It caused me to share a similar idea I’ve had related to music on the web.  One of the situations I run into a lot as I make various audio demos for the web is that I constantly have to find freely-licensed music.  There is some great stuff out there–the track we used in our most recent demo is a good example–but you have to know where to look.  Also, these wells are often shallow, and you have to constantly be on the lookout for more of them in order to get enough of what you need.  Then there are artists (Moby is one example) who have made it possible to use their stuff for free demos.  But it’s not easy to find all this stuff, despite how great search is supposed to be these days.

So what about this.  What if you bought a song, and then released it to the web for free?  I don’t mean “bought the right to download it from iTunes and uploaded to a p2p site.”  No, I’m talking about buying the song outright.  Buying exclusive rights to it, and dumping it into the public domain. Crazy, right?

Well, what does a song cost?  Let’s forget about Top 40 music for a minute, since I don’t want that even if it were possible to afford it.  I’m thinking more of the kind of music people want for demos and videos and soundtracks.  $10K?  $100K?  The RIAA seems to think $750K is a reasonable amount for a song.  A cool $1 million?

The economics of this don’t look good until you stop and realize that as you read this, millions of people are paying $0.99 for songs on iTunes, paying for the right to download them into their personal collection.  Now, what if instead of doing it that way, a bunch of fans got together and pooled their $0.99s, add them together until it comes to some insane amount that satisfies The Industry.  They exchange this huge sack of money for the right to walk away with this song they love, and then share it by putting it into the public domain.  Everyone wins.

It’s possible to buy one-of-a-kind paintings, statues, and the like, and to then donate them to museums where the public can go and enjoy them.  Is it possible to buy a song?  ’cause if it is, there are a lot of us already basically doing this.  We just need a way to do this transaction.

Me: “To see a movie.  Have you ever gone to see a movie at a theater?”

Nephew: “Yes.  I’ve seen Curious George, and I didn’t like it at all.”

Me: “Did you not like the movie, or the experience of the theater?”

Nephew: “The theater.  It was me sitting with a bunch of strangers in front of a giant screen.”

Me: “I know exactly what you mean.  I’m going to see a movie that came out months ago in order to avoid the same thing.”

The arbitrary is not experienced, it is witnessed.  What I am doing is not without grounding; it only appears as such, because the ground is not present in the decision itself.

Making good decisions requires a questioning of the things that would lead my progress to appear consistent.  I should work hard to not be arbitrary, remembering that in doing so I will appear as such.  This is the paradox of good decision making.  Remembering that it is impossible to both seem and to be consistent at once makes it easier to live a life apparently filled with contradiction.

In December a few of us working on processing.js had an idea–what if we could visualize sound data coming out of an <audio> or <video> element?  My colleagues were good at thinking in terms of “how can we make what we have now work?” but I had another idea.  “Let’s try and teach Firefox how to do this.”  In December I set myself a challenge:

This post marks the beginning of what I expect to be a somewhat regular series of posts in which I will document my thinking, learning, and progress related to some Firefox development.  I say “Experiments” above, because I am going to try a number of things.  First, I’m going to push into a part of the Firefox source code where I haven’t worked before, namely, the DOM implementation (note: it scares me, to be honest).  Second, I’m going to do so in an open and pedagogic way, attempting to cast aside my own ego and hesitation at looking foolish–I don’t actually know how to do what I’m going to try, and will learn and fail as I go–on the way to producing an authentic model of open development for my students.  Third, I’m going to work with a few others who are also interested in extending themselves and extending the web.  The only thing I can assure you of at this early date is that these posts will be an honest account of the attempt.

Yesterday, the end result of that work landed in mozilla-central, on its way to inclusion in Firefox 4.  I’m immensely proud of the work we’ve done, and thrilled that my peers in the Mozilla community have also accepted it.  I’m also very tired

There’s lots of things that I could talk about in terms of the code and API, and probably we’ll do some of that soon (you can already use the API in a Firefox nightly, read about the API, and try live demos).  But what I wanted to end this series of posts by saying something about how Firefox, the Mozilla community, and the open web, make what we did possible.

The other day my family had some friends over, and we got talking about what I do.  Of course they had heard of Firefox, and used it themselves.  “But can you explain the difference between this and the other one I use, Internet Explorer.”  One of the big differences, I explained, is participation, the community of involvement, and the accountability that comes with this.

When we started these experiments, we did so without needing permission.  I didn’t have to sign an NDA, go talk to and convince the right people, or get approvals.  I just grabbed the source code and started messing around.  And I did make a mess, at first.  I learned as I went, and we iterated on the API a lot (I have over 80 versions of it here, not to mention the various implementations of those).  We weren’t judged for doing it wrong, or for the pace or directions we took.  Instead, we heard of lot of “this is very cool!” and “have you thought about this?”.  We were able to take one of the world’s premier applications (Firefox) and rework it.  It’s hard to overemphasize how significant this is.  We couldn’t do what we did in very many other contexts.

