From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <8a7446c6ef3710add53e323abe77607b@sphericalharmony.com>
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2013 08:39:38 +0000
From: mycroftiv@sphericalharmony.com
To: 9fans@9fans.net
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: [9fans] Can you pass the Advanced Namespace Test?
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 2ba6b1dc-ead8-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

Hi 9fans, it's been awhile since I posted, hasn't it?  :)

This post will probably be the weirdest one yet but maybe it will help
everything else make sense.  Some of this is going to be personal, I
warn you.

I am a dirty old hippie freak amateur software developer having a
public "meltdown" on 9fans.  I'll try to explain my behavior from the
personal perspective, and explain a few things about Advanced
Namespace Tools along the way.

The year 2012 was very bad for me mainly because my Dad died.  I loved
him a lot and we got along but I also feel like I profoundly
disappointed him in life.  I turned out to be a weird hippie-musician
with incredibly extreme ideas about placing the human-to-human level
of reality ahead of things like laws and businesses.  I pretty much
believe what John Perry Barlow of the EFF believes, but with even more
hippie freak extremism.  Anyway, even though I describe myself as a
"piano teacher" I haven't had much employment at all for a long time.
I have arthritis and even though my parents didn't understand my
values, they helped support me even though I wasn't really working.

Instead of working, what was I doing?  Music, writing - and PLAN NINE
FROM BELL LABS.

When you are an unemployed, good-for-nothing son living off your
parents, it is Not Easy to explain why you need money to pay a credit
card bill which includes a large amount of old decrepit computer
hardware, ridiculous quantities of ethernet cabling, uninterruptible
power supply, and $200 a month home T1 line.  Why would you need this?

"To provide free public Plan 9 grid services to 4chan, mom!  It's
actually a really cool idea, if you could just understand..."

This is not parody, this was literally my life.  I know it makes no
sense.  Meanwhile I'm also playing classical piano and studying
physics and music and working on horribly overambitious ideas about
how the structure of classical music and the structure of physics is
identical and Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata is actually a musical
portrayal of a spaceship being dragged into a Black Hole, because
Matthieu's tonal theory shows constant harmonic movement towards flat
tonalities, and this is like being caught in an enormous tonal black
hole pulling you down towards the flat tonalities.

Yeah, I don't think anyone is gonna read that book.  Neither musicians
nor physicists are interested in insane Totalizing Theories of how
everything in reality is a fractal mapping of everything else and the
structure of music and the structure of cosmology is just as good an
example of anything else.  I still like the idea, but whatever.

Back to Plan 9.

During 2012 my Dad, who was a professor of law at the university of
wisconsin and often taught intellectual property, died after several
years of worsening health.  I don't need to go into any details
because I'm sure everyone has lived through these things, and we just
have to get by.

Anyway, I felt bad - still feel bad, really bad - that from my Dad's
perspective, I never accomplished a single thing in the world.  He was
actually way too nice to say anything like that, don't get me wrong.
My dad was a very very mild mannered and kind man so this is about me
feeling guilty about never doing anything that I thought he would be
proud of.  Stupid cheesiest psychological motivations in the book
right, I know, but I'm just telling it like it is.

So at the start of 2013, I determined that even if my Dad wasn't
around to see it, I wanted to take a more serious approach to life and
exert my absolute maximum effort to do something worthwhile.  As a
classical pianist with arthritis, I was not about to take the stage on
Carnegie Hall anytime soon, but I thought that returning to work on
Plan 9 with renewed focus, I might be able to actually do something
worthwhile.

So, I started rebuilding my grid, and noticed as I was doing so that
my own softwrae tools from the previous few years actually fit
together in a way I thought was quite synergistic, and so I started
working hard on polishing and extending everything.  I started to get
really excited because I felt like I had stumbled onto something very
cool and "hidden" in Plan 9 design.  The sense that "wow, maybe this
namespace tools project could actually contribute something to plan 9
that other people would care about" started to drive me to work in a
fanatical way on the project.

I became so possessed with determination to make ANTS the best Plan 9
software release I possibly could that it was pretty much impossible
to sleep.  The idea that I could finally put something out in the
world with some value to other people, and thus to some extent redeem
a life that up to age 40 would be described by most people as "dismal
failure" - pushed me to work myself far past the point of physical and
mental endurance, so currently due to lack of sleep and overwork I am
indeed in a hysterically emotional and irrational state.

(Just in case any is Worried About Me - I'm fine!  I am committed to
doing my best in the world for as long as I can and as not giving up
no matter how things work out.  My dad told me to do my best, and I'm
trying to, and I won't give up, and I want to have helpful and
positive relations with all other living beings.)

How does this relate to ANTS?

