My personal research agenda

For better or worse I always tried to keep this blog fairly empty of personal content and as short and straight to the point as I can muster. This post breaks both rules. I know this because I wrote this paragraph last and all secrets of this post have already been revealed to me. So if you don't enjoy reading long tracts of personal thoughts, you better stop now.

Brad Neuberg recently published
a post
that really got to me. I am not a computer scientist and I don't pretend to be one. I do enjoy the act of programming, but unlike many programmers I know, it's not enough to make me feel fulfilled. My work needs to have a meaning I can relate to and challenges I want to solve.

He writes about a need to set your own Personal Research Agenda and I couldn't agree more. Making the list puts in perspective what you're doing and where you actually want to go. Even if you can't always work towards your goals, and I guess most of us have to compromise, it's good if we are at least zigzagging in the right direction.

Hence I've been thinking of my list since and while I haven't come as far as Brad in postulating problems I would like to work on, I do have a general sense of what I want to do and how close I am to doing it. I'm not surprised by my slow progress, since I was always inept at deciding what I want to do with my life apart from remaining
green
. So how am I doing these days, if I take everything I've said so far into an account?

I'm not doing that great.

As those who have tried to contact me in the last few months already know, I am very busy these days. However, having a lot of work isn't the same as having challenging work and I can't really say that my work is challenging. This will change, probably even fairly soon, but it looks unlikely I'll deal with challenges I want to solve. So that's strike one in baseball lingo.

Am I working on problems that have meaning to me?

I loved books since I have learned to read and through the years have only become more fascinated with the medium and what was being done with it. When I look at web, I feel we're only at mere beginning and I would like to explore more of what can be done with it. Probably because of my fairly reclusive nature I care more about malleability of published content than currently more fashionable explorations of ways to discover it.

I am also similarly intrigued by mobile internet. As most people these days I own a programmable mobile phone and unlike most I also
own
a tablet. I don't often find time to think about what I could do with them, but when I do, I just get flooded with ideas I'd like to try.

I can't talk about my work yet, but I can safely say that last two paragraphs don't describe it. Strike two.

What's left is learning new things. I can't honestly say I haven't learned anything lately. I've certainly spent plenty of time doing it. Sadly I have remarkably little to show for it. Thinking about the discrepancy between effort and time put in and results, I came to the conclusion that I've simply spent too much time dealing with transient problems of tools used that produce little residual knowledge. I gained most by exploring subjects I won't work on.

That's strike three and out.

Flashy new old machine

It’s been a week with a lot of novelty. I got a new monitor, a nice 21″ LCD and it seemed appropriate to install a more recent, so to speak new, Linux distribution to go with it. I decided for Kubuntu and so far I quite like it.

I’ve been a Linux user for more than a decade, but for last few years I haven’t really used my machine for everyday browsing. One reason were bookmarks accumulated in my powerbook and the other absence of Flash plugin for x86-64 platform. Flash plugin is still missing, but clever folks contrived a way to use the i386 one. Basically you install compatibility libraries and another, 32 bit version of Firefox.

Still, I mostly use the one without a plugin and so far it has certainly been an eye opening experience. Once upon a time sites fell in two categories, those made more or less completely with Flash and others, which didn’t use it at all. I have no idea when this changed, but it’s certainly not true anymore. These days most sites seem to be combination of both approaches.

As with Javascript it can work quite nicely when used sensibly and in an unobtrusive way. However, there are lots of sites like this , which you simply can’t use without Flash. With proliferation of video and widgets, that play ever more important roles, I feel that web is becoming less open with every day.

I probably wouldn’t mind that much if Flash player itself was open (I don’t really care about development tools). Well, when all else fails, you can always hope.

Public social graph

I’ve been following sporadically discussions about opening and sharing social networks’ social graphs. It’s hard to be a user of web services these days and not wish it was easier to recreate network of friends on new ones. Following sporadically means my opinion on subject may be more firm than right. I guess that makes it a perfect blogging material.

Latest article I’ve read on the subject comes from Brad Fitzpatrick, someone always worth listening to. It’s an interesting post and Brad has obviously thought about privacy issues, but there’s one conceptual problem I still don’t see resolved.

It sounds paradoxical, but I don’t think public and private data have an empty intersection. If for some reason you want to have a pseudonymous account on social network cooperating in this scheme, how can you reliably avoid being discovered? If you, for example, use same email address as with other services, then anyone using social graph data can find you out by matching hash values.

The only solution I can think of is to use a different email address, but this is neither particularly scalable and you have to decide upfront about how you intent to use the service. It also won’t work for sites, where you are already registered. There you can only hope you’ll be asked for consent before that data is given out.

Still, I’m more or less convinced that sharing will happen. Current situation is simply to painful for everyone involved (apart from biggest players) to persevere. I just don’t know what the downsides will be to which I’ll have to adapt.

Update: More on the subject from Bill de hÓra . He says exactly what I hope I would be thinking, if I was actually doing the thinking.