The theft of anything of value is considered an immoral and unethical act in civilization (going as far back as the Code of Hammurabi and The Ten Commandments, because it deprives the original party of their good.

The capitalistic point of view is that what I earn, is mine, and stealing what’s mine is theft. The valuable things (“apples”) are property of the individual.
The communistic / marxist point of view is that what’s earned by individuals is shared by the community and always accessible. The valuable things (“apples”) are distributed evenly as property of the community.

But the digital point of view says we can make duplicates of media, with no loss of value to the original…and ethical behavior is undefined.

If I steal an apple from you, you may go hungry tonight, but I will be full. But if I could “copy” that apple (with a matter duplicator that takes a value-less, shared element, like dirt on the ground, and recombines the atoms into said “apple”). Would it still be theft? Neither of us go hungry, since we now both have apples.

Ever torrent anything? It’s quick, easy, and community-oriented. Plus, you have access to a huge library of media (music, television, movies, images, books, etc.) These works are shared by a community using Peer-to-Peer technology, and considered theft, even though the original copies are never taken. The multi-media corporations of the world (everything from Viacom to Hulu/NBC to EMI) hate piracy because it’s so prevalent, and it’s so difficult to stop. Once a file is copied, and shared, it’s difficult to stop the dissemination.

But why stop it? It’s an efficient way of disseminating your work. It would be like an apple farmer trying to stop the creation of “matter transmitters” from copying their apples… They’re not able to! The savvier solution would be to create their own matter transmitters to directly transmit their apples.

Why don’t Media Corporations Co-Opt Piracy?

Problem: a popular, digital television show is pirated from a media corporation, and torrented by the torrenting community

Case Study Solution: Media Corporation (e.g. Hulu) creates their own torrent application, to build their community of “seeders” who share their network’s work

Pros:

• Authorization for users to log in and out of the system for torrenting: want access? then sign-up
• Advertising can be show anywhere in the application
• Metric-tracking to show how often a show is shared, watched (if the software has viewing capability): I hate that wonderful shows are killed off because of shit-metrics (i.e. Nielsen Ratings). Firefly would still be around if people would track Torrent metrics
• Custom extensions for sharing and opening torrented files (i.e. .hulu, or better yet an open-standard torrent extension): this is a bit grimy, since I hate polluting extension-types if we can normalize them into an open-standard, but maybe this will push for such a solution)
• Directory capability for posting and listing recently torrented shows
• Rewards for “premium-seeding” users : discounts or beta-test access capabilities: give back to your community!
• LOW-to-NO Infrastructure Costs: the sharing is done by the user community, on the Peer-to-Peer technology framework

This last point is clutch: think about how much bandwidth and storage Netflix uses: almost 30% of peak bandwidth usage was used by Netflix users in the United States in 2011. Instead of having to pay for a deep technology stack, have a cluster of dedicated servers seed out the original files, then the community will take care of the rest.

Cons:

• Initial Capital Investment in Software Development (you can always ping Dom & Tom for that!) On the other, what corporations have that individuals don’t is vast amount of capital to invest in such ventures.
• Pirates always be Piratin’: even with a software app, a big, healthy, well-instructed community, and a media-campaign that puts you on every “must-have” platform on the planet…Pirates still be piratin’ yo. You can’t keep them out, and what’s free is free. But big guns bring to play what pirates normally can’t: Money. Money to spend on engineers, designers/aesheticians, UX/UI folk, lobbyists to promote their policies in government (or community-outreach) campaign goals (i.e. open-source format, adoption in less-than-welcome countries, integration in school systems, etc.))
• DRM (Digital Rights Management): even IF you have a great network, distribute these medias, people can pull them, post them, and re-distribute out of network. DRM is PITA (pain in the ass; get with the acronyms yo!), and there’s stop-gap solutions, but to be honest, I think technology wins the day in supporting what people want. Dr. Ian Malcolm taught us, it’s that Life Finds a Way.. But that’s a discussion for another day… Point is, this doesn’t SOLVE that problem, but then again, neither does anything else currently working. This solves the distribution-system of piracy, which I believe is a major hurdle.

You can’t stop technological efficiencies (unless you still have stock in horse-and-buggy corps). What you CAN do is learn from it, adopt their practice, their technology, and leverage with your core values and marketing models (advertising, subscription models, free-to-play, etc.)

