transcyberia.info

Virtualization is cool. Literally. Consolidating servers is a great way to reduce carbon emissions.

Running a multi-core Xen server nowadays is like having a mini-datacenter-in-a-box. Cramming a dozen logical servers into the rackspace and energy footprint of a single physical server, it's a geek paradise. And a boon for the bottom line.

So naturally, when Amazon keeps upping the ante in it's Xen-based EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) offering, that's a cool thing.

Which begs the question: make or buy? How does running your own server rack (make) compare to renting EC2 capacity (buy)?

In Why most things fail, Paul Ormerod gleefully attacks economic orthodoxy. Traditional economic theory fails to explain the complexity and dynamics of the real world. Much more promising is an artificial life approach. Here, unpredictable interactions between simple agents give rise to complex behavior of the system as a whole.

Creating a simple computer model of a software market in which some firms pursue an open source strategy turns out to be very instructive, and funny.

See the group of ooo.......> agents up top? That's the open sourcers, competing with the closed source xxxxx.........> firms. You can click on the image to see an animation, or download the model and run your own simulations.

Now here's a wacky idea: let's rule the planet by wiki. Quote metagovernment.org:

Metagovernment [...] is the system which will run a series of governments using a scored, versioned website as the medium for legislation and bureaucracy.

Huh? What have these guys been smoking? You don't save the planet by combining wikipedia-style proposal writing with slashdot-style voting.

And how, exactly, is this technocrat babble supposed to replace the tax-collecting, monopoly-of-violence apparatus of the State?

Open source governments begin with no power to use force or collect taxes. Periodically all existing governments at every level will be asked to cede power to the websites pertinent to their region.

And we'll all live happily ever after.... This stuff is just inane and counterproductive. Who wants to be ruled by a Wiki cabal?

The open source movement has a lot to contribute towards better functioning political systems: a culture of transparancy, proven patterns for decentralized collective action, and a substantial influence in, and understanding of, technology culture.

Of course open source is politically relevant. Reducing politics to an exercise in software version control is not, however, a valuable contribution to that debate...

Several Dutch sources confirm (in english) that Microsoft's Office XML (OOXML) has been approved as an ISO standard.

Amidst new reports of voting irregularities, this makes ISO the worst april fools joke in history.

Microsoft has succeeded, not only in pushing through a non-standard, but in effectively destroying the credibility of ISO. This is a serious blow to the concept of standardization.

The amount of dirty play exhibited around the OOXML effort reveals the PR talk from Redmond about "interoperability" as nothing but a sham. To quote Glyn Moody:

If the whole sorry OOXML saga shows anything, it is Microsoft's deep and utter contempt for the whole idea of an open, collaborative process based on mutual respect and consensus. Henceforth, members of the open source community must view with deep cynicism all - not just some - offers by Microsoft to work more closely with the free software world. If they don't, they could find themselves used and abused just like the once famous, and now former, International Standards Organisation.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogel's recent announcement of new high-availability features in EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) drew some attention. And indeed, being finally able to manage IP addresses for EC2 services removes one of the biggest drawbacks EC2 had until now.

Amazon reseller Rightscale even drew some nice diagrams explaining how the new EC2 features make renting a fault-tolerant hosting environment a breeze.

Some pretty interesting details got omitted somehow, though.

Mailman is our mailing list software of choice. Even when using PloneGazette to format mailings, we prefer to use Mailman as the actual mail sender: it's faster, it has superior bounce handling, and it runs on our dedicated list server, outside our Plone environment.

Managing subscriptions for simple publication sites can be as easy as creating a MailManSubForm. However, if you have a full-fledged Member site you'll want to integrate mailing list subscription/unsubscription options as part of the member profile personalization experience in Plone.

We need to use the Plone Member database as master for the mailman database, in other words. This turns out to be quite easy.

XFN is vulnerable to relationship injection attacks, as discussed earlier here and there and elsewhere. Summary: If I create a malicious page and put a rel="me" link to your page, your XFN "identity" contains my malicious page and is therefore compromised. The same holds true for links to other people.

We can arm ourselves against such an attack by requiring that all links are bidirectional, i.e. reciprocated. This is, in practice, too burdensome. If you have 10 pages, you'd have to link to all 10 pages from all 10 pages to truly establish identity. If you have 20 friends with 10 pages each, they'd have to put all your 10 pages on all their 10 pages. And everyone would have to do that for everyone.

The following @LinuxJournal caught my eye:

Open Source has won. We've moved into Gandhicon 4. Now what?

This refers to a simple but powerful model for the adoption of open source:

First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

And we do seem to have crossed over to the fourth, last stage: Gandhicon 4, in which we win.

Just take a look at the news emanating from Redmond lately:

• Facing Free Software, Microsoft looks to Yahoo.
• Microsoft opens it's programming interfaces.
• Windows Server incorporates the lessons of open source software.

