ptworld.net renewed for the Sigala project

My first foray into Internet consultancy was in 1998, under the guise of PT Internet, but it was short-lived as I took up a full-time post a few months later.  However, wanting to maintain some online foothold, I bought the domain ptworld.net.  I naively assumed that a .net domain could denote an association with any kind of Internet services, whereas, at the time, it was intended for organisations involved in networking infrastructure or Internet Service Providers.  However, after a few years, with the proliferation of top-level domains, such a specific association faded away and I eventually got round to create a website, but sadly it became quite neglected until this year ...

After months of preparation, I’m pleased (and relieved) to have launched a renewed website, up-to-date and providing extensive coverage of what I’m about – especially in terms of research and software development, and my experience.  The site’s navigation reflects the interdisciplinary nature; hyperlinks are used liberally to allow ease of movement between the more theoretical research topics concerning Buddhist ethics to more practical perspectives such as cognitive interventions using thinking routines.  Regarding software development, I try to take a historical perspective when solving problems, which I incorporate also in my portfolio.   Alternatively, connections on a given themes may be explored via the tags or the use of the search facility.  

The banner image is a photograph I took whilst living in Doha.  It depicts the Corniche, with promotional slogans in English and Arabic.  The complete set (in English) is ‘Think’, ‘Realize’ and ‘Achieve’ — remember that Arabic is read from right to left.  Certainly, they have already achieved a great deal for a small state and the World Cup is arriving very soon.  It serves partly as a prompt to myself to persevere and keep the dream alive, as it were.  I’m not so good at self-promotion, but at this juncture the website is primarily an invitation to help nurture a viable business to support Sigala, a project that I have researched extensively.   The project needs to convincingly answer the question of why it’s a good investment.  How can the trusted network be leveraged to generate income ... ?

In terms of roadmap, there remains the need for a proof of concept.  Whilst I’ve established that Symfony is capable of delivering prototypes, I have found that consolidating all the project strands has been quite an undertaking and have not yet progressed this.  It may be better for someone else to do the coding, so with that in mind my next step will be to create mockups. 

Another reason for the delay has been a detour, which led to a mini project in itself to address the problem of delivering a faster and more secure public-facing website.  You may notice with the ptworld.net site, that URLs typically end in ‘index.html’, which means they are static pages, with no processing overhead from scripts or database queries to deliver the content.   All being well, you should notice that translates to faster page loads in your web browser.  The software responsible for delivering such pages – the result of this mini project – is MakeStaticSite, a set of Bash shell scripts released under the AGPL license, invoking popular GNU tools such as wget and rsync to generate and deploy with various options a static site.  It’s an age-old problem, but my focus has been on deploying live sites rather than creating archives, and is aimed especially at converting sites made in WordPress, though it works generally with any site accessible via http.   

Many developers consider WordPress retro, old or out of date, and prefer more modern approaches that are unconstrained by such a monolithic architecture and thus replete with possibilities.  But whether making WordPress headless or dispensing with WordPress altogether, it is acknowledged that it carries with it a significant technical overhead for development and maintenance.  I doubt that many individuals and small organisations are concerned about the constraints of themes; they will be happy enough if there’s a nice-looking result that clearly conveys the nature of their activities and will reach the intended audience. WordPress already satisfies their needs, so for them, at least, MakeStaticSite can allow this to continue whilst providing the additional benefit of delivering a safer and faster public-facing site. 

MakeStaticSite is already quite functional and I can see many possible improvements, but I need to move on as time is really limited.  If only I had a good and capable team at my disposal ... 

Commitment to Research for Human Flourishing

In March 2011 Japan suffered a catastrophe with a massive earthquake off its East coast. A chain of events led to the Fukushima nuclear power plan disaster with the release of massive amounts of toxic radiation. I visited Tokyo a few months later, in July, when the city's population seemed subdued and fearful in a similar way to how many people have been with the Covid-19 pandemic.

I was hosted by Professor Yukari Shirota at Gakushuin University. In response to what happened, Professor Shirota made an emphatic statement, which I paraphrase: “Japan does not have much in the way of natural resources, only human resources. I therefore commit my life to research.”

