Category Archives: Web/Tech

OLPG

I seldom exactly plan to do what’s in fashion, and sometimes perversity makes me positively eschew it. So I didn’t realize that I was following a trend when I went shopping for an ASUS 4G eee PC last week.

Preamble: Remembrance of keyboards past

I’ve carried around a Palm-something with keyboard for at least 9 years, moving though the generations – Palm III, Treo 90, Treo 600. I’ve used it for clinical notes, lecture notes, conference sessions, meeting minutes, emails, draft articles, writers’ notes, scene sketches, blog entries, Backpack jottings and some forms I’m sure I haven’t remembered. I’ve typed in wards, in offices, in hotels, in airports, in bus stations, in cafes, on buses, on trains, on planes, on three continents and in both hemispheres, north and south. But the heyday of PDA keyboards passed for me after the GoType clamshell, which was large but as robust a setup as a subnotebook when propped on my lap, and the Palm III Stowaway, which had a beautiful touch and an undeniable ‘ahh’ factor as it unfolded. Supposedly universal wireless keyboards weren’t, as I discovered to my disgust when I
migrated from the Treo 90 to the Treo 600, and my universal keyboard did not. That keyboard, with its awkward split spacebar, was probably the nadir. I enjoyed a brief Indian Summer with the Treo 600’s dedicated plugin keyboard, and then one day to my shock (since I’m used to my equipment lasting well beyond the median on the survival curve) that keyboard stopped working and all that was left for me was the Palm ‘universal’, wireless, finicky and devoid of any means of preventing the Treo taking flight when the bus corners like a Bondmobile. So when I first ran across the eee PC, my first thought was – I can use this on the bus. Not to mention carry it all day: my 12” G4 Mac, beloved as it is, makes its presence known after a few hours in the backpack, and is, I’ll admit, a bit cramped to use on the bus, though it’s survived most flights in Economy seating. It’s the best single computer I’ve ever used and Apple hasn’t made anything to replace it. I remain unseduced by an iPod anything with only two-thumb input, sophisticated as the interface is. But a 2 lb, fully-functional computer, with a full keyboard, even if the screen is widescreen …

1. Keyboard

The keyboard is NOT cramped to a longtime writer-on-Palms with size 6 hands. Though it’s sometimes uneven in its registration and isn’t the softest keyboard I know (that’s a 9-year-old G3 Powerbook with a keyboard like a feather pillow) the travel of the keys is minimal and they have a crisp touch. It has one aggravating feature prevalent in compact keyboards: the placement of the up arrow key between / and shift, so unless I make the stretch I pop the cursor up when I shift-right. I can type quite comfortably on it; in fact, a full-sized keyboard can feel too large after an hour or so on this little one, particularly for the right hand, spanning space-bar to back-space. I have less difficulty than I expected with the tap-touch pad, since I’m so heavy-handed in my steering I tend to disable tapping because of unexpected consequences. I’m noticing I’m starting to tap more because the silver rocker bar, though intuitive to use, is comparatively stiff.

2. Tweaking the interface and installing software

The basic interface is cuddly, with simple icons launching the included open source software, customized for basic use. I haven’t enabled the full interface, though seeing what other people are doing with theirs is giving me an acute case of interface-envy. I spent some time, courtesy of eeeUser.com – whose wiki and detailed forums I’d recommend as a first stop – installing software and tweaking the interface. Installing software had me moving in and out of the terminal, me with my 24 verb UNIX vocabulary, carefully copying the code required to expand the registries accessed for the installation of software and pin the system, and then adding GIMP, Inkscape, NVU and its descendent KompoZer. The single most useful thing I did not learn in time was how to move windows that were too large to fit on the screen so I could tell Synaptic (package installer) that yes, I understood those were unvalidated packages and bad things could happen, and could it please just go ahead and install. My workaround was to use Synaptic to find the package name and then install from the command line. For future reference, it’s alt-click-drag to move a big window up and clicking on the tiny right arrow at the bottom right of the screen makes the bottom toolbar roll aside and retrieves that little bit of real estate.

Courtesy of a utility called Launch Tools (see this page), I removed some of the icons I did not expect to use, replaced several of the generic ones by specific ones – like those for Firefox and the 3 Open Office programs – and added new icons for the programs I had installed as well as some direct links to services, eg, Backpack, Typepad, Flickr. Launch Tools has a few quirks, but is a boon to the novice/elementary user, as the proper hack involved an intimidating exercise in XML editing. (An alternative has just been announced.)

Launch Icon is a recent addition to Launch Tools, allowing one to roll one’s own icons from an 80×80 px .png. The source image works best, I found, when prepared according to the instructions given for base icon of the manual method, but make it 80×80, not 120×120, or it will be resized and the icon too small. In essence, one should start with an 80×80 transparent layer and paste the icon on top with any background removed, then save it as a .png. I tried converting .pngs from various sources, with uneven success. If the icon does not load on the right of the dialog window, beside the slider, then it is not being registered and will not convert; the program may insist on using a previous icon. There is a page of slick icons contributed by eeeUser.com members. My home-made icons haven’t got that glossy button look to them, but a bit more idle time in Photoshop or GIMP will fix that.

