Binary Balance

The information equivalent of a nuclear bomb detonating over the Shima Hospital that is SOPA / PIPA last week would seem to have put a rather large question mark over the future of the these proposals (thanks to Wikipedia et al.).

Of course, copyright reliant industry’s troubled relationship with technology isn’t new. Historically, it’s been something of a slow-motion rear guard action over the years as technology steadily makes it easier and easier to distribute information. But previous attempts to combat the inevitable seem very quaint now that the stakes have been well and truly raised.

They say there’s only two things that are certain: death and taxes. Well, taxes is a given I suppose, unless you happen to be in a position to mostly lobby your way out of them. Death on the other hand is a little harder to lobby against at present. The Death card in the traditional Tarot deck (as watchers of The Simpsons or readers of Promethea may recollect) is often interpreted as representing change or transformation. In truth, perhaps the one universally inevitable condition is change. Following on from this, I thought I might try an analogy that incumbents such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) could find some affinity with: At present, the movie/TV industry is like the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Once more or less invincible, now they find they are smack in the middle of the molten ore of advancing technology, transforming themselves into all the past shapes stored in their memory in a desperate attempt to avoid their own destruction. Read more...

Read an interesting book recommended by a friend the other day: Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff. The main thrust of Rushkoff’s book is that all media, all forms of communication, starting at speech, moving on to the first examples of an alphabet, to the printing press and now to online communication have a bias and one needs to be aware of a medium’s bias when communicating through it. Bias in this context meaning that each medium tends to elicit particular attitudes and behaviours from it’s users.

If I can attempt to paraphrase, Rushkoff infers that this last communication revolution based upon the computer is a very important one, because now we’re actually getting to the point where the tools we are creating are taking on the characteristics of living things. They’re not quite living things yet though and at least until the hypothetical singularity manifests, the people who program these almost living tools will continue to take on an increasingly important role. Conversely, in the years to come those who do not at least have a basic idea of how programming is done will be at an acute disadvantage (politically, socially, financially, culturally) much like the illiterate following society’s adoption of the written word. Read more...

It seems that social media is everywhere today. Live tweet our show using the hash tag ‘#WhyJustWatchWhenYouCanCriticise’! There’s other websites as well as Facebook? But how do do your friends know about your inane comments on those ones?! One could be forgiven for thinking the read/write web is getting old hat these days. Web 2.0, how unfashionable an epithet for use by today’s modern web hipster. Read more...

Traditionally in the website building and maintenance sector of the IT industry, there have been two sub-specialisations: the web designer and the web developer¹.

To define my terminology more clearly, I’ll risk stating the obvious: web designers tended to have more of a graphic design background. These people might end up doing the ‘front end’ work on websites. They’d do the colour scheme, set the font, maybe do the logo and icons if they were good enough. As websites started to share the space with or become web applications, designers started to take responsibility for the user interface (UI) aspects, although UI design almost seems to have become yet another sub-sub-specialisation of it’s own. Web developers typically had more of a programming background and worked on the ‘back end’ of the website or web application. Server side and client side scripting, maybe some server and/or database administration.

but as the web has matured, the line between these two archetypes has continued to blur and it is this middle ground that I personally find myself standing on. Read more...

I watched the video of David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote address from RubyCon 2010 the other day. It was unapologetically pro-Ruby, and delivered with the flair and showmanship that has made DHH and 37Signals the polarising force that they are. Being quite fond of Ruby, I found myself nodding along to most of what David had to say. But I don’t wish to add even a small amount of new fuel to the programming language wars that seem to go on endlessly around the place. The purpose of this post is not to join in on any Ruby circle-jerking.

One of the things that particularly stood out to me in DHH’s keynote was a quote from Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language:

The very fact that it’s possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness. The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.

The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil. This is a great quote and it rings very true for me. Along with some other parts of David’s address, it got me to thinking about how the uniformity that we enforce in other aspects of life in order to minimise the potential for evil may also be minimising the potential for good. Read more...