I recently watched a presentation done by Martin Seligman, ex-president of the American Psychology Association. He’s the main man behind something called ‘positive psychology.’ It’s a fairly new branch of the discipline, and one in which there’s alot of positive interest.

Ever since the 50’s, psychology has dealt with illness. Medical solutions to psychological problems have been the ‘norm’ of psychology as a science. As such, psychologists got the reputation of being a little scary. Talking to one meant they’d analyse you to find problems. Your repressed memories and assumptions could be read from a single conversation - therefore psychologist were those to be ignored.

Well, according to Mr Seligman, this is no longer the case (at least with him). Since the mid-90s, there has been an increase in interest in psychology as it has diversified into new fields of practise. One such field is this positive psychology.

The talk I watched was done at something called TED (www.ted.com) - it’s a conference organised whereby experts in their field are invited to share their ideas. The best thing though, is that they’re then asked to move their ideas into a different field. To throw it out there for all the other brains at the event to understand. Sometimes these sparks can light a fire.. that’s the idea anyway.

Well, Mr Seligman’s talk was on happiness. It’s a fairly new area, and one open to massive interpretation: so here’s mine.

Seligman talks of three types of happy lives.

Pleasant Lives - Celebrity, Indulgent, Experince

Good Lives - Appreciation, Focused, Commited, Engagement

Meaningful lives - Pensive, Broad, Faith.

They’re not mutually exclusive or inclusive. It’s interesting, it’s possible to have all three.

His studies have led him to find the opposite of what he’d expected to be true. The most ‘happy’ life to lead is the Meaningful Life, then the Good Life, followed by the Pleasant Life. His reasoning is that although the pleasant life is something we all aspire to; it’s also extremely habituating. If you have air conditioning, then a fan is no replacement. The step up is great - but once you’re there you’ve got to enjoy it and appreciate it, else it becomes the habitual norm and anything less is sub-standard. Ironically the pleasant life is the most depressing, as improvements are finite - and more often than not they happen in big steps, rather than incremental changes.

The interesting thing was is that he applied this ‘happiness’ to technological development (not necessarily electric). Sure, you can put out a “pleasant” application and people will be happy with it. However, it’s got to be constantly improving. If you create an application that people can get engaged with, it moves up a step to the “Good”applications; people are happy just using it. The third stage is the ‘meaningful’ application; one that gets the user interacting meaningfully with it. A great example is facebook.

Now, the interesting thing to me is that this group of ‘three’ is very similar to another group of ‘three’ that I read about at University. There’s replacement, enabling and ubitiquous technology. The three categories seem to fit nicely as pairs.

Replacement technology - that which replaces a process we already have, but makes it easier.

Enabling technology - that which enables us to do things that were either not possible, or too time consuming to be worthwhile before the technology.

Ubitiquous technology - technology that becomes so widely used and pervasive that it becomes a part of the fabric of society, and is taken for granted.

Reading Zeth’s blog post, Zeth cites commentators that say the time is over for the Open Source World, that development is slowly stalling and the exciting ideas of the 90’s that came out of Open Source are being commercialised and exploited. I don’t think that for one second. Software has (unnecessarily, one may argue) become far more complex. Sure, improvements in programming have been made and there are better skilled people out there than before - but packages are becoming far more complicated.

I’d ask, is this needed. The ‘Pleasant Life’ of Seligman talks about how having too many pleasures can be depressing. The constant expectation rather than fulfilment is lost on people who fail to appreciate. The same can be said for software consumers.

The ideas that have made people rich are rarely complicated. It’s a simple idea, executed well that succeeds. The problem now, is not in “integrating all these fantastic packages and solutions,” but in the realisation that perhaps that’s not what is needed. Perhaps we need to look again to the simple things in life. A hammer doesn’t come with a screwdriver attachment, in the same way a phone doesn’t have to come with ‘twitter integration.’ Sure, it’s a nice feature for thos that want it… but for those than don’t it becomes a barrier to using the original ’simple’ aspect of that technology.