The other quirk I noted was that when I wanted to create links, it seemed to work better if I used the command syntax to launch firefox to that link, eg, ‘/usr/bin/firefox http://www.typepad.com’, rather than using the ‘link’ option. Add Icon makes it easy, just type the name of the program, hit return and let the program fill in the complete command, and then add the URL in the same box as a second step; then hit return.

I tinkered with the Firefox stylesheet, replacing it with one intended to minimize the toolbars, and installed a couple of tiddlywikis as dynamic notebooks, which run just fine on the fully functional browser – even Import Plugins, which I’ve had trouble with elsewhere, just works.

3. Wireless connection

My initial wireless connection was to a WEP-enabled router and that went easily, just needing the password. My usual connection is WPA-enabled, non-SSID broadcasting, and although it was being detected, it was registering as nameless and not connecting via “Wireless Networks”. I was psyching myself up for a serious bout of the command line when I thought to investigate what lay behind the ‘Network’ icon, and pulled up a window that allowed me to add name and password and configure automatic connection; since then, the eee PC has hopped happily on to that network.

4. Photography

The photograph adorning this post was prepared entirely on the eee PC, as suggested in this article on photography workflow. I popped the SD card from the camera directly into the slot on the side of the ASUS, opened it in file manager, copied the file over to the internal drive, and then cropped, resized, adjusted the color and sharpened it using the GIMP. The photo was shot under artificial light, and so my cursory fiddling did not recapture the white of the eee PC, but the luster is visible; with practice I’d get accustomed to interpreting what I see on the tiny screen, at least for my level of photography.

5. OLPG?

Oh and the title to this post? The reviewer opined that if the OLPC project was One Laptop Per Child, this one could be One Laptop Per Geek. My only disappointment: discovering, the day after I bought this one, the first mention of release of 4G versions in the same colors as the 2G stripped down versions. Sigh. My frivolous side would have liked a blue one. TLPG …?

The Cult of the Cheap: How today's culture is killing our Internet

Having read various reviews and responses to Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture, I had already formed the impression that I would agree with the justice of the case, but irked at his failure to be true to his own argument.

And I did, and I was. I was in sympathy with his regret for the passing of standards in writing and reporting, and for the threat to established institutions. I have a traditional education, which inclines me to value standards in reasoning and expression, and to respect expertise. I’m also trying to succeed in as a writer according to the traditional publishing model. In short, I’ve got an investment in the traditional way of doing things.

However, Keen has written a polemic, a very Web approach, exemplifying some of the practices he pillories. He employs cheap insults. He piles anecdote upon anecdote in journalistic style without – this is a scientist beef – any sense of denominator, whether this is a rare instance, or a common practice. He does not explore what other forces might have contributed to, or might actually have been causing, the decline of traditional media and authorities. Misattribution of cause is no help.

In his paen to the objectivity and quality of mainstream media, he does not acknowledge the extent to which the newsworthy is the adworthy, with editors pressured to suppress or modify stories that will threaten the advertising revenue. He does not address the issue of bias, commercial and otherwise, in the mainstream media. He does not assess his benchmark, the quality of reporting. If the misrepresentations of subjects that I know enough to review primary sources on – scientific and medical literature – is anything to go by, then the mainstream media often fail to do their topic justice.

And this isn’t the first time that Culture has been deemed under threat from the Great Unwashed. In the mid nineteenth century, it was from the “mob of scribbling women” who had the temerity not only to write, but to have their ill-educated, uninformed, crass, and embarrassing effusions widely read. As a spiritual descendent of those scribbling women, I know that “standards” are remarkably malleable when used to dismiss the works of the non-PLU (“people like us”). Joanna Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing ennumerates the ways.

I also started wondering about which way the whodunnit went. And I propose the contrarian view: The internet began with the amateurs. The culture of cheap consumerism (on the WWW) is what’s killing it.

Mainstream media has been subsidized by advertising revenue, or by government. We’ve no sense of the true costs of high quality production, whether of journalism, broadcast arts, or published information. As consumers we’ve grown accustomed to cheap mass information and cheap mass entertainment. It’s not such a big step from demanding cheap to demanding free. The media are also responsible for the culture of celebrity which feeds into the culture of self-exhibition which Keen also deplores.

Keen does not question what seems to me to the flawed business model of mainstream media, nor consider that the real constituency of mainstream media is the advertisers, not the readers/viewers; when the advertisers go elsewhere, as onto the WWW, and the readership remains, it’s irrelevant. The WWW exposed the vulnerability in this business model. It did not create it.

A great many of the practices he criticizes are an expression not so much of the Internet, but to the application of commercial and criminal practices established well before the Internet,  much less the WWW. The selling of mailing lists. Prevalent, insulting and intrusive advertising. “Customer testimonials” that are bought and paid for by the manufacturer of the product. Con-men and women and fraud artists plying their trade. (Why don’t we abandon the fashionable neoligisms like ‘phishing’ and ‘social engineering’ and call them by the old-fashioned terms. More people might just understand enough to heed the warnings).