Well, ANTS is "radical hippie anti-authoritarian communist data
sharing software" which tries to overthrow the authority of a central
root filesystem and let every process have a different, Totally Groovy
Namespace, in which that process can "Just Be and Do My Own Thing,
Man!"

ANTS is my attempt to make the most free-form, liberated, no-rules
form of Plan 9 that I could.  I dont LIKE the rules such as "boot for
venti first, then your fossil, then your cpu" - maybe i don't wanna!
Why can't I boot whatever I want?  Who said that this "root
filesystem" is so important, anyway?  Why can't that file system over
there be my root?  Can't all the different roots be EQUAL and not put
one specific file descriptor on a pedestal and say "this is the King
File Descriptor?"

So yeah, ANTS is like "Plan 9 goes to the Rainbow Gathering and drinks
some Kool-Aid and everyone gets naked and lies under the stars and
sings songs together."

And a final note on the Stupid Patent Thing

I talked to my dad A LOT about software and patents and how I thought
it was all just total BS and a broken, bad system.  He agreed by the
end of his life I think more than he had earlier, because he had seen
a lot of court rulings that he thought were ill-considered in this
matter.  I can't speak for him, and he never at all agreed with my
Very Radical Ideas about every single aspect of society - but he did
agree, I think, that the patent system had gone very wrong in the
field of software.

So, let's draw the picture together here to try to understand my
public meltdown.

I'm a weird guy desperately trying to do my best in the world and
offer something, anything of value to other humans.  I believe in Doug
Hofstatder's ideas about "superrational cooperation" and to me, trying
to just write software and give it away and never dream of trying to
engage in any of the Patent BS is just the best way to live as a human
being.

So I try to release ANTS to the Plan 9 community, and I just can't
tell what anyone thinks.  Some people say it seems cool, but even
though I made all this documentation and ready to use virtual
machines, it doesn't seem like anyone is really exploring the thing
that I invested all my heart and soul and best efforts in creating.  I
thought people would be interested and excited by what I was trying to
do, even if my implementation was amateurish.

There is a pretty well-known thing called "impostor syndrome" and I
feel that really intensely in Plan 9.  Compared to just about everyone
else, I'm just an amateur who "wandered in from the street" and I have
a lot of ideas for how to use Plan 9 and I struggle to implement them
practically - but I think a lot of the ideas are cool.

Anyway, I have a lot of anxiety about whether my software is
interesting, useful, or if anyone cares whatsoever.  Thank you by the
way to the several people who HAVE given me positive feedback, it has
been very helpful to me.

So anyway, in the context of all this, last night, I have the thought
to myself:

"I wonder if I could get in touch with some of the Plan 9 people who I
had thought might have some interest in this, maybe ask them as a
personal favor to take a look?"

About two random web searches later I stumbled on a recently issued
patent for something that seemed to me just like Doug McIlroy's old
original idea about free muxing of pipes rather than just linear,
which I had done a light version of myself, and I would have laughed
at the idea of patenting due to the clear statements of McIlroy and
Thompson decades ago.

The feeling "here I am slaving my ass off in my basement, and nobody
has the interest or motivation to really figure out what it is I'm
tryong to create" combined with seeing a Big Business Patent on a
different implementation of the trivial idea of pipe-muxing - well,
you probably read the post I made in the midst of those emotions.

I believe in human beings living their life as human beings - and that
our human to human interactions are more important than business,
patents, and laws - because those things were create to serve us, but
instead it seems like we end up serving them.

The whole reason I love Plan 9 is that I think it is the "most human"
os - a kind of software antidote to a society that is way too rigid
and uptight and where free creativity and sharing of ideas is choked
off.  Even my ability to just reach out and be friends with other
people who work on Plan 9 somehow seems like it is barred by this
corporate patent NDA BS that isn't actually helping us as human
beings.

In other words - the matrix has us.  The systems of commerce and law
that we created to serve our needs have grown and grown and become
like these huge autonomous machines - IBM is just a big machine made
of all these structural rules and it follows the structural rules so
it patents everything it can because of obligation to shareholders,
etc etc etc - and that is why I feel only friendliness to all the
human beings who work for IBM, but I still don't care for IBM, because
IBM only cares about me to the extent that I serve or harm its
economic interests.  You can't be FRIENDS with IBM.

I want to be friends with the world, so all of the things which stand
in the way of human beings treating each other like human beings seem
to me like things we should question.  I feel bad because I doubt
complaining about how dumb software patents are made it easier for me
to win friends in this community, where the echoes of Pike vs.
Stallman are still to be heard.

Anyway, no clue who made it to the end of this wall of text, but
thanks if you did.

Ben Kidwell "mycroftiv"