JulioBiason.Net

A few years ago (two or three), I saw Richard Stallman at FISL where he said that things like Webmail were bad ’cause you don’t have any control over the software it runs in the server. In a way, he is right: How do you have any control over your data if you don’t have any control over your software? How can you be sure that the server isn’t doing something nasty with your information since you have no way to request the source code?

Requesting the source code is one of your rights if you are using a GPL-licensed software. That way, you can be sure that the application is not sending your information to someone else or looking for things it shouldn’t. But the GPL says that distributed software should have its code available; in a web 2.0 world, nobody is distributing any software: it simply is there. Therefore, even if you run a GPL application, do lots of modifications, because you’re not distributing it, you don’t need to make your changes available to the world.

The thing that was bothering me, though, is related to some web apps/websites I used at some point. They had this pretty cool thing and I was wondering “Is that something I know, like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or whatever?” but, in the end, I couldn’t find anything that would say what they were using in the backend. And, just now, I was wondering how the GPL would apply to such websites.

Besides the GPL, there is another very useful license: The modified BSD license or simply “BSD”. The only rule the BSD license requires (compared to the “5 freedoms” GPL enforces) is that you can’t remove the copyright from the original authors. You may add your name, but the original copyright must appear somewhere. I wondered, then, if the GPL would have such requirement. I’m not a lawyer, but I think this does:

5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.
[...]
b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is released under this License and any conditions added under section 7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to “keep intact all notices”.

That, to me, sounds exactly like the BSD. So, if you’re using a GPL software in your webserver, you must point, somewhere, that the engine behind your powerful site is copyright the original authors.

Now you must ask yourself this: How many websites out there are using WordPress with a modified theme that completely removed the “Powered by WordPress”? Or sites that chose (not sure why) the GPL version of the jQuery and didn’t mention that anywhere?

For a while, I’ve been ranting about the new “Star Trek” movie by J.J.Abrams and written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. This morning I finally realized why it bothers me and why the line “OMG, boobies in Star Trek?” makes me giggle.

First, let’s take a look at the list of main Star Trek characters in the series:

• The Original Series: James T. Kirk, Spock, Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy, Montgomery Scott, Hikaru Sulu, Pavel Checkov, Uhura (and let’s throw Christopher Pike just for the sake of it.)
• The Next Generation: Jean-Luc Picard, William Riker, Geordi La Forge, Worf, Beverly Crusher, Wesley Crusher, Deanna Troi, Data.
• Deep Space Nine: Benjamin Sisko, Kira Nerys, Odo, Julian Bashir, Jadzia Dax, Quark, Miles O’Brien, Jake Sisko, Worf (yes, again), Ezi Dax.
• Voyager: Kathryn Janeway, Chakotay, Tuvok, B’Elanna Torres, Tom Paris, Harry Kim, The Doctor, Neelix, Kes, Seven of Nine
• Enterprise: Jonathan Archer, T’Pol, Charles Tucker III, Malcolm Reed, Hoshi Sato, Travis Mayweather, Phlox.

  Go on. Go clicky-clicky and try to find the two that doesn’t fit. I’ll wait.

  Did you spot the two?

  Ok, the answer is: Wesley Crusher and Jake Sisko (although I made it hard for you to noticed why Jake doesn’t belong there.) They are the only teenagers in the whole list of series that were main characters (there we some kids in “Voyager”, but they would appear in only one or two episodes.) All the others look like they are in the late twentys or early thirties (with a few exceptions that look more like they are getting into their fourtys.) And that also includes non-human, ageless forms, like Odo, Data and the Doctor, and the ones with longer lifes, like the Vulcans. Even the youngest crew of all series, the Voyager (they were going into final training before going officially into service when they were transported to the Delta Quadrant) looks like they were in the later twentys.

  And that’s why the new Star Trek bothers me. All the actors (with the exception of McCoy) look like they are in their early twentys and in full operational status already. Even in the original series, when the Enterprise goes into its official mission of “explore strange, new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations”, Kirk looks like he’s in the late thirties. And now you have a Kirk that looks like he just out of puberty.

  Yes, there were boobs in the TOS. But they belonged to mature females, not some out of puberty, hormone full chick.

  To me, it looks like the tone of Star Trek changed from “When you get out of your studies and do some real life training, you may be a member of the most important ship of the human race” to “jump into the most important ship of the human race! All you need to do is be able to talk!”. Sign of the times, maybe, when you’re supposed to finish college and be a full experienced whatever-they-call-you-in-the-field. But, still, Star Trek looks a little bit tainted with an “easy way to get there” view.