When people find a way to beat the system, I always wonder when the system will steal from the ingenuity of the people.

As a final thought, you cannot beat technology. The concept of matter duplication, at least at the digital level, is here. When it extends to physical objects (which we’re starting to see in the Maker community), the concept of currency as a whole, and what is “value”, will need to be revised, and ethics again re-determined.

Cookies are a Powerful Incentive

Whenever anyone joins our company, they get an “AT domandtom.com” e-mail, usually their first name. Someone noticed all our e-mail signatures were formatted a thousand different ways; every N-P combination of name, title, company name, mobile, home, even fax (we have a fax?).

We had a quick pow-wow with our team and came up with the new signature. We asked everyone to add at the bottom from their “AT domandtom.com” e-mail addy’s. After 2 days, I noticed only a few people were upgrading their sigs, so in thanks to them, I sent a cookie basket to the New York and Chicago offices.

People e-mailed to thank me, but were cautioned against doing so until AFTER they had updated their sigs. See, word caught round that “thanks” were only official after they came with the new e-mail sigs. Now these baskets had a variety fancy-ass cookies, but limited quantities of each, so everyone moved like lightning to upgrade before all the epipen-licious-ness were gone.

It became a neat “mother, may I?” game. E-mails from everyone in the company throughout the day, all with the new e-mail tags, and everyone comparing the subtle, fancy cookie flavors. All thanks to the power of cookies!

Consider them in your arsenal of incentivication.

I caught up on Lost : Seasons 4 – 6 on a well-known re-capping site. The same with The Office (since Season 3), Mad Men, Dexter. I’ve stopped watching Dexter altogether and supplemented my intake purely with weecaps.

“Weecaps” are a minute or detailed digests of what went on, how it went down, and any reactions to it. And it saves me a ton of time then actually WATCHING anything. My schedule every day doesn’t afford me any time for regularly televised entertainment. So if I can snort a line of t.v. instead of having to sit and smoke it, I will.

And it’s great!

1. I imagine every scene, and how the characters play it out.
2. There aren’t any commercials.
3. It takes 2 minutes to an episodes 48.

And the best part? Whenever I’m in the room with one of those “fans”, I can faux-fan it up (“wasn’t the season finale of Lost craz-ay and unfulfilling?”). No I haven’t ‘watched’ it for 3 years but my opinion’s still backed by well-informed digests.

Even the President gets Daily Weecaps, and who knows what kind of snark the CIA throws.

I’ve been reading weecaps of new shows I’ve never seen (hi Fringe, The Event, Chuck…).

I’ve even started reading weecaps of movies saving me time, money, (and outrage at losing both) : (sorry Thor, The Adjustment Bureau, Limitless).

In fact, it lets me sync up with movies I’d never watch in the first place (what’s up Human Centipede, Water for Elephants, and The King’s Speech? no I don’t want to watch you stumble around for 3 hours, I’ll just imagine it). It gets so bad that whenever I walk by a movie theatre, I scan the titles to see if there’s anything I want to immediately “wiki” and read.

There are downsides a plenty! Lack of good writing, difficulty in following convoluted, on-going story-lines, investment in character-development, supporting your local t.v. show with precious “viewing” count. But it’s all worth it for one reason…

Time.

I have no finite amount of time to spend on multiple story-lined drama. And in that world of no time, I have to compact the massive amounts of entertainment into a fine packet of crystalized fun called the weecap.

This is a working theory of some of the development and management challenges I come across when managing a team of developers, project managers, account managers, clients, designers, freelancers, and everyone else in our network.

The Situation

Imagine you make a list of everything you need to do today. You write that list down. You take a phone call, e-mail, or hear one of your developers is *blocked* on a project. You drop what you’re doing, assist them, come back, and find an e-mail needs a response.

At the end of the day, you’ve solved one item on your list.

Instead of promising yourself tomorrow will be better – you’ll be better disciplined – or staying late to finish that list and never coming home, what if you managed the problem.

Your job is not what you think it is.

Nimble Development is Agile Development for Team Leaders. It helps you manage your tasks and moving the team forward with their tasks.

1. Nimble is Open
2. Nimble is Listening
3. Nimble is Moving

Nimble is based on the core principle “Your problems are everyone else’s problems”.

