{ 2001.03.23 } The thing about the modern world is that it's possible to compare two pieces of information from completely different places. This wasn't always possible: The speed information travelled from England to America was the same speed people travelled there. It is possible, as it wasn't before, to have a world empire, a top-down control system. Once upon a time we could only communicate with neighbours, and the world was bottom up, cellular automaton, emergent. Today there are only neighbours.

This has coloured the way we think. But what if it wasn't like that? What if there was cultural diversity not from any historical differences, but because it was impossible that uniformity could be maintained? If humans conquer the galaxy, that's what it'll be like. And we'll think differently, have different social ideas, different philosophies because of it.

Sometimes I think like this: Imagine a grid of people all standing just within shouting distance from each other, over the entire country. When a person hears a shout, they repeat it. How would that look, from above, seeing that ripple of noise moving around? How would information travel? How would it interact? This is closer to how the world really is, and we forget that.

{ 03.22 } The upcoming UK census uses a system based on job (and from there, contract type) to determine your socio-economic class, ranked from 1 to 7 (1 being people with the best "life chances"). You can check your class online. I'm a 1.2.

{ } Joke just heard: What does a cow with no legs die of? Mouth.

{ } It's Thursday, it's stinking fresh Upsideclown, and Victor's had some feedback. It's a complaint. Oh dear.

Some of the members of said collective clearly have aspirations to be serious writers: these show potential and, frankly, deserve to be aired in a more salubrious and credible environment. There are others, however, who have wasted their opportunity to speak, and use the medium as a space for mindless rant, monotonous polemic and victimisation.

Or maybe it's fan mail. You can never tell with Victor. Upsideclown presents: Point of View.

{ } Ahead of its release on Saturday, Apple have updated their Mac OS X pages with movies and graphics of the new operating systems. It's those little touches I love: Print previews (even from the web) being save-able as pdf; an Undo option on the desktop; Services (ooooh, Services) -- that last being the ability of applications to easily hook together. I remember from using NeXT having a text editor to edit source, and the Pascal compiler putting an option in the Services menu to compile and run, completely removing the save launch and load intermediate step. Mmm, geek lust. And I've heard that all the Developer Tools are included with the final release. Wow. It's like the 1980s.

All of which makes me think... I've been coming round to the idea that the GUI, as is, has reached the end of its lifetime. The operating system world is in a similar state to DOS before Windows. There was no compelling reason to upgrade the operating system, and that's the state we're in. There are no big differences in new version, between rival products (Mac OS and Windows), and no innovation. But perhaps I've been too hasty with that idea. A universal login, shared contacts/calendar/file-storage between Windows XP, Hotmail, and any other application that wants to (Windows XP and Hailstorm) is indeed compelling and probably something that does indeed need to be done at the OS level. As a www developer, running Apache, a solid database, php, Perl, but also Photoshop, BBEdit, Microsoft Office, on my laptop, on the train, without an internet connection (that'll be Mac OS X then), that is also compelling. Extremely. There are clear differences emerging between products, which is a good thing, and although I'd class none of this as "innovation" there are a large number of growth points that independent and small developers can take in directions that the OS behemoths haven't even considered.

I'd still like to see alternative ways of dealing with my information. I don't believe that the GUI is the be-all of how to store my documents. We can see it's crumbling already: I use my email client to store messages, MP3 software lets me browse my music, I use the www (and not my Finder or file explorer) to hunt for documents. Why shouldn't all these pieces of information be treated in a universal way? Perhaps it's a good thing that the focus of all these new services is the www because it takes the constraints off the desktop so it can move, change and experiment in new ways. I want timestreams. I want dynamic views instead of folders. I want built in versioning. I want to browse a database as a file system, and do sql on my mailbox. I want to see new ways of working, even bad ones as long as they're new. The GUI is too hard.

{ } Every day I barge my way on to the tube in the morning, eat mouthfuls of other people's hair (not voluntarily) for fifteen minutes, push and shove through the station, and listen to sarcastic tube drivers ("Stand clear of the doors. If you don't get out the way, it's your journey you're delaying.") the whole way to work. But this morning... This morning the tube was empty. I mean, there were seats. At Liverpool Street the driver announced that we were running a little ahead of schedule (who ever heard of schedules when there's a train every minute?), that if we were moving on to remember to take all personal belongings with us. On the platform it was announced - to the no people standing there - that there was another train behind this one, and please stand clear of the doors. I'm not accidentally up an hour early. I haven't heard of it being National Stay At Home Thursday or anything similar.

I think I've stumbled into that mythical parallel London where the public transport system is good. I like it here.

{ 03.21 } GZigZag is an open-source version of Ted Nelson's ZigZag [thanks Paul].

{ } Look, look, this is useful. Or something. Web service listings of public SOAP services.

{ } Hack an ecommerce 'site with only your browser, somehow news at ZDNet:

Here's how it works: After choosing a product and receiving pricing information, a hacker can use a standard browser's "edit page" feature to show the hidden HTML code on the page. The thief then saves the page to his computer, alters the price information and then hits the "publish" key on the browser. In many cases, that page is then accepted by the shopping cart software - and that $999 watch becomes a $3 special.

Hacker? Hidden? Thief? Alters price information? Price information? In the url? Like "cost=5"? The only valuable information this article gives me is the exact percentage of kill-them-now-for-their-own-good stupid people running dot coms. [via MeFi thread.]

{ 03.20 } Okay, so I've read the Microsoft Hailstorm White Paper, and read a whole load of articles about it. It's a fascinating and complex concept. My executive summary is roughly as follows:

Taking all the services that people have on intranets, usually with Outlook, like contacts management, calendaring, appointments auto-added across calendars, expenses, the whole lot, and taking it to the internet, for the masses (with one interface the MSN Instant Messager). All remote calls are done using SOAP, all data in XML. Buzzword city. Information is kept on centralised servers, authentication performed using Microsoft Passport.

I like it. But: Okay although there are many ways to feed into the storage area, there's no way for me to swap the backend. There's no way I can build my own Hailstorm that would interoperate with the Microsoft version. And these are services that many people can and do offer already: Microsoft aren't providing any way for people to work together; they're duplicating online wallets, calendars and so on, the only advantage being that more people will use the same service (so it can be hooked into websites in confidence that people will be using it). Oh, and it provides lock-in for Windows. So I like it, but I'm concerned.

{ 03.19 } As another week begins, Monday carries with it fresh Upsideclown:

It isn't beyond the realm of possibility that the way it happens is one day he sees a woman stepping on a snail and (unconsciously recalling that long Summer when he was six watching his beloved mother stomping on the beasts on the patio) thinks: "My goodness, that's what I've been missing all these years," shortly followed by, "I'd better go to the bathroom. I wonder where the handcream is?"

Fetishes, sexuality, snails. My very own Upsideclown, none the less. An exploration of sexual deviance and discovery thereof, in Hit Me Baby, One More Time. References supplied, as they say, on request.