Grade: Incomplete

Ron Jeffries writes...

Jeff Sutherland, co-inventor of Scrum, says he has never seen a Scrum team become hyper-productive without adopting the XP practices. Less elegantly, I have said that teaching Scrum teams how to get Done-Done is why I have such a lovely blue convertible...

Well, my dear little children, I’ve got bad news for you. It is your precious context that is holding you back. It is your C-level Exeuctives and high-level managers who can’t delegate real responsibility and authority to their people. It is your product people who are too busy to explain what really needs to be done. It is your facilities people who can’t make a workspace fit to work in. It is your programmers who won’t learn the techniques necessary to succeed. It is your managers and product owners who keep increasing pressure until any focus on quality is driven out of the project.

So Called

I get frustrated listening to smart people talk about things they are only marginally familiar with. Part I of this recording was interesting... people talking about their own experience with specific systems and practices.

Part II of this recording is frustrating because they've not called in anyone with experience with XP, and so debate XP as they understand it. Not that they don't have good experiences and smart things to say here and there. Just that this one could have been much better.

Good software development evolves from a team's conversation about what's working for them. The heart of XP in my experience are practices that foster a teams conversations. Those practices should themselves evolve from those conversations.

This recording has some good conversations, but mostly I am frustrated because I'd love to be a part of their conversation.

Agile Open Northwest 2009, Feb. 10-11

We've had two great AONW open space conferences, 2007 in Portland, and 2008 in Seattle.

This year we are back in Portland, close to the MAX, and as low-cost as ever: $125. There's still a bit of room to sign-up if you don't wait. The conference is Feb 10-11.

Agile Open Northwest 2009, the best open space conference in the world. Learn from each other at AONW 2009...

"These two-day Agile Open Northwest conferences are an extremely good value. ..[Y]ou learn directly from practitioners in the agile community what works and what doesn't. I attended the first two of these conferences, they were stunningly good... loads of practical, useful stuff and stimulating discussions." -- Ian Savage, PNSQC Program Chair

As Scheme Moves Forward

On the Scheme Language Steering Committee Nominees page, Will Clinger writes...

The R6RS has given us the option of writing programs in the new and more static language it describes. Two implementations of the dynamic language most recently described by the R5RS have added support for this new mode of execution, and four brand new implementations of R6 Scheme are well under way.

That represents a partial success, but this process has disappointed users of the language formerly known as Scheme...

As demonstrated by ERR5RS, the major new features of the R6RS could have been added without forbidding... the dynamic language paradigm of IEEE/R5 Scheme...

Do you practice hygiene (with your macros)?

No. God no.

Hygienic macro systems are a sign of weakness and a false crutch. If you can't write a macro that doesn't inadvertently capture a variable, you shouldn't be writing programs that write programs.

(Been a while since I've ranted. Hasn't it?)

Many, Cooperating, Screens That Compute

John Dowdell writes about recent internet-ready TV news from CES, and extrapolates...

We've got to start designing to the range of inter-cooperating display screens a person may use throughout a typical day in 2012.

And we've really got to work hard at bringing in your friends' and teachers' understandings of what's worth your attention onto those varied screens.

Future applications will be multi-screened, using the cloud, to connect with your friends. That's where the highgrowth markets are going.

Beavs Beat Trojans All Over Again

The Oregon State Beavers basketball team did not win a conference game
last year, and had not won a conference game since February 2007.
Until today, when they upset the USC Trojans at home, just as the
football team did in the fall. Nice for them to have that monkey off
their back in just the second conference game this season. The team
with nowhere to go but up just elevated themselves a notch.

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-uschoops5-2009jan05,0,6109731.story

http://blog.oregonlive.com/behindbeaversbeat/2009/01/haynes_sounds_warning_to_rest.html

Tim Riley Podcast Begins

Subscribe to Tim Riley's podcasts. They begin Monday and cost
something like $4/month. Definitely worth the few bucks for Tim
Riley's unique approach to local and national news, and everything
else. This could be the beginning to a new format for Riley, and
perhaps Emerson, that transcends the fickle, short-sighted 20th
century media companies.

