ALASSCA gaming blog officially launched

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If you have a hankering for games that make you think, or games that make you laugh and have a good time, or games that just make you say, “huh, that’s different,” check out the gaming blog that Adam Lizzi and I just started. It’s called ALASSCA, and it stands for “Adam Lizzi’s Abstract Strategy, Stairball, and Chessball Authority.” Adam likes to invent games in his spare time, and whenever he’s not brainstorming some new monstrosity, he’s hunting down bizarre and under-appreciated games from around the world.

If you’re curious as to why I’m involved, besides being a fan of Adam’s games, you might want to see my introductory post for the connection with free culture 😉 Hey, I have a free culture fetish, I can’t help looking for the free culture connection!

LJ users can subscribe at alassca. Please subscribe, read, and leave comments!

Web designers, fear obsolescence

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Warning: intense geekery follows.

I was browsing through Asheesh Laroia‘s Subversion repository, looking at the flyer he used to advertise my last talk at JHU, when Asheesh suggested that I look at the source code for the page.

HOLY @#$%, go to his Subversion repository, and then use your browser’s “view source” feature to see what’s going on behind the scenes of that page. (Warning: unless you are using Firefox or Safari, your browser may choke on that page.) Apparently this page is using a normal Subversion XML file and transforming it using XSLT into something pretty and readable. I have never seen anything so scarily efficient! I have no idea what that code means! And to think I was so proud of learning how to use CSS…

Asheesh cannot claim credit for creating the pretty XSLT, he is using the Insurrection web tools to prettify his Subversion. But he can take credit for noticing the awe-inspiring simplicity of that page!

Remember the Diebold memo

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Aphid: heh.. im grading midterms right now [for introduction to digital media]. one of the questions is about diebold; there’s a short essay section on “Why might it be desirable to have voting software be open source?”

Here’s the exact question:

Diebold Election Systems is a company that designs and sells electronic voting systems. The Diebold AccuVote-TS™ touch-screen voting terminal has recently been adopted in many U.S. states. Inside these terminals is a 50,000 line computer program that records, stores, counts, encrypts, and distributes the votes cast by citizens using the voting terminals.

On its website Diebold assures us of the integrity and accuracy of its terminals: “When a voter casts their ballot using the Diebold touch screen system, the ballot selections are immediately encrypted and stored in multiple locations within the voting station. When stored, the order of cast ballots is scrambled to further insure ballot anonymity. The image of each and every ballot cast on the voting station is captured, and can be anonymously reproduced on standard paper should a hard copy of ballots be required for recount purposes” (See Diebold’s FAQ).

Unfortunately, Diebold considers the source code for its terminals to be a trade secret. In his recent art piece “Dark Source”, artist Ben Rubin has pointed out that this might be problematic (See the Dark Source project). Why might it be considered problematic that Diebold does not reveal to the public the internal (i.e., software) workings of its touch screen terminals? What are four important characteristics of free or open source software? Give three reasons why its might be a good idea to have the votes of democratic elections recorded and counted with open source software rather than with Diebold’s software.

I’m glad that Diebold has become part of curricula around the country, it’s important and should not be swept under the rug, but it still weirds me out… I wonder if this is how veterans feel when kids are learning about their war in history class?

This artist Ben Rubin actually contacted me and Luke back in the day, under the misapprehension that we had copies of the source code which we could give to him, but he quickly lost interest in us once he learned that we only had the e-mail archive. Ah, memories…

How much mayhem can *you* inspire?

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From foxfour, an objective measure of beauty with a small but critical flaw.

The problem with the “Table of Helens and Equivalents” proposed in the article is that the author suggests that merely taking up smoking (a unit of arson) or tossing an inner tube into a pool (a unit of ship-launching) is sufficient to register on the Helen scale. I beg to differ. Clearly what makes Helen of Troy a good measure of beauty, rather than simple trouble-making, is the amount of activity that her beauty *inspired*, not the amount of mayhem which could be directly attributed to her! Helen wouldn’t have needed to be particularly beautiful in order to launch ships or burn cities herself. She could have just been a pyromaniac who was obsessed with ship-building, and it wouldn’t have mattered if she were incredibly ugly. (This is not to say that I would not find such a woman attractive… a woman who is into fire and sailing can’t be all bad.)

Thus we can see how the author arrived at the ridiculous conclusion that Mrs. O’Leary must be incredibly beautiful because her cow started the Chicago fire, and what his error was. The cow was not inspired by Mrs. O’Leary’s beauty, and did not burn Chicago in O’Leary’s name, or even on purpose (if we agree with the author in his account of O’Leary’s “careless cow”). Of course, if this had been an inter-species lesbian love story, and the cow had burned Chicago because of her unrequited lust for Mrs. O’Leary, then perhaps Mrs. O’Leary would have merited at least a nanoHelen or microHelen. However, at that point it might be necessary to ask whether the Helen scale is only intended to measure beauty by human standards (i.e. how much damage a woman can induce her fellow humans to do) or if it crosses species boundaries.

