Speaker For The Diodes - August 31st, 2008

05:25 am - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2007-01-21:

"If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?" -- Dick Cheney, U.S. vice-president, quoted in a New York Times story published April 13, 1991 after the first Gulf War.

http://www.slate.com/id/2072609/

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

09:41 pm - The Unfortunate Reason For The Annoying Cuts

Yes, I'm going on about LiveJournal-specific stuff again. While this is just to explain things to my LJ readers, I'm mirroring it to the other sites anyhow for the sake of completeness. Or maybe because my mind got infested with hobgoblins, I dunno.

The short version: LJ did something I find unacceptable. I don't want to vanish entirely from the view of my LJ-using friends, so I'm posting these "hey, new entry over here" entries on LJ but no longer posting whole entries there. I know I'll lose some readers, and I'm not happy about that, but I feel I have no other reasonable option. This makes me sad.

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At least a few of you noticed that my last few entries, including quote-of-the-day entries, have been posted to LiveJournal entirely behind what look like cut-tags, and a few of you have noticed that those are really links to full entries on sites other than LiveJournal. I've gotten some questions, some emphatic complaints, and at least one wrong (but close) guess. I did anticipate that folks would not be thrilled, and even that I'd lose readers over the change, as much as that prospect dismays me (and worries me, as I don't really have a good idea how many readers I'll lose). And I guess I really ought to provide the explanation where folks can see it easily, without extra clicking.

Really, I'm not fond of cut-tags myself, though they do have their uses. I routinely cut dreams and memes because I expect those to be 'noise' rather than 'signal' for a significant number of my friends and I don't feel as strong a need to make sure those get read as I do my other entries; and I have even occasionally cut for length (though I have a higher threshold for "needs a cut" than many people, and am more likely to cut as a way of folding/unfolding long parenthetical passages), as well as to make something easy for folks who'd be upset by it to avoid. But I'm with you on the "it breaks the flow of reading my friends-page" complaint, and I'm less likely to click a cut than to wade through a long entry right in front of me myself. So why am I inflicting on y'all something that I wouldn't particularly like as a reader? Well, basically, I feel boxed in -- this seemed like the least-bad course of action open to me when "put up or shut up" time arrived (late on the 28th).

This really goes back to Strikethrough 2007. (I hear you groan.)

Reaching even farther back than that: when I started using LJ, I liked the fact that it was free, and I liked thefact that it didn't have advertisements on it. I thought a couple of the paid-account features would be nice but I certainly didn't feel I needed them, especially considering how much time I spend broke. But after I'd been using LJ for a while and had decided that the service as a whole was something of value to me, not just a random entertainment, I decided I should pay for my account when I could, to support the site. (I don't recall whether my first-ever spell as a paid-account user was that, or whether someone had gifted me some paid time before then. I did receive gifts of paid-account time on several occasions, which meant that I had a paid account a little more often than I could afford to pay.) Once I'd gotten used to, for example, being able to create polls, I decided I really liked having paid features, but my main reason for scraping up the money when I could was really still to support this site that was giving me a service I valued even at the basic level; getting the extra features was a bonus, not the motivation.

Then Six Apart, who bought LJ, did some vile crap.

I wasn't hit directly, but I was sufficiently offended that I realized the Proper action would be to say, "If you don't make this right, I'm leaving." But I wasn't prepared for relocation, so leaving would have carried a high-enough cost to me (in terms of starting over) to make me flinch ... and I flinched. (And felt shame at having flinched.)

I took a somewhat lamer step though, and reverted my account to basic, withdrawing my financial support and stating (yes, in fora that site-management read) my reasons for doing so and my hope that they would redeem themselves enough to again be an organization that I could support in good conscience. Six Apart never did really get a clue, I think -- they made some gestures in the right direction, but didn't do enough. And then they went and did similar crap again, showing by actions (though denied in statements) that their advertisers' concerns carried more weight than those of their users. (An understandable -- even predictable -- prioritization for a company built on an advertising model, but I hope equally understandably offpissing to a user base that had been around longer than the advertising.) So in addition to "Do I want to support an organization that does that?", there was an added layer of, "Do I want to pay to be treated poorly?"

