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I’m playing with a WordPress plugin called AsideShop – it lets you define a category to be handled as “asides” and provides a way to override the post display template so you can make them look however you want. The cool thing is – you can define post templates for each category on your site, if that kind of thing floats your boat. Very cool. But, I do need to figure out how to exclude items in the Asides category from the main site feed…

Looks like I can write asides, which could live somewhere between Twitter tweets and full-on blog posts. Should be able to also have just an asides page and feed, too… Might have to think about the presentation of asides, and see if I can yank them from the main feed as well…

really? asides? I wonder what those are…

There. I said it.

Earth day sucks. It’s harmful.

It provides a cop-out, marketing-based, feel good way for people and companies to feel good about half-assed lame excuses for making a real sustainable difference.

Every day should be earth day. This one-day-per-year stuff is garbage. This “oh! what did you do for earth day?” feel good crap doesn’t help. Frack off. Every fracking day is earth day. What did you do for EVERY OTHER DAY OF THE YEAR earth day?

Just like striving for “carbon neutrality” isn’t going far enough. We’ve got to start undoing a half century of crapping all over this planet, and these silly Hallmark™ sound bite gestures just don’t cut it.

Yeah, awareness is good. But, really, who needs to have their awareness raised? This is 2008. This is post-Inconvenient-Truth. This is not news to anyone who can or will do anything about it. Can we stop the silliness now, and just assume that saving the earth should be a mainstream, full-time activity and not some stupid annual event? The “Green” issue of Vogue. The “Green” episode of $stupidTVShow. The celebrities touting their guilt-salving charity work. Ridiculous.

As long as we have countries spending a trillion dollars on wars to secure cheap gas for SUVs, all the weak gestures in the world don’t amount to a hill of beans. As long as we have countries willing to strip mine entire provinces to extract petroleum to keep the economy booming, switching a few light bulbs isn’t going to make much of a difference.

Walking through campus this morning, I witnessed a red faced, agitated young man. He was ripping posters off of a poster board, and shredding them in his hands. I looked a little closer – wondering what he was doing. He was being quite selective in the posters he was ripping – they all appeared to have been informational posters about “new atheism”. I saw him rip two of the posters. I didn’t see the information on the posters, aside from the title, but a quick Google turned up this web page describing the movement. Obviously, it must be suppressed.

I almost confronted the man, and then realized that there likely wasn’t much that I could say that would do anything but aggravate him further. He was doing God’s work, removing the traces of blasphemy.

From a University poster board. At a research university, where all ideas are supposed to be valued and freely explored. Where tolerance, understanding, and communication are to be valued, cherished, and nurtured.

On a campus that boasts a “Chair of Christian Thought”

I’m hoping that whoever put the posters up will replace them, if only to show red faced agitated man that information can’t be destroyed.

He did have the forethought to leave the posters of almost-nude, oiled up hotties for the Bermuda Shorts Day parties around town.

I should probably clarify a couple of things about what I was trying to say about social networks as sharecropping activities.

First, I am not trying to suggest that hosted services are inherently bad – I think it’s great that services like WordPress.com and Edublogs are available – and they are not sharecropping. Hosted services can be great – they let people easily post their content, and a well designed and managed hosted service doesn’t infringe on a person’s digital identity, nor on their ownership of the content they publish.

Applications like Facebook, where content is absorbed and ownership is stripped through the process, are sharecropping.

Second, it’s not (all) about advertising. There are ads on lots of good services – they have to pay the bills for offering a free service somehow – but there’s a line that has to be drawn. If a service is overly advertised, or the ads are intrusive, then it’s just not cool (in my opinion, of course). Saying a service is evil because they try to make money is just wrong. As long as it’s done with taste, isn’t invasive, and isn’t directly messing with a person’s content (i.e., inserting ads in the content itself, etc…) then it’s likely OK. But it’s a personal thing.

The easiest way to see if something is worth contributing to is by asking the question “who benefits by my using this service?” If it’s not clear, or the primary beneficiary is the service provider, then it’s probably not a good place to be, and is possibly running under the sharecropping model. Actually, that’s a good question to ask when dealing with anything – who benefits? why are they doing this?

Examples of 3 hosted services that are NOT sharecroppers:

• Flickr (it’s free, but they benefit primarily by Pro subscriptions)
• WordPress.com (it’s free, but they make their money on paid upgrades)
• Edublogs.com (it’s free, but they also sell upgrades and services)

Stephen ran a cool line of command line goodness to crunch out a list of the most commonly run commands he runs in Terminal.

The code he ran is:

% history|awk '{print $2}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head

Hey, that’s pretty cool. Crunches through the shell history, spits out a list of commands, groups them by uniqueness and sorts them by number of occurrences.

