one small voice

Since upgrading to WordPress 3.0.1 recently, I’ve noticed that the category-specific syndication feeds seem to be broken. I’ll have to fix that so the folks at Planet Jabber don’t get bored with my posts about philosophy and such…

My friend Dizzy just pointed me to a fine essay by Daniel Akst on friendship (or the lack thereof) in modern society. It’s no surprise that I would enjoy the essay, given that I’m a big fan of both Aristotle and Epicurus, that I have written two essays on friendship, and that I have re-published essays on the topic by Emerson, Montaigne, and Randolph Bourne over at monadnock.net. Good reading!

While travelling in Europe a few weeks ago, I thought of a book I’d like to write:

Don’t Buy This Book, You Can Read It for Free on the Internet!
The Closing of the Copyright Era, the Open-Sourcing of the Book, and What it All Means for Readers, Writers, and Publishers

Not that I’ll have time to write it anytime soon…

Last night I posted my third report as co-director of the IETF Applications Area. Enjoy! :)

I’m saddened to learn that James P. Hogan, one of my favorite science fiction authors, died yesterday. Although I don’t read much SF these days and haven’t in years, for a while there I devoured every JPH novel I could get my hands on. I think that the one I liked best was Code of the Lifemaker — the last scene sticks out in my mind as a tour de force of tongue-in-cheek description. He and I corresponded via email for a few years because I maintained a FanSpace about him at the old version of my monadnock.net website. He was quite an original, heretical person and the world is worse off for having lost him.

As mentioned, a few weeks ago Ben Campbell issued a working group last call for comments on draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis. Eventually this resulted in quite a flood of comments from Ben, Dave Cridland, Philipp Hancke, Waqas Hussain, Alexey Melnikov, Kevin Smith, Matthew Wild, and Florian Zeitz. Matthew has helpfully collected all of the comments into a handy compendium, and I’m currently converting those comments into trackable issues. I shall work to process all of these issues in the next week or two (probably two, because I have a lot of documents to review for this week’s IESG telechat). Look for follow-up discussion on the xmpp@ietf.org list.

Now for something completely different. :)

When asked about their favorite piece of music by Beethoven, most people would probably name the Moonlight Sonata, the Fifth Symphony, or something else that’s quite famous. I grant that I love Glenn Gould’s recording of the Lizst transcription for piano of the Fifth Symphony. My absolute favorites, however, are the Ecossaises (WoO83) — six charming little sketches that all together total about two minutes of music. I have them in a recording by Alfred Brendel, and every time I hear them I find myself looping through the set three or four times in a row.

Yesterday afternoon I posted my second report as co-director of the IETF’s Applications Area. Probably anyone who’s interested in it is already subscribed to the apps-discuss@ietf.org email list, but I figure it can’t hurt to post about it at my blog, too…

On May 13th, Ben Campbell (co-chair of the IETF’s XMPP Working Group) published a Working Group Last Call for comments on draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis. This document is the core definition of XMPP so it’s important that we get it right. If you care about Jabber/XMPP technologies, please take a day to review this spec (it’s ~175 pages long!) and provide feedback on the xmpp@ietf.org discussion list. Thanks!

While at the OAuth WG interim meeting yesterday in California, I signed my first copy of XMPP: The Definitive Guide (Japanese Edition). Here’s a picture:

Many thanks to Tatsuya Hayashi for bringing his copy all the way from Japan.

I just posted (via email to the apps-discuss@ietf.org list) my first report about my activities as co-director of the IETF Applications Area. I was tempted to post it via blog, too, but I don’t have time for reformatting the whole thing so you can read it in the list archives.

