Writings

I can't wait to see the blog post today that follows this one.

I recently made the switch from OS X to Ubuntu after realizing that all Steve Jobs wants is for you to shut up and buy a new iPod; don’t you dare criticize his taste or the way he treats third-party developers like dirt.

-- David Siegel

One of the interesting effects of the internet has always been the lack of a direct connection between online identity and real world identity.  While Pen Names have been a fact of life since the dawn of modern literature, something did change when we went from addressing someone as "Sean, yeh I know him" to "sdague on freenode, yeh I know him".

Back when I first registered dague.net, I did so with a very specific rationale.  I'm a fan of centralized identity.  If you follow the web links on my homepage you'll be able to find out all the relevant identity bits about me, my employer (IBM), my marital status (married), projects I've worked on in the past.  Consolidating all that information around dague.net made that my central identity.  Using sean at dague dot net as my email address, and putting http://dague.net in my signature meant that all my various internet posts could easily be tracked back to me.  My online identity is a whole, made up of all the things I've put out there over the years.

But while this is my take on identity, it isn't the only one.  Other people are much more interested in distributed identity, or faceted identity.  When AOL first started giving out real email addresses to people, they started with giving out up to 5 email addresses per account.  The assumption was that a family of 4 would take advantage of this, but that it wouldn't be interesting to most people.  This assumption turned out to be fatally flawed.  Their biggest uptake on accounts was by individual account holders, who would create 5 discrete faceted identities to interact with different online communities.  They wanted the freedom to act as they would in each of those communities, with no connection back to their real life identity.

The test case for each of these is the "Resume via Google Test":

Assume you are in an interview with an employer in the future, and they've got a ready index of every bit of your information that has reached the public internet that can be corolated back to you.  Does this help or hurt your chances in getting the job?

This test could be applied to any arena actually, be it jobs, dating, politics, etc.  Everything you've ever said on the internet will be there for ever.

If we take each approach to its extreme you find the following:

• Centralized: content is created on the internet to enhance the reputation of the creator.  If someone can't track your content back to you, you can't capitalize on the fact that that content was good, which may lead to: jobs, dating, etc.
• Faceted: the internet is a brutal place.  People like to take things out of context and will persecute you for being different.  It's better participate in seperate communities with a fresh reputation per community, as context within that community is much easier to understand.

Where are you on the Identity Spectrum?

Recently I've been asking this question to a lot of my colleagues, gotten some funny white board diagrams, and found some interesting results.  In the small sample set that I've got so far, I've found that while there is a generational element to faceted vs. centralized identity (them kids are quite a bit more into faceted identity), it doesn't look like it is the overwhelming factor.  Most of the people that still have strongly faceted identity also found As a kid, did you have a single large group of friends, or very specific friends that you did specific things with.

These are some early thoughts on the subject, with no real conclusions at this point.  I do think this would make for a quite interesting area of real study (instead of anecdotal interest), but that is definitely not my field. :)  I'd love to get comments from people about where they feel they live in the Identity spectrum, or even that I'm off my rocker for characterizing it like this.

Another day, another set of ADO.NET code gutted.  I love mondays!

Today the SQLite Assets for OpenSim were liberated from their cruel ADO.NET oppressor, saving memory and CPU time in the process.  I did manage to break things for an hour or two as I had misunderstood the semantics of IDataReader.  Thanks to Grumly57 on #opensim-dev for sorting out what I did that was really dumb. :)

XMPP4R is written in Ruby. If you don't know this language yet, continue to ignore it. Learning it will make you realize what you missed until now, and you might run into severe problems (depression, etc).

--XMPP/Jabber Library for Ruby

That line is used twice in Futurama (in two consecutive episodes), uttered by Professor Farnsworth.  When Futurama was on Cartoon Network for the last 4 years, that line was blanked out on every airing of either episode.  Why that line was deemed too "something" to air, when nothing else was cut, always seemed odd to me.

Futurama is now on Comedy Central, and as of last night, is airing Futurama un-censored. :)

While our new woodstove insert is really great, and is definitely reducing our oil usage, it causes a bit of an issue when it comes to distributing the heat through the house.  When running on wood heat we get warmth right up the center of the house.  The office at the end of the upstairs hallway ends up being the warmest room in the house.  It is far too easy to make the upstairs unlivably warm, while the rest of the house is quite cool still.