Research is fundamental to human resourcefulness and is an activity that I would like to develop more effectively. Whilst research is a natural aptitude and I’ve long nurtured an interdisciplinary approach, I have only a very limited publication record despite having spent decades in academia; to earn a living I have served mainly in a technical support capacity.  I originate ideas quite easily, some expressed on this blog, but I have found it exceedingly difficult to gain traction for them.

Reasoning that I needed to devote more time to my endeavours, in July 2020 I decided not to accept an offer a 12-month contract extension to my post as Digital Projects Officer at the History of Science Museum (HSM).  Instead, I would work full-time on my research activities. However, I shall retain a connection following the award by Museum of the (unpaid) position of Honorary Research Fellow, which was approved by the Board of Visitors at their meeting last November.

There are several strands to my research that might benefit HSM. The most immediate concerns any digital aspects, particularly online communications, an area I have explored for a while and about which I will touch on below. There are other, broader aspects. In 2024 the Museum will be celebrating the centenary of its founding and I’ve already outlined some visionary ideas. I may take the opportunity to expand on them.

A number of my research strands have concerned aspect of science and religion, a broad theme whose historical development took a major turn in the 17th century, the century in which the original Ashmolean Museum was founded. The building now houses HSM, but it is still formally referred to as the ‘Old Ashmolean’. This was a period that saw the rapid rise of rationality; indeed, we denote this period as the Age of Reason. The consequences have been far-reaching, most especially in the increasing emphasis on materiality, which has pervaded notions of science and research in general.

I talk briefly about that development in Buddhism and Computing, the first tangible fruit of my research. A contribution to the ‘Mud Pie Slices’ series, it offers more than a slice of my thoughts from the past decade on critical issues around computer-based technology, particularly as manifest on the Internet. It has been a considerable challenge to squeeze in a wide range of topics without undermining the overall flow, but the issues are urgent and I wish to facilitate better access to them.

Buddhism and Computing summarises and ties together some of the main strands of my ideas in response to challenges facing humanity, concerning the freedom to think and act autonomously, the quality of awareness and so on. I conceived the Sigala project in sustainable online social networking as the primary deliverable in response to these challenges, but until recently I kept my research notes in local documents. I have now set up a website for the main body of research, research.siga.la.

Thus far the part-time efforts of one person, it has large gaps, is rough around the edges, out of date in details, lacks marketing (Why so few images? Where’s the explainer video? Etc.), yet it seeks to offer a coherent and humane vision. I’m hoping that once word gets around, the thesis will gain acceptance and the presentation strengthen, and so on.

For me the process started in November 2007 when I started to reflect on what friendship truly means and how best to support it online. Initially, I conceived this in educational terms, but very quickly saw that its scope was universal.

Having been introduced to the Internet in the early ‘90s in the context of research, I have been strongly averse to the way the Internet, particularly the Web, has been commercialised.  Browsing the Web today with its numerous interruptions, whether for legal consents or advertising, do not make for an aesthetic experience.  Furthermore, changes in search indices and results generation, favours organisations, particularly corporates, and has diminished the voice of individuals; all told, it has generally become harder to find high quality and truly diverse materials.  

Nevertheless, we need viable economic models and I see great potential in applying the work of Avner Offer, who recognised a spectrum from the gift to the market in his theory of the 'economy of regard'.  I’d like to incorporate this in Sigala.

I will elaborate on the substance of the project in future blog posts. For now, I just mention in passing that the website is a kind of knowledge base, whose process is ongoing. As explained, I author and manage the content on my laptop at home using a locally installed WordPress, a web content management system whose popularity is due in no small part to the fact that it is open source software.

Using this setup has yielded the first technical fruit. Running to a few dozen pages, the site is not large or complex, but there is a lot of text, so it may take some while to browse to find something specific. So, as with most websites, a search facility is provided. However, I’ve taken an existing search plugin, WP Static Search, and modified it to work offline, i.e. without an Internet connection or web server. I’m only an occasional coder, but have uploaded my changes to Github and submitted a pull request. This means you can download the entire site onto a memory stick and browse and search it there. (Just one tip: when downloading the zip file from Github, the plugin folder should be renamed back to ‘wp-static-search’ before deployment.)

However the research proceeds, I shall always be looking for opportunities to innovate!