The Bangus Ultimatum

Okay. So maybe things are getting tough at work lately. Every partner is potentially The Boss (and there are dozens of them), they want it done right, and the want it yesterday. And these firefights can pop up when you least expect it.

Still, it’s a field trip compared to the special hell of my last real job. Back then we rigged up a program that would monitor the servers and automatically page us if things go wrong (Gosh, remember *pagers*!?!). Every now and then, I’d get a page at wee hours of the morning, and if the thing can’t be fixed remotely, or if I didn’t have the laptop because management didn’t have the goddamned sense to give us enough, I’d ride back to the office. Not to heal a patient; not to investigate a crime scene; not to advise a client – but to coax a computer back into serving up websites so people won’t miss the latest showbiz chika.

You cannot reason with that kind of tyranny. The machine will entertain no excuse, hear no plea for mercy. It will just page you and page you and page you until you either fix it or blow your own brains out. You think your boss is a bastard for texting you at 10 in the evening? At least the fucker will have to sleep eventually. Maybe he’ll even flop sweat while you fix things. Maybe he’ll be a friend and give you some slack. Praise or thank you for a job well done.  My boss back then- my real boss when you think about it – was a box running Windows NT. It couldn’t care less if you bled away your life.

So yeah, give me a grumpy, demanding partner any time. At least the guy has a pulse.

That I do regret about not being a programmer. Compared to what we had to deal with years ago technology-wise, creating web applications has never been easier.

You see, back in my days (I started in ‘98, which is an epoch ago in internet time), a lot of the technologies now commonly used to build web applications were either so far up in the air or simply not there. There were dozens of companies each offering its own toolset/process/metaphor, and it wasn’t always easy separating the winners from the losers (remember the Broadvision fiasco?). So we opted for the most stable technologies, even if they weren’t up there in terms of abstraction or ease of use. We stitched together web apps with HTML and Perl, and every once in a while we’d be edgy by embedding Java applets on the client side (gosh, remember those?) And we did it all using basic text editors (mine was HTMLed).

If we were in the construction business, it would be the equivalent of building condos without power tools or heavy equipment, and we’d do everything ourselves from digging the foundations to tying together steelbars to pouring concrete.

Now, web developers benefit from robust frameworks (Rails, Zend), mature IDE’s (integrated development environments, which pack together programming editors, debuggers, etc.), and better languages (Ruby, Python, PHP, .NET).  They’d be building the same condo’s, except this time they have robots that automatically build foundations and scaffolding, and they’ll have cranes to move prefabricated modules around. And the pace at which things evolve is just amazing. It’s almost…unfair.

In the future, media studies and media history academics will probably look at this event as a watershed event for the transition of media from synchronous/passive/firm-generated, to asynchronous/active/user-generated.

The latest incarnation of Microsoft’s Halo franchise, earned $170 million in 24 hours, the largest opening day in the history of the entertainment industry. The Xbox 360 title beat previous records set by blockbuster theatrical releases like “Spider-man 3” and novels such as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

Hail to the Master Chief!

It’s no secret that CD sales have been plummeting as people are opting for digital music downloads. And it’s not just a “piracy” issue. Legitimate online music stores are also on the rise. So what does the recording industry do to fight back?

True to its form, it comes up with a physical product – the Ringle. Basically, it’s a cd with one hit single plus a ringtone version, plus two extra songs (presumably too weak to merit their own Ringle). – all for $6.98. (Note that the iTunes usually sells songs/ringtunes for under $2).

It’s an idea so monumentally stupid, and symptomatic of the recording industry’s refusal to move on from a dead-end format (the cd, which at least justifies their price structure).

But then again, if this doesn’t work, they can always resort to suing the fans. Things might be a bit difficult for them, though. A federal appeals court ruled that RIAA’s “insta-lawsuit” strategy – churning out thousands of unspecific, boilerplate “John Doe “complaints, is illegal. Now isn’t it sweet that they’d have to make a specific case just for you?

Back in the year 2000, Yahoo was sued (and lost) in a French court. The judgment ordered Yahoo! to pull out Nazi memorabilia, prohibited by French law, from its auction site. Yahoo! was up in arms over the decision, saying that:

“Yahoo.com is not doing anything unlawful. It is completely complying with the law of the country in which it operates and where its target audience is,” he said.

“Yahoo auctions in the U.S. are ruled by the legal, moral and cultural principles of that country.”

Fast forward to today. Yahoo! is now being sued in the U.S. court for selling out one of its subscribers to be arrested and tortured by the Chinese government. Yahoo! is now singing a different tune, playing the citizen of the world and moving for a dismissal of the U.S. case and urging a shift of venue – to China.

It’s not true that the Internet is this inherently un-regulate-able utopia. Government power and corporate interests can converge to produce what in fact could be the most regulated space in history. We can’t sit back and trust the network’s architecture alone to protect our rights. Just as in the real world, our rights online is something we have to stay vigilant about.

David Lynch (great director I admire, and who doesn’t) said in a recent interview with MTV that he’s quit using film (you know, those celluloid strips used by ancient cameras) and is going digital from now on:

MTV: You shot “Inland Empire” using digital technology. Will you ever go back to film?

Lynch: Never. Digital is so friendly for me and so important for the scenes, a way of working without so much downtime. It’s impossible to go back. Film is a beautiful medium, but the world has moved on. The amount of manipulation we can do, anybody can do, is so much the future. Film is so big and heavy and slow, you just die. It’s just ridiculous.

Anti-”piracy” rhetoric carry some moral currency when you consider how bloated and expensive film and its related technologies are. Traditional film outfits invest a lot of money, and as a matter of policy, the law should protect their expectation of a reasonable return. But digital technology (lighter, cheaper, more accessible) changes the calculus. When it costs so much less to produce movies, does it still make sense legally protecting old business models?

The lack of blog posts was due to enrollment madness in UP. It’s almost over now.
One of the new things this semester: the bulk of my workflow will be done around Emacs (or specifically, XEmacs). I finally have an office computer that can run it. Here’s how it looks like:

If you’re someone whose computer experience is limited to the candy-colored confines of Windows or MacOS, it looks like a retarded text editor. What’s so cool about that?

Except that Emacs really doesn’t give a fuck about cool. It’s currently version 21.x, and the code and concepts behind it have been around since the 1970’s. You don’t get to be that old and grizzly by thinking about cool. You get to reach that number of iterations by being neurotic about function. It’s a text editor, indeed – but this text editor can surf the web, read and write email, do math and databases, handle your calendar, remotely control computers in the network, among many many many many things. It’s not a killer app – it’s a pissed homicidal maniac, but chances are, you’ll never find out.

Right now it’s keeping my to-do list, and churning out beautiful pdf’s of legal pleadings (via LaTex and ghostscript). Yes, these things make me happy.