1. Review Tasks, Blocks, Key Players – make a list of every task that needs to be completed *today* for that project, including your own tasks, and the key players involved
2. “Walk The Line” – go through each task with each player, and see if there’s a block on it, if there is, timebox your time to assist solving it, listen to the goal, review the prep work, and test theories
3. Open to New Tasks / Blocks – be open to asynchronous requests within the timebox’d block. Is it completable within the timebox? Can it wait until you re-position?
4. Reposition – take on a new blocked task by priority, accomplish an item on your list, respond to an “open” item

At the end of your day, you should find the team as a whole move incrementally closer to their goal. Your task items may have moved forward, because instead of treating other problems as “distractions”, you plan for them, attack them, and resolve them before they come to you. As long as the entire team is moving forward in their goals, progress is made.

Agile Development is for specialists who are able to work independently.
Nimble Development is for utility players in charge of managing individual, agile developers.

Let’s ask ourselves why would I post anything at all when the entire net-related culture (and aren’t we one big net-family?) is probably creating something of equal if not better value? Does the world need another blog post? Why am I writing this?

How Did We Get Here?

1. Back in Darpa-times, scientists posted websites to share information (+1 : help).
2. Regular feeling-folk posted thoughts and feelings of their lives, sans any objectively useful material (+1 : entertain)
3. In reaction, topic-folk reject feeling-folk’s thoughts as “useless”, and create counter-”useful” posts on specific topics (+1 : help)
4. Web applications pop up to provide services in daily activities (shopping, travel, search for answers to life’s mysteries) (+1 : help)
5. Video posts by feeling-folk pop up to provide entertainment; Video sites pop up to provide access to life’s activities (news, films, vidcasts) (+1 : entertain)
6. Feeling-folk hook into micro-blogging services to packet-burst thoughts and feelings (+1 : entertain)
7. Topic-folk create analytics widgets, reputation points, candy-achievements to incentivize “topical” content (+1 : help)

Why Are You Here?

1. You search for answers to questions (in order of importance : what, where, when, how and sometimes why?)
2. You search for entertainment in a variety of media (video, audio, textoral)

Why Am I Posting?

Ipso factor, either I’m posting to help you answer a question (topic camp) or to entertain you (feeling camp). Conversely, you’re reading to either be entertained or answer a question you’ve asked.

Much like the world doesn’t need another shitty play (stop it Richard Greenberg), the world doesn’t need another shitty blog post.

But what about a third reason for reading what you read?
What if you found this, came here by accident and read up to this… Period.

And what if there’s a third reason for writing what I write?
What if I wrote this to inspire a discussion?

“Bull-shit!” you might say. “This ain’t a fucking discussion. You’re just writing yourself out.” (you’re vulgar)

Ah, so. This isn’t the discussion. I’m posting to inspire the discussion in you.

If I can post something that you discuss internally with yourself, then I’m helping asking a question instead of answering it. I can write about something you might not have thought about before.

I write not to answer nor to help (unless it’s a side-effect in which case, consult your doctor), but to inspire thought.

The opposite of entertainment isn’t boredom (the lack of entertainment).
It’s counter-tainment. My aim is to counter-tain.

Everyone is either with you (allies of your character)…. or against you (antagonists).

Once you realize the person in the scene isn’t to be trusted, take everything they say as a lie.
Examine everything they say as their attempt to manipulate you into doing something against your interests. i.e. not what YOU want.

If they are to be trusted, then trust them fully. Look to them for advice, guidance, counsel, or give it.

Lastly, anyone on stage may immediately change sides to the other. Until you know who’s who and their motivations, it’s up to your character’s (i.e. your) intuition to determine how to treat them.

There’s a subtlety to trust reactions, but it comes intuitively when you remind yourself that the person you’re talking to (or about) is someone you don’t trust.

As an advancement of the guideline, it’s also interesting to note that, from their perspective, they shouldn’t trust you, or your motivations. Attempts to earn their trust, ignore their mistrust, or deceive their trust by manipulating them and realizing their level of trust in you is just as subtle and artful.

The process to view this page involved:

1. Liking or “Like”-ing the page
2. Copy-pasting shady javascript into your browser

I’ve worked with clients in building Facebook App and Pages who want # 1. But # 2… ooo, that’s some shadiness. You can do all sorts of fun things with Javscript in a browserbar, especially when already logged into Facebook.

