Fragments weblog > Monthly Archive

The 'New Working Class'

I'm reading an ancient *cough* 1960 *cough* article, titled The 'New Working Class' (Lockwood, David (1960) "The 'New Working Class'," European Journal of Sociology, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp 248-259). It opens like this:

The problem of the 'new working class' is located in the events of recent political history, specifically in the three successive electoral defeats of the Labour Party.

This article obviously addresses an important issue, but if you're not already familiar with the meaning of the term "new working class," then the "problem" that is being addressed completely escapes you. Maybe if you're British, you'd know about the post-war string of defeats of the Labour Party, but if you're not, then the localization of The Problem in that issue doesn't tell you a whole lot.

What suddenly struck me, when reading this opening line, is how important the specifics of our own place and time are. Maybe I turn out to be addressing issues that in 50 years are still relevant, but more likely people will look, if they happen to be looking that way at all, at my work wondering what the point and the context of the exercise was. There is something to learn from mr. Lockwood's article though and that is the rest of his first paragraph, in which he explains The Problem:

In attempting to explain the failure of the traditional working class party to increase, or even retain, its support among the wage-earning population, a good many generalizations about the causes and consequences of secular changes in the class structure have been advanced and disputed. The salient thesis is that which seeks to account for the conservative drift of the working class in terms of their growing prosperity and their gradual assimilation to the middle class in an economy of full employment and rising expectations of material welfare. As one writer puts it: "The whole working class finds itself on the move, moving towards new middle class values and middle class existence."

Well, it pays to lay out the issues you're writing about in clear and plain language. After that first paragraph I know what the article is about, even though I didn't know about The Problem or its Context. So, even if some future PhD student wrinkles hir brow in wonderment over some strange and unknown preoccupation of mine, I should still try to explain what it's about, instead of assuming that the people who will be reading it will already be conversant with the issues at hand. I bet mr. Lockwood never thought he might get quoted on someone's weblog... who knows where a snip of my work will end up down the line?

Feb 2, 2004 @ 17:41 » no comments » Reading

Ping pings again

It may not be much of an issue to you, but I'm happy to report that this MovableType installation pings again. In November the hosting of my domain was moved to a new server and from that moment MT couldn't ping sites such as blo.gs and weblogs.com anymore, nor could it any longer send Trackback pings. A misplaced /etc/protocols file eventually proved to be the culprit. Now all pings ping again and that makes me want to write many more posts, just to enjoy the happy sound of it.

Feb 9, 2004 @ 16:15 » 4 comments » Sitestuff

Firefox

In case you missed it: Mozilla released the successor to the Firebird browser (née Phoenix), called Firefox. Go get it... it's the best browser around and it's now got a Windows installer.

Feb 9, 2004 @ 18:59 » 2 comments » Software

Sterling in Amsterdam

Darn... Bruce Sterling is in Amsterdam today, but fat chance I'll bump into him. So near, so far away. I wonder if he wanders into one of those alternative music stores or the old video-games-and-consoles recycling emporium tucked away in the alleys around central station. And I wonder where that Gibsonian coffin hotel is... I've never seen that.

Feb 11, 2004 @ 09:38 » no comments » General

Hidden meaning

I cannot help but make obscure references and encode (semi)private meanings into everything I write. Have a look at the very bottom of the navigation bar on this page; now hover your mouse pointer over the "It's Vee-4-Ooh!" area. That little paragraph has a HTML title attribute that reads: "aggravated mopery and dopery."

That's a reference to Pat Cadigan's Doré Konstantin novels, in which the protagonist is a detective who has the unenviable task to investigate crimes committed in online environments without much help from a law that doesn't yet recognize virtual characters and assets as "real." Konstantin uses the phrase "aggravated mopery and dopery" to describe the misdoings of the users and their virtual characters in those online environments. I stuck it in there, because I was reading those novels when developing this layout, and because I wanted to comment on the process of writing a CSS design that works across a range of browsers. IE's misbehavior and willful misinterpretations of the laws of the W3C particularly struck me as aggravated mopery and dopery.

I don't expect many, if any, people to get those little hints. Still, I'm always chuckling to myself when I've managed to work some "hidden" reference into a text and I enjoy rediscovering those hidden meanings when I happen to reread something I've written before. Recently I read an article of my thesis advisor that opened with the line: "It was a dark and stormy night..." That's a reference to the opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton's famously crappy writing. Finding such a little gem, understanding the reference and the irony with which it was written, is great. I e-mailed her to say I enjoyed it and she replied that I was only the second person to catch that reference. So few people to catch a little in-joke, but maybe that's part of the fun... it's not for everybody. I'm sure I miss a whole lot of funny references because I just don't know what the writer is referring to.

