Chris McCormick

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Dec. 9, 2010

squeakyshoecore: New tunes, interview, live set

Hello! I've uploaded two new tunes to the squeakyshoecore album of algorithmic acid. They are called ring singularity and prolate spheroid. Get yr rave on here. Incidentally, you might like to type the names of the squeakyshoecore songs into the search bar of Wikipedia. They are all named after fascinating science and mathematics topics.

upside down squeakyshoecore shoe

On the 18th of December, I will also be playing a live gig in Hyde Park, Perth. I will be using the GarageAcidLab algorithms that I use to make squeakyshoecore here in Perth, Western Australia as part of the Seriously Sound System music festival organised by the local radio station, RTRFM. I am on just after midday at 12.40 in the afternoon. It should be a lot of fun!

Leading up to that I will be interviewed on that radio station at 8am local time this Friday the 10th of December. If you are not awake for it (like me), or you don't live in Western Australia, you can listen to the podcast, which I'll post here afterwards if I can figure out where it is.

Kampai!

Dec. 4, 2010

The Europe Tax

Now that Moose and I have settled back in Perth, Western Australia, a place where citizens, teachers, and employees are encouraged to spy on eachother, I had to come up with some kind of antidote to the slightly ridiculous legislative overcompensation which goes on this particular utopia, despite clear evidence that it's already one of the safest places in the world and the crime rate has been falling continually for at least ten years.

Eyes On the Street logo

So I came up with a philosophy of responsible citizenship which allows me to do the things I enjoy doing, as and when I like, without feeling persecuted. I call it The Europe Tax and it works like this:

I behave as I would if I lived in a liberal European country, enjoying such activities as drinking a beer whilst walking down the street, riding a bike on the footpath without a helmet, carrying a laser pointer, a pen-knife, or a marker pen.
When a police officer stops me for doing one of these things, I pay the fine issued to me and I say to the officer, "ah, time to pay The Europe Tax, thank you." Instead of thinking of it as a fine and a punishment, I consider the payment a tax that I must pay periodically to continue enjoying my life the way I want.
I feel much happier paying this periodic tax than I would if I had to feel like a criminal for engaging in what are actually completely harmless activities.

Eyes On the Street branded automobile

Hopefully this will help others who live under over-zealous, rich, conservative, interfering local governments, to mentally re-frame their own place in the system of legislative over-optimisation.

(For the record I have not yet had to pay The Europe Tax in the twelve months since our return despite enjoying the freedoms I had become used to travelling and living in the EU. So far The Europe Tax has proven to be quite economical.)

Nov. 19, 2010

Disapora first run

Diaspora is the new social network effort by a group of hackers who are building a Free Software implementation of something like Facebook, or Google Buzz, but in a decentralised, open source, privacy aware way. Here are the things that I think are really promising about it so far:

Your people are organised into 'aspects' which are logical groupings like in real life e.g. "family people", "work people", "people I send rude jokes to" etc. so that you won't ever post a picture of yourself drunk and naked for your grandmother to see by accident. This is baked into the interface in a completely natural way that feels right and fits with your existing mental model of your social groups. To me this is the number one killer feature that might encourage people to use it over Facebook. I was convinced that this is neccessary by the slides from this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2. I think that Mark Zuckerberg's everyone-should-over-share-with-everyone-and-get-over-it philosophy of privacy is at odds with basic human nature.
Your 'seed' (user) is portable. If you don't like the pod (server) you started with you can easily move to a different one. This is great as you aren't locked down to a particular provider. If your social service provider stops maintaining their code, or their service is bad, or they try to snoop on people, then you can get up and leave and find a better provider and take all of your data, posts, contacts etc. with you.
It's decentralised. There isn't a single server or point of access like there is with Facebook and Google Buzz. This might sound like it would not work, but it does because you can friend people on other servers and it works exactly as if they were on the same server as you. You can even be the only person on your own privately run pod (server) and still network with, and see what your friends on other pods are up to. It's like email in that respect, except without the spam. Your address at a particular pod looks like an email address, so that is a concept that people already understand well.
It's going to link up with other social networking services like Twitter, Buzz, Facebook etc. I guess the update posting will be based on the "aspects" idea too so if you post publically then it goes out to social networks, but otherwise not. This bit isn't done yet, but I'm excited about it as it means I can stop using the other services by visiting their sites. Instead when I post something on Diaspora, I can elect to also have it tweeted or fb updated, or whatever. I am not sure if it will be two-way so that you could also read your friends Facebook status updates from your diaspora instance, but that would be very cool if they can pull it off. That would provide a big incentive for people to switch as they can maintain their existing networks.
Encryption of your data keeps it away from snooping sysadmins. You don't have to completely trust whoever is hosting your account, and the fact that Google and Mark Zuckerberg don't own your data and they can't "mine" it for their own benefit, is another big feature for me. My social graph is not a corporate asset.

People have said to me "but nothing can kill Facebook now, it's too big." I beg to differ for two reasons:

I've had internet access since about 1995, and I have seen a ton of protocols come and go, even ones that literally everyone on the internet used. Remember BBSes, Gopher, Archie, news groups, ICQ, IRC, etc. etc.? Yes, most of them are still around, but the majority of internet users don't use them any more. There is no doubt in my mind that the same thing can happen to Facebook.
Facebook is not the only social network. There are a ton of others and some of them come close to rivalling it in size. In some countries other networks have a larger presence than Facebook does. I think that people will follow two things to new software: a) their friends b) features. I think that privacy features are important to people, good ideas spread virally, and friendship groups will stick together across networks.
The internet is built on competition between software and protocols. It's a thriving environment in which the most evolved software is selected by users and survives in the long run. I believe that even if Diaspora is not it, something better than Facebook will come along and unseat it. Historically speaking it's the open and free systems and software that survive the best and longest in the network environment.

Because it's Free Software following the "release early, realease often" development model, Diaspora is buggy and insecure and lacking in features right now, but I think it holds huge promise. In the few days I have had it running I've already seen bugfixes and features going in at a tremendous rate. I'm going to continue hosting my own pod and fingers crossed, maybe I'll meet you in the Diaspora universe one day soon.