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/we-just-cant-wait-for-2009/

Waiting on WiMax

Looks like waiting for more complete reviews and early adopter
feedback is warranted before signing up for the WiMax. Mobile is what
I would get, but mostly for use indoors.

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2009/01/more_time_with_wimax.html

The Dark Pools of Finance

I am not sure "dark pools" are what's needed to resolve a crisis
worsened by, if not due to, opacity...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/872657de-cf8b-11dd-abf9-000077b07658.html

Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office: “Naked Home Invader Captured After Senior Citizen Grabs His ‘Cahoochies.’”

From the Portland Tribune...

Gresham resident Michael Gordon Dick (that’s right), 46, is being held on $104,000 bail on accusations of felony burglary, harassment and private indecency at the Multnomah County Detention Center.

The 88-year-old victim was in her robe at 6:30 a.m. when she confronted Dick after finding him in her home...

...the victim reached behind her and grabbed the intruder’s crotch, “giving him a good squeeze,” wrote Deputy Paul McRedmond, a spokesman for the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, in a press release titled “Naked Home Invader Captured After Senior Citizen Grabs His ‘Cahoochies.’ ”

Mr. Dick may have to stay on guard in jail once news of his crime gets around.

New Tim Riley Podcasts

Tim Riley begins podcasting on Monday:

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/we-just-cant-wait-for-2009/

His xmas christmas special is here:

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/12/24/1107/

Building Lisps

Some Lisp-related, and just compiler-related papers and things I've been digging up and enjoying all over again...

Expansion-Passing Style: A General Macro Mechanism

A simple way to implement macros (no hygiene, thank you). Moreover compared to a basic defmacro, this approach allows many more kinds of transformations, e.g. currying, call-by-name, call-by-need, macrolet, stepping inspector, etc. Without getting into anything else about compilation, you can plop this thing right on top of your current Lisp and create all kinds of new Lisps and tools.

Rabbit: A Compiler for Scheme

The original Scheme compiler where Steele put all the basic elements together for writing modern compilers for any language.

The 90-minute Scheme-to-C Compiler

This one's fairly recent and has not received enough attention. This is a concise, Cliff Notes, summary of Rabbit, for all intents. Amazingly it is a working Scheme-to-C compiler, of course without optimizations, the full numeric tower, data structures, etc.

Realistic Compilation by Program Transformation

A thesis that came out of the Rabbit, Orbit, SML/NJ, etc. school. Explains why most compilers should not be *-to-C but *-to-Lambda. The cheapest way to do this today: *-to-Gambit-to-C. Takes transformation to an extreme: ultimately the source-to-source transformations restrict the names in the program to those that can be directly mapped onto the machine registers, etc. But the representation is still essentially executable source code, e.g. Scheme code.

ORBIT: An Optimizing Compiler for Scheme (pdf)

See also the T Project. If you've made it this far you are interested in compilers, language implementations, and Lisp. Orbit is Rabbit, but way out there.

I'm not a compiler guru. I've had the courses in school, built some simple Scheme-ish systems, implemented "little languages" dragon-style for employers who had no appetite for Lisp, etc. I just love these papers listed above, among others to be listed some other time.

qotd, sign of the times

"Somebody's going to hell, is all I know."

http://blog.oregonlive.com/madaboutmovies/2008/12/stunner.html

(The great Nat Hentoff being let go from the Village Voice.)

pdx sicp grp

Some folks in pdx are gathering to study Structure and Interpretation
of Computer Programs...

http://groups.google.com/group/pdxfunc/browse_thread/thread/807282d048f7d12e/e75a2dd00a55d33d?show_docid=e75a2dd00a55d33d

Oh My God, It's a System!

Via Andres Valloud, a list of the Madoff scheme's dupes sorted by magnitude of their losses.

What this highlights for me is that the worldwide financial system, generally, is both worldwide and a system. It's made of interconnected, independent agents, with varying motivations and levels of self-interest, all feeding back to each other filtered and transformed information, far from ideal, instantaneous knowledge.