  But, then again, I’m an old trekkie (although I never remember if the proper way is trekker or trekkie…)

This week our connection at home is shaped. This means that, instead of the shinny 1Mbp/s that we usually have, now we have to suffer to see pages with a bandwidth of just 64Kbp/s. But there is one thing that such limited bandwidth made me realize: The next web isn’t streamable.

To get to that conclusion, I hadn’t have to go far: Just opening Google Reader shown that it’s impossible to live with a very limited bandwidth. Right now, I should have something like 1000 unread news in 1 hundred subscriptions, which means Reader have to download a large description file with all that information. Thing is, right now, it doesn’t do anything: It shows the default Google application header, the logo and that’s it. But, knowing how things usually works in this Web 2.0 universe, I know that there is something going on:

Interactive sites, like Google Reader and GMail use AJAX. AJAX relies on XML, which is a structured plain text data (the same can be said for JSON.) XML allows the data to be in any other inside their structure. As an example, imagine a book information list: Inside the “Book” item, you can have a “Title”, which can be in the very beginning or the very end, but the result would be the same. So, any application that uses XML need to first receive the information, then convert it to some internal representation and then it can be used. Google Reader wasn’t “doing nothing”: It was receiving the list of feeds and the initial 100-something feed items which, due the small bandwidth, was taking very long. And, because it needed the whole thing, nothing was being displayed.

Which is a problem I see with many XML/JSON results: You can’t stream them in a way that you can start using the information before having it all. For example, in Mitter, we can’t display tweets before we received the whole message. If XML and JSON weren’t so loosely defined and we had a way to assure that after the element “User” we would have an element “Message”, then we could start displaying tweets before we had all of them (not that the format changes all the time, but since we can’t ensure that ordering, we must be ready for the data appearing in a different order — or with some other data between the ones we need.)

In a way, that’s a complete reverse of roles for AJAX. In the very beginning, AJAX was used to prevent large downloads: If you had a page where it would be useful to display all options to the user to help him/her to find data, you’d have to fill the page with that data (imagine, for example, a page with all your Del.icio.us tags, plus all the possible suggestions for all the other users.) The use of AJAX meant the site could filter results, so you’d have a smaller page, with would do small requests to the webserver, returning small amounts of data. In overall, it meant that the user experience would be faster. Now, we have so much information packed in XML/JSON formats that the user experience is not as responsive as it should.

On the post about Final Fantasy, I realized that most of the series follow the same basic premise. And yesterday, after watching the next season of “Heroes”, I realized that most TV series also follow the same idea. That’s when I came with the reverse ideas for those things:

Reverse Final Fantasy: The forces of Light and Darkness most be in balance, or the universe will explode. Unfortunately, the Light is getting over and so the Warriors of Darkness must be summoned to save the planet. To do that, they must pillage villages, destroy families, corrupt kings and such. Honestly, I think it’s cool because you’ll end doing wrong things for the right reason.

Reverse TV series: This occurred to me when I saw “Continue in the next episode” in the end of the first episode of “Heroes.” Almost every TV series starts showing the personalities of the main characters, then add some action, add some cliff-hangers, try to connect every main character in a way and (in the really well written series) it ends closing all the open plots and shows a happy ending. What I’m thinking here is a series which the first episode is the happy ending. Everyone is fine, the universe is saved, the villains are in jail… and it ends with “Continues in the previous episode.” So the whole thing is a lot of retcons over and over again, trying to explain how character X became the villain, how Y found his/her super-powers, how the city was destroyed…

The year is 2010. To reduce production costs, Blizzard decided to join all its franchises into one single product. That’s when “World of Blizzard” was born.

On it, you can be a Protoss Zealot Hunter, in your quest to save the world from Diablo and his brothers.

One of the most popular races/classes is the Zergling Priest.

When I started using Linux, around the year 2000, you could use a very simple window manager or you could use GNOME. GNOME, at the time, had this very very cute window manager called Enlightenment, which was also a royal pain in the ass to use. It required certain settings on your X to be enabled or you couldn’t use some features (like key-bindings.)

The thing about Enlightenment is that it was really nice on the eyes. Its themes were extremely good looking and there were lots to choose from. I could say that Enlightenment was the Vista of that time.