Fortunately, we have a central air HVAC system, so the solution is to just turn on the furnace fan to redistribute the heat through the house.  This works pretty well, and at least mellows out the hot spots.  Ideally we wouldn't run the fan all the time, but would duty cycle it on for some portion of an hour.  Honeywell makes a thermostat that has a cyrc fan mode, which runs the fan 35% of each hour, which was an option, but something else caught my eye.

The Proliphix Internet Thermostat NT20e is quite a nifty device.  It has a bit more programing than our current thermostat and has the advantage of having a web interface.  You plug the device into your ethernet network and get a web interface for all the controls and programming for the device.  What's even better is that Proliphix designed this with further customization in mind by publishing an HTTP API to the device as well.  This makes is very easy to have a computer create further logic for the device, like forcing the fan on for certain hours of the day, while leaving the defaults for programming in the device itself.

I've now ordered mine, and it is on it's way.  I can't wait to get this thing hooked up.

While I appreciate the environmental gains from every Linux system I've used in the last couple of years defaulting to double sided printing, this gets a bit annoying when you need single sided pages for doing code refactoring.

I found today that if I loaded up a double sided postscript file into evince (gnome's pdf / ps viewer), and told it to only do single sided printing, it did as I said.  It took me this long to figure this out, so hopefully this post saves someone the trouble.

I'm finally overcoming the jet lag from our trip, and starting to feel like a normal person again.  While I've been to a lot of other countries before, I've never had this kind of culture shock in returning to the states.

India was an incredible experience.  The country requires you to be present in a way that no other place I've been has.  You are continuously assaulted with vivid sights, sounds, and smells.  India is a place where you are in love with it one moment, and overwhelmed with it the next.  I think that kind of emotional roller coaster is very common to westerners on their first trip there.  It was at least a common thread among the wedding attendees.

Our 24 hours of transit to India was done on Jet Airways, the oldest private domestic air carier of India that recently started flights to the United States.  We flew a brand new B777 to Brusells, and an equally new A330 to Chennai from there.  Both had Linux based Video on Demand systems for all seats, providing access to 50 or so films and 100 or so TV episodes.  I managed to watch at least half a dozen things that I'd had in my netflix queue during the flight, catching up on a lot of films from the past year.  The in flight food was spectacular, as good as the food in a good Indian restaurant state side.  And to top it all off the B777 had this brand new LED light package which meant the cabin light intensity and color was infinitely variable.  We had simulated sunrise, as the cabin slowly came up from dark to a brilliant orange, as well as a rotating color display across the rainbow during one of our meals.  I can't wait until LED lighting like that becomes cheap enough to put in residential environments.  The B777 flight from Newark to Brussels was the single best air flight I've ever taken.

There was no jet bridge when we landed in Chennai, so we were instantly hit with the first of the sensations of India, massive heat and humidity at 2am.  The airport did have AC in places, which is clearly a more recent addition as rows of industrial green fans were mounted on every pillar throughout the complex.  It took us a couple of hours to navigate our way out through customs, immigration, and baggage claim to meet up with Ani (our host for most of the trip in Chennai) and his driver Johnson.  We managed to arrive 1 day after a massive cyclone (dumping 8 inches of rain on the city in a day).  This managed to clear out the air a bit, which my asthma appreciated, but also managed to do some damage to the electrical wiring in Ani's house.  Our first nice was spent in a hotel in the city while the electricians worked all night restoring power to his place.

After a few hours of sleep, and a meal in the hotel, Johnson arrived to pick us up and bring us back to Ani's.  Johnson had previously been a courier between Mumbai and Bangalore.  As such, the rides with Johnson were an experience in the full craziness of traffic in India.  Traffic, much like most things in India, doesn't have a real set of rules.  The closest thing it has is a convention that you are responsible not to hit anything in your field of view forward, as is everyone behind you.  The chaos and narrow responsibility seems to work.  While we had a few hard slamming brakes during the trip, we never really had a time where it was frightening.