A front page article in the Seattle Times this weekend speculated whether the regional home market would experience a rebound in 2009. The gist of the argument is that that market has been relatively untouched. I could be wrong, and whatever else, Seattle may continue to be less affected than other areas. However what I missed in the article was any recognition that Seattle is part of an overall system that continues to be sinking, and even worse: the home mortgage crisis may be not even halfway through its defaults.

Belying any glimmer of hope of a recovery, the Madoff list above provides a long list of banks and other financial institutions that clearly do not engage in sufficient diligence when investing billions of dollars. The Madoff case may be the most blatant but I imagine it is exemplary in exposing rampant negligence.

MallHoo

James Robertson writes about changing business models of retailers, etc.

Fuel prices are definitely a short-term issue. Moreover, on-line vendors have even more opportunities to take advantage of distribution patterns. WallMart manages their supply chain for their stores on-line. Vendors who do not require a storefront near their customers can optimize their supply chain as far down the distribution chain granularity as they desire. And they can outsource as much of the distribution as they desire.

I am continually surprised at how invisible WallMart is at least to this customer's eyes in building their on-line shopping capabilities. I see Amazon as WallMart's greatest competitor. I still say WallMart should buy Yahoo.

www.WiMaxPDX.info

Steven Hall writes that he can help with WiMax in Portland...

Just call 503-516-8457 or visit
http://www.wimaxpdx.info

Computer Horizons

As Steve Yegge points out at the end of his recent piece on embedded systems, his piece is not really about embedded systems per se, but any system that involves humans. The best explanation of this I've found is in what should be required reading for anyone that builds anything that involves humans: Winograd and Flores' "Understanding Computers and Cognition".

Minor Lispage Love Note

See previous

Lispful

(1984 Edition: Blogger Destroys Ignorance)

Before leaving on a short holiday adventure following the Northwest Snowpocalypse of 2008, I'd set out to email my blog a short love note to Lisp. After a few helpful comments, blogger destroying same, and Twitter destroying my patience for revising blog posts, I'll try rewriting with previous comments in mind...

Something I really like about Lisp and Smalltalk is the very small number of rules and the very large bang for the buck. Ioke and io fall into that same realm:

• http://ioke.org/
• http://www.iolanguage.com/

Although nothing beats Lisp for me. Consider doubling the fraction 3/2.

In ioke the following expression evaluates to the integer 3:

3/2 + 3/2

Although Smalltalk has fractions (and if it didn't you could add them), the same expression evaluates to the fraction 9/4. Why? Because Smalltalk evaluates binary messages from left to right. There are no "mathematical operators", no "operator precedence", and no syntax for literal fractions. The Smalltalk equivalent to the ioke expression above is:

(3/2) + (3/2)

Or less generally:

3/2 * 2

Smalltalk's fewer rules than the common Algol derivatives are a good thing. As Nat Pryce commented earlier, the mathematical operator precedence rules we learn in grade school are far from universal across all of mathematics anyway. Why cling to them in programming languages?

Now we get to Lisp:

(+ 3/2 3/2)

Fractions can be expressed truly as literal numbers. This evaluates to 3 and there's never any question about "operator precedence". The fewest rules of all: function application is function application. Absolutely uniform. Absolutely lovely.

OK, so it's the wiki or this

Just got an email telling me how to add some contact information stuck
in a spreadsheet on a sharepoint...

"The link below (that [some guy] sent) contains a content transmission
ID (basically giving you the view that [he] had). If you hit the link
below (also my personal view with a CTID):
http://blah-dee-blah
and then click on "[blah-dee-blah] Documents" (on the left pane) and
then click "Contacts"
You should be graced with your own personal view where you should be
able to make a checkout on the file, save it, and check it back in.
Hope this helps."