At any rate, the proposed Helen scale can be easily fixed. All that we need to do is clarify that a beautiful woman must *inspire* someone to christen a motor boat and start a grass fire, in her name, in order for her to rate as a microhelen (10^-6 helens). If she did those things herself, that would not affect her measurement on the Helen scale. With that correction, I wholeheartedly endorse this new objective standard for beauty, and I look forward to beauty contests across the country abandoning subjective judges, ushering in a new era of scientific pulchritude!

Open source currency?

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Also, I completely fail to understand what Douglas Rushkoff is suggesting here: open source currency.

Do I need to read his books or something for this concept to make sense? He seems to be suggesting that we need money that isn’t controlled by the government, and that a model of money that is based on abundance rather than scarcity will enable an economy of collaboration rather than competition. What? Can someone point me to articles that will give me more specifics? (Naturally I will also be trying to Google this myself.) This article is just too vague for me to make sense of it.

Consumerism and the Shopocalypse

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Could it be that consumerism and escapism destroy intelligent races before we can make contact with them? Is that why we haven’t found any space aliens yet? If so, what can we do to avoid that fate?

Perhaps Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping will save us all. Maybe we’ll need something a little more radical than that. At any rate, if Geoffrey Miller is right, something must be done.

Do I have spambots reading my LJ?

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I think that some of the latest users to friend my LJ are spambots: specifically abarot, albatius, axtty, and balaklavaris. Why? (1) They don’t post anything, which would make sense if they are bots, because their posts would eventually give them away. (2) No known humans appear to be friending them back, they are only friends with one another. (3) Their profiles are empty, except for one which has a link to what appears to be the homepage of two gay lovers, but which I suspect is a site designed to raise the Google rank of some related gay porn sites.

What should I do? I can’t prove that they’re spammers, but if they are they should be kicked before they can waste everyone’s time.

Follow the bouncing Nelson

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On January 4-7 (Weds-Sat) I will be in Cambridge, Massachusetts for FreeCulture.org’s first Board of Directors meeting.

On January 13-14 (Fri-Sat) I will be in New York City around Columbia University for FreeCulture.org’s first Northeast regional summit. If you’re interested at all in free culture, please register and come to our conference!

Naturally, if you want to meet up and you are in either of those locations, drop me a line.

A user-oriented open source software bounties site?

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For those who haven’t seen Bounty County yet, it is Downhill Battle’s new effort to make a central open source bounties site, where open source programmers can go to find projects that they can get paid for. Excellent job! I’d like to think that I can take some credit for this, since I was prodding them earlier this month about the need for a such a site, but it’s something they had thought about in the past, and they did all the work, so it’s difficult to understate my role ^_^

At any rate, while Bounty County is a great start, it falls short of the ambitious project which I outlined for them over the phone, so I’d like to briefly share with you my vision. Below is an excerpt from an e-mail which I sent to Nick and Holmes today.

Hey Nick and Holmes,

Congratulations on making Bounty County and getting it Slashdotted! As always, you folks work quickly ^_^ I hope that it will serve as a good way to help open source projects get the coders that they need, and to compensate programmers for their time.

However, I had something slightly different in mind, which I would like to work on… a user-oriented open source software bounties site.

One problem with open source software is that users who are not programmers have difficulty telling the difference between freeware and truly free software. The freedom to adapt a program to your needs seems unimportant if you do not actually have the ability to edit the program yourself. How can we make the freedoms of free software more important to ordinary people? There are a few ways to address this problem:

(1) Increase the programming skills of the ordinary user, or make it easier to acquire these skills. Free online tutorials and teach-ins can help to some extent, but ultimately this method requires a good deal of time and effort on the part of the user, and therefore the majority of users will never bother to acquire programming skills.

(2) Make it possible to program without any significant programming experience whatsoever (or at least make it easier for newbies to program). Some revolutionary intuitive open source programming environment could be imagined to fill this need. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to implement this.

(3) Make it easier for the ordinary user to find programmers who can implement the features and customizations that they want/need. This is the method that currently interests me the most.

I’m convinced that the best way to do this is to set up an open source software bounties site which makes it easy for programmers and ordinary people to get together. Rather than having the money come from the project itself and reflect what its developers see a need for, a user-oriented site would reflect what the public sees a need for. If the developers disagree and think that the feature requests are stupid, there is always the right to fork, which is another thing that makes open source different from proprietary software. As I may have mentioned to you, I envision a system that works with Fundable.org or some similar web 2.0 system to make it easy for users to get together and raise money for a credible bounty, even if no single individual has enough money.

A user-oriented bounty site and a project-oriented bounty site are not mutually exclusive: I think that we could add on a section like that to Bounty County if you were interested. Would that be something that you would approve of? Or do you think this would be best done as a separate site? More importantly, is this a good idea at all? Let me know what you think, and I’ll start shopping this idea around.

UPDATE: Nick replied with this quick response:

I like this idea a lot, but it’s very ambitious and would be a serious challenge to build. I would need a really really good interface to get beyond a narrow user base and it would need to raise more money than typical bounties if it’s moving towards a model where developers are actually doing this stuff for the money. Interface mockups would be the place to start.

We’re certainly not opposed to something like this, but we can’t really put time into it now, but feel free to take a shot at it and we’ll be happy to take a look at plans, schemes, and mockups.