I wonder though if many people more or less consciously encode private and thus largely hidden meanings in their work... Do you?

Feb 11, 2004 @ 11:09 » 3 comments » Research

CMS jitters

If you blog, you probably know the feeling: after a while, the layout of your blog stops looking as crisp and appetizing as it did when you just finished it. It becomes harder to write fresh and funky posts, just because you know where they will end up. Luckily, that problem is relatively simple to solve: redesign.

It's more difficult when the content management system that you're using is starting to feel a bit old and used. It's what powers the site, it's what holds all your precious data. Don't get me wrong... I really like MT, but recently I discovered Wordpress. I've been reading the docs, toyed with the interface over at OpenSourceCMS, and ruminated about the possibilities of changing over because it looks fresh and full of possibilities. Some advanced features and plugins currently keep me from moving, but the simplicity of a pure PHP program and dynamic page generation remain a rather enticing proposition. Guess I have the CMS jitters. Anne recently moved from MT to WP and Shelley plans to move as well. Alpha testing of MT 3.0 is about or has just started, so maybe I should stick around for a little longer and see what future versions of MT, WP, and maybe other CMSes bring.

Feb 11, 2004 @ 14:00 » no comments » Sitestuff

Instructions

I love it when geeks talk dirty:

Download this tarball.

Explode it.

Edit the file config.php to contain the correct DB connection information.
* If needed, create a MySQL DB for FEED ON FEEDS. Or, you can use an existing DB.

Upload the entire tree to wherever on your server you want FEED ON FEEDS to live.

Load the page http://{your server}/{wherever you put FEED ON FEEDS}/install.php. The installer will first check that it can connect to your DB, and then attempt to create the necessary two tables. Then, it will attempt to create a subdirectory called cache where it will store cached copies of RSS feeds. This part of the installation may fail, as your PHP process may not have permission to create a directory. You may need to create the directory {wherever you uploaded FEED ON FEEDS to}/cache/ yourself, and make sure it is writable by the PHP process. If you needed to do that, reload install.php.

You should now see a message that says you're ready to go!

Feb 16, 2004 @ 09:08 » no comments » General

Router, webserver, old and new

So, it's been a bit quiet on the weblog, but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy... au contraire, mes amis! The semester just started and I'm teaching a course. I'm still a PhD student, so my teaching load is fairly light: only one course and some odd jobs each year. I'd already forgotten again how much energy it takes to get a course up and running, to connect with the students, and get them excited about this class, which they, inevitably, at first view as yet another class, yet another obligation. I've also spend some time upgrading the house LAN, which is what is post is all about... warning, technicalities ahead!

In the first picture you can see the old and the new router/firewall, separated by my old, dusty, but reliable Deskjet 520. At the bottom of the pile is my old Pentium 100 box that runs a tiny, 1.44MB floppy sized Freesco Linux distribution. It has two equally ancient 3Com 509b ISA network cards and all the computers were strung together with COAX cables; speed limit on the local network: 10 Mbps, plenty fast enough for accessing the Internet, pretty slow for regularly backing up files from one computer to the next. On top sits the shiny new router, a Linksys WRT54G, a combined 802.11g wireless access point and four port router/switch/firewall. What's so nice about this little appliance, apart from its wireless and 100 Mbps network functionality, is that it's silent. No fans to cool it, no whirring harddisks, just a couple of blinking LEDs. I've managed to put together a rather quiet computer and now I've eliminated one more source of noise from my room. Finally the noise level inside is lower than whatever sounds filter in from outside. I'm making a vow to always go for the quietest possible computing solution from now on... it makes concentrating on work much easier and at the end of the day, you're not half as tired.

Screenshot of Freesco webserver booting But, the old Pentium is not going out the window! Using the packages available for this tiny Linux distro, I've upgraded the installation to an Apache webserver with PHP, Perl, and MySQL support (see the second picture). I'm working on a website for a small foundation and I have it running with MovableType, but their site requires an aweful lot of templates to run as it should. That's why I'm looking into different content management systems. Having my own little Linux server sitting there is a great for installing an testing all those different systems.

If you don't have a whole lot of Linux experience, I can recommend installing Freesco and the Apache related packages. Because it's such a small distro, it's all very straightforward and even if you have to go hunting through directories to find something, it's all fairly comprehensible. And it just works when you install the packages, unlike the Mandrake installation on my other system. I've managed to install Apache and related packages on a "workstation install," but they don't run when I boot into Mandrake. I'm sure it will work just fine if I fiddle with some configuration files, but I don't have the time to go figure out how to do that right now. So, if you have some tips, I'd appreciate it... meanwhile, I'm pretty happy with my setup. Back to work now...

Feb 16, 2004 @ 10:49 » 1 comment » Tech