Yeah. Or I could edit a wiki page.

a-DOH-bee AIR 1.5 on Linux

"Today, we are very pleased to announce the availability of AIR 1.5
for Linux. Thousands of AIR applications such as Twhirl (a popular
Twitter client), AOL's Top 100 Videos, and Parleys.com, are now
available to millions of Linux users. This announcement also means
that web developers can now use the AIR SDK to create a single desktop
application that works on Linux, Mac, and Windows without any
changes."

http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2008/12/adobe_air_15_now_available_for.html

Looks like Linux, 32-bit at least, is nearly to the point of
simultaneous releases of AIR with Win and Mac.

64-bit Linux can run AIR 1.5 as well on the alpha Flash 10 runtime.

The Taking

We've been took.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2008/12/so_much_for_pay_limits.html

Multi Core Programming

The presentation and discussion at pdxfunc this week was all about bytecodes, JITs, and performance of dynamic languages, in particular Javascript, in particular for Mozilla. Igal took good notes. The presenter, Jim Blandy of Mozilla, made a few corrections to the notes.

Jim's presentation was well done. Future meetings of pdxfunc may very well be video recorded. Too bad this was not... people with various levels of experience with compiler internals each expressed satisfaction.

Michael Lucas-Smith was at pdxfunc and arranged for an Industry Misinterpretations podcast with Jim. James Robertson has that up on his blog now. (Aside: MLS is a whirlwind of facts on sci-fi, astro-physics, and other brainy (literally) topics... if you ever have a chance to sit down with him at a pub.)

One of the interesting highlights of the discussion during Jim's presentation was a brief segue into language compiler and runtime characteristics that do or do not play well with modern CPU architectures, especially regarding caching and off-chip accesses. This led to a brief touch on upcoming many-core chips, and MLS mentioned Intel's Larrabee chip, which will have many cores, each essentially a simple, small-but-64-bit, Pentium plus vector processor.

Programming languages and implementations that support small, dynamic, shared-nothing (or at least shared-little), asynchronous processes stand a chance.

InexpressivenessYet World Wide Webiness

Joe Gregorio writes...

One of the reasons that I have this feeling is that after programming for the past 25 years the field hasn't really changed.

I also have the feeling nothing about programming has changed. Except when I have the feeling that a *lot* about programming has changed.

I'm now in the frame of mind that 25 or 50 years is really not that long, and already programmers have created a world-wide web of information and computation, used by a significant number of people, that seems capable of outlasting any of its current parts. That's something.

On the other hand programming is still too hard (inexpressive), still too much like it was 25 or so years ago.

a-DOH-bee *doesn't* hurt the web (mostly)

Via Phil Windley, someone (not sure who) continues to get it wrong...

The Web is under attack by proprietary platforms like Air, Silverlight, etc. They have clear and obvious advantages but they have one big disadvantage: their lack of openness. Nick says that we need to accelerate the inclusion of the capabilities of these closed platforms in open standards and browsers. "We need more stuff in the browser faster." Mike says that the competition of Web browsers has led to improvements like Javascript being 10x faster now. Joshua thinks that stories about the threat to the Web are highly overrated. The Web has made great strides over the last few years.

Adobe AIR runs webkit, javascript, etc. just like many other applications. And it has the general ability to connect to HTTP servers, mail servers, XMPP servers, etc. So to claim that "the web is under attack by proprietary platforms like AIR" makes no sense to me.

Sure, AIR is not "a browser" out of the box. That's a good thing. It is an application development platform. Browsers (in the traditional sense) are not good at that.

Clearly the browser implementers are finding ways to become more like AIR, out of necessity. Browsers are not the end of evolution, neither is AIR. They are each points along the way to whatever comes next.

Everything Becomes Lisp

"Find out how closures and lambda functions make programming easier by
letting you define throwaway functions that can be used in different
contexts. This article details how useful closures are as a functional
programming construct within PHP V5.3 code."

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-5.3new2/index.html?ca=drs-tp5008

That's some damn hobby you've got there

Via Isaac Ropp...

a-DOH-bee: Please Don't Hurt The Web

From a-DOH-bee...

