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Californian Ideology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

“The Californian Ideology is a name given by two authors to a set of beliefs combining bohemian and anti-authoritarian attitudes from the counterculture of the 1960s with techno-utopianism and support for neoliberal economic policies. These beliefs are thought by some to have been characteristic of the culture of the IT industry in Silicon Valley and the West Coast of the United States during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.”

I’d say that it’s more like simulacra of bohemian and anti-authoritarian attitudes. Silicon Valley “culture” has always struck me as deeply bourgeois and conventional, given to groupthink (ie avoidance of “negative” people), and sharing many triumphalist and millennialist attitudes with religious fundamentalists.

New developer resource from Google:

doctype

Doctype is a Google-sponsored open encyclopedia and reference library for developers of web applications. By web developers, for web developers.

* Open source
* Open content
* Open to contributions from anyone

Looks like a very useful resource and an interesting new application of social media. Not sure if it’s wiki-based, or whether this is something new from Google. Found via Gruber.

Upgraded to WP 2.5.1, now with extry hax0r resistance. Go thou and blah blah.

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blogging, geek, wordpress

How lame has a blog gotten when the blogger only makes entries about upgrading the blog software? This lame.

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blogging, wordpress, geek, upgrades

Grand Text Auto » Programs Ted Nelson Likes: “When I pressed him to mention any programs - including small-scale ones like games - that influenced him, he said he wasn’t a game guy and just mentioned some other ‘full platforms’ that aren’t computers: Tinderbox, Emacs, and Flash.”

2 out of 3 ain’t bad. Which 2 I mean is left as a really simple exercise for the reader. I wonder if Mark Bernstein’s seen this?

(Via.)

UPDATE: He’s seen it.

Technorati Tags:
mac, emacs, tinderbox, hypertext, ted nelson

Kent’s Bike Blog: One Watt Planet Bike Blaze (and some other lights) Reviewed:

“Back in the early days of personal computers, Byte magazine was the magazine for computer nerds. A guy named Jerry Pournelle (yeah the same Jerry Pournelle who writes science fiction novels) wrote this column that was supposed to represent the ‘normal’ user’s view of computers. But his column became popular, people sent him stuff and when he’d have a problem, he could make phone calls that ‘normal’ people couldn’t. I remember one instance where he had a problem with some Microsoft product and Jerry’s solution was something like ’so I called up my buddy Bill Gates and he flew a couple of techs down from Redmond to look at my system…’ OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that extreme, but it was close.”

Pretty damn close. I can remember reading those Pournelle columns with a good deal of outrage. He was sort of the original A-list blogger, now that I think of it. Pournelle, though, did usually attempt to figure out problems with the Frankenputers he used to accrete, rather than the modern blogger waiting all of 5 seconds before throwing the problem onto the mercy of the LazyIntarWeb.

(Via novia.)

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blogging, geek

I was looking at the OmniFocus forums yesterday, trying to figure out a way I could sync the app between my work and home machine (I spend a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing) and there was a post from Tom Negrino on how he does it:

I’d like to sync OF between my MacPro up in my office (where the app and its database lives) and my MacBook down in the house, but I’m not going to try to figure out rsync to do it. I don’t even have OF installed on the MacBook, but I still use the laptop to enter and edit info in OF when I’m not in my office.

How, you ask? Both machines are running Leopard, and I use Leopard’s Screen Sharing to view and work with the MacPro’s screen from the MacBook. It works great.

I used some of the tips from Macworld’s Screen Sharing article to improve the sharing experience.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1310…harepower.html

This works easily for me because my house and office are on the same LAN, but I think it will work over the Internet, too, though you may have to fiddle with router settings.

Until the Omni folks deliver their own sync features, screen sharing does it for me.

And I sort of like this idea, with 2 exceptions:

1. I don’t actually use OmniFocus on the iMac, the only machine I have running Leopard, and
2. I find it kind of clumsy to have to switch to that damn window every time I want to use the app.

And then it hit me, thinking about that recent post about NYPL and Mac virtualization, is that what I really want is Unity for Screen Sharing! Wouldn’t it be great if I could run an app on another machine but have it be just another window? X11 does this, right?

Well, VMWare guys, are you listening?

Technorati Tags:
apple, geek, mac, vmware+fusion

SimpleBits ~ SimpleQuiz › Part VIII › Titles:

“Q: When marking up a book title or publication, which of the following is the best choice?

<br /> A. <p>My upcoming book, <em>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</em>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>B. <p>My upcoming book, <i>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</i>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>C. <p>My upcoming book, <cite>SimpleQuiz: Get Down With Markup</cite>, will be a bestseller.</p> <p>

Interesting issues, discussed in the comments to the post. Some are saying C, since it’s a title. That seems wrong to me. Some are saying B, since it’d be typeset that way, which also seems wrong (presentation vs semantic.) Choosing A wouldn’t seem to be any different from B, except that <em> is supposed to mean emphasis; it’s only a synonym for <i> because most browsers have chosen to render it that way. Very interesting discussion in any case; well worth reading the whole thing.

(Via mph.)

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geek, web, markup, semantic+web

Reading the NYPL monthly newsletter this morning, I saw what looked like a great new service: MyLibraryDV. From the newsletter:

Download classic films, Hollywood hits, lifestyle programs, and more — for free! All you need is your NYPL library card, high-speed Internet access, and MyLibraryDV to access more than 1,000 movies and TV series, including favorites like Antiques Roadshow and America’s Test Kitchen.

Well, that, and a Windows machine, or an Intel-equipped Mac with BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare Fusion:

Can I use a Mac with the service?

The Download Manager for MyLibraryDV is a Windows .exe file that can only be installed on computers running Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2, which enables you to run Windows Media Player. You can use a Mac to operate the Download Manager and view videos if you have an Intel processor and Windows 2000 with SP4 or Windows XP with SP2 operating system installed and running. Macs without this capability will not be able to install and use the Download Manager.

So the answer here is “not really,” though of course you can make the case that a Mac running Windows does it better and more stably than a PC. (Ask me sometime about the epic struggle it was to burn 3 Word docs to a CD on a Windows laptop yesterday. Why people put up with this stuff is beyond my comprehension. Well, besides “they have to.”) But anybody with a G* is out of luck. NYPL, you’re better than this. Really.

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libraries, mac, nypl

More on the oversimplicity of “Digital Natives” etc. (The Googlization of Everything):

As Henry Jenkins writes, there is so much interesting stuff going one out there among age groups, among members of communities, and across oceans that flattening out everyone into “generations” or “natives” and “immigrants” is just false and useless.

It also has real-world implications. Once we assume that the kids out there love certain forms of interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems and devices that meet our presumptions. By doing so, we either pander to some marketing cliche or force an otherwise diverse group of potential users into a one-size-fits-all system that might not meet their needs.

Also see the first comment for the predictable “it is TOO” take on things, replete with the usual ageist assumptions and based mainly on hypotheticals and anecdotal evidence.

Technorati Tags: culture, digitization, geek, libraries