one small voice

stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, et alia

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2007-04-27

An Untroubled Liberty

Jacob Bronowski on freedom and beauty...

Last month I posted about the views of both Alexander Nehamas and José Ortega y Gasset on beauty. Recently I revisited several essays by Jacob Bronowski on the same topic. Here are some quotes that interested me from his essay "The Shape of Things":

I do no regard aesthetics as a remote and abstract interest. My approach to aesthetics is not contemplative but active. I do not ask, "What is beauty?" or even, "How do we judge what is beautiful?" I ask as simply as I can, "What prompts men to make something which seem beautiful, to them or to others?"

This is a rational question and it deserves a rational answer. We must not retreat from it into vague intuitions, or sidestep it with hymns of praise to the mystical nature of beauty. I am not talking about mystics: I am talking about human beings who make things to use and to see. A rational aesthetic must start from the conviction that art (and science too) is a normal activity of human life.

And:

To my mind, the cave painting as much as the chipped flint tool is an attempt to control the absent environment, and both are created in the same temper; they are exercises in freeing man from the mechanical drives of nature.

In these words, I have put the central concept of my aesthetic: evolution has had, for man, the direction of liberty. Of course men do at times act from necessity, as animals do. But we know them to be men when their actions have an untroubled liberty -- when children play, when the young find pleasure in abstract thought, when we weigh and choose between two ambitions. These are the human acts, and they are beautiful as a painting or an invention is beautiful, because the mind in them is free and exuberant. And you will now see why I framed my opening question so oddly; for it is not the thing done or made which is beautiful, but the doing. If we appreciate the thing, it is because we relive the heady freedom of making it. Beauty is the by-product of interest and pleasure in the choice of action.

Elsewhere, Bronowski discusses the status of art-works as artifacts and the fact that all artifacts have a double aspect: we experience what they are but also how and why they were made. So we can ask two questions about any artifact: what was its creator trying to do, and why did he do it quite that way? The answers to these questions usually fall under the headings "content" and "style", but Bronowski emphasizes that content and style are separable only in analysis, not in reality. By trying to answer these questions about an artifact or more particularly a work of art, you can "relive the heady freedom of making it" and thus experience aesthetics from the producer's point of view. And after all, we wouldn't have art-works if creative individuals didn't produce such works in the first place.

Posted on 2007-04-27 at 15:11. File under philosophy.

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2007-04-18

Proxy65

Projects on the move....

I finally got around to moving the proxy65 project from JabberStudio to Google Code Hosting -- the new location is <http://code.google.com/p/proxy65/>. See you there! And yes, one of these days I'll prepare the 1.1 release. ;-)

Posted on 2007-04-18 at 14:17. File under jabber.

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GMX-Jabber

Another step towards world domination...

The German news site heise online is reporting that GMX.de, probably the largest ISP and hosting service in Germany, has added Jabber support for all the domains they host. I think that's the potential for about 5 million more servers on the Jabber network...

Posted on 2007-04-18 at 11:13. File under jabber.

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2007-04-13

Triskaidekalogophilia

Wordie fun on Friday the 13th...

I just added two more words to my Wordie list: omphaloskepsis and ultracrepidarian. Are they cool or what?

Omphaloskepsis comes from the ancient Greek words for navel and sight, thus resulting in a fancy word for navel-gazing.

The roots of ultracrepidarian are a bit more complex (well-explained here), but the meaning has more bite: "going beyond one's area of knowledge". Thus we could say that Al Gore was a classic ultracrepidarian when he made "An Inconvenient Truth" -- just because he invented the Internet doesn't mean he's an expert on climatology. ;-)

Posted on 2007-04-13 at 21:13. File under language.

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2007-04-12

SoC Projects

XSF and otherwise...

Today we announced the official XSF Summer of Code projects over at Extended Conversation, but a little digging reveals that there are plenty of Jabber-related projects happening under other mentoring organizations, too! Here's what I found:

Adium: Improved Bonjour Support for Adium
Adium: Improving Adium's XMPP Support
Adium: Improving multi-user chat
Drupal: Implementation of Jabber/XMPP communications interface for Drupal
Eclipse: VoIP via the ECF Call API and the Jingle Protocol
GNOME: VoIP and video call client using Telepathy
MoinMoin: Interactive Wiki Maintenance with Jabber/XMPP
Pidgin: Telepathy support for Gaim
Pidgin: Certificate Manager and Improved SSL Support

We wish success to all the SoC projects!

Posted on 2007-04-12 at 17:03. File under jabber.

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2007-04-11

Alternate Presence

Blogging elsewhere...

Just a reminder that I continue to blog about Jabber/XMPP over at Extended Conversation, the official weblog of the XMPP Standards Foundation. Today I posted two entries, one on XMPP-related I-D Updates at the IETF and the other on Presence Scalability (specifically comparing XMPP and SIMPLE on bandwidth usage for interdomain federation).

Posted on 2007-04-11 at 16:43. File under jabber.

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Why Bother With Standards?

Some potentially entertaining video...

The good folks at VON have posted video of a recent panel discussion in which I participated at Spring VON 2007, entitled "My Mother Uses Skype -- Why Bother With Standards?" I had fun playing devil's advocate, so the video may be somewhat entertaining in a geeky sort of way. :-)

Posted on 2007-04-11 at 09:47. File under jabber.

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2007-04-04

IMbox

Noteworthy Jabber/XMPP news.

Here is some Jabber sleekness I've noted recently on the web:

SleekXMPP is a new Python library for XMPP, from the great Nathan Fritz.
Xeus Messenger is a sleek new Jabber client for Windows.
MyGADs (sporting a sleek Jabber interface) got a best in show from PC World at the CTIA Mobile Phone Show.

Yes, sleek is the word of the day. :)

Posted on 2007-04-04 at 14:31. File under jabber.

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