I’m not done with this topic, but I’m going to park it for now, and go paddling!

The joy of Tiddlyspot

When I first encountered Tiddlyspot, the hosted version of Tiddlywiki (Wikipedia entry), the brilliant, javascripted-to-the-max, server-independent wiki written by Jeremy Rushton, I confess to not immediately seeing the need. I had about a dozen tiddlywikis applied to various writing and organizational projects, a number of which of which lived on a 1 G fire engine red Transcend JF110 alongside their own copies of Portable Firefox for both OSX and Windows. What I ran up against, though, was a concern about security, if I moved outside a restricted set of trusted computers (especially to university library systems). A USB stick seemed to me too good a vector (think phage), and since I haven’t done the poking-under-the-hood on Windows machines that I have on Macs, I wasn’t confident that I had the expertise to ensure I didn’t transmit anything unwanted on the Windows side. But I liked my portable wikis.

Hence the beauty of Tiddlyspot. It’s accessible from any computer-with-internet (and reasonably modern browser), without incurring the security risk of transferring a USB stick. The sign up is simplicity itself: username (which becomes the subdomain name) and password gets you a wiki. You have the option of a public or a private Tiddlywiki, via the control panel tucked behind it, password accessible. A handful of different flavours are available on sign-up, and once you understand Tiddlywiki styling, you can apply that understanding to Tiddlyspot to customize the look – with the caveat that you have to keep the content in the sidebar that allows you to upload and download. The standard set of Tiddlywiki plugins can be used to create tag clouds, most recent updates, splash pages, etc. Backup is a one click download of the whole file to your local hard drive – no XML or archives. You can take it off-line by downloading a local copy, working on it, and then uploading it later. Saving changes and uploading is password protected. I’ve had to email tech support once, and got a prompt and helpful response from Daniel Baird, author of the infernal Minesweeper plugin for Tiddlywiki. (Infernal as in addictive).

Limitations and unknowns: Tiddlyspot Tiddlywikis don’t seem to be terribly visible to Google (I tried an inurl:Tiddlyspot search, which missed most TS-TWs). Maybe this is because TWs tend to be internally linked rather than externally, but maybe Google doesn’t digest Javascript well; I want to look into this. I don’t know how big a TW can get before it breaks (though I haven’t broken one yet). A new dialect (well, different from Dokuwiki and Backpack) of markup has to be grasped. Plugins can slow down the loading (aww, but they are such fun!) There doesn’t seem to be a way to dump all content to a single flat file, though there’s a plugin that will create multiple hyperlinked static HTML files. TW in general is not meant for multiple users. When I started the Okal Rel Universe Concordance, with the intention of it being a multiuser wiki, I had to think through a protocol to prevent co-authors from clobbering each others’ edits. Only the last user is recorded as editor: there’s no edit history. I don’t know whether its security has yet been challenged by the scriptkiddies and wikispammers [1] (this is a downside??) – but note the ease of backup and reconstitution. ([1] Insert here obligatory plaint from senior netizen that this is not the web of yore).

The TS-TWs I have going so far are: the aforementioned ORU Concordance, the Women Scientists in Fiction page previously mentioned (still in early stages), a collection (still in its early stages) of Worldbuilding resources, and a couple that are currently private. On the USB stick, and possibly to move on line, I have repositories of medical and scientific scraps of information, a concordance around a series of linked novellas I am working on, and a scratchpad for another writing project. Other people have been far more inventive – see the Tiddler titled ‘Examples’ on www.tiddlywiki.com.

Additional links:

  • Portable apps for Windows, for Portable Fireflox and a surprising number of others
  • Portable apps for OSX
  • My Tiddlywiki resources page on Backpack – since Google doesn’t seem to be great at indexing TWs, and most of the information and instructions for TWs are contained in TWs, I’ve realized I need to make an immediate note of where I find something – or I might never find it again. A while back I tore my hair out trying to find the plugin that would load the latest 5 tiddlers on opening.

Doing the garden

"Websites are like gardens," wrote the BMJ’s Richard Smith. "Turn your back on them
for a few weeks and they’re overrun with weeds in the form of out of
date coming events and hypertext links leading nowhere." It’s been rather longer than a few weeks, but I’m finally knuckling down to do some gardening over at my SFF site, to update the style of the website, and to consolidate and update all the various pages I have written over the years and still consider fit to print. It was actually 1997 that I applied myself to finding out what HTML was all about, perusing books on HTML in the reading room of the alas-now-closed National Science Library of Edinburgh, and built my first web-page, with the help of my notes and the NCSA’s classic "Beginner’s Guide to HTML", so that almost qualifies me as a senior netizen. The growth of technologies and creativity has been extraordinary – I certainly can’t claim to have kept up. Unfortunately, corruption, exploitation and pollution have also grown apace, but that’s a topic for another post.