[Fri Feb 22 14:17:28 CET 2008]

The Spanish daily Público published an article yersterday about DVD Jon that drew my attention. It turns out that the Norwegian hacker who wrote DeCSS, the application that can break the scrambling system used by the media industry to provide copyright protection for DVDs and similar, has now released doubleTwist (the homepage can be found here), an application that liberates other DRM systems, like the one used by Apple's iTune. As usual, the industry will kick and cry, but one wonders to what extent they can be allowed to cripple not only software (as they have been doing for decades now) but even digital media in order to force semi-monopolistic practices down the customers' throats. For, let us be clear, the issue here is not so much intellectual property, as they usually claim, but curtailing people's freedom to purchase a given work of art from a vendor and play it on a device bought from a different manufacturer. Today's large conglomerates in the entertainment industry would rather have us locked in, but I simply cannot see how that could be sold as "standing up in defense of our creative minds". {link to this story}

[Wed Feb 20 16:26:55 CET 2008]

Jenna Wortham writes in Wired about the freeze-ins, the latest trend in the sort of improvised gathering techniques that have become so popular in the last few years. Needless to say, freeze-ins could easily be implemented as a part of a campaign for political and social demands. The clip below corresponds to a stunt that gathered around 1,000 people at London's Trafalgar Square a few days ago.

{link to this story}

[Wed Feb 20 09:50:33 CET 2008]

Here we go for another round of PHP versus Perl comparison. Rcently, an organization I volunteer for had a need to grab an HTML table containing information about all members and sympathizers and convert it into a format that could be easily imported into Excel. I took it as an excuse to give PHP one more try. While technically literate, I don't program for a living and am not necessarily very familiar with this or that library, this or that programming language. I don't code 10 hours a day. I only use them as a tool to accomplish something, a clear and precise objective I need to do, and that's all. Therefore, simplicity is what matters most to me. I don't want to spend longer than I should trying to get things to work after I'm done with my regular day.

So, what modules are available to massage an HTML table and convert it into a comma-separated value format that could be imported into Excel? Yes, there are some tools already available on the Web (check, for example, here), but my needs were quite specific and our tables needed some additional massaging. In other words, I had to write my own script. Big deal, right? Well, when it comes to PHP, I found some commercial-ware written by the folks at Blue Chillies (not an option, since my organization wasn't willing to pay a single dime) and little else. Yes, as I said above, there are hundreds of tools already written and packaged (most of them perhaps not even written in PHP at all), but that's not what I needed.

After searching around for a while, I got antsy and thought to myself: "there must be a better way to do this. Why not forget about PHP and try Perl instead?" Sure enough, the solution was a Google search away. In the end, I used the HTML::TokeParser module from CPAN to parse the HTML and print each cell from the table to a comma-separated file. Easy enough and I had it all done in a few lines of code. Even better, there were a few other modules to choose from. So, there went my latest attempt to force myself to prefer PHP over Perl and become more familiar with it. And, remember, I'm no Perl programmer. I don't spend my days programming. I just want the quickest tool for the job, that's all. It's truly not an issue of being far more familiar with Perl than with PHP. The Perl community just makes it easier for people like me to do whatever they need to do and move on with their life. {link to this story}

[Mon Feb 18 16:57:23 CET 2008]

A few days back I was perusing the Edge website (highly recommended if you care about the latest scientific and technology trends) and came across a talk with Kevin Kelly about The Technium and The 7th Kingdom of Life that contains some intriguing thoughts:

The main question that I'm asking myself is, what is the meaning of technology in our lives? What place does technology have in the universe? What place does it have in the human condition? And what place should it play in my own personal life? Technology as a whole system, or what I call the technium, seems to be a dominant force in the culture. Indeed at times it seems to be the only force —the only lasting force— in culture. If that's so, then what can we expect from this force, what governs it? Sadly we don't even have a good theory about technology.

I'm trying to investigate ways to understand the long-term consequences of technology in the world and place it into some position along with other grand things like biological nature, big history, the physics of the cosmos, and the future. It's a very ambitious project and, surprisingly, there isn't really mucht hinking about technology in terms of its sphere of influence in a way that might be useful to thinking about how to evaluate what we make.

There's no predictive theory of technology either. I've been inculcated with the fundamentals of GBN-style scenarios to understand that all predictions are wrong by default. So, when I say predictive, I don't mean in the sense that we could actually predict, in detail, what technology will do. I mean predictive in the sense of a theory that would give us the tools to guide its direction at the large scale. a theory that would let us say that we know enough about technology's past that we can expect certain thigns about it in its future. Right now, we basically take technologies as they come up, and each novel technology, one by one, catches us caught off-guard. Though I don't think I'm capable of generating it, a useful theory of technology is what I would love to find.

(...)

... we still don't have a good sense of what technology is or how we should define it. Technology in its modern sense is a term that wasn't even invented until 1829. We had been making technology for centuries, but didn't have a word for it. I suggest we still don't know exactly what it is. Is it anything that we make from with our minds? Or only certain things?

Even more intriguing are, I think, Kelly's thoughts about the way science and technology are connected in our contemporary society:

Science and technology are intrinsically connected. We have a sense that science is a method of thinking that generates technology, but I've come to the concusion that technology is a type of thinking that generates science.

The scientific method itself is not constant. It is evolving. What we call the scientific method has been changed by technology from the very beginning. The necessity of peer review, and repeatability of experiments, for example, were types of thinking that had to be invented and required technologies like print to make possible. A scientist from 400 years ago would not recognize the scientific method as it is practiced today because a lot of the elements of research that we now consider essential to the scientific method weren't invented until very recently: for instance, placebos, statistical sampling, double blind experiments. All these things are new, some of them invented in just the last 50 years.

New technologies being invented today, such as social software, distributed instrumentation, and new ways of seeing will all transform the scientific method of the future. It is very likely the scientific method will change far more in the next 50 years than it has in its first 400 years of its existence.

Specific technologies are like individuals, or species, and the society or ecosystem of these individuals is the technium. I'm especially interested in how the technium works at the system level —how it operates as an ecology of technological species, as a complex web of interacting agents each with their own biases and tendencies.

The fact is that technology and science are more and more intermingled in today's society. I've recently finished reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn's seminal work, and am currently reading James Gleick's Chaos, and it's patently obvious to me that science and technology cannot be understood independently of each other anymore. We'd better make sure that future generations feel comfortable with the basic concepts both in science and technology or we are in trouble. In any case, Kelly is correct when he argues that we haven't studied yet how technology is affecting our culture. The serious study of topics like new media, the history of science and technology, the concept of technology assessment, theories of technology, the technology acceptance model, technology transfer or the technology lifecycle are still in their infance. There is plenty of work to do. {link to this story}

[Fri Feb 8 18:43:54 CET 2008]

I have been following the development of Enlightenment's E17 window manager for quite sometime now. Every now and then I download their bits and give it a try on my work desktop for a while. It still has too many rough edges to use it on a daily basis —well, at least for work and six months ago or so, which is the last time when I tested it. However, it seems obvious to me that, as things stand, these are about the only folks who are still putting together a non-Windows-like graphical environment full of innovation and cool effects —other than Apple's Aqua, that is. Don't get me wrong. I do like GNOME and can also see how some people may love KDE, but I find it quite difficult to get excited over anything they are doing. Sure, they are bringing Linux closer to the masses, that's true. But they are hardly breaking new grounds or trying anything new. The Enlightenment people, on the other hand, are. Check out the latest video available on the Elive CD website to see what I'm talking about. By the way, they also have a version for the MacBook. {link to this story}