I started investigating other sites using the LJ software, both to prepare a bolt-hole in case 6A did something else that I really could not abide (multiple ones, in case my first pick went 404, turned evil, or got sold), and to try to keep up with (and be findable by) friends who had already fled LJ in disgust, in protest, or both. (With only partial success on that second bit. *sigh*) But while I wanted to not feel 'stuck' in LJ, I also really didn't want to leave. LJ is a social networking site in addition to being a blog host, and thus it matters where other users are. I really, really hoped that 6A would listen to the message its users were sending, correct its course, and be worthy of my cash again.

SUP bought LiveJournal, and some users predicted doom and gloom while others held out hope that the new owners would have a Clue (or show signs of being able to learn when Clue was handed to them). My message was that I really wanted SUP to be a company we could trust, and that would treat its users in a way that I felt I could support. SUP made some disagreeable moves early on, digging the hole deeper, but eventually at least started learning how to talk to LJ users, even if their even greater emphasis on ads was offputting (to put it mildly). Lately it's felt like they're taking three steps forward and two steps back, whereas at first it seemed as though they were making two steps back for each step forward. There are still some important bits missing, and the trust problem is not helped by things like taking away the ability to create basic accounts and using the excuse they used. Nor did the announcement that they were "bringing back basic accounts" that turned out not to be what we used to call basic accounts -- that there would be advertising attached somehow even to 'basic' accounts (which used to be the distinguishing feature between 'basic' and 'plus') and that, contrary to an earlier promise, existing basic accounts would not be grandfathered when ads were added to so-called 'basic' accounts.

They floated a few proposals for how to add ads to basic accounts, some better than others, depending on one's priorities and one's purpose in blogging. One of those, I considered poison. Alas, they decided on that one.

More than a few people who do not have LJ accounts and do not wish to for whatever reasons -- I'm not really sure how many, but a few I know in meatspace have mentioned it -- regularly read my journal. And as far as I can tell, I'm getting occasional non-LJ-user readers finding my journal via search engines (or links from non-LJ blogs). As of 2008-08-28, those people started seeing advertisements on my 'basic' LiveJournal journal. That's not cool, for a couple of reasons. First, because I know some folks are going to be put off by seeing the ads, so if there are ads I want it to be only because I decided that what I gain by having ads is worth more than losing whatever percentage of readers find ads distasteful enough to not come back. And I haven't decided that. Second, because if my words are being used to sell advertising, I want a cut. And third, because here I've decided that LJ -- as 6A and then as SUP -- has not (yet!) earned my support, and SUP has gone and said, "Oh, that's okay, we're going to make money off of you anyhow."

(This "show ads to not-logged-in readers seeing basic users' journals" business is obviously not so toxic to every basic user. Some post friends-only, so nobody can see their entries without being logged in anyhow; others don't expect, or don't care about, random strangers' and their impressions; some consider the ads to be such an insignificant factor that they're just not concerned regardless (though why anyone who thinks that wouldn't get a Plus account instead eludes me). We don't all have the same priorities here.)

Hey, their site, their investment, their rules. They can do that if they want. But also, hey, my content -- I can take it out of their playground. I'd rather have them earn my respect and my money than sell my work to advertisers, but that's not the direction they decided to go.

I know they have to get their money from someplace, but the whole point of withdrawing my financial support, however tiny it had been, was to tell them that if they wanted it from me, I wanted to see the policy problems fixed first. And yes, I realize that I'm effectively saying I expect something for nothing by continuing to use the site without paying. But as long as that was an option they allowed, I figure that was cool. They've now said "no free rides; either pay or be bait for the advertisers," which is not an unreasonable thing for them to say. And seeing that I do have options -- despite drawbacks like having a lot of people not follow me -- my answer to that reasonable announcement is a similarly reasonable, "since I don't like that, I'll put my writing elsewhere instead." This is not about whether LJ has some moral or ethical obligation to support free users (especially if, as they appeared to back when that 'strike' business was going on, consider those of us who wish to send them a message as 'enemies' (*sigh*)) without imposing ads -- we've had that conversation and I've stated my PR arguments, my for-the-good-of-the-community arguments, my economic arguments, and my admittedly weak ethical arguments (basically: "but you told us you weren't gonna!", which doesn't qualify is a 'contract') in that conversation. Them what 'as the gold made their decision, and that conversation's done; now it's just a question of how I act in light of the new rule.

