An elegy for sweet forgetfulness, soon to be lost forever

In my memory, I'm standing on the Île Saint-Louis, looking at a butcher shop.

But was I ever there? I've provably been in Paris. I've likely been on the Île Saint-Louis. After that I don't know. In my mind's eye I can picture it and picture myself there, but my mind's eye is a notoriously filthy liar. I can remember any number of events that never happened, and I have forgotten many important events that did.

If I was never there, where did this memory come from? It could have been Edmund White, whose evocative novels of his life in Paris have always brought the city to life for me. Reading Declare by Tim Powers brought these memories back, and added wartime paranoia and Nazi intrigue to the mix.

I'll never know for sure whether I've been there before. My previous visits to Paris were before the era of ubiquitous surveillance, GPS cellphone tracking, Google Latitude, Foursquare and ultrazillions of digital photos being taken of absolutely everything at every moment and being pasted online. So even once all of the artificial "privacy" barriers are dropped, once indexing and face recognition systems correlate every sparrow fart since the dawn of the digital age, once every credit-card purchase record is cracked open and something like Vernor Vinge's GreenInc provides a complete personal history of every human, nobody will be able to say with any degree of clarity whether that memory is true or false.

I weep for the children. Their digital trail will never allow them to erase their personal history and start over. No more retrospective virginity restorations. No more he-said, she-said he-did. No more bonfire of the diaries for personal reinvention. Everyone will become a politician denying their words of the day before, followed by an immediate multi-POV video playback with subtitles, location tags, and links to probable original sources shown in the goggles of everyone around them.

On the other hand, I weep with joy for the children. Memory prostheses will make arguments quite different: instead of arguing whose recollection is more accurate, people's agents will automatically debate the relative authoritativeness of the certificate chains and trust authorities of the different sources of evidence. When professionally photoshopped memories, reputation laundering, real-time distributed consensus auctions and whitelisted memory attestation services become common we just won't worry about it anymore. We won't argue about trivia.

Maybe I'll steer clear of the Île Saint-Louis on my next trip and leave the past alone, whether it's mine or borrowed from somebody else. I'll just preserve my own personal mythology a little bit longer.

Homogeneous web development: Meteor, Derby, Firebase and the portents of doom

A variety of new web frameworks are being cooked up that allow you to write one set of seamless code for the client and server.  It's a problem that has haunted the web development community since the dawn of JavaScript and the DOM.  One approach is to basically define the database operations on the client.  Does that sound like a good idea, or does that sound like a great idea?

Meteor

Exposes the MongoDB API directly on the client to work on automatically-synced data subsets. What could possibly go wrong?  Let's name the project after a flaming ball of rock and find out for sure!

Derby

Is client-side MVC too confusing? Is Node.js too immature? Let's combine them and see what happens!  (It remains to be seen whether Derby is named after a hipster hat or a county fair event.)

Firebase

"We have a full security system in the works that will allow you to control read and write access on individual locations in Firebase on a per-user basis. However, it’s not ready for widespread use yet, so right now all data in Firebase is publicly accessible. Please keep this in mind when building apps! Please contact us if you need security or want to be one of the first to try out the new system." ^*

Despite my scornful tone, I'm actually very optimistic on these technologies and very hopeful that at least one of these will be ultimately successful.  I'm also really happy that I'm not going to be the first person trying build an application on this stuff. Given the theme of the project names, it's fair to say that most early adopters will get burned.

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* Yes, that's a direct quote.

Taste matters: why I should have known better than to use GoDaddy

Years ago I registered several domain names.  They were a lot cheaper then, and because I didn't want to think about which registrar to use, I went with the cheapest and most popular one: GoDaddy.

I did it despite their stupid, vaguely patriarchal name.  I did it even despite the blatantly sexist advertisements.  I told myself that they were just doing what they had to do to bring in customers, that it really didn't matter.  I silenced my doubts and gave them my money.

Since then, GoDaddy's behaviour has been increasingly tacky, insulting, and just plain bad for the Internet and its users.  I'm moving all of my domains onto another registrar, and although it is a pain in the neck, it's the right thing to do.  The lesson for me is that taste matters.  If a company seems distasteful to you initially, they're likely to offend you later — and they'll be doing it with your money.