May 5
I'd started to waver after I wrote The Teledyn Cube; I was reminded that I really didn't want to know tons of extraneous crap about computers, I just wanted to use computers to do interesting things, yet here I was, constantly upgrading, de-spamming, changing fonts; as a kid I wanted to be a cowboy astronaut, not a de-spamming font-selecting upgrader of badly written software! My the Cube concept, however, platonically recognizes how there are some people who do want to be de-spammers, others who want to be upgraders and font-selectors, and who know everything about what they do and hang on the new release newsfeeds like musicians at a sheet-music store (to quote Martin Mull) and that is why we will shift to the hosted cubic computing model.
As an aside, the new 'g ho, st' webtop does underline a fundamental missing key to complete the Teledyn Cube: the difference between self-hosting and hosted work is trust, and if your hosting company doesn't trust you, even if you want to do something illegal, and if you can't trust your hosting company not to do something illegal, then there can be no computing communications environment. The binding between client and server needs to be as with a doctor, a totally protected relationship. Instead our modern laws have bred the exact opposite, an Orwellian model where everyone assumes the other is out to turn them in for a reward, a world where the children make the laws as to who is to hang and who is not, where every object you touch might turn you into the Authorities destroying your life forever.
But I digress ...
So, anyway, after finally formalizing the Cube idea, I started to ween myself of the ego-dependence on being the big-man sysop/sysadmin and leave that tedious life-sucking job to youngsters who don't know any better ;) and I moved increasingly to an abstract computing-space model, a model that held my data somewhere with all these goofy iMachines as simply the dumb terminal portals into a singular My World. I moved as much as I could into Google Apps, kept as little as possible actually on the laptop, abandoned the desktop (it is now a picture server)
The final straw was meeting up with Posterous and realizing how, while by no means complete, they were aiming at an interface that was elegantly useful, devoid of special tags and obtuse rules of geekdom. Sure, there's the risk that what I write there could vanish into a black hole tomorrow with no local copy, but I had also long since ceased to hold any hope of being convincing to anyone on any of my computing ideas.
Whappen?
out of the parking lot and into the sky! -- old blog TeledyN is dead, long live blog TeledyN. After 12 years of self-hosting, I figured enough was enough, there was just no sense in running my own box and all the admin and maintenance and bother and expense, and so here we are, cloud-hosted on posterous.com, and a new phase in the web presence. So where is all the old stuff? Not here. In a trunk, actually. A database dumpfile trunk that is somewhat opaque but not irretrievable; from time to time I may re-post some favourites, but mostly, if you're here for something you were expecting to find, you're too late.Comments (2)
Jun 20, 2009
garym @teledyn said...
yeah well, it was a matter of value; the webstats engines said next to nobody was interested in any those gems except spammers and after 10 years development, all the self-hosting software was still largely broken, frustrating the participation from those few who chose to try, and upgrades were always a two-week nightmare of broken pieces loosely fitting.I'd started to waver after I wrote The Teledyn Cube; I was reminded that I really didn't want to know tons of extraneous crap about computers, I just wanted to use computers to do interesting things, yet here I was, constantly upgrading, de-spamming, changing fonts; as a kid I wanted to be a cowboy astronaut, not a de-spamming font-selecting upgrader of badly written software! My the Cube concept, however, platonically recognizes how there are some people who do want to be de-spammers, others who want to be upgraders and font-selectors, and who know everything about what they do and hang on the new release newsfeeds like musicians at a sheet-music store (to quote Martin Mull) and that is why we will shift to the hosted cubic computing model.
As an aside, the new 'g ho, st' webtop does underline a fundamental missing key to complete the Teledyn Cube: the difference between self-hosting and hosted work is trust, and if your hosting company doesn't trust you, even if you want to do something illegal, and if you can't trust your hosting company not to do something illegal, then there can be no computing communications environment. The binding between client and server needs to be as with a doctor, a totally protected relationship. Instead our modern laws have bred the exact opposite, an Orwellian model where everyone assumes the other is out to turn them in for a reward, a world where the children make the laws as to who is to hang and who is not, where every object you touch might turn you into the Authorities destroying your life forever.
But I digress ...
So, anyway, after finally formalizing the Cube idea, I started to ween myself of the ego-dependence on being the big-man sysop/sysadmin and leave that tedious life-sucking job to youngsters who don't know any better ;) and I moved increasingly to an abstract computing-space model, a model that held my data somewhere with all these goofy iMachines as simply the dumb terminal portals into a singular My World. I moved as much as I could into Google Apps, kept as little as possible actually on the laptop, abandoned the desktop (it is now a picture server)
The final straw was meeting up with Posterous and realizing how, while by no means complete, they were aiming at an interface that was elegantly useful, devoid of special tags and obtuse rules of geekdom. Sure, there's the risk that what I write there could vanish into a black hole tomorrow with no local copy, but I had also long since ceased to hold any hope of being convincing to anyone on any of my computing ideas.
Funny, I thought you'd be the last man standing as far as self-hosting went. -- Seb