My blog has moved.

My blog is now hosted over here:

http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog

Facebook comments

My blog is syndicated on Planet Debian, Planet GSLUG, and Facebook (through their "notes" system). I occasionally get a comment about one of my posts over on Facebook, and every time I do I remember one of the reasons I avoid that site.

[someone] made a comment about your note "note title".

To see the comment, follow the link below:
[link to Facebook]

What's missing here is of course the actual text of the comment. Blogger does this right: the actual comment is emailed to me. Not only does this impose the annoyance of having to click on the link, but I often read my email offline, and so a message like this is worse than useless for me. (worse as I have to postpone it for later, which means I need to deal with it twice) It would be even better if I didn't have to click to reply, but with a Web service you kind of expect that. (one of the reasons that I'll be setting up my own blog at some point: I can use software that actually allows me to compose replies offline)

I don't know why Facebook does this, but my guess is that either (a) they haven't thought about it, or (b) they want to drive up page views and make it annoying for me to not use their site. If it's (b), then that apparently works for a large swathe of the population, but it makes me want to avoid them like a bad cliche.

[EDIT] This post is attracting spam; closing comments.

Good ideas in customer service: kill the hold period

The lender for one of my student loans has apparently started using a rather cool system to manage incoming customer service calls. If all the call-takers are busy, then instead of forcing you to sit there listening to a call telling you how important your business is to them, they let you request a call-back. They ask you to enter a phone number where they can reach you, then give you a time window in which they'll be calling (in my case I think it was about two minutes wide). When my turn came up, they called me and I was able to speak with a human immediately.

This is such a huge improvement over the typical call center experience that I'm amazed it hasn't caught on more broadly.

• It's presumably good for them since they don't have to pay for a long incoming toll-free call, particularly when most of the call is just muzak.
  
• It's great for me, because instead of sitting by the phone like a hawk in case I miss the customer service rep, I can go do something useful for a few minutes until the time the call is scheduled for.
  

I'm guessing that this option will be available in more and more places as companies computerize their telephone systems. Another nice twist, if there are any telephony guys reading this, would be to allow me to request the customer service call from a Web page, eliminating the toll-free call altogether and presumably saving some expense for the company.

An interesting question for me is how they generate those estimates of when they'll be able to help you. I'm guessing that they use some queueing theory to estimate the most likely wait time for the next incoming customer, but this is something I have only a fuzzy awareness of. However they did it, the estimate seemed accurate enough to me.

cwidget gets a Web page

I spent some time last weekend putting together the infrastructure to generate a basic Web page for cwidget. The Web page is generated by Ikiwiki (thanks to the incomparable Joey Hess for a really nice piece of code there) and doubles as the cwidget documentation; it will be included in the next upload of libcwidget-doc. It can be found in the source tree under doc/ikiwiki.

It's currently a bit skeletal: in particular, it really needs some tutorial/HOWTO material for new users. But it at least has all the basic information that I personally expect from a project Web site.


I was playing with ikiwiki for a week or so prior to setting this Web site up, and the more I use it the more impressed I am. When I get my new Slicehost instance set up (probably next weekend), this blog will probably migrate to an ikiwiki installation over there. Being able to edit my posts offline (about half my hacking time is offline), being able to expose a change history for posts, and not having to maintain an installation of a monster PHP program (as the docs put it, if you don't run the CGI then ikiwiki has the security implications of cat(1)), are all absolutely killer features for me, and I look forward to expanding my use of this tool. Joey has struck gold yet again.

[UPDATE] This post is attracting spam and no real comments. Closing comments.

ANNOUNCE: cwidget

I've just uploaded the first release of libcwidget to Alioth and NEW. libcwidget is a high-level C++ library for developing user interfaces that run in a terminal using curses as the display and input layer. It uses widget abstractions similar (but of course not identical) to those found in GTK+ and Qt, with signals and slots provided by libsigc++.

Background

Back when I started writing aptitude, I had one general goal:

Just because it runs in a terminal doesn't mean it has to suck.

I tried to apply this in the user interface, but I also applied it internally. The curses programs I looked at before writing aptitude all had very ad-hoc UIs. In many cases the code was structured with each "view" that appeared mapped to a custom C function call; if the author was feeling ambitious, similar-looking screens might be abstracted into a single function call, but the basic structure of the interface still reflected the call graph of the program.

aptitude had a primitive interface abstraction layer from the get-go; over the years, I borrowed ideas from GTK+ and restructured this layer into a full widget set. libcwidget is this code, disentangled from the guts of aptitude and slightly cleaned up. Because of its history, it is missing widgets that aptitude doesn't need (like a multi-line text editor), but it provides an extensible base that you can build upon.

