Content centric architecture and distributed versioning
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00:00
Projective planeComputer fontCodeSoftware developerMechanism designContent (media)Right angleLecture/Conference
00:37
1 (number)Content (media)Cartesian coordinate systemSlide ruleWeb applicationBerners-Lee, TimComputer fileMechanism designWordMultiplication signFile formatScalabilityOrder (biology)Sign (mathematics)Computer fontCurveCategory of beingElectronic mailing listFlow separationTwitterComputerIdentity managementComputer architecturePhysical systemFacebookDifferent (Kate Ryan album)QuicksortPlanningGraphic designCollaborationismOpen setForm (programming)Programmer (hardware)Vector graphicsComputer programmingFile systemDescriptive statisticsMereologyChainAnalogyWeb 2.0PlastikkarteDivisorGoodness of fitRevision controlLibrary (computing)XML
06:16
Repository (publishing)Patch (Unix)Visualization (computer graphics)Revision controlComputerComputer fileMultiplication signDifferenz <Mathematik>Different (Kate Ryan album)CodeQuicksortMathematicsVideo gamePower (physics)Euler anglesProjective planeFile formatInternetworkingGreatest elementPeer-to-peerPhysical systemComputer-generated imageryCentralizer and normalizerTelecommunicationPerspective (visual)CollaborationismMereologyMeasurementPresentation of a group1 (number)Endliche ModelltheorieTheoryBoss CorporationType theoryComputer architectureFacebookLocal GroupBlogLetterpress printingMetreReal numberCurveComputerString (computer science)Computer architectureInferenceUniform resource locator
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Web-DesignerContent (media)Computer programmingVideo gameFlow separationEvent horizonRevision controlDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Similarity (geometry)Term (mathematics)Pattern languageGraphic designGodQuicksortSocial classInternet forumComputerDependent and independent variablesBitSource codeMultiplication signInheritance (object-oriented programming)Speech synthesisFormal languageWordLecture/Conference
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
So, what I'd like to talk about, well, actually some of it fits in with the font project Dave was talking about, but basically how we, well, most of you have also a background as developer and for working with code, we've got all these super nice mechanisms of versioning and now even distributed versioning, but how do we actually deal
00:25
with all the other content we produce, because of course code is content, but, you know, not everybody writes code, but everybody nowadays writes, you know, is updating their Facebook status or their Twitter or their Identica, or
00:45
basically not only are people making SVG pictures in Inkscape, because they're doing that as well, of course, but all of us are constantly making stuff and, well, really in the computer this stuff is not that important, because we've got really
01:01
nice systems, we've got architectures, but the content is just the stuff that goes through it, like the content is not the central thing, and the way most people work, we're just sending all our content into Facebook or some other kind of web application. Effectively, we're bypassing all the smart tools our
01:23
computer has, and we push it away and, well, we can't really get it back, so this is like the problem with, like, it's what Tim Berners-Lee refers to as the data silos, so that all these applications have their data locked up
01:42
inside of them. You must imagine, like, if you work on a desktop application, closed formats, of course, is a nasty thing. You're dealing with Word files and how to import them, whatever, but, like, the analogy with the web would be that Word would have its own file system. Oh, that would be even more nasty,
02:05
I imagine. Well, that's how it is. And, of course, we want mechanisms so that this data can somehow be decoupled from the application. Well, well, but, of
02:27
course, there's lots of people making these really nice formats, and you can think of these XML formats, like text encoding initiative or the scalable factor graphics. Like, UFO, of course, is not as famous, but I put it
02:42
there as well. It's for fonts. And, you know, the big one we're all using every day, XHTML. You can think of these things for interoperability. I
03:00
is that on the next slide? Oh, yeah. All right, we'll get back to the versioning. But actually, they're about, like, operability. Like, the data becomes something you can work on. So, it's not something that's meant for the application to, it's not something practical for the application, where the
03:23
application is putting its stuff in there. No, it's like, it's becoming this thing on which the application becomes the tool that operates on the data, because the data is designed to be a description of a resource, and it's meant to be fit to describe that resource. It's not necessarily meant,
03:41
it's not primarily meant to operate with a program. So then, the programs, in the end, become, like, the disposable part of the chain, and the content becomes, well, the real deal. Like, a practical example, I guess. Oh,
04:03
yeah. That's good. A practical example. So, well, collaboration on fonts, it's not really big yet, as Dave already said. Right now, it's mainly just people working on one font. Well, that's a shame, of course. And, I
04:23
mean, I really love the open font library showed, like, we need this diacritic here, or we need this little thing here. Like, well, that's like a bug, you know, that needs to be fixed. So, you can look at all the smart
