So it looks like I SUMBITTED instead of SUBMITTED a dissertation. Darn, I better change that today and I will make sure that I update it online.

So I missed a number of talks and events the last day from WTH. But one of the truly astounding elements of this con is that they basically but everything online,–videos, slides, commentary–within a day or two.

There was a nice-looking talk on the History of Unix and a more controversial discussion on the place of “free speech ideology” among hackers, organized by Toni Prug. Given that my dissertation covers the rise of expressive rights among hackers, I am especially interested in this discusison. I will refrain from commenting until I see the video (available at the link above).

I am pretty exhausted. Immediately following my return from .nl, I managed to stay up through the “lag” and the next day starting at 7 a.m., I continued with my month long formatting sprint and today I delivered the goods. I had some nightmarish moments. For example, yesterday I discovered that nearly every last footnote subscript was formatted with some quacked-out “www-221111” format, making them too small. When I discovered this, my heart stopped but, I along with some help, converted them to some normal style and all is good again.

Today, when I printed my dissertation on the uber-expensive, U of C watermarked, paper, the ink dared to flaked off. And I was printing it on the best of our departments’ printers. We switched printers and alas, the printing resumed as normal. I am so relieved this is almost over. I say almost because I will hear back in one week if they accept or if I need to tweak something (or turn in a whole other copy, which at 2 volumes and 2 copies, won’t be pleasant).

Yesterday I spent a good chunk of my day writing the acknowledgments. I am actually quite fond of these “outpouring of thanks” and am known to read them before anything else with every single book I have. I just love to see the different ways in which people pay their gratitude and respect to others. It is also the only section we academics can openly admit to our deep boundedness to others in the production of knowledge. I am afraid I did not thank everyone I wanted to and some of my descriptions are actually a little terse. There is a lot more I could have said but it will have to wait for another time or in person. And really thanks to everyone who helped me get through this.

You can read the first 30 pages of the dissertation which includes title, copyright notice, table of contents, figures, acknowledgments, abstract, and prologue. Soon I will have a sample chapter up and for those who want the whole document, email me. I will post the whole thing soon but actually want to change the formatting. For example, I could not, for the life of me, get quoted source code to fit within the margins with courier font 10, which was the smallest size they would accet. But I will change the margins for the online version and have courier for all the technical material.

I learned some interesting information through this whole formatting ordeal. For example, you can embargo dissertation at UMI for up to two years. Perhaps this is because you think that your dissertation is part of the axis of evil, or just too sucky for public view, or perhaps you don’t want others to take your ideas?? I am not sure but I have placed no embargo although I may not include one section of my dissertation online when I post it. It is just too ranty and feels a bit like a conversation with self.

But for now, all I can do is melt on the couch, relieved this last sprint is ovah!

So it is about time I link to my dissertation abstract and conclusion. If you know nothing of the wonderful world of free and open source software, I recommend the abstract. If you know about F/OSS but are particularily averse to academic jargon (words like ethicalize, articulate.. nested within tons of citations etc) steer clear from the conclusion. It is probably my most “academic” chapter, where I sort of whipped out all the jargon that I kept somewhat, though not totally, controlled in the rest of my dissertation. If you know of F/OSS and words like “problematize” excite you, read the conclusion. For the feel good section of my dissertation and to commemorate the end of debconf5 and celebrate the coming of What the Hack, here is a excerpt on the hacker con, titled In-Person Sociality: The Hacker Conference and the Distillation of Lifeworld

A big thanks to Shay for the title suggestion. I look forward to writing the acknowledgements this weekend; there are many folks I need to thank!

A sample chapter is coming soon. And if you see typos, please do email me and let me know. It is been quite a task catching every last one…

So one of the things I stopped doing to finish writing my dissertation was reading. And soon I will once again have the chance to catch up with exercising my eyes and hopefully mind… Recently I have been brought to the attention of and in contact with two folks that write aboout hackers and F/OSS. One is Tim Jordan over at the Open University and the other is law professor Greg Vetter over at Houston University. Both have very interesting writings that I am excited to dive into!

No No, not nervous breakdown… But on the verge of having to come up with the final title to my dissertation. And it is hard because all I am coming up with is eminently boring.

I have the first part set in mental stone:

The Social Creation of Productive Freedom:

And then there is the magical colon to deliver the punch. But I am afraid there is little punch with what I have so far.