"Adobe(R) Wave™ is an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service
that work together to enable desktop notifications. It helps
publishers stay connected to your customers and lets users avoid the
email clutter of dozens of newsletters and social network update
messages. Adobe Wave is a single web service call that lets publishers
reach users directly on their desktop: there's no need to make them
download a custom application or build it yourself."

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Wave

Em, why not use atom format and atom pub?

Sucks - one media downsize too many

Tim Riley is hilarious. And the best newsman in Portland, if not the world.

http://www.oregonmediainsiders.com/node/1748

Programming Languages and Concurrency

This is in reponse to some questions from an earlier post...

I remember reading posts of yours criticizing STM in the past. Given some of the link love towards Clojure lately, have you softened on STM a bit? What are your opinions on the state of concurrency and the current crop of language out there now?

I don't know if I have softened on STM. My main concern with STM is that it is experimental, and moving it into widely used languages like Java and C# would be premature, at best. I am happy to see it in languages like Clojure and Haskell, where it can be experimented with.

Look at Clojure's ref mechanisms: there are several kinds, and now "atoms" are a kind of ref that seems intended to be used *instead* of STM. (Or maybe it is considered an alternate, atomic form of STM isolated from the previous, transactional STM?) That's all fine and good - Clojure is an experiment in concurrent, mostly-functional programming.

But where will STM bottom out? Will we end up with five kinds of refs? Ten? How many rules and exceptions to rules will we need to use them all effectively?

Having more people program more real applications with Clojure, Scala, Haskell, Erlang, and so on is great. Clearly we are just at the very beginning of a long evolution of concurrency mechanisms and how they are expressed in programming languages.

Thank goodness this is happening in widely varying languages, and not just in Java and C#. We'll certainly need multiple languages and mechanisms for addressing different kinds of concurrency problems. And many more than that to explore with enough variety to determine the better ones.

I am personally interested currently in how simple a language and its concurrency mechanisms can be for the widest variety of problems. While Haskell, Scala, Clojure, etc. are much better than Java or C#, they are still more complex than necessary for many applications.

Moreover, the "client" aspects of concurrency problems and opportunities continue to be largely negelected. However small and mobile or rich and graphical, we have to get away from the awful browser/ajax model. Yet even more clearly, there is no reason to retreat to the old desktop model per se. I'm afraid we're going to be stuck with crap for a long time here.

Atoms

Clojure takes another step away from Lisp. Clojure now as "atoms" which are not to be confused with Lisp atoms. Not necessarily a bad thing. I'm just saying.

Since they are a kind of "shared reference" maybe they could have been called "arefs". Oops. No. That is a ubiquitous Common Lisp function for arrays. I guess there are only so many terms to be applied. So to speak.

Lisp is a great vehicle for language experiments. Clojure is a vehicle for that on the JVM, specifically in the area of transactional memory and coordination via shared references. I'm not a big, big fan of this scheme so far, but I'm interested to see where it goes.

Down On Main St.(ream)

Mark Watson lines them up...

Gambit-C Scheme does have the Termite package for concurrency but something more main-stream like Scala or Haskell seemed like a better idea.

Ouch. Maybe lisp won't be our overlord.

Actually Gambit does not support multiple cores in one OS process either. It has Erlang-levels for threading, and almost as good for mailboxing, but just on one CPU.

So then Clojure? Good bit simpler than Scala or Haskell. Much more expressive for symbolic programming as well.

Mark points to an impressive comparison favoring Haskell over Scala. (Assuming all things being equal.) I wonder what the learning curve is to get really good numbers for various kinds of programs in Haskell, with its laziness, etc. Especially good memory usage numbers.

If Roundball Had Body Checking

Dwight Jaynes' opinion of Kevin Garnett...

"At some point, doesn't an elbow have to be thrown? Or can't you at
least hammer him on a shot attempt? This is enough to make you
appreciate hockey, where you can take care of things like this."

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DwightJaynes/~3/477143969/yes-kevin-garnett-is-a-dog

NYC

Some really nice photos from Tim Bray of one of my favorite cities,
NYC. The photos are nice, and have a different light and angle than
the images that come to mind as inner memories...

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/12/05/Fuzzy-New-York

government-related twitter and blog directory

http://newthinking.bearingpoint.com/2008/11/20/govtwit-directory/

(loop)

"Clojure actually uses fewer parentheses to call java code than java code does."

podcast: http://podcasts.pragprog.com/2008-12/stuart-halloway-on-programming-clojure.mp3

Says this may be controversial to lisp programmers. Stuart obviously
has not seen the loop macro. ;-/

http://www.ai.sri.com/pkarp/loop.html

()

Let me get this straight, just as I am acclimating myself to groovy,
the world is coming around to lisp? I'll believe that when I see it.
But 10 years from now, I can imagine a programming community that
thinks nothing of the (), which is exactly how one should feel about
them.

http://www.dehora.net/journal/2008/12/02/qotd-mock-objects/

http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2008/12/languages.html

The Transition is Over?

Has there ever been a presidential transition where the outgoing president has so completely disappeared, and the president-elect has so early-on assumed such a presidential presence? Not that I am complaining, because I believe the incoming administration to be more capable. But it seems that if a Mumbai-like attack or a significant-enough non-violent event were to occur in the US between now and Jan 20, who would America expect to see at the presidential podium? Could it cause a constitutional crisis of its own?

Best Groovy Book So Far

http://groovygrailsrecipes.com/

Monday the 8th at pdxfunc

pdxfunc is meeting Dec. 8 at CubeSpace...

Jim Blandy will present trace-based just-in-time compilation techniques, how they're being used in his work at Mozilla with the SpiderMonkey JavaScript implementation, and how these can be applied to functional programming languages. Jim is a contributor to GNU Emacs, Guile, GDB, GLIBC, Mozilla SpiderMonkey, Subversion, and others.

Julian Blake Kongslie will present his efforts in implementing modern state-based search using Haskell. He'll discuss the problems of search in FP in general and/or how he implemented his present solution. Julian is a graduate student at Portland State University, and author of the Chortl register-transfer language and Riviera continuation-based web framework.

Another Smalltalk in Flash

http://blog.smoaktalk.com/2008/07/simple-smalltalk-interpreter-in-flash.html

WiMax in PDX - you can order it now

The web site is up to check availability of, and place an order for,
WiMax ("mobile broadband") in the PDX area. Retail locations to open
early in 2009.

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2008/12/clearwire_coming_to_pdx_this_m.html

Too much information

Interesting bit on C#'s LINQ and C#'s "Dynamic Typing" having too much
information at compile-time and not enough at run-time...

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/CSharp-LINQ-DLR

What's interesting is that none of this is interesting in simpler languages.

Winter Coders' Social II - Tuesday, December 9th, 7-10pm, CubeSpace

from pdxfunc...

http://calagator.org/events/1250456151

Last December, many of the local software developer User Groups banded
together and had a party (instead of the regular meetings). It was known
as the Winter Coders Social. In August, we had a Summer Coder's Social
as the outdoor and sunny successor!

Now, we're having a second Winter Coders' Social. Good and geeky times
will be had by all. Come join us.

Bring yourself, games if you have them, and a dish to share.

Food:
Some beverages will be provided.
Potluck signup: http://tinyurl.com/coders-social-potluck-form
Current potluck list: http://tinyurl.com/coders-social-potluck-list

Fun:
We'll be playing games, like last year, so bring 'em!

There will be a programming competition! Any language welcome, no
particular toolkits or api skills necessary. These'll be problems that
just require thought. If enough of you are interested and bring a
language that you're only vaguely familiar with, we'll have a separate
league for language newbies. Prizes? Bragging rights! Plus a surprise
or two.

Hope to see you there!

P.S.: We will need a cleanup crew immediately following the party; if
you don't have to split right away, we'd appreciate your help. :)

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/pdxfunc?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Geek Meets Art, Dec. 7, PDX

"DorkbotPDX brings you Collin Oldham, Shelly Farnham and Steve Davee

Come join us for an evening of geek meets art. The fine folks at
AboutUs will be hosting us for this event, which takes place December
7th at 6PM. AboutUs is located at 107 SE Washington St, Suite 520.

The event is free and open to the public. Feel free to bring snacks
and drinks to share. Please spread the word!"

http://dorkbotpdx.org/wiki/dorkbotpdx_0x02

Emacs and Clojure

Bill Clementson's got some useful info for using Emacs for Clojure...

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/081118.html
http://bc.tech.coop/blog/081120.html

Leaving a Legacy

Is software the only domain where "legacy" is a bad word?

The Register wonders about "legacy" software.

Legacy as a bad word means to me "unworkable" or something nearly so... code or entire systems that you'd rather not have to work with.

Note this has less to do with age than design.

Now I have to go. My dog is leaving a legacy in my back yard.

Live, Local Radio Drama in Portland

KCMD 970am in Portland, home of some good local radio (and streaming and podcasts) like the Rick Emerson Show, is bringing back live radio drama.

The first two 25-minute plays will be Sunday, December 7th, at 6pm: A.Z. (After Zombies), and The Crimson Mist (sounds like a 1940's crime drama set in Portland).

Try not to be that idiot

Dwight Jaynes on Saturday's Civil War football game between University
of Oregon and Oregon State...

"One other small thing: There is going to be a tremendous amount of
emotion in that stadium Saturday. It's going to be close to the
boiling point. So everyone please behave. No fights in the stands. No
stupid behavior. No riots after the game. Treat your rival and the
game of football with respect. I hate it when innocent people get hurt
because of the actions of idiots. Try not to be that idiot"

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DwightJaynes/~3/466425587/and-my-civil-war-pick-is

The Stone Age of the Web

Tim Bray writes...

"For actual business apps, the kind that our servers spend most of
their time running, the war for the desktop is over and the Web
Browser won. I just totally don't believe that any combination of
Flash and Silverlight and JavaFX is going to win it back. AJAX is
increasingly central and we need to make sure that our Web Suite and
its tools support it well. But as for GUIs and the client side, let it
go already."

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/11/24/What-Sun-Should-Do

It's early still. Observe that almost all energy for the last few
years around the web browser has been aimed at overcoming its many,
serious deficiencies and making it seem more like a desktop operating
system.

I don't know much about silverdoodle or javafx, but "any combination
of flash" includes the AIR combination, which incorporates "the web
browser" and then some.

There are certainly great things about web browsers, html, and even
javascript. But there are great things beyond those as currently
reallized.

In the history of the web, it's still the Stone Age. We have not even
discovered metal yet. We're just beginning to maybe glimpse what the
Bronze Age might be like.

The choices ten years from now will certainly be neither "2008
Desktop" nor "2008 Browser".

-Patrick

Quiz: Second Degree Sprain

Sunday night update from the OS Beavers on the state of Quiz Rogers shoulder injury...

Here's what I understand about a second-degree shoulder sprain: it's worse than a first-degree sprain. I would think if Quiz Rogers plays in the Civil War he runs the risk of worsening the tear, possibly taking him out of whatever bowl game the Beavers get. (No worse than the Sun Bowl.)

I'd suppose Riley will start the game without Quiz and play him, at most, only if needed.

For all you OS fans.

Feeling Civical

The result of my civics test...

"You answered 31 out of 33 correctly — 93.94 %"

Just a Little Death - No Not That

From Jim Webber's QCon notes...

"A little part of MNot dies each time he sees an XML schema"

Star Trek

The first Star Trek movie I've looked forward to since Wrath of Khan...

The Emacs Way

I had a good beer talk this week with Merlyn about IDEs and Emacs. Merlyn's been playing with Clojure, a Lisp for the JVM. And he was looking at the effort it might take to provide support for Clojure in IntelliJ. Our conversation started briefly before the http://xpdx.org meeting.

"Why not Emacs?", I asked.

Merlyn's face scrunched up a bit in that look that Emacs seems to cause on many programmers' faces.

