:: cortesi

cryp.sr release

26 July 2010

A minor update of cryp.sr has just gone live.

  • Fix a bug that sometimes left pads unresponsive if there was an error saving (thanks to Ian Channing for giving me a heads-up on this issue).

  • Allow user to specify a filter (shortcut "/"). Matching is case-insensitive, and performed against the raw markdown source. If a list item matches the filter, all its ancestors and all its descendants are displayed.

Hashes are published in the @crypsr twitter channel, and the updated source is available on github.

sortvis.org

14 July 2010

I've just put up sortvis.org, the new official home of the sortvis sorting algorithm visualisation project. The site has a complete set of up-to-date images, explanations of the visualisation techniques, code snippets, and a rather snazzy Javascript image viewer to let you pan and zoom through the huge images produced by the sortvis dense visualisation. Take a look, and let me know what you think!

A couple of months ago I launched cryp.sr - a minimal, proof-of-concept host-proof application that was little more than a text area with some crypto bolted to the back of it (more detail here). In the first few days after launch, nearly 1500 pads were created, and from the logs it looks like at least a few dozen people still use cryp.sr regularly today. This left me scratching my head somewhat - cryp.sr had no features at all, and its only redeeming quality was extreme simplicity. What exactly were people storing in their cryp.sr pads? Well, we can safely assume they weren't writing novels in a browser text area. In fact, we can take a pretty solid guess that most cryp.sr pads contain lists - most likely lists of login credentials and todo lists.

So, I thought, why not make cryp.sr a kick-ass host-proof list manager? I could give it all the things I've always missed in the innumerable online todo-lists I've tried: nested lists, VI-like keybindings, multi-level undo, Markdown for formatting. And that's exactly what I've done. Please try out the new cryp.sr, and let me know what you think. Since I'm now actually trying to make an app that users will find pleasant to use, I'm especially interested in feature requests and usability problems.

The source for the cryp.sr browser client can be found here. Hashes for the main application and the data conversion app that migrates current users to the new data format will be published in the usual place - the @crypsr Twitter account.

Taiaroa Head

18 May 2010

Taiaroa Head

Taken on a stormy day from Aramoana Mole.

There was a minor flap recently when Andy Rubin compared Apple to North Korea. Many turtle-necked Apple hipsters had their feathers mildly ruffled, and bloggers gleefully reaped a tiny flurry of page impressions. Quite right too, because Rubin was clearly wrong. Apple is nothing like North Korea, because Apple is the China of the tech world. Lend me your ears for a minute, while I make a broad-strokes argument for this statement.

Mao

CC-licensed image from here.

Not so long ago, the consensus in the West was that political liberty and capitalism went hand-in-hand. Wherever one arose, the other would inevitably follow, and in their wake would come prosperity. When China started liberalising its markets, it seemed self-evident that the rise of capitalism in China would bring democracy in its wake. The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 were supposed to be a sign of things to come, a precursor to wider revolution. The West's argument was persuasive - it was borne out by a century during which the world was a roiling cauldron of political and economic experimentation, and nearly every command economy had failed. Today, the international landscape has changed entirely. The West has had a catastrophic financial meltdown, and things are only getting worse. There is a sense that the US-led Western order is in decline, and the Chinese-led east is rising. China has been the fastest growing major economy in the world for a decade, and the Communist Party is more firmly in control than ever. Today, there's no apparent prospect of political reform. Chinese intellectuals and diplomats are beginning to mount an increasingly assertive and persuasive argument for a system of government that brings prosperity without liberty, and dictatorships the world over are listening very, very carefully.

In the software world, we've also spent decades arguing that freedom and prosperity go hand in hand. This is the "Open Source" justification for free software: a pragmatic position that we should have liberty not for its own sake, but because it produces better outcomes. This is also the argument behind open hardware platforms, behind open Internet standards, behind interoperability. Some bloody battles had to be fought with monopolists, but in the main the last 20 years have been a stunning success for openness. There has always been a minority who have made a more fundamental case for liberty, but it's important to recognize that they have lost the debate. The engine that drives the most important Open Source projects is entirely based on a superficial utilitarianism - the Googles and IBMs of the world don't contribute to Open Source because they love liberty, but because the financial return they get from doing so is greater than their investment. The fundamental distinction between openness and free-ness hasn't been important so far, though, because ideology and utilitarian arguments were aligned. Now, things are changing. No-one can deny that Apple's mobile device strategy has been a complete slam-dunk. The iPhone is the most profitable handset out there by far, and the iPad is shaping up to be huge. Apple's long-term plan is breathtakingly ambitious - it's making a play for complete dominance in the mobile market, with an integrated offering that controls everything from content to applications to the devices themselves. It's therefore making a play for total control of the way most people will experience computation in the near future. Not even the most die-hard free-software hippie can deny that Apple's success has been won on merit - their devices are simply, unmistakably better than the competition. Open platforms have been out-classed in almost every measurable dimension. So, we may be entering the next stage of the computer revolution with devices where every native application has to be approved by a single authority, where even programming languages and development tools are centrally controlled. Apple's competitors and imitators are watching and taking notes, because far from being punished by the market for this, they have profited beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.

Apple and China have put pragmatists who also value freedom in a quandary. In the past, practice and ideology aligned neatly: political liberty and economic progress went hand in hand, and so did open platforms and commercial success. There are now powerful counter-examples to this line of thinking, and it seems clear that making a pragmatic argument for liberty has been a strategic mis-step both in politics and in technology. Advocates of freedom will have to turn back to more fundamental arguments: human rights, ethics and morality. We should recognize that at this point in time, we're losing the war of ideas. I must admit, in my darker moments I'm pessimistic about our ability to make the case persuasively to a disengaged public.

PS

To keep this post manageable, I've not talked about factors that muddy the waters for the technical side of the argument. For instance, I don't think Microsoft is a counter-example, and neither is Apple's support for open web standards. I'll save those for a future post. I'd also like to point out that I'm absolutely not anti-Apple - I own a lot of Apple gear that I use every day. My position regarding China's place in the world is a caricature of Stefan Halper's superb book "The Beijing Consensus: How China's authoritarian model will dominate the twenty-first century". You can listen to him speaking about this book at the Cato Institute over here.

Sortvis updates

01 April 2010

Odd-even sort

There have been some improvements to sortvis!@) - my sorting algorithm visualisation project - in the last few months. Graphs are now more balanced, with an equal lead-in and lead-off at the edges. There have also been a swathe of algorithm contributions - thanks to Aaron Gallagher and Chris Wong (the image above is of Odd-even Sort, contributed by Aaron). As usual, you can find the code for all of this on github. I've updated the visualisation page on my blog with new graphs for all algorithms - go take a look here.

I plan to move sortvis and the collection of visualisations onto their own domain soon. I'm also thinking about making large wall-posters of the visualisations available. I plan to make some prints for myself, and I'm assuming that I'm not the only one geeky enough to want a sorting algorithm on my wall. Would anyone be interested?

Copyright 2008 Aldo Cortesi