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Chapter 2: The Commons: From Tragedy to Triumph

The chapter starts by outlining Garret Hardin’s tragedy of the commons argument.  In short, my understanding of the argument is that due to the inherent selfishness of individuals the commons are doomed to overuse — unless they are turned into private property, or turned over to the state, and unless the users of a resource are regulated through coercion. Hardin’s paper is more generally about population limits and his views appear quite bluntly Malthusian.

Having seen functioning commons, Ostrom disagreed with Hardin’s analysis.  She studied commons that worked (and also those that didn’t), and captured her analysis of what made a commons sustainable in her work “Governing the Commons.”

Continue reading “Thoughts on Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals, Chapter 2”

Thoughts on Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals, Chapter 2

This chapter starts out with a brief biography of Ostrom and her work, providing some context. I think it’s the right amount – the ideas are more important, but it is interesting to get some biographical context. The patriarchal system she faced early on is pretty galling – difficulties in getting where she got to, just by virtue of being a woman.

Ostrom doesn’t slot into a particular predefined school of thought, with some ties to some conservative right thinkers, yet some radical views. I like that Wall approaches it not so much trying to pin her ideas down to any particular ideology, but looking at what practical effects the ideas have had (and can have).

Continue reading “Thoughts on Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals, Chapter 1”

Thoughts on Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals, Chapter 1

In case it helps anyone, here are the steps I needed to take to get geben working in spacemacs in order to debug local web apps (this in Ubuntu 16.04):

  • Add geben package to .spacemacs and reload
 dotspacemacs-additional-packages '(some-other-package geben)
  • Assuming you have xdebug installed, add the following to your php.ini file in /etc/php/7.1/apache2/php.ini
[xdebug]

xdebug.remote_enable=On

xdebug.remote_host=localhost

xdebug.idekey=geben

xdebug.remote_autostart=On
  • Open the file you’re interested in debugging
  • Start geben in spacemacs with M-x geben
  • Navigate to localhost/some-app.php in a browser

That should trigger geben. Debugging time!

A bonus note: I didn’t have any luck with geben-find-file when trying to add breakpoints to other files in the project, but using geben-open-file worked (just a little bit more cumbersome.)

PHP debugging in spacemacs with geben

At HWC London tonight, I worked on a small thing – figuring out why my avatar was appearing blurry when pulled in to other sites following a webmention I’ve sent to them.

For example, on this like of one of Chris’ posts at boffosocko.com:

There’s me at the bottom left, cheerfully blurry.

I wasn’t quite sure why, because the h-card I added into my WordPress theme links to a profile image on my site that is 654×654.

Looking at this with Calum we saw that I have multiple h-cards appearing on any given page, and (other than the one I’ve hard coded) they all point to my image on Gravatar.  Not only that, they are specifically pulling out a 40px square version of my gravatar.

With a little inspection it turns out that every post on my site has a h-card embedded in it.  It’s in the post footer that is added to each post, like this:So the bit that says ‘by’ and my name, also includes h-card microformats.  And in that h-card markup, the image source is my gravatar image, at size 40px.

I wasn’t sure if having an h-card in every single post even made sense, but a bit of discussion with Barry helped me to understand the places you might have the h-card, and that while there’s various ways of doing it, an explicit h-card per post is certainly fine.  Barry pointed me to the authorship page on the wiki for more details on this.

OK, so where does the h-card per post come from in my site?  Given that it contains microformats, and I don’t think WordPress has much microformats built in, the most likely candidate is for it to be somewhere in my fork of the Sempress theme.

A quick search for h-card in the code of my theme for h-card shows yup, that’s where that post footer is being rendered.  It’s in the sempress_posted_on function – there’s a call to get_avatar, a built-in WordPress function.  In that call, the argument for the desired avatar size is being passed in as 40.

So I’ve bumped that up to 96, and all should now be well.

 

 

HWC London: 10th January 2018

Our team away afternoon at the start of November was a trip to The Glassroom, a ‘pop up tech store with a twist’.  It was set up in a space in central London, by Mozilla and the Tactical Technology Collective, and upon entering it looks pretty similar to an Apple store.  Cool white colours and ‘products’ on pedestals, even a Genius bar (though here named the Ingenius bar).

The topics of the exhibit were personal data, personal data security, and privacy.  It’s purpose was to get us thinking about the kind of information that is stored about us online, who owns that data, and what they are doing with it.

We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.

— Eric Schmidt, when he was CEO of Google

Continue reading “Personal data security at The Glassroom”

Personal data security at The Glassroom

Monday

Monday I went on an Insider walking tour. I really like walking tours in unfamiliar cities. If you get a good guide it’s a great way to see some of the major attractions, in a short span of time, and to get some deeper insights into the city and its history in the the process. This was great, the guide Brian was really fantastic – funny and knowledgeable.

We got some of the history of Berlin right back from where it started up until the present day. It was interesting to learn some basics of of Berlin and German pre-history – such that Berlin wasn’t the capital of Germany until relatively recently (and in fact Germany as a country didn’t exist for a long time – it was the kingdom of Prussia for centuries.) Hopefully I haven’t mangled the region’s history too much there.

The post WWII era holds the most historical intrigue for me, literally East meeting West and colliding in a barrier between the two. The demarkation of the path of the Berlin Wall is fascinating and boggling. It’s one of the starkest physical representations of humanity’s split into competing politcal ideologies, at least in Europe. It’s hard to imagine a city carved into two like that, in this case with a graphically-titled ‘death strip’ in between. It’s like for me if suddenly overnight a wall went up through London, and friends north of the river are suddenly in a different state and a different regime and I need to cross a border to see them.

Continue reading “Berlin 2017: Part 2”

Berlin 2017: Part 2

I read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin recently. It’s quite a few weeks since I finished it, so my recollections are now a little hazy, but I wanted to take the time to write something about it, as it was very good.

It was indeed a great book. Beautifully written. The story revolves around the life of Shevek, an inhabitant of the world of Anarres. The central premise is that Anarres is a world where anarchism is the predominant political system, founded by individuals who splintered away from the neighbouring world of Urras many years ago to start a different society. The life and travels of Shevek serve as the vessel for contrasting full-blown anarchism with full-blown capitalism, as he visits and explores the country of A-Io on Urras. A-Io is patriarchy and individualism dialled up to 11. The book provides many moments of point and counterpoint on the merits and dismerits of individualism and communalism when both go to their extremes.

Continue reading “The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin”

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin