Pattern Languages

Unless you’ve been asleep, you will have noticed the spread of Christopher Alexander’s pattern theory through computing. In The Origins of Pattern Theory: The Future of the Theory, And The Generation of a Living World (a talk given in San Jose, California, at the 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA)) he reflects on the theory and how it has taken root in computing.

The pattern language that we began creating in the 1970s had other essential features. First, it has a moral component. Second, it has the aim of creating coherence, morphological coherence in the things which are made with it. And third, it is generative: it allows people to create coherence, morally sound objects, and encourages and enables this process because of its emphasis on the coherence of the created whole.

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Iain (M) Banks: Feersum Endjinn

Feersum Endjinn by Iain (aka Iain M.) Banks is the best sci-fi novel I’ve read in a while. Ian M. Banks is a Scottish fiction and science fiction writer. His sci-fi goes under “Iain M. Banks” and his straight fiction under “Iain Banks”. Feersum Endjinn is in that Brit dark fantasy/sci fi style of Mervyn Peake and later Pullman. It is tough to read with one narrator whose sections read in something like l33t speak. The world of Feersum Endjinn is an outsized castle where ruined rooms are broad fields or cities and there is a data corpus that anyone not too senior is implanted to be able to access. Citizens have multiple lives, both real and then virtual. Every page slowed me down with twisted insights or insights that twisted. Easily one of the most imaginative writers, though sometimes I worry M-Banks loses his plot in the display of wit and the fantastic. Just think about the title of the book.
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PressThink’s Top Ten Ideas for 2004

Jay Rosen’s blog on the press and media has a nice entry on PressThink’s Top Ten Ideas for 2004. The top ten ideas are:

1. The Legacy Media.
2. He said, she said, we said.
3. What the printing press did to the Catholic Church the blogging press does to the media church.
4. Open Source Journalism, or: "My readers know more than I do."
5. News turns from a lecture to a conversation.
6. "Content will be more important than its container."
7. "What once was good–or good enough–no longer is."
8. "The victory of affinity over geography."
9. The Pajamahadeen.
10. The Reality-Based Community.

There are explanations or links to blog entries that explain these. It is a great way to summarize a year of ideas. More generally Rosen’s blog does a good job of linking to highlights of ideas and short essays. His blog seems a good example of a blog made up of short essays rather than just links.

Podcasting: audio for your iPod

The Globe and Mail has a good story from the Associated Press on ‘Podcasting’ lets masses do radio shows (Matthew Fordahl, Monday, Feb. 7, 2005). The story gives some history and describes some of the uses of postcasting. For more see iPodder.org.

Less than a year old, podcasting enables anyone with a PC to become a broadcaster. It has the potential to do to the radio business what Web logs have done to print journalism. By bringing the cost of broadcasting to nearly nothing, it’s enabling more voices and messages to be heard than ever before.

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Google Local

Google Local is a new Google service in beta where you search for What and Where. It will remember your “Where” as in “Hamilton, Ontario”. It then presents the results in a list with a map to the right which tries to locate a particular result.
So, for example, if I search for my name I get a result “A” for McMaster (actually for the McMaster Floral Design in the Hospital) that appears on the map where McMaster is in Hamilton. A mixed result that is sort of right, but not right enough.

Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters

Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham is a readable essay about hacking and how it is not computer science, but is akin to painting or writing. He concludes with:

Over and over we see the same pattern. A new medium appears, and people are so excited about it that they explore most of its possibilities in the first couple generations. Hacking seems to be in this phase now.
Painting was not, in Leonardo’s time, as cool as his work helped make it. How cool hacking turns out to be will depend on what we can do with this new medium.

Embedded in the essay is an idea about fame and open source hacking that needs some thought. My sense is that hacking is in the age of genius, while the arts Graham gives as examples were developed during an age where individual genius was not recognized as it is now. Hackers essentially want the recognition they think artists get for open source work even though our idea of genius is a product of a history of Western art culture. What if we reversed the theory and imagined computing culture, that downplays individual genius relative to other arts, as providing a paradigm back to the arts where the genius artist is no longer the norm?
This link came from Matt Patey.