The Social Creation of Productive Freedom: Free Software Hackers and the Liberal Tradition

I would like something about ethics in the title because a lot is about ethical reformulation so I guess I could say something like:

The Social Creation of Productive Freedom: Free Software Hackers and the Ethical Reformulation of the Liberal Tradition (and a few other things too).

I know some satoroams readers were forced to read the entire document or at least good chunks of it, so if the title-muse strikes you anytime soon, please do give me advice!

Alexander Knorr has pointed out, that even those on the “other side” also play and diz with their code.

I have also been meaning to link to his post which has some nice thought on fieldwork and its changing nature

Thanks Alex!

Today my advisor told me that I need more examples of hackers being playful and witty especially in the very acts of coding. Thanks to the efforts of my online IRC buddies we are starting to dig some good examples up.

Thanks Karl! :=)

;; if you look at this next function from far away, it resembles a
;; gun. But only with this comment above…
(defun bookmark-bmenu-check-position ()
;; Returns t if on a line with a bookmark.
;; Otherwise, repositions and returns t.
;; written by David Hughes
;; Mucho thanks, David! -karl
(cond ((< (count-lines (point-min) (point)) 2)
(goto-char (point-min))
(forward-line 2)
t)
((and (bolp) (eobp))
(beginning-of-line 0)
t)
(t
t)))

In the Free and Open Source Software world there are “events” and then there are Events, the capital meaning they are likely to be of interest cross-project. Although this concerns the Linux kernel specifically, I am sure it is of interest to many. Reported on Kernel Trap, Larry McVoy is dropping “free’ (as in beer) support of Bitkepper, the versioning system used by the kernel project and reportedly it helped to pump the kernel developement to an all time high.

Also worth reading is Linus Torvald’s statement, sarcasm and irony nicely pepppered in the text:

It’s not like my choice of BK has been entirely conflict-free (“No,
really? Do tell! Oh, you mean the gigabytes upon gigabytes of flames we
had?”), so in some sense this was inevitable, but I sure had hoped that it
would have happened only once there was a reasonable open-source
alternative. As it is, we’ll have to scramble for a while.

The politics and collaborative possibilities of version control systems and how the play out along the lines of free vs open, individualism vs collaboration, centralization vs distributed, etc are worthy of an entire dissertation. I don’t have enough of a love of the technology to do such a project but it is ripe, waiting to happen.

So so so I bought a watch for the first time in years. I guess it is because am feeling the pressure of time which is not that typical for a grad student since we can more or less make our schedules post ABD (All But Dissertation). And I am ABD, but also almost at ABDBAADD (All But Dissertation But Almost At Dissertation Defense) and I am feeling the effects of this BAADD.

My defense date is prolly going to be the last week of May which is exciting but unreal. 8 years of work reflected upon in 1.5 hours. I guess that is the nature of rituals: condensation, reflection, and (and hopefully though not so sure right now) celebration.

Recently, another anthropologist of the ether-world, Alexander Knorr wrote a blog entry about my work that I posted on DGI, his post entitled
biella in the maelstrom of complexity and confusion and he is right, that is pretty much where I am right now even though the original maelstrom was about hacker pragamtics, i.e. what they deal with in a prosaic sense with technology.

It was nice to disover his blog which is just one slice of an amazing research website the content and aesthetics in a complementary relationship. I look forward to reading his project on maxmod

But for now I guess I will make myself known here only when I can’t take the final sprint anymore…

All right I consider myself lucky sometimes. I have a really fun dissertation topic and right now I am in one of the funner parts of my diss, narrating a typical “life history” of a free software developer.

Ok, so I know there is no typical life history but there are consistent patterns that I gleaned from interviews (way too many interviews, I may add), and I am trying with detail and humor to portray hacking from the time that hackers are spring chickens to their ripe old age of 40 when they work on a free software project. I get to do this in about 30 pages but I open with a one page overview of what is to come that is somewhat silly which I like becomes it comes after this very serious discussion about phenomenology, and publics. If anyone has read the Hacker Crackdown, I am clearly indebted to Bruce Sterling.

“The spirit of exploration that forms the basis for hacking is retroactively understood by many hackers to predate their relationship to computers. It may start at the tender age of three, when they first took apart every electric appliances in the kitchen, much to a mother’s horror; lead into learning how to program at the age of five, the parental unit now overjoyed (