Clay Shirky provides a fascinating insight into how a collaborative approach utilises more skills, and empowers more people than the old institutional model. Rather than coming from an Open Source background, he uses the example of Flickr to convey his point (and then takes a stab at Ballmer). It’s an interesting presentation, and shows how you can make the most of the information/data available in a field.

However, there’s an angle to his talk which isn’t covered in this short presentation; which I imagine is due to time constraints. That’s the opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration, and what that means for us.

One of the more interesting points made by Clay, is that he poses the current ‘$1 million question’ - Are Bloggers Journalists? - and then turns it on its head.

Journalists, and journalism came about to fulfil a societal need. How to communicate with the majority of the population. Gutenburgs’s printing press was a percursor to European journalism, and for the last 400 years or so, journalism has been an integral part of mass communication.

However, we now have a little something called the internet - which, as Gutenburg’s printing press did all those years ago, revolutionise access to information. The infrastructure required to become a ‘messenger to the people’ is in place for people to with it as they wish - create facebook pages, youtube videos, or wordpress blogs. Once the infrastructure becomes freely accessible, the applications of it become massively varied.

In Clay’s talk, he mentions a ratio. 80% of people do 20% of the work, and vice versa, using a lovely graph of the long tail:

An Example of the Long Tail Graph

Though a graph illustrating a different set of data, the concept can be re-applied to Open Source Project contribution. The Green area applies to the ‘core’ developers, who may even be employed by the project. The Orange applied to the people directly involved with the project, and perhaps some power users, and the Red section applied to everyone else.

The wonderful thing about the Red section, is that you get lots and lots of people contributing very little. However, it’s these people who can really add value to a project.  With so many projects now existing across different distributions, each system becomes pretty unique.  Where bugfixes and irrationailities can be spotted and reported on by end-users running their unique system - the value added is huge.

There’s also a question of expertise.  The guys in the Red Section are the programming experts, who are commiting code.  Those in the Orange Section are the users/implementers of the code - so will typically have a clear understanding of the direction of the project and the needs that the project needs to fulfil. Whereas in the Red Section are people who use the package, but often alongside other packages of greater interest/relevance to their line of work.  It’s this cross-discipline collaboration that is unprecedencted.

Getting average non-geeky end users to use Open Projects is a massive challenge, but one that is going to bring massive benefits to Open Source Software.  Some people talk of the digital tipping point from a technical standpoint - “Woo, when we get this critical mass we’ll overtake Microsoft within the next 5 years.”  To be honest that doesn’t bother me. Judge MS as you wish, but that’s not why I’m here.  I’m here because the potential contribution that end users can make to Global Knowledge, through Open Projects.

It’s going to be possible for a biological scientist and and engineer to be reviewing the same problem for different purposes.  It’s unlikely that these two disciplines would ever communicate were it not be for this open project, and it’s also possible that only with the combined knowledge and expertise of these two disciplines, the problem can be solved.

This is what excites me most about free software, and to think we’re only just at the beginning.

One of the first lectures in my first year entertained the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods in psychology.  We had three lovely, but definately qualitatively biased lecturers.  They spoke of the personal approach to psychology, and identifying individual differences, rather than group ‘norms’ - for they argues that norms did not exist across society, due to all the difference cultures and individual experiences.

However, our quantitative lecturers disagreed.  They liked to analyse and draw lovely graphs showing difference behavioural patterns.  Attach electrodes to heads to monitor electrical pulses in the brain, and quantify social experiments using hard statistics and probability algorithms.

Well, they’re now approaching the end of their careers in this field, as Google and the ‘database generation’ take over.

There’s so much information on the internet now, that we don’t need to know whether someone is going to do something or not - we can actually see records of what they do.  Having the browsing habits of thousands, or millions of people is almost priceless data.  It’s the stuff that quantititative psychologists can only dream of.  Any psychologist will tell you how valuable that data is to them.

