stéfan sinclair :: scribblings & musings

Thanks to Chad (one of my students) for sending me a link to this picture comparing a 1GB drive from the early 1980’s to a more recent 1GB flash card. Although the technologies represented are very different, the story is clear: the continuous minuturisation of technologies is astounding. Though not represented in this picture, it’s also worth noting the difference in prices: the IBM 3380 disk in the picture would be in the $100,000 range – now you can get 1GB flash disks closer to the $10 range. The image is even more topical given the recent attribution of Nobel prizes in physics to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for their work on the technology that led to massive storage.

I have to admit that what really struck me, though, was how difficult it was to trace the link to the image that I recieved back to some original source. Many sites referred to this source image, but the URL is just for an image file, and there’s no way to get any context or confirmation about the source (including the photographer). I couldn’t find any pages on the same site that referred to the image, and who knows how useful that would have been anyway, given that the site seems to be mostly in Slovenian. A search for the filename on Google only results in endless blog entries, forum posts, and collaborative bookmark sites all interlinking, with no sense of an origin (though some of the pages provide some useful additional information about the technologies involved). I was reminded of a recent Globe & Mail article (subscription required) suggesting that Web 2.0 has really transformed notions of intellectual ownership. I was also reminded of some of Matt Kirschenbaum’s recent work on hard drives and forensics, especially since my forensic efforts to track down the source of an image of a hard drive were almost futile. (The image used here, with the enhanced view of the flash card, is from this page, BTW.)

Well I still haven’t had a good chunk of time to update my site and reboot my blogging activities after a prolonged state of stasis, but Blog Action Day (thanks Johnny) seems like a good opportunity to shake off my blogging slumber and resume my digital scribblings. I like how this initiative isn’t about banging everyone over the head with the same well-rehearsed messages about the environment, but, as the site puts it every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. The point is to forefront the environment in some way.

So I’m going to mention my disappointment at the fact that the results of the recent referendum on the electoral system in Ontario were to not institute any reforms. Why is this disappointing? Well, because the Green Party of Canada has little chance at the moment of winning any seats in the current first past the post only system. Popular votes for the Green Party doubled from about 4% to about 8% since 2003, which is by far a more significant change than the other major parties, but even at that rate, things will probably happen fairly slowly. Electoral reform would have meant that 8% of the population supporting the Green Party would have had some proportional representation in government. Why did the referendum fail? I don’t think a lot of people really understood the issue, in large part because an information brochure on the topic arrived too late and presented content in a confusing manner. I hope there will be another referendum in the not too distant future, where a more concerted effort is made to explain the advantages and disadvantages of each system.

I have deliberately steered clear of most political issues in this blog, but today – Blog Action Day – is different.

A study from June 2007 by Ellacoya Networks has some interesting findings, based on a million broadband subscribers in North America:

• web traffic has dethroned peer-to-peer (mostly file-sharing) traffic in terms of internet bandwidth
• streaming video represents 36% of internet traffic
• YouTube alone comprises approximately 20% of all web traffic and 10% of all internet traffic

I suspect the percentage of video bandwidth will continue to increase, which may be cause for some concern, though the internet has adapted in the past and I’m sure it will again.

I couldn’t resist posting this after having taught a web programming course this past term that focused on Ruby on Rails:

I’m delighted to say that Digital Humanities Quarterly has been launched:

Welcome to the first issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly: a new, online, open-access journal published by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. This issue has been a long time in the making. The first organizational efforts began in June 2005, and the journal’s technical development started soon after. Developing a new journal—on a new publication model, with an innovative technical architecture—is not an undertaking for the faint-hearted. That level of challenge, however, was central to the venture from the start: the world may not need yet another academic journal, but it does need experiments in how academic journals are published. DHQ is conceived as just such an experiment, conducted by the community best suited to make it a success and learn from the results.

As this note makes clear, DHQ will strive to experiment with digital scholarly publication, and will provide a valuable complement to other publications like Literary and Linguistic Computing, Text Technology and the Humanist Discusion Group. Part of the experimental mandate of DHQ will be to maintain an academic blog, which I will have the honour of editing once that component is fully integrated into the DHQ site. See you there!

FacetMap: A Scalable Search and Browse Visualization, a project that comes from the Microsoft Ressearch unit, is a data visualization environment that displays search criteria and a count of the matching items in an appealing way (though, as an aside, I find it ironic that a project with such an aesthetic sensibility would post such poor images on a website – I can only speculate that the researchers of the project have little to do with the webmasters at Microsoft). From what I could surmise, the interface is especially well suited to organizing and displaying search criteria in grouped bubbles, it’s not especially designed to see or interact with the items themselves (unlike some of the projects in which I’m involved with Stan Ruecker and others. Still, I like that this project is about flexible browsing (of just about any data collection), which goes beyond some of the specialized interfaces like liveplasma. Thanks to information aesthetics for the link.