Here’s what I did to decrypt the javascript:

1. Setup an easy html page that unencodes and escapes the characters
2. Put in this shady page’s javascript
3. Decode and map the variables

You can check out the descrambled script here:
My Decoder Page with his Shady Code Inside

Then I came to my senses and found the same process on StackOverflow

Looks like the script selects your entire friend-list, and auto-submits a “suggested like” of the page to them.

Shady sir. But hey, he’s got 100k+ likes now (and a 1+ “spam report” from me).

To bad ethics bars us from spamming a “report as spam” suggestion e-mail.

While debugging tonight, I found the report crazy symbolicated (i.e. all the states were replaced with the memory locations). To de-symbolicate, use the tool symbolicatecrash, a fun unix script designed to :

1. take the crash report
2. combine with the dSym file generated from your release build (you kept it right?)
3. output a de-symbolized, readable file

I found my symbolicatecrash here:
Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/PrivateFrameworks
/DTDeviceKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/symbolicatecrash

After some advice online, I copied it into my /usr/local/bin folder:
sudo cp /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/Library/PrivateFrameworks
/DTDeviceKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/symbolicatecrash /usr/local/bin

Then put the two files together and run a statement like this (names have been changed to protect the app I debugged):
symbolicatecrash test.crash test.app.dSYM > report-with-symbols.crash

And you have readable crash files!

One, note, I ran into this error:
Can’t understand the output from otool

To fix that, open up your symbolicate crash, and replace this line (around line 301):
die “Can’t understand the output from otool ($TEST_uuid -> ‘$otool -arch $arch -l $path’)”;

with this:

#die “Can’t understand the output from otool ($TEST_uuid -> ‘$otool -arch $arch -l $path’)”;
print “Can’t understand the output from otool ($TEST_uuid)”;

References:

• http://efreedom.com/Question/1-1207223/iPhone-SDK-30-Symbolicatecrash-Getting-Along
• http://www.anoshkin.net/blog/2008/09/09/iphone-crash-logs/
• http://furbo.org/2008/08/08/symbolicatifination/

Which caused me to think about the establishment of 4-year Marriage Limits. Here’s my thought hack:

You agree to marry someone, with a base contract of 4 years.
After 4 years, you can either choose to renew your marriage or part amicably, with whatever you brought into the partnership, and an equal division of anything generated during the partnership’s 4 year-term (business, residence, loans, etc.) Here’s why:

1. You won’t take your partner for granted; they could always leave, so you’ll always value them choosing you
2. You won’t take the relationship for granted – much like life & death, relationships are re-cognized when they have a visible end
3. You’ll have incentive to work out (if you’ve stopped) so your partner starts noticing you near the 3-year mark
4. Less risk of divorce and infidelity. If you’re in love with someone, and they’re with someone else, you can always wait until their / your term is up…and see how you feel then.
5. Forever is a long time… a REALLY long time, but if you’re committed to someone, why not recommit your vows to them after 4 years? After 20 years, you’ll have committed to them 5 times!
6. Western civilization (if not most of life) is segmented into 4 year phases: 0-4 for early child development, then 1st – 8th grade, high school, college (or post), and 2-4 rounds of work or research independently, until children, which result in another 3-5 rounds…From 18 – 50, a person could have 8 commitments
7. Lastly…it’s still a commitment. Whether it’s a day, a month, a year, or the rest of your life, your committed to someone, so setting a limit to it doesn’t cheapen it; it makes the commitment have definition and scope.

But what about blah blah blah?

Some Rough Facts:

1. life is short
2. people can love many people : as my college professor of marriage said: how sad is the person who can only love and see love in one other person in the world?
3. people can get sick the sameness
4. people DO fall out of love
5. what’s the difference between 32 years of marriage and 8 renewals?
6. it’s realistic, flexible enough to allow options, but committed enough to stay strong in the long-term
7. is there a harm in it?
8. anyone judging the value of a four-year commitment could be a stuck-up snob who believe in unrealistic ideals that force people to be unhappy
9. here’s an ideal worth believing in: unhappiness. recognize it and build systems to adjust for it
10. maybe you want to go back to college, maybe you plan to be somewhere else in 4 years, sell the company, move to asia, etc.
11. you could always renew after a break: i.e. 4 years together, apart 1 year, then together again

Anyway, it’s an interesting thought exercise.

I’ve thought about the past year: 2009 to 2010. Things about myself I’m thankful for:

• to be alive,
• to be in a position I’m in,
• to know the people I know, or at least understand them
• and to have done the things I’ve done.