I ran it on the 3 systems I use most often:

  84 ssh
  80 ls
  65 cd
  50 exit
  33 sudo
  19 rm
  16 mate
  11 httrack
  10 more
   9 curl

    287 ls
    227 cd
     61 curl
     51 rm
     50 tar
     48 cp
     43 emacs
     42 pci
     24 more
     24 exit

    317 ls
    215 cd
    120 rm
     47 nano
     47 mv
     36 curl
     33 more
     27 exit
     25 unzip
     20 cp

On my Desktop, I’m mostly hopping off to other systems via SSH, or editing config stuff (sudo and mate – the command line interface for TextMate). On webapps3, I’m administering a bunch of Drupal sites, so there’s a lot of grabbing stuff via wget and curl, dealing with tarballs, and editing config files. On darcynorman.net I’m mostly updating WordPress, moving files around, and (before WP 2.5) updating plugins and themes.

I’m more than a little surprised that man didn’t show up in the top 10 list on any of these systems…

It’s kind of interesting, to me at least, how each system I use has a different fingerprint of activity.

Heather posted something this morning that’s had me thinking about this pretty much all day.

Occasionally, Tim Bray talks about “sharecropping” as related to the world of open source vs. proprietary software and APIs.

What‘s a Sharecropper?· I found a good definition at InterAction Design:

“A farmer who works a farm owned by someone else. The owner provides the land, seed, and tools exchange for part of the crops and goods produced on the farm.”

It’s a lousy position to be in, because you’re never going to make much, and if the land’s owner finds something better to do with the land, you’re history.

Now, we’re all furiously publishing reams of content into various social network applications and services. We post updates to Twitter. We write on walls in Facebook (or, more likely, just play Scrabulous). We post photos to Flickr. We put videos on Google Video, YouTube, and now Flickr.

While all of these activities are valued, and contribute to the sense of online community, they are basically the activities of a sharecropper. Tilling the landowner’s field, toiling in the landowner’s soil, until, eventually, the landowner reaps the rewards.

I think it’s important to own your own land. It’s important to publish content in a way that you, and only you, can control. I think it’s important to be able to decide what you publish, how you publish, and what can be done with that. Even if you’re not publishing content in the traditional sense, the data generated by your activities has meaning. Google mines your subscriptions in Google Reader, as well as your searches. Flickr tracks whose photos you fave, and where you comment.

Publishing content into a third party proprietary application is nothing more than sharecropping. You don’t truly own what you are doing, and you are not the primary beneficiary of your actions.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t benefits to sharecropping. There are typically more people in a third party community service than would be active in an individually-operated one. The community-critical-mass issue could be solved through effective use of loosely joined individual services – I could post photos to my blog, or to Gallery2, and others could comment or reuse at will. I could post stuff to my blog, and others can use it at will. Part of this would require some more robust digital identity management stuff – if we’re using potentially hundreds of individually run services, we’re not going to create accounts on each. Something like OpenID could help here.

The other benefit of sharecropping is that, on a third-party system, you typically don’t have to worry about infrastructure. It could be argued (as I seem to do on a daily basis) that the infrastructure is trivial to manage now. Anyone (ANYONE!) can set up a server account, and use one-click installs to run any of a long list of great applications, for less than $10/month. Infrastructure is not the limiting factor any more.

Now, with that said, I’m going to go check Flickr for new photos from my contacts, and then check Twitter to see what my friends are up to. Then, I’ll fire up Google Reader to see what they’re doing on their own land.

Update: It also strikes me that compelling students to publish content into institutional repositories and course management systems is tantamount to forced sharecropping. We need to do better by our students than to guide them toward embracing sharecropping as the preferred expression of digital identity.

You can tell it’s springtime in Calgary when you wake up to this:

And then after you get to work, you check Dashboard Weather and find this:

Up to +7˚C today, then up to +22˚C this weekend. At least the surprise dump of white stuff will melt quickly… It was a really fun ride to work this morning. Maybe too much fun. I’ve got street slicks on my bike, so didn’t have much traction. Going up hills was interesting. And I had to stop repeatedly to clear snow from inside the fenders, from off of the handlebars, off of my jacket and helmet. And had to constantly wipe the giant flakes from my glasses so I could see where I was going. I avoided the busiest street portion of the ride, ducking through a park instead. No need to take unnecessary risks…

Time for another episode, this time on basic workflow – importing a few photos, deleting the crap, and processing the one(s) that don’t get nuked. This time, the dogs were quiet, and The Boy™ decided not to make an appearance. I might schedule him for a later episode…

Episode 2: Basic Workflow weighs in at 12.1 MB, and clocks in at 10:27. Or, if you want a full HD version, use the second link.

Episode 2 (1080×675, 14.6MB)

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