Getting cwidget

The cwidget library is available (both as source and as an i386 .deb) from the cwidget Alioth releases page. There is also API documentation automatically generated from the upstream repository, which, while it is woefully incomplete, should provide some information: I've tried to write Doxygen tags into most of the code I've added in the last 4 years or so.

The upstream code repository is in git (because what fun is a new project if you don't learn a new VCS?) and available here. To retrieve a copy of the repository for yourself, run this command:

git clone git://git.debian.org/git/cwidget/head cwidget

Building rails

In the 1860s, in the middle of one of the largest wars America has ever been involved in, a 690-mile railroad was built in a period of seven to nine years (depending on how you count), a rate of about five days per mile of track. Now, it's certainly true that this was accomplished through labor practices that were, by today's standards, more than a little bit questionable. However, I still am amazed that it's apparently going to take us twenty years to construct fifty miles of track in the Seattle area. By my count, that's a hundred and forty six days per mile of track. And I haven't even mentioned the harsh environmental conditions the transcontinental line faced, which a line in the Seattle metro area by and large does not.

I haven't decided how or whether to vote in the election tomorrow, but the timescale they're projecting is ... astonishing.

Lessig at the University of Washington

On Friday 2007-11-02, I watched Larry Lessig give a presentation at the University of Washington entitled Is Google (2008) Microsoft (1998)? Since it was Lessig, the talk was articulate and thought-provoking, and he used his slides very well (unlike many presenters who just read bullet points).

The argument he made is that Google is like Microsoft in some ways (and so are other companies like Facebook). In his analysis, the problem with Microsoft was that so many companies made themselves Microsoft-dependent, which both forced other companies to follow suit (due to network effects) and gave Microsoft leverage they could use against everyone in their ecosystem (e.g., Netscape). According to Lessig, Microsoft was not evil to use this leverage, but you have to recognize that Microsoft will do what is best for Microsoft, and this may not be what is best for you. He then suggested that we should be aware of the potential for the same thing to happen; in support of this point, he quoted excerpts from the terms of service from the APIs of Google and Facebook, which contain typical statements like we reserve the right to terminate your use of this service for any reason or for no reason, and asked: What if Microsoft had written this license agreement?

But it seemed to me that this wasn't his main point. He was using this observation as a springboard to talk about issues revolving around competition and public policy. Specifically, he feels that we should work towards a more just model of interaction between companies and users whose work makes the company more valuable (by contributing to a software ecosystem, by posting content on the Web site, etc). But the correct way to do this (he says) is not via competition, after-the-fact litigation, or voluntary codes of conduct: competition may not be around to enforce good behavior (as we've seen with Microsoft), litigation may be too late and ineffective (again, see Microsoft), and voluntary codes of conduct will disappear as soon as they get in the way of the bottom line. The correct approach, he argued, is across-the-board regulation so that all the companies have to play by the same rules.

From there he went on to talk about governmental corruption. He said (quoting Robert Reich's book Supercapitalism) that the reason we consistently look for solutions in the market and in voluntary compliance is that our governmental system is broken and does not effectively regulate corporations in the public interest. But Lessig is optimistic that we can change things (he joked that his publisher was unhappy with this point of view, because his brand has been built on pessimism). In his view, the politicians in Washington, by and large, want to be honest and do good, but they aren't able to within the current political system. For instance, on the few occassions that he managed to get access to lawmakers to discuss copyright issues, it was often the first time they had heard that there was more than one side to the argument. He thinks we need a national political movement that will shame politicians into being less corrupt.

This is all a simplification of what he said, of course; unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a recording of this talk on Lessig's Web site, or I'd point you at primary source material. I don't know if this is because he chose not to post it, or because it just hasn't been made available yet.

My view

In general, I thought that the speech was very interesting and well thought out. But as much as I'd like to buy into his optimism that we can fix our system, I don't think it's well-founded, for two reasons.