Subitle: Where our anti-hero riffs about his trials and tribulations in editing keyboard layouts and then provides a link to the layouts he’s created

One of the first things I did when I started using Macs many years ago was to create a keyboard layout that somewhat resembles the US International keyboard layout in Windows. The default US keyboard layout on Macs is somewhat less than optimal for producing accented characters – most characters require three keystrokes (like option-e-e for “é”). The French Canadian keyboard layout is more efficient, but many of the keys are in different locations than how they’re indicated on the physical US keyboard (the hardware). The “US International” keyboard on Windows seems to me a good compromise: not as many keystrokes, and most of the keys are where they’re advertised as being. Moreover, the way to compose accented characters is somewhat intuitive: the apostrophe (’) functions as a dead key for the acute accent, the back tick (`) as a grave, the chevron (^) as a circumflex and the double quote (”) as an umlaut.

Back then I created the keyboard layout with a special resource editor that only worked in the older Mac OS (or Classic) environment. Though the layout I created was working fine, I was starting to feel like it would be more and more difficult to edit it again in the older Mac OS (Classic isn’t readily available for OS X the way it used to be) – though maybe there’s now an OS X resource editor. In any case, I also knew that the new keyboard layout mechanism was XML-based, which seemed to me to be progress. Also, I was having problems getting the keyboard layout to work under X11 and was curious to see if using the new layout mechanism would help.

Though XML-based the keyboard layouts can be edited directly, it’s not easy to do so (not because it’s XML but because of the particular structure of the keyboard layout file). Fortunately, there’s an excellent, free keyboard layout editor called Ukelele, which made it very easy to create the layout I wanted. The only issue I’ve encountered is that getting the deadkey characters produced isn’t as straightforward (on my previous layout I could hit apostrophe twice to get one apostrophe, but now it produces the apostrophe and starts a new deadkey sequence with the apostrophe) – but that’s not the fault of Ukelele, I’m sure I don’t yet understand how something works in the new layout descriptions.

The X11 application in OS X (which provides access to the Unix-based X Window System) is supposed to allow seamless integration with the OS X keyboard layout. “Seamless integration” being a marketing term and not a technical term, it doesn’t work properly (unless maybe you use one of Apple’s keyboard layouts). Actually, most things work properly, but not the customized deadkey sequences. Fortunately (again), there’s a very helpful page on X11keymaps over on the OpenOffice wiki that explains how to dump your system’s keyboard layout and tweak the deadkeys to function properly in X11. So now I can use my “US International” keyboard layout in my favourite X11 applications, like OpenOffice (NeoOffice is great, but runs a bit slower I find), Gimp, and Inkscape.

I’ve bundled both the OS X and X11 keyboard layout files together and they can be downloaded (instructions in the READMe file).

While reading comments on a blog post about a very opinionated discussion on the choice of programming languages for developing web applications, I came across another nice post on the Dumbness of Crowds, which essentially tries to distinguish between collective intelligence (like Amazon reviews) and Dumbness of Crowds (which more or less amounts to design by committee). Although a bit different in nature, I think it’s interesting to consider this distinction in the context of larger academic projects where some of the realities are different (you may have collaborators instead of employees, you may want to compromise the “perfect” coherence of the project in favour of community buy-in, etc.). In any case, I’m also intrigued by how text analysis tools could be designed to better enable collective intelligence and social networks; but some day I’ll post a separate message on what I might call Text Analysis 2.0.

Matthew Inman has a humorous post on common Hollywood stereotypes of computer programming code and computer programmers (thanks for the link Chad). To some extent I think the descriptions stereotype the supposed stereotypers, but there are plenty of examples that come to mind of what he describes, including “Code does not move,” “Code is not green text on a black background,” and “Code does not make blip noises as it appears on the screen” (Matrix anyone?). For some reason, Bradford Paley’s artistic representation of computer code reading itself also comes to mind.

I don’t use instant messaging a lot, but when I do, it can sure be useful. Unfortunately for Mac users, iChat doesn’t directly support access to MSN buddies (which apparently has about 60% market-share), and some of my current project collaborators are MSN users. There are decent MSN clients like Microsoft Messenger or the open-source aMSN, and of course multi-protocol clients like Fire. But I don’t like having multiple chat clients open (like iChat and aMSN), and I don’t quite like any of the other interfaces as much as iChat. For those in a similar situation, I recommend following Melvin Rivera’s instructions for getting iChat to communicate to MSN through Jabber (which is really a credit to the design of Jabber). The initial setup is a bit onerous, but I can confirm that it worked for me and I find it very handy to have MSN buddies in iChat.