04:41
things that the programmers are doing, and just throw the font file in the graphic designer from Germany, who got the, was the first one to have the smart idea of, I don't know if he was the first one, but at least, the first one I
05:01
know of, had the smart idea to throw this XML format for fonts, UFO, which was initially thought of to be, well, interoperability formats, so different font applications could work together. But he thought, you know, let's just throw this in the versioning system, put it up on GitHub, and then, you
05:21
see, it's no longer some sort of, this file format no longer is it like a practical interoperability thing, it becomes, well, the core, the font itself, the thing we're dealing with. And it's nice and clean and hackable, because, you know, you have, you just have these P lists, they're
05:44
XML lists of properties, so there's the kerning and whatever, and then there's just for every glyph, so for every separate letter or sign, there's a file with the curves. And, well, so, and I think the strength of an
06:10
XML-based format which is designed to describe a resource shows, because, like, what you see there is the font, it's not an image, it's actually generated live on GitHub from the UFO, so it's visualization code which has been added
06:27
to GitHub. And you can, if you're on the internet now, you can navigate to the URL and you can see it for yourself. This shows when you go to the UFO file,
06:40
and there's even divs, so there's visual divs, so you see these are new files, the one with white to the left, and then the string OS, the strange B, you see there's the change. And, well, this code was basically written in one night, and I guess, you know, Tom Werner, who did that, is a really good programmer, but
07:03
that also testifies to how practical it is to work with a format designed like that. Yeah, well, this very much shows, I guess, because I'm not a
07:22
font designer myself. I was just rooting for this project, and I was suggesting it to Rob Minches, who committed this change. He does work as a type designer, he's a type designer. But this shows why, I guess, for type
07:41
designers, it must be pretty hard to communicate sometimes with the rest of the world, because this is a change. That's like old and that's new. And then it says, much more decent curve now in the commit log. I mean, I can't tell the difference, maybe if I look very well. Of course, this visualization
08:06
can be much more sophisticated, overlapping things, and doing nice onion skinning, sort of. But the principles there. Yeah, but this is one part of the story, no? This is the part where the fact that if
08:24
you have a format like that, it's easy to make interoperable solutions, and you can work on it from many sides. But the other part is the collaboration part, and then we get the distributed part, which is all the age. And it's a distributed versioning system, as you are probably all well
08:41
aware of. In that, the latest in a range of successful distributed systems, or messy ones. Well, of course, they're not messy. They're messy from the top down, but they're very strict from the bottom up. Like the internet, oh yeah. Yeah, not distributed, you can say it in many ways, like peer-to-peer, also
09:02
charismatic. I don't know if there's any philosophy majors in here, but it's the same thing, basically. That's why I think philosophers should get practical and get busy with making stuff on the internet, preferably. Yeah, so the
09:24
internet, which is a very successful distributed system. But culture, I guess, is the most successful one. We all have it, and it's actually just distributed versioning. We all have a bona fide copy of the
09:43
repository in us. No, really. There is no central culture repository we're committing patches to. It doesn't exist, such a thing. The only place where culture exists is in us, and in each one of us, like a whole
10:03
bona fide version of it, and just with slight differences from one to the other. And then, you know, I like this notion of a pool request on Git. So when you ask somebody to accept your patch, like, please do that, well, I guess we do that all the time, in real life as well. I mean, it's what a
10:25
conference is about, also, I guess, or giving a talk. So, yeah, why then? Well, of course, because they're... So these systems come natural to us, like
10:41
distributed systems. Like, the internet could get big because it's the way we like to work. Everybody just puts their little part in there and nobody's the boss. But they're also, of course, resistant to abuse. Well, of course, well, they are. Because, you know, computer systems are different than
11:01
culture, because they don't have to be messy. They can be strict and centralized. And, well, you're all aware of the whole Facebook discussion, I guess. But there's a really nice presentation on that by Mr. Evan Moglen, how that just allows for decentralized architectures. They allow for
11:24
inferences to be made, because you can see all the communication from all the nodes. And that we can't do in real life. Like, we can only look from our own perspective. We don't have a top-down perspective in culture. No, yeah, no, there
11:43
should not be such a thing, I think. Yeah. I have five more minutes, so I guess I would like to talk with the audience then. Well, yeah, I don't know, I don't...
