Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Roving Eye: 2/9/08

Ole Eichhorn is blogging again, and has been for about a month. Welcome back!

My favorite new read of the holiday season was Richard Preston's "The Wild Trees"" (Fluffer to Kevin Kelly for the recommend.) It tells the story of men and women compelled to find the world's tallest tress - and climb them. Many of these monsters are in North Coast redwood country that I know fairly well. Not that I've got ambitions towards the climbing, but I'd love to walk those groves. [Shack happy already? — ed. Yes.] The author has a photo gallery section on his site that's well worth a look. Sort of puts my own old growth hunting activities in the shade, so to speak.

If you're anticipating major surgery, voluntary or otherwise, here's a word for you: Acidophilus. Seems the antibiotic cocktails used to prevent post-operative infections are also powerful enough to blow away your internal set of intestinal flora. That's the collection of bacteria that have become our symbiotic digesters in return for a usually congenial host environment. Once they're gone, the old GI tract - um - doesn't work so well. So the Acidophilus capsules with replacement flora, usually ignored by all but diet supplement fiends, are suddenly important in rebooting the system. You can find them at the nearest health food store - that would be Trader Joe's in our case. HT: our doc, who we love for his minimalist outlook on prescriptions.

Best YHOO post. Cruel, but fair, just like the Piranha brothers.

Review: Two Books on Open Source Software Licensing

A short trip to the East Coast over the last few days provided an enforced opportunity (ten hours of flight time) to catch up on self-assigned reading. One area of interest, due to a current project, is the ins-and-outs of open source software licensing in the context of building a system that will be partially open and partially proprietary. There have been enough alarmist horror stories circulated by partisans on both sides (Viral! Unconstitutional! Free-riders! Corporate media stooges!) to have me believe this was a time to avoid the blogs and look for a text, Yup, a good ol' fashioned squashed tree book.

Book Review: Glenn Reynolds' An Army of Davids

(Hey, everyone else seems to have written one; why buck the trend?)

I'm not the first to observe that there are really two books inside the covers of Army of Davids, each occupying about half the page count. In the first, Reynolds speaks of what he knows first hand: citizens' media, the forces that have created them, and much of the social impact. As living proof that you don't have to build a portal to wield influence in the Web, Reynolds brings the credibility that he can surf that particular set of waves. In the second half of the book, he opines on matters such as space, nanotechnology, and biotech, where he has no direct experience. Reynolds is not a technologist or businessman, and it shows.

Listening to the Dormouse

Before leaving on vacation, on the recommendation of a friend I picked up a copy of John Markoff's 'What the Dormouse Said', a history of some of the early days of Silicon Valley and what became personal computing and hypertext technology, told in terms of the interaction and overlap between technologists and the developing Bay Area counterculture of the 60s and 70s. I did not count this against my 'no work' pledge, since many of the dramatis personae of the story fall in the range between nodding acquaintance and longtime colleague. Part of the fun of this book was learning the backstory of those in the former category, in a few cases explaining attitudes and behaviors that I'd just taken as given before. Markoff has done a great job at extracting the tales of those days while they still last, and presenting the characters and stories in a sympathetic treatment. (He's not a photojournalist, though. The pics are the same I've seen for years. There have to be more good blackmail historical images in attics somewhere around here. I've seen this great one of Larry Tesler in a 'fro...)

The greatest value of this book is in not only showing the countercultural roots of the Valley, but in dissecting out and exposing the fundamental differences of philosophy between those who saw computers as a tool for augmenting humans - the Engelbart/Nelson/Kay school, and those who saw them as a potential replacement - the strong AI school of McCarthy and others. This is a nuance that has been lost on most other historians and journalists, particularly those without a technical background, so kudos are due.

