim O’reilly talks about Apple as an Innovator (or more to the point: why Apple is percieved as an innovator). The O’reilly Publishing weblogs are worth checking on a regular basis in any case.

• Anytime anybody asks me why I think comics are capable of being literature I throw the Fantagraphics catalog at them. They are to comics what Eastgate Systems are to hypertext…

  …It, that is.

  The most insightful and analytical critics, the theorists, the artists and the writers.

  If it’s comics, intelligent and matters, nine times out of ten it’s also Fantagraphics.

  The reason why I mention this is that they need your help. Go over there and buy some books from them.

  Them’s good readin’.

• Tim Bray says smart things about the Iraq War that I wish I’d have said.

• Wait… there’s more.

  Tim Bray points out that it isn’t CSS that’s difficult but Internet Exporer’s buggy implementation that’s a hassle.

  (Yes I know Dave Winer linked to this one, but I think he completely misrepresented the post as an anti-CSS post. And as we all know, only about one person in five actually follows a link to see for him or herself.)

• I’m here in the complete Garfield archives online.

My Icelandic metabolism is telling me that it’s tropical out there and barely tolerable.

The English around me are saying that the weather’s rarely this good and that I should savor it.

And they stare at me when I say that I’d like it to be about three or four degrees colder, at least (centigrade, of course).

And it’s too humid, but then again, the UK is always humid.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.

For the last few weeks I’ve been asking anyone who will listen if it isn’t weird that our economy is based on software, more and more, yet users don’t want to pay for software.
Dave Winer—Who will pay for software?

Mark Bernstein and Dave Winer have been throwing out several interesting comments on the value of software in the last few days.

Dave’s comment, quoted above is, unfortunately, to the point and truer than we’d like.

People don’t value quality.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about innovative software, inspiring and moving books, mind-bending and touching world cinema—

Or music.

Of course it doesn’t help that they are only confronted with rubbish. Microsoft’s software is notorious for its security problems. Mac Classic crashes like a two-legged doberman hound driving an SUV without a driver’s license. Mac OS X is slower than a salted snail stoned out of its mind on pot and 50 kilos of pure, unadulterated swedish granite wielded by a brat on ritalin.

The book industry pushes stories with plots so thin and wispy that they’d make a jellyfish self-conscious.

The movie industry pushes chunky shit so smelly that X-Men 2 and Matrix Reloaded qualify as the artistic and intellectual highlights of the year.

And it’s a catch 22. Developers and creators don’t make well crafted stories and software because they see a distinct lack of demand for the stuff in the marketplace. Those who could appreciate the craft can’t find or aren’t exposed to it due to the dominance of the large players in the marketplace.

Just the appreciation factor is bad enough. The fact that most people aren’t willing to pay a small amount of money for your hard work that, as Dave clearly demonstrates with regards to software, is actually a small fraction of your actual task-related outgoings…

That has to be one of the most despiriting things that can happen to any sort of developer or writer.

A new paperback is half the price of a DVD, will work in any country, provides many more hours of entertainment and yet qualifies as a bestseller if it moves 100 000 copies.

That’s in the US, a post-industrial, wealthy, high-tech country.

The sales of a single volume of Byron’s Don Juan sold over ten times that, easy, in what was an industrial country in its infancy, with a fraction of the current US of A’s population.

Sure, you can give away free copies of the software you commissioned. The recipients don’t pay you – the software seems ‘free’. But, sooner or later, value of some sort flows back up the system. If it doesn’t, nobody will do it again. And that value is always something convertible to money: that’s why they call it money.
Mark Bernstein—Costs

While I do not necessarily agree with Mark’s statement that value, in software or craft (and storytelling is a craft), is always convertable to money, the point needs to be hammered in that there is both immense value and work in GPL-compatible software.

(Otherwise called ‘Free Software’, I use ‘GPL-compatible’ here for want of a better term, “Free Software” is too ambiguous, and GPL-compatible unambiguiously includes popular Open Source licenses such as the BSD and X11 licenses).

Software under GPL-compatible licenses are frequently distributed, deployed and used as if it had little to no inherent value.

The point and purpose of GPL-compatible software is to give the user the freedom to participate in the software development process.

It is one of the few things that can promote a general understanding of programming in the general populace as well as amongst the craftsmen of creative artifacts. Which is something that, according to Mark, needs to happen if computer-mediated works are to mature.

Free Software (capital ‘F’, capital ‘S’) such as Ruby, Python, Mozilla and GCC is much more likely to promote a general understanding of programming and programming skills than proprietry software.

The fact that some of the features of the Ruby programming language are implemented in Ruby, meaning that a humanities academic like myself can learn about the language by reading through the files of the implementation, is mind-blowing.

That ability is such a basic and fundamental thing, granted and protected by GPLed software and is, by definition, impossible in closed-source software.

That alone is of immense value, monetary or otherwise. In fact, it makes Free Software much more valuable to me and other content creators than closed-source will ever be.

Again, monetarily or otherwise.

Which makes it especially disheartening to see how few people are willing to pay money for GPL-compatible software.

Would I prefer that my University spend my tuition fees on GPL-compatible software rather than closed-source software such as Director or Peak?

Even though the GPL-compatible software could, in theory, be deployed for free, without payment to its developers?

Yes and yes.

The value that the students and lecturers of an Art, Media and Design faculty stand to gain from being able to participate in the process of software development as a part of their courses, research and content creation—

That value far outweighs the value and benefits of more ‘sophisticated’, bug-ridden and unreliable industry-standard software such as Macromedia Director.

But for that to happen, Arts and Humanities people would have to get over their fear of code.

Which is about as likely as Britney Spears writing a literary masterpiece on par with Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.

The discussion of academia continues, tracked and started by Dorothea.

The irony here being that I agree with most of what Dorothea has said on the matter (in fact, have found it rather hard to find specific valid criticisms of her slating of academia that doesn’t sound like “but I like it”) and yet I am studying full-time for a PhD. I’ll have to explain that some day. I know my reasons. Might be useful for others if I told them.

I’m not, on the other hand familiar at all with the situation described by The Happy Tutor. The words “self-hating losers” and “$150,000” especially don’t ring a bell.

Maybe your average European university is poorer than your average American one (outside of the few like Oxford, Cambridge and selected new Universities like East Anglia, you can call them the celebrity Universities).

The point being that very few people in the universities I’ve gone to earned something like $150,000. And given the industrialisation of University production (the mass-manufacture of qualifications) the number of universities where somebody does will drop fast in the next few years.

And I’d never ever even contemplate using the phrase “self-hating losers” about my Comparative Literature students. Intensely proud. Fanatically stubborn. And capable of drinking any old English academic under the table.

Then again, that describes most Icelanders in any case. Academic or not.

That, I guess, is my only real criticism.

This discussion has treated the word “academia” as if it is only a part of the American economic life and culture.

The system is similar all around the world and will only grow more similar as the Americisation of Europe continues.

But…

Pride. Satisfaction. Rage. Self-doubt. Confidence. Them’s words of culture and psychology. You can talk about the similarities in the system all day long. But the people and nations differ, as does their handling of the system.

So talking about the system and how it treats people is a valid and necessary thing. But the talking about what sort of people come into the system and what they are like when they come out of it—

That’s something that varies wildly depending on the country and culture. Generalising wildly will be a blatant lie at best and a gross insult at worst.

Talk about how you came out of it to your heart’s content. The fact that Happy Tutor was once a self-hating loser is an interesting point and shows the vast difference between the the old “loser” Tutor and the current excellent writer.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.