[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Benjamin Mako Hill
Member since: 2005-06-16 06:25:53
Last Login: 2008-11-06 21:25:57
Homepage: http://mako.cc
Send Me Your Antifeatures, Win a Flessenlikker
At OSCON this year, I'm going to be giving a talk about "antifeatures." Antifeatures are a way to describe a particular practice made possible by locked down technologies. Antifeatures, as I describe them, are functionality (i.e., "features) that a technology developer will charge users not to include. You can read my short article on the topic published in the FSF bulletin in 2007 for a series of examples and a more in-depth description.
One thing I want to do is put together as large a collection of these antifeatures as possible before the talk. Please read the article if you haven't already and send me examples of other antifeatures either as a comment or in email to mako@atdot.cc. Credit and my deep gratitude will be given to anybody who sends me something. A prize in the form of a real Dutch flessenlikker will given to the best example I get.
GitHub, Firewalls, and Freedom
Dafydd Harries pointed me to this announcement of a "Firewall Install" version of GitHub. Basically, it's a locally installed version of GitHub designed to serve those that, “wish to enjoy the benefits of GitHub, but are unable to do so because of corporate restrictions or laws that prevent you from hosting your code with a third-party service.”
Daf and I put a little time in writing up a short reflection which I've posed over on autonomo.us. Our key points are that this represents an important compromise in the rough direction of autonomy by an important cloud player and that, unexpectedly perhaps, it has been motivated by organizations under strong institutional pressures — groups like large firms and governments. Although it certainly makes sense that these players would be reluctant to “outsource” to centralized systems, we argue that these groups might provide an unlikely ally in at least part of the fight for autonomy.
Berlin
After a week at the International Open and User Innovation Workshop 2009 in Hamburg, I'm in Berlin again this week. I've got nothing concrete planned other than spending most of my days hacking on a few projects. Let me know if you're around and would like to meet up.
I'll post more about my travel and talks schedule this summer as things firm up in the next couple weeks.
Spelling
When he was my adviser at the MIT Media Lab, I used to feel bad that
I had trouble spelling Chris Csikszentmihályi's name. As this
screenshot from Chris' Dopplr page shows, I am apparently in good
company.
AttachCheck Revved
I finally got around to pushing out a new version of AttachCheck --- a trivial little program I wrote several years ago that tries to prevent people from having to send followup emails with subjects that include phrases like, "REALLY attached this time," by asking you for confirmation when you send an email that says you've attached something when it looks like you haven't.
The release fixes a single bug that affected a few users --- thanks to Iain Murray who sent the patch in and apologies to him and others for taking a while to push it out.
There's very little to AttachCheck and, if I remember correctly, it was the very first program I wrote in Python. I'm only mentioning this revision because it's been quite a few years since I last mentioned the program and, while the script doesn't do much, it continues to save me a little embarrassment and effort every other week or so.
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