Well, today Alexander Hanff - fighting for our freedom - heads to the House of Lords in order to prevent Phorm from getting their hands on our data; and to question why BT haven’t yet been charged on any count for gross invasion of privacy in regards to their trials of the Phorm software last summer.

In order to understand what we’re dealing with, I offer the following analogy to those less technically minded.

The internet is an exchange of bags, each containing a little bit of information.  Let’s say you pass one bag a second from your machine across the internet to an ‘internet server.’  It’s very easy for someone to look into any of these bags - but mainly due to volume (but also due to simple logistics) people tend not to bother looking in your bags.  It’s not to say they can’t though.

Well, phorm contains software that looks through all your bags, and analyses them for ‘key-words’, from which they can then target adverts at you.  If you’re communicating with someone, why do you want them looking through your bags - you don’t!

When you deal with your bank, you’d put a padlock on the bags, that only they and you have the key to unlock.. so your online banking details are safe..r.  If you’d rather not have someone looking through all the information you exchange across the internet, charging you for the pleasure, and then holding more information on your browsing habits than you even do yourself.. say Yes to Phorm.  else do the sensible thing and “JUST SAY NO!”

* To all my friends who have received the SPAM mails recently, I apologies profusely.

It’s quite annoying when you receive SPAM from one of your own email addresses.  In my case, it was plum202@hotmail.com.

It’s an address I registered and used way-back-when - and hasn’t seen me using it for the last 5-6 years.

Anyhow, I logged onto it, and tried to close my account.  However, I could not do so as there was a ‘billing account linked to your Live ID.’  I was advised to goto https://billing.microsoft.com to resolve this issue.

However, on landing at https://billing.microsoft.com - I was greeted with a message to say “This Live ID does not have a billing relationship with Microsoft.  Please Click Here to join.

Silly Microsoft.

Anyhow, I phoned their customer support… three different numbers I was passed between til ending up with some Hotmail specific department.  I spent over an hour on the phone in total, and finally ended up with the support guy passing an email onto someone else to take a look.

The best thing about it - the guy set a gmail.com address as the reply-to: address.

I thought I’d ask him a few questions and get him to give me some advice on hotmail versus gmail.  He duly obliged, telling me to goto google.com and sign up there ‘or something like that.’

Yeah.. bear this in mind when you next choose a Webmail provider.

This documentation shows how to us ipvsadm to create load-balanced services on CentOS that are capable of handling over 8 million concurrent connections in 1GB of memory. It’s possible to use this to load-balance any service. However, this doesn’t take into account data-syncronisation issues you may incur. For this you’ll need to set up Networked File Systems and Database replication (maybe coming soon).

Instructions for CentOS 5 (with ip_vs loaded in kernel as module).

Load ip_vs module

modprove ip_vs

Install ipvsadm

yum install ipvsadm

Run the following commands on the commandline and test them by visiting the $(external_ip) address in your browser.

ipvsadm -A -t $(external_ip):$(port) -s rr -p $(timeout_in_seconds)
ipvsadm -a -t $(external_ip):$(port) -r $(nat_ip_real_server1):$(port)
-m -w $(weight) [ example = 1 ]
ipvsadm -a -t $(external_ip):$(port) -r $(nat_ip_real_server2):$(port)
-m -w $(weight) [ example = 1 ]

Once you’re confident they’re set right.  run:

ipvsadm –save

This will output the config file to the screen.  Copy that into /etc/sysconfig/ipvsadm.

nano /etc/sysconfig/ipvsadm

Restart ipvsadm

/etc/init.d/ipvsadm restart

Test the sites.

