Technology

Last night, I was ego surfing, and decided to check my Google rank for the keyword “Robert.” That’s right, just “Robert.” I have been in the top ten off and on, but last night this site actually came up higher than the blog of Robert Scoble.


I think this means I was momentarily famous. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel any different than before. By this morning, the effect wore off. I am now back under Scoble. Such are my thrills of late.

I also started up a stub page on Wikipedia for my googleganger, Robert Peake the Elder. Some art historian with a lot of spare time later went to town. Unfortunately, the Peake side of my family tree ends with my love-em-and-leave-em great-grandfather Peake. So, short of DNA testing (or some evidence that this painter had a double-jointed thumb), I’ll never know if we are related.

I was saddened to read that technology journalist Marc Orchant passed away this afternoon, having been unconscious for several days following a major heart attack. I only met Marc once in person, but he struck me as vibrant, fit, and extremely likable. He is survived by his wife and two children. If you feel moved to help support them through what must be an incredibly challenging holiday time, details on making a donation are available here.

Marc’s was a lightning-quick creative intelligence and, coupled with his love of technology, made for stimulating conversation and insightful reading on ZDNet and, later, blognation. The blogosphere is abuzz with tributes to his memory. For my part, I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences to his family, and hope that they are buoyed up by the support of friends and family during this time.

Linear navigation can be dull. Furthermore, it requires the person browsing to think like the person who organized the navigation — from distinctions between organizational models down to the structure of the hierarchy. (What, for example, on my own site, is the difference between a “category” and a “tag”? And why is “Humor” under “Poetry” but not “Technology” or “Life”?) I got to thinking about how to break down the artificial barrier between content tags and content categories, as well as how to organize concepts in a more intuitive manner than nested lists — and came up with the following navigation system for my site (requires Flash):


Basically, the navigator places a central topic in the middle, and arranges related topics (either categories or tags) around the central topic, using both proximity and text darkness to signify how often the related topics have appeared in the same articles as the central topic. The navigator displays a maximum of six related topics at a time, with left and right buttons on the side to step through additional related topics. Click on a related topic and it becomes the new central topic. Then click on the (blue, underlined) central topic to go to that category or tag page.

I have placed a miniature version of this experimental navigational system in the sidebar. It automatically detects category and tag pages in which it finds itself embedded, and displays them as the central topic. Hopefully, this will prove a useful means for visitors to browse through related topics on the site, and find new information without having to understand artificial concepts like categories and tags, or some relatively arbitrary hierarchy.

After a brief experiment with Twitter, I concluded that the trend toward quantity over quality being perpetuated by social network status updates wasn’t for me. In fact, it seemed downright unpoetic. Then, thanks to Jeanine’s site, I discovered Goodreads. Finally, a niche network with a purpose I could get behind: discussing books. The only other specialized social network I had signed up for in the past was LinkedIn. But that was about work. This is about books. Delicious books!

I even went so far as to set up a private group for other students, faculty and alumni in the Pacific University MFA program. I figure this could help provide an outlet that is missing from the low-residency format — the opportunity to chat throughout the semester with other students about what we are reading. The results of that experiment remain to be seen.

Shortly after that, however, softened by my recent joinerism, I caved in and signed up for Facebook. It seems I am of a certain generation such that if I want to keep up with some of my friends, I need to be on Facebook. So, there I am — to the chagrin and relief of my wife, who has been reconnecting with friends overseas for some time through Facebook and and attempting to impress its wonders upon me (“Look! I gave someone a garden gnome!”), and a number of friends who have invited me to join up at various times. OK, OK, I’m on — happily reviewing books, posting photos, and turning friends into zombies. How did I ever live without this? Curmudgeon no more.

Related Links:

• Goodreads Profile
• Facebook Profile
• LinkedIn Profile

Our Air New Zealand Boeing 747 came with an in-flight entertainment system, including movies-on-demand and arcade games. A few rounds into Tetris, I managed to crash the system, complete with the classic Windows “application has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down” message.