Some really great memories (in no regular order):

• meeting my girlfriend Angela (in March)
• traveling to Sao Paolo, Brazil for a weekend (and watching Old Boy on the flight, including a crazy sex scene that made me hide the laptop).
• birthday party for my friend Carolina, and it was eye-opening, the disparity between rich and poor, and the enormous amount of carne they enjoy
• traveling to London in the fall for three weeks. I really had a blast living as a day-to-day commuter, making my way to Tag’s offices, having meetings, going over for thick bread and jam breakfasts, and nearly every night a different dining spot. I saw a lot more of London than I ever thought I would have, including walking around town to the Tower, their modern museum, their theatres, the Eye, one of the oldest pubs in London. It was also great to contribute professionally to a high-end software product: CMD for Tag. The good company was bonus.
• Traveling to Japan with Angela,
• staying in Ryokans (eastern-style hotels with vegan-organic meals, great coffee, great vegetables, the best smelling elevators, and “transformer” rooms (I had a lot of practice setting up and breaking down our futon-beds, but sometimes just passing out on the floor-heated tatami mats worked just as well)).

We saw some outstanding Kabuki (rotating stage? Check. Ninja-rooftop-fight intro? Check. Understood only half of it? Check.)

• And Kyoto, where we caught a glimpse of a Geisha, walked around the neighborhood, almost lost our eardrums at a Noh performance (4 hours? Oh man…)
• Tsujiki Fish Market at 4 a.m. – styrofoam mountain! Eating the freshest fish in the world, doing a sushi bar crawl (3 places? I can’t eat enough. Ok one more round, with the fish prepared with a blowtorch)
• Eating the best-tasting tempura and noodles in a cheap diner in a side-street.
• Tasting horse and other weird korean beef-style foods and washing it down with some CHO
• Watching Angela passout in first class from our economy class seat. Seriously, I sat kiddy-corner to her the entire flight out.
• Disney World: Parents 30th Anniversary
• Blizzard World: flipping the tube with my twin brother Tom, and having to scramble back in before the lifeguards saw us; jamming my finger for 3 weeks after
• Making fun of scooters Mom and Aunt Pat were in; then secretly riding around them all night with Tom
• My Dad telling I’d never get dinner at 11:55pm, scooter-racing to the bar, and calling him to gloat
• Chicago: my friend Tim’s wedding; a really great final dance at the Wedding; enjoying a sober (ish) wedding; nicest wedding since Joe’s
• ZARDOZ!
• Seeing The House perform All the Fame of Lofty Deeds
• writing my first iPhone App: ComicVille
• Getting a raise at work
• Making my first movie in a long time, about my hands fighting each other to kill my brain. I shot that all night at Angela’s place, even forcing her to stay awake to shoot. I edited that in 3 hours, and run to submit it at 11:59pm
• Making my 2nd movie in a long time, Tres Problemas with my friend Mugsy. Amanda, our friend, edited it, and everyone in it was fantastic, specifically Rainne Wu, my twin brother Twin, and my girlfriend
• Starting guitar lessons Monday January 3rd, and continuing all year. Playing every Monday at New York City Guitar school. Really… awesome.
• Chicago
• Meeting Audrey, some Freddy Mercury nutball badass girl from Staten Island (“it’s not a fkin’ library”) at Taste of LIC in June with The Chocolat Factory
• The XX – boston – harvard – cambridge bed + breakfast
• Quitting my job at Tag and joining Dom & Tom, Inc. full-time
• Getting a boost up from Conversation, office-space, and big C’s.
• Contributing to FreeOrion and thus being a contributing of the Open Source philo; and making the (bit)-world a better place

Simple things, I guess. Good moments in some Far-Off places, and some Not-So-Far-Away places.

A summarizing thought about last year:

Overall, it felt like a year of growing more comfortable professionally, especially doing Dom & Tom, Inc. full-time; re-discovering filming + acting; meeting someone pretty amazing, and staying together longer than month; the regular pain of being far from Chicago; refusing to cow-tow to who I was; and some bad-ass traveling and programming.

Looking forward, I have a lot left to create, relationships and company to nurture, playing more guitar, programming harder, acting in my work, and adding more to this blog.

But traveling wise, the only place I want to be for a while is home in bed.



]]> http://dominic-tancredi.com/2010/07/05/birthday-notes-2009-2010/feed/ 0