My work life is now measured in fortnights, because that’s how often the IESG holds its formal telechats. Preparation consists of reviewing and commenting on ~800 pages of Internet-Drafts, plus following up with document authors, working group chairs, and other IESG members in a search for solutions to whatever problems I’ve identified. Because I haven’t found the right rhythm yet, it seems that I burn up about 15 hours a day reviewing specs on the Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before the formal telechat (there are informal telechats in the “off” weeks, but they aren’t as intense), then spend the rest of the two-week cycle on follow-up tasks, working group management, writing my own specs (last week an update to draft-saintandre-tls-server-id-check, this week an “editor’s review” of draft-ietf-xmpp-3920bis, next week I hope finally a consolidation of two different proposals to the XSF for distributed chatrooms), tracking dozens of email lists (probably 1000 messages a day), helping developers at Cisco and in the broader XMPP community with issues they’re trying to solve, and occasionally dispatching some of the many other responsibilities I have. Did I mention that I’m working 70+ hours a week nowadays? :)

Now that I have been selected for an official role at the IETF, I find it more important than ever to remind myself that power corrupts. For instance, an IESG member such as me can put up all sorts of obstacles in the way of publishing an RFC (as I just did by filing my first DISCUSS, on draft-ietf-mediactrl-sip-control-framework). Therefore I have written the words “power tends to corrupt” on my whiteboard at the office, as shorthand for the full quote from Lord Acton:

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

Those words of wisdom seem quite consistent with one of the founding principles of the Internet, enunciated by Dave Clark and enshrined in The Tao of the IETF:

We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

Greg Feirman has pointed out to me that Jeff Riggenbach’s recent article Yevgeny Zamyatin: Libertarian Novelist quotes a bit from my essay Zamyatin and Rand, which was originally published in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS) back in 2003. Excellent! The fact that scholars like Jeff Riggenbach are able to link to essays such as this is one reason why I post them online.

Speaking of JARS, Chris Sciabarra informed me the other day that my essay Nietzsche, Rand, and the Ethics of the Great Task will finally appear in Volume 10, Number 2 of that journal (officially this is the Spring 2009 issue, but publication was delayed until Spring 2010). Here’s to Chris for his dedication in continuing to publish JARS despite significant challenges. Out of respect for Chris and JARS, I’ll wait at least six months before posting this essay online, so expect to see it in late 2010 or early 2011.

It’s been a month since I’ve posted here. Sorry about that — I’ve been awfully busy in my work. Maybe after IETF 77 I’ll have a bit more time to write, but don’t hold your breath. :)

On Friday I learned that the Internet Engineering Task Force’s NomCom has selected me to serve a two-year term as Area Director (with Alexey Melnikov) of the Applications Area, beginning at IETF 77 in Anaheim this March. Being selected as Apps AD (and thereby a member of the IESG) is a great honor, and I shall endeavor to live up to the highest principles of the IETF while serving. Here’s to rough consensus and running code!

A lot of people think that American politics, even American society, has become increasingly polarized in the last ten or twenty years, marked by a widening chasm of left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, secular vs. religious, etc. On the surface, that’s true. But I think the deeper division is the elite vs. the people, the political class vs. the productive class, those who govern and those who are governed. Indeed, once you notice that nothing ever changes in the District of Columbia or your state capitol — that the elites follow essentially the same policies no matter which gang is in charge — you start to realize that the supposed divisions among the people are extraordinarily convenient for the political class, because they keep the people from realizing that their real enemies are not the folks to their left or their right, but the elites up above. And while I am duly cautious about the dangers of popular rule (as were the Founding Fathers), I think Americans have much more to fear from elitism than from populism, especially in an age when knowledge and information are more dispersed than ever.

I run Prosody as my personal XMPP server at stpeter.im, so last night I decided to take a look at its source code. It’s quite a pleasure to read! I might need to take a more serious look at the Lua programming language because it seems to encourage readable code (though I think the Prosody team has a lot to do with it, too).

Here are some photos from today’s rally on the steps of the Colorado state capitol in opposition to the health care skulduggery in the District of Columbia, orchestrated by the good folks at the Independence Institute…

Today is the 11th anniversary of Jer’s first release of the jabberd server, which we commonly herald as the birthday of Jabber/XMPP technologies. All these years later, there’s still so much to do! Here’s what I’ll be focusing on in 2010:

• End-to-end encryption
• Finalizing Jingle-based file transfer
• Multi-user Jingle for voice conferencing and the like
• Distributing chat rooms across servers
• Bridging between serverless mode and server mode (very useful in distressed networks)
• Reputation systems for XMPP servers and users

I’m sure other topics will emerge, as well. :)