I said above that participation is paired with accountability, and this is also very important.  In the early months we built something that worked, but not what we have today.  As much as Mozilla made it possible for me to experiment, they also made sure that what got accepted was of the highest quality.  I haven’t blogged about audio much over the past three months, mostly because we’ve been too busy getting the patch fixed up based on reviews.  Before it could land we had to think about testing, security, JS performance, DOM manipulations, memory allocation, etc.  To get this landed we needed lots of advice from various people, who have been generous with their time and knowledge

What’s different about Mozilla?  I think of something Joe Hewitt wrote on twitter back in the spring that struck me:

Bottom line: we can currently only move as fast as employees of browser makers can go, and our imagination is limited by theirs. @joehewitt

Not one of the people who did this work is an employee of the Mozilla corporation.  When we decided to get serious about trying to include this in Firefox 4, one of the people working with us filed a bug, and the response was, “I don’t think we have the cycles to get this done in time.”  “That’s OK, we’ll do it then,” was the reply.  And we did.

The web is too big and too important to only go as fast and as far as a small group of employees can take it.  Mozilla gets this, and values community involvement like ours.  What we did is not unique–there are other great features and bug fixes coming in Firefox 4 that were done by community members vs. employees.  In fact the distinction between the two is often hard to see when you’re working on this stuff–we all work together.

Having said that, let me publicly congratulate my amazing audio peers, without whom this work wouldn’t have happened: Al MacDonald, Corban Brook, Yury Delendik, Charles Cliffe, Ricard Marxer, and our cheerleader and supporter, Chris Blizzard.  Also thanks to the dozen others who wrote demos with our stuff in the early days.  Demos are how you win (Chris Blizzard taught me that).

I’ll end with a video someone shot of my keynote talk at the recent Mozilla Summit.  I was doing a quick demonstration of what is possible with this API.  I look forward to seeing what the rest of the web will do with it.

We are told that open source is about “scratching an itch,” creating software to solve personal problems, and the culture the surrounds such an enterprise.  This is true, in my experience; however, it is not my experience.  Where open source is most often taken to mean source code, I have been primarily interested in what is meant by open, whether that be open education, open source, or open data.  For me, and I speak intentionally as an individual among a much larger crowd, open is about people more than technology.

Where some people choose software projects in order to solve problems, I have taken to choosing projects that allow me to work with various people.  I have given up the comfort of being an expert , and replaced it with a desire to be alongside my friends, or those with whom I would like to be friends, no matter where I find them.  My history among this crowd begins with friendships, many of which continue to this day.  I love almost none of the technology I use, and view it as a means to an end: working on things, for me, is about working with people.

This way of working, where collegiality subsumes technology or tools, is central to my personal and professional work.  Even looking back over the past two years, most of the work I’ve done is influenced by a deep desire to work with rather than on.  I need almost none of the software I build, I have no itch to scratch.  In order to be effective, working with requires that I be attentive to the other more than to the thing we do together.  Working with demands that I recast myself in the shape of the other, and vice versa, that I be willing to change, that I love and allow myself to be loved.  I cannot succeed if my gaze is only on the thing, especially if this thing is allowed to come between us.

In the context of working with, technology once again becomes the craft I both teach and am taught, it is what we share with one another, the occasion for our time together, the introduction, but not the reason, for our friendship.

And it can be difficult to observe what I am describing, for it will always show up as something much more mundane to those not working this way.  To watch us work, it will seem that we only build things, that we talk only of certain things.  It is possible for someone to work on something together with others who are working with each other.  But it is not the same thing.  It is not what we do.  Looking only at the thing we build together, it is easy to miss what happens around it, and who is there.

When we got to the market we got chatting with a local backer who makes European pastries, breads, and preserves.  She had the girls sample more than a dozen fruit preserves, all of them more unique and interesting than anything I’ve seen at the store–Banana Ginger, Peach Mint, Apricot Chile, etc.  We ended-up with a few bottles and an overflowing bag of Dutch almond twists (“No, you take more than that!).

On Sunday, after a slow and pleasant rain, I ventured out with the girls to go and see what we could find in the woods.  “Dad, the rain has cleaned everything!”  This season has been one of the best I can remember in terms of bugs and being able to move in the woods during the summer.  We crossed the creek at the back of the woods and noticed Raspberries.  A little further up we found the first ripe Elderberries of the season (very early).  After picking all we could in our baskets we headed home, but not before coming upon a beautiful apple tree with large red apples.  We got a basket of those too.