Make module & config persistent @ boot time:

echo modprobe ip_vs >> /etc/rc.modules
chmod +x /etc/rc.modules
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!! /etc/rc.modules is used instead !!
!! of rc.local as it loads earlier !!!!!!!!!
!! in the boot process.!!               !!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

chkconfig –add ipvsadm

Done

It’s quite nice how people can see that all my different email addresses can be linked via a gpg key.  If you deal with me through this blog, you can see the companies I work for, and vice versa.

I like that.

Too many D’s for my liking… but a fantastic marketing point.

After David Davis resigned from the Commons today, the speech he gave focused on where technology and policy collide.

We will have, shortly, the most intrusive identity card system in the world, a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictator should have with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it.

We witness and assault on jury trial - that bulwark against bad law and its arbitrary abuse by the state, short cuts to our justice system will make our system neither firm nor fair and the creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers.

It’s definately time for the debate to happen.  Just because we can do things with technology doesn’t mean we should.

It’s a massively important area of discussion, with huge social implications.  However, because it comes under the “geek umbrella” - most people choose to ignore it or ’switch off’ from the conversation.

“Digital Rights, and what “feature creep” can achieve in terms of illegal/immoral operation.”

It’s something that I think needs to be put in the forefront of the public psyche - in so far as legal issues are regarded by the majority.

Leaving social issues to a group of people often stereotyped as having negligible social skills doesn’t seem to be a sensible idea.

Just discovered a pretty random ‘feature’ on Facebook Chat.

I don’t know how many of you use facebook’s relatively new chat feature.  It’s a small box in the bottom right of the browser.  Anyhow, yesterday I logged into my account on the iMac downstairs.  It’s a private PC that only me and my family use, so I left my facebook account logged in downstairs.

Earlier this afternoon, I spoke with one of my friends on the facebook chat.  We had a short conversation, without any confidential/personal information being discussed - but a chat nonetheless.

Anyhow, I just turned the screen on the iMac, and the facebook page was still up in Safari - and to my horror, the chat that I’d had upstairs on my own PC was shown up in the bottom right of the screen in the Safari browser.  Therefore, I can only assume that what I typed upstairs was broadcasted to my logged in account realtime - without me knowing.

Normally when I log into a site, I expect it to log me out elsewhere - especially with Instant Messenger.

Watch out for the same thing catching you out!

Over the past few weeks I’ve been helping my Uncle out by setting up a few computers for him. He wanted a laptop to take out ‘on-site’ - and a Desktop for a new employee.

Unfortunately, the ASUS eee901 is not yet available, and the 7″ series is slightly too small for his perceived ‘on-site’ usage, so he ended up getting a Toshiba Laptop and HP Desktop - both running Windows Vista (against my advice).

So, three weeks on, he’s not happy with Vista at all. Having already spent a fair bit of cash on the two machines, he was little disappointed that some ‘core software’ (his term) was still not installed. The new “Live Mail” application was also far too complicated compared to his Outlook Express - the change in UI wasn’t welcome.

So, I installed Mozilla Thunderbird onto both computers, and OpenOffice.org. I do have to admit to setting the default file-format to Windows 97/XP/2003 formats though (.doc, .xls and .ppt). I’d like to not do this, but for simplicities sake when dealing with clients - it was the easier option.

Aside from running the proprietary accounts software “Foundation Evolution” - I’ve got the company running on a very open-’saucy’ setup. The best thing about it has been the change in attitude towards the software since originally buying the PCs. After initially thinking that my enthusiasm for the ASUS eee was due to the Linux OS on it - it seems likely that when the 9″ series come out, that will be an addition to the “Construction Computing Team”.

The best new was though that I received a call this morning asking me how to install OpenOffice.org on all of the computers and get rid of MS Office & install Thunderbird on all the machines. With the old setup, there would have been a training overhead in having to run different versions of the same software on all four PCs - however, with the Open Source Setup, all the computers, despite being purchased at different times, can run the same software - giving the users the opportunity to use the computers to help run the business, rather than having to work out how to use that particular version of the program.

Smile