Since I'm now going to lay some critique on the book, and on those in the stories, I should first acknowledge my own debts. It was Stewart Brand's 'II Cybernetic Frontiers' - still on my shelves - that in my undergraduate days influenced me to drop a biochem dual major and focus on computing, by showing there was more to it than punch cards and assembly language. A copy of the first Xerox PARC Smalltalk report, bummed from a friend, deeply influenced my coding style while I was still a practitioner. Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg's seminal 1976 article, Personal Dynamic Media (PDF), set a vision of computers as media that has been a guiding light for my entire technology and business career (though I diverge on specifics). Much later, Stewart Brand was an instigator of one of my favorite projects at Apple, the Electronic Whole Earth Catalog, one of the earliest experiments in CD-based multimedia publishing. And Doug Engelbart was a gracious colleague to us upstarts during the Dexter Hypertext Workshops.

While it's an inherent problem that any retrospective of events has to adopt a point of view for the sake of narrative, the weakest point of 'Dormouse' is its treatment of how these ideas transitioned into common commercial practice and thence to popular culture. Playing off the countercultural theme, Markoff seems to jump straight from the earliest days of the Homebrew Computer Club to the open source movement of today. That's leaving out over 25 years of entrepreneurial history to try to drag the anti-capitalism of the 60s and 70s into this decade.

Regardless of the seminal role of the ideas outlined, it must be acknowledged that not a single one of the projects described in 'Dormouse' achieved a commercial success. They were works by cognoscenti, for cognoscenti. Like it or not, scale adoption is the means by which personal computing technology impacts culture and economy. Markoff at times seems to adopt the view heard from these pioneers that their work was misunderstood, or ignored, often in the rush to commercialization. For instance, I have heard Alan Kay be even more acid in person regarding the bowdlerized, fragmentary implementations of the PARC ideas that finally saw market.

These problems were of the pioneers' own making. The most poignant portions of 'Dormouse' describe the organizational problems lurking behind the creativity. In fact, none of these organizations and systems managed to scale beyond the size of a modest startup, or survive a single generational turnover of computing technology. Meanwhile, Gordon Moore became one of the creators of an organization that lived in exponential time over many generations, and coevolved with a Valley technical and business ecology that could also do so.

Grand visions have the risk of becoming idées fixe, if not salted with market and social feedback. Organizations and cultures do not become augmented without fundamental transformation. Literary machines must be open in an open society, and cope with the inevitable bad actors. The intellectual challenge of programming recedes into the platforms that carry new media to all the niches of the Long Tail. It's no disrespect to the those who listened to the dormouse, to say that they needed the entrepreneurs of the Valley to make this happen.

In spite of these caveats, I recommend this book, particularly if read alongside two earlier works cited by Markoff: Steven Levy's 'Hackers' and Freiberger and Swaine's 'Fire in the Valley', alternate narratives of overlapping events. These are most often mentioned by those who lived the stories. The 1988 collection A History of Personal Workstations, edited by Adele Goldberg, pulls together some of the academic output of the times of 'Dormouse', for those inclined to dig into primary sources.

For the later Valley and personal computing history, you'll have to search the used book sources for Frank Rose's 'West of Eden' and Paul Carroll's 'Big Blues', respectively treatments of Apple and IBM during the 1980s, and both reasonably accurate from my first or second-hand knowledge. The definitive history of Microsoft during this period is still to be written.

For the engineering and entrepreneurial cultures that became dominant, no one has ever done it better than Tracy Kidder with The Soul of a New Machine. Nominally fiction, Doug Coupland's 'Microserfs' is a humane treatment of the less machismo culture of the early 90s. The voice of the engineer who has to make a product out of a vision is still best expressed in Florman's classic 'Existential Pleasures of Engineering'. If anyone has written a classic memoir of Valley venture capital, I haven't seen it.

What I Read On My Winter Vacation

I hate traveling during the holidays, so usually we hang out at home and hope for the best as far as the weather goes. No such luck. If you paid any attention to CA weather of late, it's been like that old Al Capp character with the cloud always over his head. It rained, then rained some more, and while considering what to do next, it kept on raining. So I caught up on the reading queue a bit, between trawling the net for translation information and new blogs. A few mini-reviews from the turn of the year:

Kenneth Timmerman, The French Betrayal of America. Don't read this book if you have ulcers, high blood pressure, or need to sleep well tonight. Also don't expect a blow-by-blow of the whole Iraq/UN Security council affair. This is background which makes that affair understandable, not as an outlier, but as a direct continuation of a pattern of perfidy and support for Saddam by the French government in general, and Jacques Chirac in particular. Read this and you'll never look at the news from Paris the same. One thing I found wanting: Timmerman at times cites 'rumors' that US oil or arms companies were engaged with either Iraq or Iran, which were used as justification by the French for some of their own activities. He never pays off on these hints - were they self-serving disinformation, or something more serious? It's a small but significant weak point that these rumors are not clearly sunk or substantiated.

