stumblelog

Serve a static website on an arbitrary local domain under Mac OS with Pow

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:43:40 +0000

curl get.pow.cx | sh ; mkdir ~/Sites/foo ; mkdir ~/Sites/foo/public ; echo 'hello world
' > ~/Sites/foo/public/index.html ; ln -s ~/Sites/foo ~/.pow/foo ; curl http://foo.dev/

No need for a config.ru, just symlink it and you’re away.

Video

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 10:25:35 +0000

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Sun, 27 Nov 2011 10:22:01 +0000



Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:00:39 +0100

Without Apple, I quite simply wouldn’t be the person I am today. I grew up with computers, but I only used them to play games (and very occasionally write letters) until I used a Mac. It was on a Mac I was first inspired to be creative and build things using computers. I designed magazine pages. I drew icons. I wrote my first software program on a Mac, and set in motion the wheels of my future career, and it was on a Mac I designed and built my first website.

Steve Jobs has died, but his vision and drive live on through millions of people like myself, who were captivated and inspired by the products that he and the many other brilliant people at Apple created. The world is a richer, better place for him having been in it. Whilst our first thoughts whenever we lose somebody may be of how much emptier life suddenly feels without them, the impact they’ve had on us all is still with us, and always will be.

Thank you, Steve.

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Tue, 30 Aug 2011 14:15:19 +0100

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Fri, 12 Aug 2011 07:58:50 +0100

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Tue, 09 Aug 2011 22:36:05 +0100

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Sat, 06 Aug 2011 00:15:18 +0100

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Fri, 29 Jul 2011 22:25:02 +0100

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Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:52:25 +0100

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Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:27:34 +0100

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Fri, 22 Jul 2011 09:54:30 +0100

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Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:41:47 +0100

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Mon, 27 Jun 2011 10:47:31 +0100

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Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:50:23 +0100

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Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:47:32 +0100

Artificial Scarcity and Entitlement

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:15:07 +0100

Imagine for a moment that tomorrow a company perfects the Replicator, as envisioned by Star Trek: a device capable of manufacturing any object, of any complexity — food, drink, clothing or machinery — for negligible energy and material costs. How would contemporary culture adapt to such a device?

In Star Trek (and other science fiction with similar fantastical technology) the existence of such devices leads to cultures where currency has been rendered obsolete, and no person need go hungry or unsheltered. But it’s hard to believe that replicators would ever precipitate the same utopian outcome in the real world.

The dawn of ubiquitous computing and communications has had a disruptive effect on numerous previously-stable business models. Those affected most are usually those which relied upon the scarcity of a resource, be that news, music or television programs.

Each one in turn has found itself confronted with a paradigm shift leading away from scarcity, and typically has failed to adapt to the new order that develops. What began with Napster in the late ‘90s has led to everything from news pay-walls to Digital Rights Management on movies and music. When these measures inevitably fail new legislation is lobbied for to plug the gaps, but by that point it’s too late to change perceptions: the resource is manifestly no longer scarce.

Once this becomes apparent to the general populace, the value of that resource tends to drop rapidly. Music once had an intrinsic value, but clearly it was tied to the scarcity of the medium — you could lend a CD to a friend and until they returned it you didn’t have that CD to play yourself.

Once the physical medium no longer played a part in that transaction and one could make a perfect copy at no cost it was only natural that people would share these copies with one another. Big media like to portray this as theft, but in reality, just as with the Replicators in science fiction, the scarcity has been replaced with abundance and with it the business models that rely upon it have become obsolete.

The solutions to these problems aren’t all readily apparent, and many experiments in how to maintain a profitable business around the distribution of these resources are still underway, most of which try to introduce artificial scarcity. One such example would be Spotify. Ignoring the egregious terms for artists, for some Spotify represents a good value proposition for convenience, while for others it only makes sense to use whilst remains free.

How you feel about this is likely to be tied in with how often you listen to new music, and how often you listen to music you already own in some other form. Nonetheless, with expectations set by a new age of abundance, it’s not unreasonable for some to feel aggrieved at the service introducing increasingly onerous levels of artificial scarcity, with restrictions on how much music you can listen to in a given period, and more frequent (unskippable) advertising.

This sentiment isn’t the same as entitlement: it’s a natural reaction to artificial scarcity, and those that attack this reaction are simply struggling to rationalise what is in effect a significant transitionary point in civilisation. As Clay Shirky wrote in Cognitive Surplus, “When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of its value is tied to its scarcity.” There is no law written that states that every business model is entitled to exist in perpetuity.

We’re a long way from the utopian future Gene Roddenberry and others imagined would exist once we lived in a world of abundance, but if we’re to ever get there we need to discard the notion that the intrinsic value of things is determined solely by its scarcity.

Photo

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 14:04:15 +0100

Drawing Autism.

Sat, 28 May 2011 09:46:55 +0100

Drawing Autism.

“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade!”

Fri, 27 May 2011 20:33:26 +0100

“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade!”