I am, yes, trying to have my cake and eat it too, by continuing to post links to my new entries elsewhere. I accept that my decision not to support SUP at this time carries a cost, and I'm trying to minimize the pain as much as I can without resorting to whining, "but activism shouldn't inconvenience me." The Absolutely Correct path would be to delete everything except a message saying why I'd left, and not post to LJ again until/unless they live up to my standards. I'm doing this halfway: continuing to post pages that they'll put ads on, but having the only thing on those pages be the pointer to the part worth reading elsewhere. (Well, I hope my journal's worth reading anyhow.) I get a fraction of the value I used to get from LiveJournal, and they get a fraction of the revenue they'd hoped to get from my journal.

If they'd already convinced me to resume paying for an account before throwing this latest wrinkle in, this would be a much more difficult decision. It wouldn't affect me then (as currently implemented but if this doesn't bring in enough money, expect them to impose more ads more places), and I seem to have gotten pretty good at finding excuses and rationalizations for "not leaving quite yet" these past several months, so I'd have to weigh just how much I really cared purely as a matter of "preserve the atmosphere of classic LJ" principle. As it is, it does affect me, so the decision, while still terribly unpleasant, was at least obvious. Either tell SUP/LJ, "I'm a blowhard who can make lofty arguments but in the end you can go ahead, ignore everything I've said, and walk all over me," or demonstrate, "Yes I really did mean what I wrote, and will act in accordance with that reasoning even when it costs me more than a few dozen minutes of typing; even when it costs me some of what I'm here for in the first place."

Sadly, this makes me even less likely to pay for an LJ account in the future, because the longer I have to get used to not sharing my entries on LJ, the less value LJ will have for me even ifwhen SUP does demonstrate they can be trusted to treat their users well.

In the meantime, while I know that some of you will disagree with my reasons or think that I'm right but that a Strongly Worded Letter would have been enough without changing my posting habits, and I know that many of you find the extra step irritating because it does disrupt the scrollin'-thru-the-friendslist groove (and you have to do the OpenID dance to post a non-anonymous comment), I hope that most of you will at least understand that this is no mere caprice, and will click through to check out what I have to say anyhow, or will follow me to Blurty, CommieJournal, CrazyLife, DeadJournal, GreatestJournal, InsaneJournal, JournalFen, or Scribbld, (or DreamWidth when that becomes active) and friend me there.

And if you do not, I will understand. I knew there would be a price in readership. I wish it had not come to this. I'll miss the insightful, funny, helpful, and snarky comments from those of you who stop reading.

Just don't call this a 'flounce'. I'm not doing it for Teh Drahmah (I had hoped to make the change low-key but I underestimated how much the cuts would upset people). And I'm not even doing it to Make A Statement to SUP -- I've made my statements to SUP, explicitly, carefully, and repeatedly, when I told them why I had reverted my Paid account to Basic and what the consequence of imposing ads on existing basic accounts would be. (And I made my statement in a place where a representative of the company assured us the staff were reading every comment.) They didn't believe me, or more likely bet that I represent an ignorable minority (in which they may well turn out to be absolutely correct), or both, and "put up or shut up" day arrived. They took an action I'd said would be unacceptable, and here I am not accepting it. It's pretty simple, regardless of how annoying it is.

I'll entertain suggestions for ways to make this even less dramatic, and less inconvenient for y'all and for myself. So far this is the least painful of the solutions I've come up with consistent with my concerns. If you have a solution that neither violates the LJ TOS nor lets LJ earn advertising dollars from my writing, and is less annoying than this, I'll listen.

