clevercactus: year 2

So Russ just reminded me that the anniversary of clevercactus was yesterday. (Thanks Russ!).

Strictly speaking, the anniversary was that of the the "public release" of the company and product. Things don't happen on a clear-cut timelines, but it's nice to mark milestones.

Now, I had thought about it on and off for the last few weeks, but of course I had to actually get to the day to forget about it -- and about mentioning it! But since I have an irrepresible need to come up with something clever (no pun intended :)) to say, I'll just use my faulty memory as an excuse and make this an entry about the year that begins, as well as a celebration of the year that's gone by.

One year! Wow. Thanks to everyone who has helped us get here!

The best is yet to come. :)

self-organization is not a pipe dream

A couple of weeks ago on a post about google, gmail, centralization and not, Andrew left a comment that stayed with me. He said:

Decentralisation is _never_ going to catch on. The average person does not care. They just don't.

The reason it stayed with me was because I've heard it before, in many forms, and in different contexts.

In my head, I generally rephrase the statement to "The average person should not have to care." If they were up to date in all the issues involved, they probably would care. But it's not their job to care. It's our job. It's what we should be looking out for. Well-informed users are great, and of course everyone on their field wishes that more people would care.

Now, whether people care about this or not isn't the issue. The issue is that we (we = the developer community) haven't really offered a good, simple solution that works in decentralized form for many of these problems. We have to give the best possible solution to problems that most users don't see, because we can't expect everyone to be an expert. If you gave people a decentralized tool that was transparent in its networking and security, they'd use it. The benefits of using one over the other could and should be explained, but some of them would be obvious and immediate (not that it's a silver bullet, of course sometimes you want centralized services).

It's up to us to care. Because users shouldn't have to.

bloomsday's 100th

Rejoyce Dublin 2004: a website with information on the festivities surrounding the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday.

I have to go visit the Tower at Forty-Foot again soon. :)

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead..."

exactly

"The physicists say that I am a mathematician, and the mathematicians say that I am a physicist."

Albert Einstein

Source: this article from The Guardian about a recently discovered diary that casts some light on Einstein's last years.

Incidentally, The Einstein Archives contains digital versions of his writings, and there are a couple of others over at the always-excellent Gutenberg Project.