One of the things that actually did happen a few years later was that GNOME changed its default window manager from Enlightenment to Sawfish. Sawfish, although not that good looking, was way more configurable and, apparently, the author was willing to make it more integrated to GNOME than Enlightenment. No biggy, GNOME changed window manager, but Enlightenment had its own fan base, so they took separated ways.

More years later, the Enlightenment team announced the start of release 17, also called E17. They plans were big: they would use a lot of new libraries and it would be fast and you would get even more eye candy, with shadows and real transparency and real time updates on icons and such (almost what you get today using Compiz.)

The biggest problem with E17 is that it didn’t survived its own promises. Every step forward in development was followed by two steps back. Features added were moved to yet another library and everything had, apparently again, to be refactored again. All libraries were being constantly hacked and never had any releases.

It was almost a year after the E17 announcement when the XFree team announced some new features they were planing, which would allow any window manager to use features like real transparency and real drop shadows and almost everything that the E team promised. At this point, anyone would think “So the E team joined the big dogs and help them to develop something for the community.” Well, wrong. They decided to keep their plans and don’t look around.

Even more time later, XFree announced XDamage and XRender, two features that paved the way to the current compositor-enabled window managers. Even weirder, there were two projects that managed to do that, one lead by RedHat and another by SUSE. Problems? No, they decided to talk and found a way to merge their projects into a single entity, not fragmenting the community and giving a fair change to everyone.

So, since the E17 announcement, we had a major release of X, now forked into X.org, opening it to the great community (XFree was not that open with other people suggestions), several libraries and almost every single desktop is using these new features and getting some very nice eye candy every day.

And what did happen with E17?

Last week I downloaded gOS, a light-weight distribution which uses E17 as window manager and desktop environment, using the sources from the repository, as there are no formal release yet.

What I saw was a alpha release of… something. The keybindings still don’t work properly, the themes are more proof-of-concept than usable (too much animation and very few helpful things), their widget set sometimes decides to ignore the current theme and falls back to the default one and, still, it feels like the window manager is always trying to get in your way and annoy you in the worst possible way and never ever help you.

More than 7 years and still no stable release. In that time, every single desktop environment managed to slim down and get more eye candy and be more user-friendly.

I don’t know about you, but I think E failed.

First of all, yes, I use Digg and Reddit. For those who don’t know, these are two of the most well-known “Web 2.0″ sites. People send links about some news (or something interesting) and other people vote for such links. The most voted links go to the main page, from time to time. It is interesting to see where the collective mind goes, even when you find yourself in one of the retarded corners of the internet.

The biggest problem with them is that there is no way to point that one history is the same as another posted already. While I’m not sure about it, I hope the both sites would consider that, if someone post a link that was already posted, it would count as a vote for the first story and not create a new thing so people have to vote for it again.

Even with link dup checking, there are still some problems: Imagine that I find something interesting in the web, so I post some very small description on this website with a link to the original story and post my blog link on Digg/Reddit. Then I just sit down and wait for people to come to my site and I get a lot of money from Google Ads (no, I don’t have Google Ads on this site.) This is called “link-hijack” by the Reddit community and, more than once, I saw links with “Non-Link-Hijacked” in the title, which means someone decided to pick the original link and post it instead of someone else blog.

There are some link-hijacks that are a little bit more complicated to catch. First, let’s say someone find an interesting image. You can post it on tinyimg, imageshack or even in your hosted Gallery, with all those lovely Google Ads. There is no link for the original story and, most of the time, since the image appears on several different places at the same time, you lose the track of the original. Also, there are some stories which are, actually, part of the same big event. One of the examples that comes to my mind is the “This is cool”, which appeared on Reddit (sorry, but it is quite hard to find anything on Reddit after more than one week.) It was a photo of Barack Obama pointing to something. Someone photoshopped it, putting some sunglasses and added the link with the title “More cooler”. Then it started: People added an explosion on the background (you can see it here, which was posted under the story “Cooler”), and people put a nanchuck on Barack’s hand (see it here) and posted under the title “Coolerer”.) So, the joke spawned over several different links, and over several different links. There is no way an engine would recognized them as the same thing (and, most importantly, are they the same thing?)

That brings a question: what it is more interesting, something that people say “this is interesting” or something that gets a lot of attention on the web (like the original link-hijack)? Personally, I think that the even behind such stories and links is the main factor. Posting a link which explains climate change is destroying the environment and another link where scientists make pretty graphs showing that there is no relationship between global warming and the decline of pirates are, in fact, different stories, but they are linked by the same event. And that’s the problem with those aggregators: they care about links, not events.