In principle, I should turn off comments on the LJ fake-cut entries, so that the comment pages won't be able to generate ad revenue either. But I figure that would annoy people even more, who want to post non-anonymously with the fewest extra steps possible, so I'm just going to hope that the comment pages don't get many ad-views.

I haven't chosen a 'main' site yet, but I'm posting the same content everywhere except on LiveJournal anyhow, so if you want to pick one, see where most of the comments start showing up, I suppose. I've got a partial design in my head for a system that'll gather the comments from all the copies of an entry into one place, but I haven't started trying to build it yet. DreamWidth is making smoother inter-site interoperability one of their goals, so perhaps they'll build something that will save me from having to roll my own (in which case they'll be my "front door"). Currently, InsaneJournal and CommieJournal are at the top of my list, and IJ is where I've been seeing the most comments other than LJ. The site that each fake-cut links to may differ (it's the alphabetically-first site without ads from the list of sites the entry has been posted to 140 seconds after the script started trying to post to all of them at once. If it points someplace other than whatever you've picked as your preferred place to read me, by the time you see the LJ entry the real entry should have showed up on my 'recent entries' page at all the other sites, barring site problems or network problems).

Additional reading:

• the so-called-basic account proposals, and discussion thereof
• announcement that changes to 'basic' accounts had gone into effect
• "Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure (part one)", by synecdochic
• "Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure (part two)", by synecdochic
• "Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure (part three)", by synecdochic

I'll let someone else find old links giving background on Strikethrough, Boldthrough, the breast feeding kerfuffle, the removal of Basic accounts, the monkeying with the popular interests list and interest-searches, the ominously vague statements regarding interpretation of also-vague policy, statement/action inconsistencies, and other reasons why LJ is in a position of having to earn trust back. I need to go do something else for a while.

11:01 pm - Brightness vs. Angle graph for IR LEDs?

I can't afford to order parts yet, but I figured I should work out enough of the design for the infrared flash I want to build, to have some idea what parts I need to save up for. I know that infrared LEDs are available with different angles of coverage for the cone of light they project, and I can easily enough calculate the angle-of-view for lenses of various focal lengths ... but I'm missing a crucial clue required for this geometry problem.

Do IR LEDs project a sharply-defined cone of even illumination; or do they appear to get continuously brighter as you get closer to seeing them head-on, with the viewing angle on the data sheet just indicating the range in which they're brighter than some industry-standard arbitrary threshold? (If you graph intensity versus viewing-angle, does the plot look more like the blue curve or the red curve in the figure to the right?) When you're using an IR photoreceptor simply as a switch, it doesn't matter -- either the coverage angle just tells you the angle over which your detector is guaranteed to get at least a certain amount of the emitter's power, or if you're trying to detect the orientation of the emitter you calibrate the receptor to trigger at the threshold you observe at the angle you want to declare close enough. But for photography, it's going to affect how hard it is to avoid "hot spots" in my photos, overexposed areas, uneven lighting.

Is the answer the same as for visible-light LEDs? If so, I can find out experimentally with LEDs I have at hand, easily enough. I'm betting that coverage angle depends at least partly on the shape of the lens -- domed vs. flat -- but does the fuzzy-vs.-sharp distinction also depend on the package? Or is the answer an extremely convenient "it's always like the blue curve" or "it's always like the red curve"?

I've been thinking of mounting the IR LED array on a flexible (or possibly hinged) surface, so I can change the curvature to change the coverage angle of the flash. So that when I'm using a 200mm lens, I'm not wasting energy lighting up the whole area that a 28mm lens would see, and can therefore get more distance (or use a smaller aperture) with the same number of milliWatts. I'll need to be careful not to create hot spots if I do that. And even if I don't make it adjustable, of the LEDs themselves make a hot spot in the center, I'll need to play games with the angles of different LEDs in the array to even that out. Unless I sacrifice some percentage of the output and stick a diffuser in front of them ... or is a diffuser with a Fresnel lens in front of that the proper way to go about this regardless?