Ani lived on the outskirts of town.  The road to get there was poured concrete in sections, and gravel in other bits.  It was at least 1.5 km walk from his house before you could find a place where you could buy a sealed bottle drink.  As such we relied heavily on drivers during our time in Chennai (though we took a few walks around the area during our stay as well).  Ani had to practice every day for a Jan 2nd dance performance, so we tended to be home bodies during the heat of the day (which I honestly couldn't complain about too much, as it was in the low 90s and humid most days), then would go out into the town in the afternoon / evening for shopping, sight seeing, and dinner.

The first few days were largely wide eyed amazement.  Never before did I consider a bicycle a 2 person vehicle (often with the passenger carrying a large object such as a 21" TV in box), a motorcycle a 5 person vehicle (2 adults + 3 children), a three wheeled auto rickshaw an 8 person vehicle, and a bus to carry so many people that it was noticable tipped when driving down the streets.  The highways are a mix of pedestrians, animals (mostly cows and dogs), bicycles, skooters, motocycles, auto rickshaws, cabs, small family cars, clearly upper class cars (land rovers and a few other SUVs), trucks of various sizes and carrying capacities, and buses.  The varied ecosystem of the highway ensures that everyone moves into any space they can fit in to, causing the traffic to not so much flow, but pulse through the congested sections of the city.

Chennai is in the south of India, which has seen most of the middle class economic growth from IT.  While not nearly as impacted as Bangalore, the shooting up of IT parks can be seen everywhere.  IT parks are a uniquely India invention, where a chunk of land is carved out in either a collapsed part of the inner city, or on the outskirts.  State of the art towering office complexes are built allong side appartments and small shops, all within a guarded walled in complex.  This creates a largely isolated bubble from the rest of the environment.  The rising tide is not lifting all ships, but building in new massive disparity between those that have and those that don't, and displacing many of those without in favor of the new progress.  The sharp contrast of poverty and wealth is tangible and visible nearly any place you go, and is one of the inescapable parts of India that gets to you over time.

The cities are constantly bathed in the glow of orange halogen lights at night, providing and enternal twilight during the 12 hours of dark.  At night, at home, doors a locked, bolted, and padlocked.  Windows are grids of iron bars, with translucent panes so no one can see in.  In the telephone colony, where we were staying, the night watchman walks the street all night blowing his whistle and banging the gates with his staff.  The matter of factness of this speaks more to the disparity than anything else I saw.

India is a land of plurality.  The primarly religion is Hinduism which contains a pantheon of gods, mostly focussed around the avatars and forms of Shiva (the destroyer) and Visnu (the creator).  The theory of Hinduism, what a westerner might know of the mythology, looks a lot like the Greek or Roman pantheons.  The practice, however, is much different.  We had the unique opportunity to get tours of 3 temples with Ani who is a strongly practicing Hindu, which provided a level of very personal interpretation that could not gathered in any other way.  Hinduism, to me, felt much like the Shintoism of Japan, something born from the worship of fundamental forces in nature which evolved over thousands of years into something more structured and ritual.  The gods of Hinduism are not the fixed points we are used to in the west, but more maluable entities constantly changing form from one to another like a flowing stream.  We were let into the inner sanctum of one of the Shiva temples we visited and saw the evening pooja, which included the bathing of the idol in milk, then the dressing of it, while dozens of attendees chanted and jumped up to catch a view the moment the curtain covering the idol was removed.  The essence of belief was tangible even for outsiders that had not understanding of the language being used.

Language was an challenge in Chennai.  While Ani is fluent in English, having an american father and growing up as much in the US as in India, the English skills of most of the collective that wandered in an out of Ani's house each day were much more limited.  Tamil is the native language of that province of India.  By the end of it I knew a few tamil words: water, done, small; figured out what set of English words tend to be universal: no problem, hello, super, tea, coffee, ok; and found a set of hand signals that could communicate a few more ideas such as no, yes, going, eating, walking, driving, flying, and sleeping.  We had many amusing misunderstandings as part of this including Susan's reaction to one conversation "What I've gathered from Gopal is either our clothes are clean, or they are gone." (they were neither), but we managed to muddle through quite well.