First, he argued that competition will resolve some of these problems (that was before and after he said we can't rely on competition, which I found confusing and may indicate that I misunderstood something). His evidence for this seemed to be that when Microsoft was dominating the world, users responded by reducing their dependence on Microsoft products and by switching to alternatives such as Linux. But, in fact, although more people may be using Linux than in the past, virtually everyone is still only using Windows, it's still almost impossible to find a programming job that isn't Windows-only, and Microsoft is still raking in money hand over fist; indeed, they're doing so well that they're planning to expand their workforce by a third. To take just one data point of many: I ride the bus to Seattle and back, and I regularly see other people using laptops as they commute. Virtually all the laptops run Windows. Occasionally I'll see a Mac, and every few months I'll see a guy running Linux on his laptop; I say "a guy" because it's the same guy every single time. So by my estimation, use of Linux on laptops in buses on the 545 route from Redmond to Seattle is way below 1%, with Macintoshes somewhere around 5%.

To broaden my point, I think Lessig has fallen into a trap that highly intelligent people, particularly those in academia, tend to fall into. In academia, you are surrounded by people who value learning and thinking deeply about the world. These are people who will give serious and unbiased consideration to questions like what is the social effect of my acceptance of the Facebook Terms of Service? and If I become dependent on this service, will that possibly affect me in five years if the company decides to act against my interests? The problem with this is that these people are not representative of the population at large. The population at large thinks why is this check-box getting in the way of me sending pictures to my friends? And I have no doubt that any kid who, e.g., refuses to sign up for Facebook as a protest against their TOS will be roundly mocked in their social circles for being a weird antisocial nonconformist. (of course, this may not apply to the small minority of people like myself whose social circles consist of weird antisocial nonconformists)

Second, Lessig's optimism about the political system seemed to be based on his observation that the people in government are, by and large, not venally corrupt: they want to do good, but the system is constructed in a way that makes this impossible. To me, that's a tremendously disheartening statement. If our problem were simply a few, or even many, corrupt politicians, this would be a solvable problem: even nowadays, Americans have some ability to choose who gets elected, and I believe that a sufficiently well-coordinated campaign could replace bad politicians with good ones.

But if the problem is that the system is corrupt even when the individuals are honest, it's a much deeper problem and frankly one that I don't know how to solve. While individuals have some direct control over who gets elected, we have no way to directly change the system that produces the corruption; the levers to do this are in the hands of the politicians elected through that broken system. It's unlikely that the politicians themselves will fix the problem, because they've benefited deeply from it: if the system is left as it is, well over 90% of Congress members will keep
their jobs in the next election cycle, and any effective change seems likely (by definition) to disrupt this cushy arrangement.

On the other hand, running new candidates for office will not fix the problem. After all, if the problem is that the system is corrupt even when the participants are honest, then putting more honest people into government will have no effect. In order to get elected, these new politicians will have to become just as corrupt as the old ones, because that's how the system is set up. So we might change the faces, but we'll have the same old problems.

I recall two specific concrete proposals that Lessig made to make the system more responsive. First, he suggested shaming politicians who engage in corrupt behavior -- presumably taking large donations from interested parties. I don't see how this will help. Americans generally have a very low regard for the political class as it is; will pointing out particular examples of politicians taking money really make a difference when it comes to votes? And if it doesn't, will it really produce any change in their behavior? Politicians are motivated by votes the same way corporations are motivated by money; unless they stand a chance of losing their job (which is virtually impossible in any event), there's no reason for them to change how they behave.

His second proposal was for a system of contributions where it's impossible for any individual to prove they had donated a particular amount of money to a particular candidate. Even assuming it could be implemented perfectly, I don't think this will really solve the problem, for two reasons. First, it's not generally a secret what moneyed interests want. Politicians who want to attract large donations can just take positions that they know will appeal to donors of that sort. The donors themselves can make this easier on the candidates by, e.g., posting public position statements on issues of the day. Secondly, and this is far more insidious, even if politicians honestly represent their positions, then because success in running for office is so tied to the amount of money the candidate can raise, only candidates who hold opinions favorable to large corporations and wealthy individuals will be able to get elected. In fact, for all I know this is what happens already!

But with all that said, it was a really interesting talk and Lessig tied together some things you might not think would go together. If a video or Flash presentation becomes available, I would recommend watching through it. And hopefully my pessimistic predictions will be wrong; it's certainly happened before.

Mail

Amusing tidbits you pick up in the mailing industry...

No, you can't mail running chainsaws. At least I'm pretty sure about that; I don't know a specific regulation against them, but USPS takes a dim view of anything that puts its employees and machinery at risk.

On the other hand, you can mail live scorpions if you package them appropriately. Note that, however, that this is limited to the US; apparently doing so in Australia is not a good idea. The same page also gives the rules for mailing baby chicks (which must be not more than 24 hours old) as well as adult chickens (Express Mail only, please; and no refund if the chicken dies in transit unless the container was damaged).