Aptana Has Help

Eclipse is my IDE of choice. I will not argue that it is the best IDE for each of the tasks I use it for – that is not the point. I like Eclipse because it represents a one-stop-shop – I use it to edit web pages, style sheets, JavaScript, Python, PHP and Java. Eclipse also gives me access to my code repository using Subversion.

Lately, I have also been using Aptana, an Eclipse plug-in that helps me create JavaScript. It also makes some of the latest Web 2.0 cool effects available to me by helping me integrate various JavaScript libraries with my code.

Today, I discovered that the Aptana site provides some high quality help for web developers. I do not specialize in front-end development; therrefore, I find this page very useful. I am currently promoting the use of AJAX at a client site – these resources will be very useful. So will Aptana. Give it a try.

Vista Makes Me Cranky

I had a chance to sit down and look at Microsoft’s new Vista operating system yesterday. I have nothing to say about the technology itself, but I realized that Vista makes me cranky.

First, I do not want to buy a new machine or upgrade an old one to be able to run Vista. I want to install Vista as a Virtual machine under the terms of the current license. I hate the Windows authentication feature – my laptop, which has a licensed copy of Windows on it, failed authentication.

I have just realized that my feelings about Windows are not even rational any more. I am just cranky, and I will find fault with any part of the OS. How did I get this way?

Cultural Software

My friend Lesley sent me a link to some wonderful free books that are published under the creative commons license. One of the titles that caught my attention was CULTURAL SOFTWARE: A Theory of Ideology, by J.M. Balkin.

In a previous life, I was a student of political science, and I enjoyed it very much. I was particularly interested in language, and the history of some key concepts we take for granted. For example, the concept of so-called culture.

Culture is a noun today, and it has been defined in many ways by many academic disciplines. However, the word did not begin as a noun but as a verb, and it was related to the word agriculture. One raised and cultured children to appreciate and know things about art, music, society and politics.

Culture, when it first became a noun, was the means by which we trained an socialized children. In time culture became disconnected, the product of culturation. Culture become a force, a mystical energy that shapes us on its own, an entity with near volition and personality. Culture became a thing – it became reified. (Reification comes from the Latin word res, which means “thing”.)

Continue paying attention to the language. To coin a phase “Cultural software” is to take the noun “culture”, to turn it into an adjective and to use it to modify a thing called software. In this case, the term software is also a metaphor – it transfers its meaning to the word culture. “You got some peanut butter on my culture – yes, well you got some chocolate on my software.”

So what do we get? In the preface of the book, which is almost all I have read, we get this definition: “To be part of a culture, to be socialized or acculturated, is to possess a certain kind of information-cultural know-how. Cultures are populations of individuals with relatively similar kinds of cultural information . . . I call this cultural information cultural software.”

A brief browse of a few chapters suggests that the author sees software as an artifact that has been consciously made, and he sees a process of culture-making that can be compared to making software. As a software developer, I see cultural software as plumbing for thinking and being in a society. I see culture-making as a necessary activity both for maintaining and for adapting the status quo.

The author seems to be aware that there are several ways to deploy software. We can download and configure, but we can also spread software as an infection or a virus. We are most of us familiar with “viral videos” or with the term “meme”. We are all familiar with the dreaded “computer virus”. Neither software nor culture is something any of us can control.

A meme, as first defined by Richard Dawkins, is a unit of cultural transmission. The author points out that “memes improve their reproductive success if they have behavioral effects that promulgate their own spread.” This is interesting. At first, memes were observed in the culture, but now we are trying to engineer them in the lab. Biological metaphors apply, but so does the mataphor of software.

Overall, I like the use of “software” as a metaphor for culture. The only thing I have not seen in my quick scan of the book is the concept of the unintended meme or accidental culture – we are the products of culture as much as we are the makers of culture. Some ideas have a force of their own and an influence beyond what was intended by any of us.

I will give the book a read. Before I begin, I want to ask: Is culture making us, or are we making culture? I could also ask, are we making software or is software making us? As the saying goes, “The fish do not see the water.”

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