Last week was the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia (“the land of civilization, culture and enlightened thinking”, according to the official Web page). It has been reported that the conference was supposed to be about narrowing the digital divide. Croquet architect and all-around Computer God Alan Kay presented a model of the dynabook, er, $100 laptop to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, while his buddy Nicholas Negroponte presented one to the Pope. Picture here. (And there was much amusement in the Stearns household when we realized that this made me one degree of separation from Annan and two from the Pope.) A lot of world leaders were taking this theme very seriously, but I hear the conference turned out to be all about US control over the ICANN system for Internet domain names. Even more leaders were taking seriously this idea, as argued by countries like China and Iran, that the world can't accept ICANN to be under the control of a rogue state that practices state censorship, executions, unilateral invasion, torture, use of chemical weapons, etc. President Bush chose not to attend, in order to that he might visit Asia and criticize China regarding human rights.

The ICANN flap is interesting in several ways. There's the timely main story in the news about the relationship between the US and the rest of the world. Then there's the timeless backstory about the idea that progress is not achieved by consensus or committee, but by someone actually doing something that works. That's what the US did. We only got into trouble because it was successful. I'm fascinated by this idea lately as it relates to development within Croquet. It's hard for people who feel excluded to do other than to demand sharing, and particularly hard for them to realize that nobody “anointed” the folks who are producing the stuff they want to be shared. People do stuff and it works. Then other people want it. The trick, if it were possible to optimize such things, would be to share when things aren't yet working so that others might join in the creative fun. But too many cooks and the management cost of such “optimization” can easily spoil the soup. It's a dicey thing. I know, because I'm on both sides of the problem right now.

But the most noteworthy thing of all, to my mind, is that the ICANN flap is all so unecessary. US officials say the current system works just fine, technically, and they're sort of right, except that the rest of the world says it doesn't, and they're right too. But I think there's a much better way to handle the mapping of addresses, which we're currently trying to build out in Croquet. Whether we're the ones to do it or not, there's no technical reason that the whole thing can't be done in a way that makes the whole political argument moot.
[Read More!]

Today was my boss's last day, and, ironically, my first anniversary. Julian Lombardi will be Duke's Assistant Vice President for Academic Services and Technology Support. He'll be responsible for the university's IT customer service and development.

They made him an offer he couldn't refuse.
[Read More!]

Der Lauf der Dinge is that film in which a whole series of objects cascade in a very long Rube Goldberg. (I understand many cultures have had similar cartoonists. I think its wonderful that where previous generations drew pictures, civilization has developed to the point where individuals can and do actually realize and record such fantasies.) You may have seen a take-off of this in a car ad.

I think the reason for our fascination with this has to do with movement carrying the action. You can have theme and variation without movement, and without physical objects. Consider novels, painting, music, and zillion other things. But here we have a case where there is nothing of interest at all except for the theme and variation expressed by the movement and positioning of physical objects. And it is fascinating. A reviewer has written of the film that it is like watching a Hitchcock film with objects instead of people.

I think this all relates to previous discussion on narrative and 3D.

[This is fallout from a session at OOPSLA.]

I admit I haven't thought through the implications of the FCC's recent orders about the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, but I'm pretty damn sure that our leaders haven't thought it through.

The idea is to create the biggest unfunded mandate in history by forcing all Internet service providers to retool their systems to make it easier for the feds to monitor communications. The cost to universities alone is said to be at least $7B. I don't know what this does to municipal and home grown mesh network systems. I suppose that the intent is to make it too expensive for anyone but a TelCo to operate anything other than restrictive high-level services. The prophetic David Reed laid out the the issues five years ago, saying it much better than I can.

To this I would add an uneasiness as to what steps a person must now apply, or is allowed to apply, to protect “intellectual property.” We are required to take practical precautions to keep our freedom of privacy else we loose it. If we wreck the Internet in a rush to destroy any practical means of protecting privacy, then who in the end will be allowed to actually claim the priviledge of privacy? Only those large institutions who can afford to run their own government-approved private networks?

I want a Macintosh Tablet, but this guy is agitating for one in a strange and maybe wonderful consumer-based pull-marketing campaign.

There were some comments to a previous entry that I thought were worth calling attention to all by themselves. The general theme of these was that of user interface and how the role of media in storytelling can inform the design of new UI paradigms. Highly appropriate for Brie.

So I'm moving those comments here. I want to keep the original page for the my attempt to define the heart of Croquet independently of UI, applications, and software distributions. [Read More!]

When Croquet is a success, what will it be? Really? Forget about the applications, what will Croquet itself actually do?

The other day I was sitting on my back porch. Resting comfortably on my lap was all the resources I needed to do my high-tech computer work. The box also played my favorite music, and when my wife asked about the lyrics, I was able to look them up in the greatest library the world has ever known. We checked our calendar, and printed a custom map to the next day's event. And so forth.

Not so very long ago, it would have been very hard to imagine this, despite having had it all spelled out for us by Vannevar Bush or by Douglas Englebart on specific dates in 1945 and 1968. For any given technology, it seems to be very hard for most of us to fully imagine our future with it. I think the reason for this is that when the future comes, it's all about the applications. The music player. The information index and specific song lyric libraries. Calendars, directions, and the tools for my work. We live in applications. We buy applications. Applications make or break a technology. But these applications don't just happen because they are good ideas. They happen only (and not always) when there is a suitable enabling technology. It is rare that we think about what the enabling technology really is, fundamentally.
[Read More!]

There's an interesting short editorial in Tech Review about the significance of mesh networks. This is where wireless networks can be made from a vast network of independent, individually owned, volunteer peers, rather than a centralized distribution of wires or radios towers. The essay brings together three themes of Wetmachine.

The technology is an overlay on a self-organizing P2P network, closely related to Croquet and the Internet itself, and a strong interest of Croquet and TCP/IP architect David Reed. There's “Inventing the Future.”

The essay then mentions how such networks are not owned by anyone, and that this effects commercial network carriers, particularly for the “last mile.” There's “Tales of the Sausage Factory.” (Indeed, I am indebted to Harold for first exposing me to this powerful technology, right here on Wetmachine.)

Finally, the editor broaches the cybernetic quality of these beasts. Meshes draw inspiration from the behavior of swarming bees, so might not there be emergent properties in such meshes that go beyond sterile function? There's our host John Sundman, whose “Cheap Complex Devices” draws more than a casual comparison between a swarm and human consciousness — or is it computer consciousness?

My oldest daughter (age 13) just “independently” invented Croquet. Or more specifically, she's reinvented the underlying computation model called TeaTime. She's been playing a computer game called “Sims”, in which a single player can create a simulated world, populated with characters that she has configured. These character interact with each other based on their “personalities.”

The version of Sims she uses is not collaborative: each game is independent of anyone else playing the game. But my daughter has a friend (born within a few hours of her, from two parents that lived in the same dorm as my wife and I). Her friend also has Sims, and being 13 year old girls, they play their own games while they talk on the phone with each other. “Let's make a character called 'Howard.” Let's have him do such-and-such. Let's do this. Let's do that.“

They're each using the telephone to coordinate the ”commands" to their respective simulations. Then the games play, producing the same results, even though the game isn't designed to be networked. That's exactly how Croquet works.

Now, there are other issues in the Sims, and these girls are as interested in the differences as in keeping things in synch. Pretty cool.

I have no news. Or too much.

I thought summer was supposed to be “off season” in academia, but things have been incredibly busy. Some of the stuff we've been doing:
[Read More!]