12:22
I'm curious how people see these... Like, I have the idea that many of the workflows and methodologies and tools that are being developed for programming, programming? Computer code is just another kind of culture. And I have the idea that many of these tools that are being developed for computer
12:40
programs, that's very smart to try and implement them onto other kinds of culture. And I was wondering how the public thinks of that. We have someone that wants to respond to this. You have to come. So, I was wondering if you could
13:08
talk about why you think designers haven't picked up these tools before, because version control has been around for a long time. Well, it's... I think it's a matter of culture, also. Like, I know designers who've used
13:23
version control, but they are very specific in being, well, maybe geeky designers. Like, for me even, being busy with starting to think about things like programming and computer code. I have to overcome such a huge prejudice in my own
13:44
brain. Because, you know, I'm like, oh my god, that's not the sort of thing you're supposed to do. Because this basically boils down to this difference between, like, this separation between arts and, like, humanities and
14:04
science, I guess. Which is still very, which is not very present anymore in, like, a real way. Like, the stuff we're doing all is kind of similar, but it's still very real in a social way. Like, so, the thing is, for example,
14:22
something like GitHub. It's why they're making something extremely, something that's oriented extremely to, like, a programming or maybe, like, I hate the word geek, so I'll keep, like, doing this when I say that. Like, to maybe a very geeky crowd, like, a distributed version control system. But they're
14:44
really marketing it like it's the most awesome thing ever. And they're, like, and they're using a language, like, I'm used to for marketing other things, which I might find awesome. So I come across them,
15:05
like, they're speaking my language, I guess, in a way. And that makes it, this clash there. So it's, it's a bit of, it's culture. Like, if you, if you're writing a scientific paper, you're not going to have it designed by a graphic designer,
15:23
because it will just look to, like, it will look strange to your colleagues to have something fancily designed. You want to do it in LaTeX and in computer modern, because then it'll look like all the other papers. Which is a
15:41
good thing, because you want people, you want to make sure people know that you're about the content. Can I invite someone else to maybe ask a question? Yes, in the backpack. John, you have to come to the front.
16:00
Can you talk a bit about the decentralization of your pants? Well, I'm spreading the meme, I guess, in that sense. No, it's just, I don't know, I'm very decentralized, they're still here. Like, but, but I'm, I'm now,
16:21
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm like, this is a pull request, like, you all can go wear these pants if you want to. I wouldn't mind, I would be pleasantly surprised, I guess. But it's also a way, yeah, it's in a way, well, for me, it signifies, because I found out that when I would post to social networks and
16:41
things, I would be like, because, yeah, I have also a life as a performance artist, and so these performances, they, they tend to feature tight pants, and, and then I would post pictures of them, and they would look, generally, like, awesome. Like, they would look really, like, fashionable, like, like, really
17:03
fashionable event, fashionable artsy things going on. I mean, I would, I would take a web development course, and, of course, being busy with all this stuff, but I didn't tell anyone, and, and then I was like, no, this can't go on. So I sort of, in a sense, I outed myself in my own social sphere, like, I
17:28
outed myself saying, yeah, I'm busy with computer programming, but I, I still hope I can wear tight pants sometimes. And then I, I sort of made a joke of it, saying, well, not a joke, it's, it's significant. And then I think, if I, if I
17:43
sort of stand firm for the computer programming in the artistic world, I stand firm for the tight pants in the programming world. Yeah.
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