Now, to be completely honest, I don’t think anyone would come an easy solution for that. It is easier to track links than events. And how would you check if link X is really related to link Y? Again, you have to trust that the community would take care of showing that X and Y are linked (or not) by some mechanism (tags? direct dragging links to say that they are related?) The first think that comes to my mind is something like “Human Brain Cloud” does to create the relationship between two words: the more the people link those two, that relationship becomes stronger and all the other ones, weaker. The problem is: would you really expect that people would sit down and say that link X is related to link Y? Over and over again? Instead of just clicking an arrow that points up or down? No, I don’t think so. You’ll have to search the current links, see of there is anything related and create the links.

But, in the end, I can see that cool things would emerge. Like you could be seeing some news report about google, which points to another news about how the energy usage is going up in the world, which is related to another story about Finland hoping that big datacenters move there where it is cooler (so no need of air-conditioning) and energy is plenty. Too bad we can’t expect that people would actually sit down and relate stories.

As most of you already know, I’m playing World of Warcraft for a while. “For a while” means “time enough to create about 6 characters.”

Anyway, this morning, playing with my Blood Elf, I got myself asking “what the hell is this ‘dead scar’ in the middle of the map?” And the answer was easy to find on WowWiki. And, to my surprise, they have a pretty good explanation for that.

Which also made me think about the whole WoW lore. I mean, it is not the first time I got impressed by the richness of the lore. When I was playing with a Draenei and doing all the chained quests one right after the another, I got a pretty good idea of the events from the arrival of the Draenei to Azeroth, to the beginnings of the alliance between humans, elfs and dwarfs and the draenei. And the way the quests were designed makes this easy to get, as long as you follow them in order.

Before WoW, I used to play GuildWars. The way GuildWars works is quite the same way WoW works, except that the quests are designed to be done in just one place, then you have to complete a special quest, a “mission” in GuildWars-lingo, then you move to the next area, do more quests, open the mission and so on. It forces you to follow the lore, to learn what did happen in there.

In a way, like Gerald once told me, things get a complete different perspective when you realize that everything your character is is just a few numbers in a database. That’s the way I feel about most people who play WoW: they are just fighting the numbers in the database, not following a story where you play a character on it. They are munchkins, not RPGers.

PS: Isn’t it cool that the two androids in the Star Trek universe make a nice subject?

When you still had to use dial up to connect to the internet, a few people thought they could put they “My Dear Diary” on the web. It was more pratical do maintain, you could add things anywhere there was a phone line and a modem (hint: not many places at the time) and you didn’t have to carry a book under your arm. I’m not kidding about the “diary” thing: in the beginning, you could spot a lot of “today, someone kiss me, hihihi” things around. People weren’t afraid to tell how they were feeling and such, because it was so new no one you know would actually read that stuff.

And then, suddenly, internet became mainstream. It was a media everyone was looking to reach, like TV and newspaper. And it reached every house, at amazing speeds (if you still remember downloading things over dial up.) And then, suddenly, bloggers became “journalists” and the magic was gone. People wouldn’t tell their feelings, they would tell what they saw, ’cause that’s what “journalists” do. And then people dropped jobs to become full time bloggers, like a journalist without a newspaper.

So, basically, blogs turned from being “dairies” to another way to make money. It became another company-thing and less a personal-thing.

But, why the hell would I write a post about it? Because I’m feeling the need of a “dear diary”, but I don’t want that everyone knows it.

One of things I really like to do, sometimes, is hear different covers of songs. Once, I had about six different versions, from different artists, of “Helter Skelter”.

Today, listening to “In The Air Tonight” (by Phil Collins), I decided to check the other versions. You can hear 30 seconds of the music before buying in on iTunes, so… why not?

And, honestly, I think they all fail to deliver the meaning of the song. They are too happy, or so indifferent to the meaning of the lyrics that they sound almost boring. Now, there are some covers that are better than the original. Like “Mad World”, covered by Gary Jules, sounds way better than the happy beat by Tears for Fears that is amazing (it also makes the song seem way longer than it should.) But “In the Air Tonight” can be called perfect in the first version. It is dark, the music behind it keeps the pace with the darkness of the lyrics that is amazing. You can feel the real meaning behind the words by just listening to the music.

By the way, if you know any good covers of mainstream songs, let me know.