Scott Ott, Axis of Weasels. When the tooth grinding from reading Timmerman gets to be too much, put it down and pick up this book of snark and comic relief from the mad genius behind Scrappleface. There is no international crisis or political outcome so dire that it can't be lampooned. There are a few snags in the dish - I was periodically reminded that Mr. Ott and I do not share views on religion, abortion, gay marriage, and evolution. (Evolution? Just what century is it?) But fortunately, he's not running for office, so I can skip past the offending bits and enjoy the residue in good conscience.

Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn. This history of the invasion of Northern Africa, the US Army's first action of World War II, was recommended over the dinner table during my visit to Army War College. This entire campaign is in danger of falling out of school book histories, and Atkinson does an admirable job of digging into the archives of the Army and our adversaries of the time to bring it back to life. Those who have some notion that the efforts of the Greatest Generation were meticulously planned need to read this book, and compare to today. In spite of numerous errors, Operation Torch also marked the point when the productive and logistical capabilities of the US began to eclipse our allies, an event that is still playing out. Atkinson's work is marred only by the occasional descent into 'people journalism' marginal to the outcome of the action.

Peter Cozzens, The Long War for the Northern Plains. This is number four in the author's series "Eyewitnesses to the Indian Wars, 1865-1890". I've had an interest in the war in the Northern Plains since touring several of the significant battlegrounds some years ago, and working on related content as part of a multimedia educational project even further back. The size and price of this volume is likely a bit much unless you share that level of interest, but I enjoyed it. The contents combine contemporary newspaper articles and military reports, and later recountings by the participants, including some from the Native American side. Here you will learn that the history of 'embeds' goes back a long way, and had serious risks of being a 'hair-raising experience' at the time. Personality journalism, criticism of actions that led both to defeat and to eventual victory, and the duels between hawk and dove are just as old. Those brought up on Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee will find that neither of those actions was decisive. It was the ability of Col. Nelson Miles to supply his troops and relentlessly follow the Sioux villages through the harsh winter of 1876-7 that finally broke that proud tribe to the reservations. There are honors and horrors enough here for both sides of that long-ago war.

A Case of Nautical Resume Inflation

(No, not John Kerry - there are enough blogs yammering away about that.)

Alas, a big name VC has exploded the r�sum� of one of my favorite authors. But he is safely beyond the reach of KPCB's diligence, having long ago completed his IPO as far as his fans are concerned.

Hat Tip: Oxblog

BJ Fogg and Captology at BayCHI

Once again the Bay Area chapter of SIGCHI put on an interesting event at the PARC auditorium yesterday evening, this time featuring BJ Fogg of Stanford University's Captology research group. What's Captology? It's the use of computers for persuasion. We're not just talking your vanilla 'rich media' or pop-up ads here. A page of examples explores the space of 'macrosuasion,' where changes in attitudes are the main point of the product, and 'microsuasion' were it is more at the feature level.

The talk featured a variety of interesting examples. I thought the most interesting were the US Army's first-person shooter simulation game with the player in the place of a recruit [one million active users, including current military], and the RSI Guard product designed to prevent or mitigate repetitive stress injuries from computer use. In both cases, the products persuade through involvement (my terminology), having the user enact a role with built-in valency. In the latter case, the product has an upfront interview asking the user just how fervently they want to be nagged.

BJ has a new book just out from Morgan-Kaufmann, revealing a fair amount of design and framework previously reserved to clients. Suggested for those interested in computers as media or practical applications of computer based persuasion (and propaganda).