Chris Anderson is a smart guy, but his Wired article on the zero dollar economy has some major flaws.

• Convoluting the fixed costs of filling a server rack, with the marginal cost of serving additional customers, with economies of scale, is rather confusing. The fact that serving an extra customer is free, does nothing to explain how you'll reach return on investment and pay for depreciation. Nor does scaling, which does explain a tendency to monopolization, but that isn't mentioned.
• Narrowing externalities down to the non-monetary values of reputation and attention is rather unhelpful. There's enough monetary externalities that merit attention. Network effects, anyone?
• A glaring deficiency is any treatment of transaction costs. It's transaction costs diving to zero, far more than marginal costs diving to zero, that powers the surge in networked business today. The two are highly complementary.

Webmonday Aachen yesterday featured great talks (video available) and lively discussions.

Technologies like XFN enable exchange of social network data between different carriers. Now people can search your social network through the Google Social Graph API.

As it stands, there is a real concern for user backlash as these APIs start being implemented and users find themselves presented with eerily accurate information about themselves magically appearing on websites without their ‘consent’.

Suddenly even people in the dataportability camp start scratching their heads about the implications of unbridled data sharing.

The separation between our online identities is a feature, not a bug. Unifying our fragmented online selves into a total identity is not only technically difficult (XFN is vulnerable to relationship injection attacks). It's also epistemologically unsound.

Not everything that can be done, should be done. We should be talking less about technology, and more about what we want. And especially about what we don't want.

If you start thinking about social data control, it soon becomes clear that ownership of social data, like opensocialweb.org claims in their Bill of Rights, is a fiction. If Alice publishes a link rel="friend" relation with Bob, and Claire publishes a link rel="coworker" relationship with Bob, we know a lot about Bob without having to ask Bob. It ain't Bob's data, and it ain't under his control. That's because it's social data.

Combine this brewing privacy backlash with mounting signs of social media fatigue and you may start to wonder if, maybe, social networking has reached the peak of it's hype cycle?

Cloud computing is a big meme to wrap your head around. A good place to start is this video (go to tab "The Coming Cloud"), featuring amongst others Nic Carr, who wrote the book.

The free software community should be mightily worried about these developments.

• A world in which most software runs in one of two megaclouds controlled by the likes of Google and Microsoft is the ultimate dystopia from a software freedom point of view.
• Currently available open source cloud computing software is mainly funded by Yahoo!. A Microsoft takeover of Yahoo! can hardly be beneficial.
• The web 2.0 / cloud computing / software as a service paradigm disrupts the social contract constructed by the GPL around software distribution - because it disrupts software distribution per se.

Centric, one of the few suppliers of software stacks for managing municipalities and other government outfits in the Netherlands, has announced support for ODF (and OOXML) throughout it's product suite.

The announcement follows after a row last year with the municipality of Heerenveen. After switching to OpenOffice, Heerenveen complained about the lack of interest by Centric in enabling ODF support for it's Doc4all application. Heerenveen let an external programmer write the required functionality.

GetronicsPinkRoccade, another major player in the Netherlands claims it has been supporting ODF for three years already. Searching for any references on it's site either through Google or using the local site search did not return any mention of ODF by GetronicsPinkRoccade though.

Following Martin Aspeli's excellent buildout tutorial, in a clean chroot setup, has helped me rediscover the joys of programming. Because, let's face it: if Python is The Beauty, Zope2 surely is The Beast.

Zope3 is a much more gentile creature. It's availability within the bowels of modern Zope2 releases is a godsend, as any developer working with Plone3 will testify. Meanwhile, the Python community at large has rallied around the Python Package index and easy_install eggs as the primary channel for distributing code.

To leverage these new development practices, you need to be able to control your python environment. Read on to find out, why this is a problem, and what you can do about it.

The announcement that Facebook apps can now also be deployed on other websites (outside Facebook), has gone largely unnoticed, except for some Dutch press coverage.

Following the introduction last year of the Facebook platform, which precipitated the OpenSocial effort, widening the scope in which Facebook apps can be deployed is potentially a big deal. Deployment of Facebook apps across the web is attractive for both application developers (gain exposure) and for Facebook (drive traffic).

However, Facebook may have passed the peak of it's hype cycle already. The proliferation of apps results in a deluge of spammy messages that seriously annoys the user population.

Exporting this problem to other sites will only hasten the "Through of Disillusionment."

In 2001, Manuel Castells published an instant classic: The Internet Galaxy, Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Re-reading it strikes you full force with the enormity of changes we've seen already, in the few years since 2001.

Here your are, in the age of World of Warcraft and Facebook, reading a text that analyzes role-playing chat environments and The Well as premier instances of social behaviour on the internet. Meet The Flintstones.

However, in other respects, Castells turns out to be a powerful visionary.