Interviewed by Richard Jones

I asked Richard Jones to interview me.

I'm sure that my answers (found below) are a bit longer than most people's attention spans. To alleviate my guilt, please follow these instructions and further the meme:

1. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."


2. I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions.


3. You will update your weblog with the answers to the questions.


4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.


5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

1. Why do you write a weblog?

I write to try to capture my thoughts. I suppose that I don't really care about other people reading them but on some level I like the fact that they do. There is an ego trip associated with putting your thoughts out there and having other people read them. At the same time, I get to use readers as a sounding board: anybody who disagrees with what I write is welcome to comment and hopefully give me some insight that I hadn't previously seen.

I decided a while ago that I didn't want to have the kind of blog that goes on and on about what flavour of ice cream I ate this morning or which of my friends I will be seeing tonight. I think that in the future I will come back and read my thoughts from this year and last year and try to see what changes took place in my head and when (and maybe even why). Being able to see what I was thinking when certain events took place is kind of cool. I don't want to look back and see a list of what I was doing - I want to see what I was thinking about.

Finally, I blog because I'm fundamentally a yapper. I have an answer to every question (even though it might not be a great answer) and I sometimes feel the need to get that answer off my chest even if nobody is listening. That's why I sometimes blog about morality or society. My friends laugh at me (kindly) because I always have something to say about everything so I figure that some of that should end up here.

2. What's the coolest online community enabling system right now?

I think that wikis hold the #1 spot for me. They allow users to collaborate, chat and create together which is something that most other systems lack for one reason or another. A lot of features from other systems could be folded into wikis but even the basic (simplest) wiki system is far more powerful than most other systems.

Blogs are cool but they don't really create tight communities. They create clouds of people that read each other's blogs and leave comments for each other but they remain fundamentally un-collaborative publishing mechanisms - a way for me to tell you what I think/feel/do.

IRC has more immediate interaction but loses completely on the asynchronous level. I know, I know, there are bots that will tell you when the last time foxy6969 was in the channel but it's not the same. Wikis are always now.

Usenet has asynchronicity but is more like mailing lists. In fact, let me just lump mailing lists in here as well (even though there are access restrictions to most mailing lists that don't exist for most newsgroups) and say that both allow you to post articles (like a blog) on a given topic. I would say that Usenet fosters more community spirit than blogs but still loses to wikis.

Online games (like MMORPGs and so on) also foster great community spirit but are very limited in their focus. Even though most wikis have a theme, almost all have a very heterogenous collection of pages.

Tagging services like Flickr and del.icio.us don't create communities. They expose existing interest groups. You and I may tag the same resource the same way but have nothing else to say to each other. Also, tagging is not conversation (no matter what the pundits say) and is an incredibly low-bandwidth medium of communication. The lack of consistent commenting means that tagging services are more like personality quizzes than they are like a community blackboard.

So wikis is my final answer.

3. What on Earth is WOD?

The WODFS is a Write-Once Distributed FileSystem. I wrote it in the winter of last year with my friend Justin and we put a lot of work into our "baby". The system is based on the design of archival storage systems and distributed filesystems and its main goal is to allow users to simulate an infinite, indestructible hard-drive.

The WOD allows you to keep saving data forever to a network of computers that store only the unique parts of your data. This means that each "chunk" of data is only ever stored once (conceptually). Each node in the network caches the most frequently used blocks so that you can achieve a disk access speed that is reasonable.

What's really cool is that since the WOD is write-once, you never actually "lose" any data. Even deleted data can be easily retrieved.

The system includes a set of extensions to the filesystem that allow you to create special folders and access files that contain data from the past. For example, if you have a folder called myprojects where you put all your code, you can open (either by creating it in Windows or by cd'ing to it in UNIX) a folder called myprojects@2004-01-01 and you will see that folder's contents exactly as they were on the first of January, 2004. This works with any folder (even the root) in your filesystem. Individual files track every single saved modification and allow you to browse through the history of the file using dates (as explained above) or by appending @ and a negative number representing the number of steps backwards to take.

I'm working hard right now to finish the code to hook the system into the Windows explorer but right now things run only on UNIX. Performance is not as good as we would like but the whole thing is written in un-optimized Python so that is to be expected.

4. What's your favourite Python hack?

I think that right now, my favourite hack has to be the soft reference module that we developed for the WOD. We hooked into the GC routines of the Python runtime to manage a set of objects that gets collected only when the memory they use is needed.

Close runners-up include hacks that involve meta-classes or decorators.

I'm not a big fan of cramming as much code as possible into one line. I like to see elegance and consistency. By consistency I mean that even hacks should be done in the spirit of the language used.

I've spent the last years coding in Java and so I really like hacks that show flexible (sometimes even functional) capabilities of languages. I like to see languages pushed to do things that they were not necessarily meant to do in clean and cogent ways.

I've always been a big fan of LISP and Scheme so I like to see hacks that modify language structure or build "small languages" or that modify a set of entities (objects or functions or whatever) transparently and orthogonally. That's why I like playing with decorators and meta-classes.

5. Blogs vs. Usenet, fight to the death. Who wins?

Blogs win. Honestly I think that blogs and usenet are pretty similar and if bloggers had some more tools (other than Trackback and comments) to allow a threaded style of linking between their posts (like metadata that allowed a tool to generate lists of related posts) then blogs would be a lot like Usenet but without the crappy flamefests and trolling and religious wars.

Blogs mean I get to choose whose writings I read. I like that choice. There's no spam and in general most blogs are consistent enough that I know after a little while whether or not to keep reading the blog.

Usenet can go any way. There are often spam messages posted to newsgroups. There are trolls who spend their time wasting other people's lives. Also, newsgroup organization is more centralized than blog management (says the guy who blogs on blogspot.com).

All in all, blogs are more flexible and allow more personal choice and freedom. They get my leftist vote.