I switched to chess, and beat the system on its “difficult” setting in about twenty moves. Apart from its opening book, the system was pathetic - it couldn’t spot a simple fork or think more than a few moves ahead. During the rematch, I got it into a somewhat complex situation, likely a forced checkmate in about ten moves. It hung there with an hourglass for a good twenty minutes, then coughed up a dialog box asking me which part of the system it ought to shut down in order to conserve memory. Honestly, some are incapable of accepting defeat.

After I selected the default option, the entire operating system crashed hard into a black screen and began rebooting. Not surprisingly, the boot screen proudly proclaimed Windows CE circa 2004, then began loading up files using the ancient Xmodem serial protocol. Finally, it booted itself back into friendly pictures of New Zealand coastline. I spent the rest of the flight hoping Microsoft hadn’t won the bid on the flight controls.

I was shocked to discover today that French PHP programmer Bertrand Gugger passed away last week due to a heart attack. Bertrand was co-lead on the Net_Monitor project with me, and contributed many valuable additions to the project, including all the SMS messaging support and end-to-end testing of European SMS messaging providers.

Bertrand was a character, to say the least. He was passionate about PHP and often had very strong opinions about how to write code well. This, combined with an imperfect grasp of English, often got him into trouble on the Pear Developer lists. Still, in the end, Bertrand and I always got along really well and he contributed some very valuable code to the Net_Monitor project as well as many other Pear projects. Whatever he did, he wanted to do right, and this commitment to writing high quality code - as well as a voracious interest in contributing to PHP development - will have implications and benefits for other PHP programmers for a long time to come.

Reading the news a week late on the Pear website drove home how little I have been involved with a community that used to be such a big part of my life. After James’s death, I began to refocus my life (and this website) on one of my original loves: poetry. And, with the growth of the company and my development team at work, I rarely delve in to actual PHP code these days.

That said, just the other day a new programmer signed on to the Net_Monitor project, and I am happy to see this work continue. Coding for love instead of money, giving something back to such an amazing community of talented programmers who have made so much possible for me in my own career and life - is a kind of lineage I have been proud to take part in. Bertrand was an important part of that lineage, right up to the end. He is survived by wife and children, who have my deepest sympathies now.

Que vous reposez en paix, Bertrand. You will be missed.

(Or, A History Of My Web Presence, With Nods To
Robert Pinsky And The 14th Century Samurai Creed)

When frames were in vogue,
my address bar remained constant.
When full-page graphics were in,
you could see my big head for miles.
I never used a black background,
I made trendiness my enemy.
When blogs were in fashion,
my thoughts became chronological.
I do not own an island in Second Life,
I make imagination my island.
When no-one hits my website,
detachment is my unique visitor.

“Every word was once a poem”

In this so-called information age, we live among language more than ever before. For example, one of the latest fads drawing hype to itself faster than a black hole sucks light is Twitter: a web-based social networking site predicated on “tweets” - brief text messages uploaded to a web site that others subscribe to, follow and read. Thus, the blogging concept of writing for a perceived audience is accelerated to a dizzying pace.

I tried Twittering for a day, sending tweets when I changed my activity or mood. Between the web-based, software-based and cell-phone-based options, I was never disconnected from a sense that I could and perhaps should send an update in case someone out there might actually really care about the excruciatingly mundane details of my life. This is the fundamental promise of the internet, and social networking in particular: the audience that cares. It has been the impetus, since the beginning, for a mind-boggling number of words, from the early days of IRC and BBS systems to a shiny new rehash of the same fundamental drivers and mechanisms, which is now being called Web 2.0.

My sister asked me to design the logo for her website. Her vision: a woman in warrior pose holding a lotus in her upturned palm. My immediate thought: why not use Blender? After all, I had some success playing with existing logos earlier.

An enduring logo has to work in print, be quickly recognizable, and turn out well in just two colors. That means anything done in 3D must translate well to 2D. But because Blender is such a great tool with so many useful plug-ins, it acutally turned out to be an ideal starting point for this rather complex design.

Even though it’s been awhile since I’ve made a major contribution to Pear, I’m still on the map. (Click the southernmost monkey in California.)