My grandma asked me on the phone today if we are enjoying our woods, and I could honestly say that we are.  I told her about the mother deer and its fawn that we stumbled upon as we walked home, and about the fruit we’d picked.  One has to go into the woods in order to receive what it has to offer; but once there, the gifts are abundant.

Much of my work thus far has been a backend rewrite.  This was long overdue and somewhat painful, but has enabled me to start fixing bugs and adding new features really easily.  We’ve setup a DXR instance at Mozilla, which you can find at http://dxr.mozilla.org.  I’ve also put my Dehydra/JSHydra debugging tool there, too (see http://dxr.mozilla.org/viewsource).  Note: not all of the features I’ll be discussing below are installed on dxr.mozilla.org yet, but they will be soon.

I’ve been fixing things in the UI, and starting to layer new kinds of data into the index.  The first was to add compiler warnings.  You can now search the warnings using keywords and optionally limiting to certain paths:

The more common use of this warning info is encountering it within the source while looking at a piece of code.  Warnings appear with an ‘!’ icon beside them, and hovering over the line shows the warning text.  Here’s an example:

Another feature I’ve had numerous requests for, and is now implemented, is source code navigation aids. When you are in a large file, and looking at line 2456, it would be nice to know that this line is part of Foo::Bar(), and the signature of Bar(). Here’s what it looks like:

Notice that AddRequest is highlighted in the sidebar, and a light-blue signature bar has appeared at the top of the source. These happen as you move your mouse, depending on the line, and disappear on their own.

I’m now moving on to improve/replace the current source info popup. I haven’t decided whether to use an improved popup, add another panel to the left sidebar, or do something with inline expanding divs. The way Flickr’s new popup works is one way I could go:

The inline expanding divs might work like this:

I’m going to spend another week or two on UI fixes before moving on to data analysis fixes and index improvements (there are some great build system changes coming soon that are going to make this easier–hello xpidl.py, I’m looking at you!).  If you have UI input, please give it to me soon.  Meanwhile, the fearless Joshua Cranmer, my lone and valued contributor, is working on making DXR generalized for projects other than Mozilla.  I hope to integrate some of his build/index changes coming up.

More to come soon!

As far as I know there’s no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of “addictive.” That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it’s clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille. TV has become much more engaging, and even so it can’t compete with Facebook.

While I don’t agree that there’s no word for something we like too much, I think Graham comes to a more interesting place as he ends:

But if I’m right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

Here he says something really important, making a point one doesn’t encounter enough on the web, nor in the street.  I’m talking about the seemingly irreconcilable link between freedom and personal renunciation.  Illich discusses it length:

Christians who imitate him [Christ] soon discover that little practices of renunciation, of what I won’t do, even through it’s legitimate, are a necessary habit I have to form in order to practice freedom

…it reminds me of the things which, in the modern world, we can give up — not because we want a more beautiful life, but because we want to become aware of how much we are attached to the world as it is and how much we can get along without it. These unnecessary things have now multiplied to such an extent that you can’t easily give a social shape to them. Some people will give up writing letters on a computer — not because it’s bad, and not because they don’t like to have to answer letters at the speed of e-mail. Others will give up the services of physicians or, as somebody who I know has done, guaranteeing that each of his children will get a college degree.

The certainty that you can do without is one of the most efficacious ways of convincing yourself, no matter where you stand on the intellectual or emotional ladder, that you are free. Self-imposed limits provide a basis and a preparation for the discussion of what we can can renounce as a group of friends or a neighborhood. I have seen it, and I can witness to it. For many people who suffer from great fears and a sense of impotence and depersonalization, renunciation provides a very simple way back to a self which stands above the constraints of the world. (Illich, “The Rivers North of the Future,” 101-2)

Graham writing about his refusal to own an iPhone, and further, his recognition of this act as a personal, and therefore inessential, move, is significant.  We don’t lack for models of consumption, excess, and self-fulfillment online; what we need are more acts like this that are disengaged from the web yet which nevertheless exert an influence through it.  Our need to learn to say no is not simply about addiction; it is more importantly about the possibility of the self.

ly – love you

I wondered aloud on twitter that I’d never encountered this, and this thought caused me to pause to ponder whether expressions of love online are possible.  “I’ve never seen that,” is what I heard from most people on twitter, the rest responding with humour.

Online communication, and in particular the kind practiced on irc, is, in my experience, funny, witty, clever, engaging, technical, often childish, and sometimes deeply meaningful; however, I can count on one hand the number of times it has offered a moment in which to express love between friends.  I don’t mean sexual love, but rather a deep friendship.

Perhaps it’s that most relationships one engages in online are not truly deep; perhaps it’s that the public nature of the communication precludes certain kinds of more personal engagement; perhaps it’s not really possible to express oneself this way online.  Whatever is happening, it’s interesting to think about online communication tools, what they make available and what they remove from the functioning of friendships online.