All the food was incredible, and bountiful.  What I considered to be a huge portion turned out to be what they wanted to give me for the first course, with two more to follow.  I think I offended Ani's housekeeper Gopal a bit by cutting him off in giving more food, but after a certain point I was just going to explode.  My two days of illness actually helped with that issue, as it gave me an excuse to not eat multiple pounds of rice at each meal. :)  We had so many flavors, many of which I've never experience before.  At least 4 meals there have made it into my top 10 meals ever had.  Yes, the food really was that incredible.  They are tastes I can still vividly recall now.  Most people loose weight in India, but I think Susan and I both put on weight during our stay due to the truly amazing flavors there.

While most of our time was spent in Chennai, the wedding itself was in Calcutta, 1800km up the east coast of the country.  Sourav had wisely suggested we take a train up to Calcutta, which was a long haul train taking 28 hours to get there.  Susan and I got 1st Class AC tickets for the trip, which meant the compartment had a metal door that was lockable, at the wopping cost $80 per ticket.  There were 10 1st Class AC seats on the train which probably carried at least 5000 people.  They were broken up into two 4 person cabins, and one 2 person cabin.  When we arrived to get on the train we happily found that we had been assigned the 2 person cabin, meaning we had the best seats on the entire train.  While I brought some books to read on the train, I found myself glued to the window for all the hours where there was light outside.  My only regret is that the window was too dirty to take pictures through, as the most stunning visuals of the trip were clearly during that trip.  Many of those images are burned into my brain though, and things I will never forget.  My dream is that someone will just attach an HD channel to the side of the train and dedicate a TV network to just playing that.  It would be better visuals than 99% of everything out there, and something I would watch regularly.

Everything looks different in contrast, so it was great to have Calcutta as a contrast to Chennai, and to see a different part of India.  Calcutta weather was cooler, 80s in the day, 50s at night, which made it the ideal weather for me.  The air in Calcutta was cleaner, making it more like Beijing, dirty but still breathable.  There were parts of Chennai that triggered my asthma quite badly.  Calcutta was at one point the British capital of the city, so has a bit more urban planning.  It is also lacking the IT industry, which means no new upper class.  The tangible effects of this is less traffic (there are very few private cars in Calcutta compared to Chennai), less polution, and less staunch disparity between rich and poor.  Manual rickshaws still exist in Calcutta, as does a very thriving taxi industry.

The wedding itself in Calcutta was amazing, and a very different experience in many respects.  The Hindu ceremony lasted a couple of hours, and we were fortunate that Sourav's uncle provided translation and interpretation for much of it, and that few of the non westerners were really that interested in the ceremony itself, so we managed to be able to stand 10 feet from it taking great pictures througout.  Food and coffee (better described as suger-milk) were brought around during the entirety of the ceremony.  From 4:30 to 8 there were about 50 people at the venue, half being Sourav and Mary's friends from the states.  The rest of the expected 270 people showed up just for the meal which started about 7:30.  Again, the food was amazing.  At about 10 the American crew retired to one of the guest houses with 4 cases of Kingfisher Strong, and hung out playing cards and chatting until 2 in the morning (others stayed up until 4).  I made some new good friends out of that crew of Americans, many of whom I had known a bit in the past.  Plus I got time hanging out with Trey, which is always wonderful.

Our final day back in Chennai was a wonderful wrapping up of things.  We spent the day shopping, got a great meal (with brand new flavors I had never had), and spent an hour walking on the beach watching the ocean crash in as the sun waned.  That time on the beach was one of the most peaceful times I've had in years, and sealed up the trip quite nicely for me.

There are so many stories, both amusing and astonishing, that lie between the cracks of the overview above.  Much like after my trip to Sydney in 2000, the next year is going to be full of things that stir up memories of India, and random events when we were there.  As far as my vacations have been, this has been one of the most incredible ones as it took me completely out of the world I was in, and forced me to be present somewhere else for the entire time.  It's hard for me to fully comprehend that it was only 2.5 weeks of time.  Attaining that level of mental reboot is hard in such an interconnected world, and I fully appreciate events that let you do that.

It was most definitely an adventure, with lots of highs and lows throughout it.  But adventure is always a good thing. :)

The gas station that I use on the way to work underwent construction during December.  When I stopped to get gas this morning, I noticed that they had posted a set of google map directions to St. Francis Hospital (one of the local big hospitals) next to the pump, as well as listed some emergency numbers.   I have no idea why, speculations are welcomed in comments.