"Emacs has had great support for Lisp for decades.", I pleaded. "I like that Clojure is bringing a lot of programmers to Lisp these days. You only have to learn a bit of Emacs to use it for Lisp. It's not any harder than learning Lisp itself."

"Yeah. Maybe", Merlyn told me, unconvinced. Then the meeting began.

After the meeting, over at the Side Door, with a good, draft Pilsner in hand, I was asked by Merlyn, "What's the fundamental difference between an IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse and Emacs?"

The argument I made was this: In Emacs, everything is a buffer. If you edit a program, it is in a buffer. If you edit a directory or even just choose a file in a "dialog", it is in a buffer. Some of the functions in the directory buffer are directory and file-specific. Most are just general editing functions. If you run a shell or any subprocess, that process' input and output is in a buffer.

And across all these buffers the contents are made up of text, but also things analagous to words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. Many functions operate as expected within "text editing" even though the more specific mode is for files, or programs, or email, or whatever.

I compared this to what little I know of the Eclipse-like IDE, especially Eclipse as a framework for building extensions. In Emacs this is easy and many people build small or large extensions. In Eclipse my sense is this is relatively more complex and not as many people, as a percentage of total users, extend Eclipse in any significant way.

Here's what I think the Eclipse framework provides: an "architecture" for an editor. There is an implementation of the text editing area; there is an implementation for those tabs at the bottom where build results and test results go; there is an implementation for those trees to the left where file and class hierarchies are displayed; and there is an implementation for the pop-up dialogs that ask you to choose a file or set a property of some kind.

The problem is these are all big imposing structures with an "A.P.I." - users cannot edit their contents in general ways, and extenders cannot extend them in general ways. They a "CLASSES" which are supposed to be "ABSTRACT" and "MAINTAINABLE".

Horse hockey! The Emacs way wins even if the culture is all for IDEs as a Pascal-ish Pyramid.

Wel, I didn't explain my reasoning with that much enthusiasm, but by the end of our discussion I *think* Merlyn's willing to give Emacs a try.

Some references...

• "A Cookbook for an Emacs", Craig Finseth
• "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Display Editor", Richard Stallman
• Foreward to Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Alan Perlis

The foreward by Perlis does not address text editing or Emacs at all. It addresses Lisp. The Emacs way *is* the Lisp way. They grew up together. Neither would be as good without the other. Maybe neither could have existed for so long without the other.

From Perlis...

Algol 60, never to be an active language again, lives on in the genes of Scheme and Pascal. It would be difficult to find two languages that are the communicating coin of two more different cultures than those gathered around these two languages.

Pascal is for building pyramids -- imposing, breathtaking, static structures built by armies pushing heavy blocks into place. Lisp is for building organisms -- imposing, breathtaking, dynamic structures built by squads fitting fluctuating myriads of simpler organisms into place.

The organizing principles used are the same in both cases, except for one extraordinarily important difference: The discretionary exportable functionality entrusted to the individual Lisp programmer is more than an order of magnitude greater than that to be found within Pascal enterprises. Lisp programs inflate libraries with functions whose utility transcends the application that produced them.

Even scarier...

Maybe I am more afraid of this blog and the people who comment on it,
than I am even of Paulson...

http://www.prisonplanet.com/paulson-was-behind-bailout-martial-law-threat.html

Welcome to Y2K redux?

Hank Paulson, $700B, No Oversight, and Martial Law

We cannot get Hank Paulson out of power soon enough. Via Steve Dekorte...

"Senator James Inhofe has revealed that Henry Paulson was behind the
threats of martial law... prior to the passage of the bailout bill..."

http://www.dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=3723

Smalltalk and UIs

Stefan Tilkov nearly apologizes for saying...

"I can't help but wonder why VW and the apps built with it have a UI
that sucks so much. Smalltalk is pretty obviously a great language,
the development environment is great – why is there no support for
native UIs?"

http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2008/11/smalltalk_uis.html

First, this is nothing new. Second, don't "native UIs" generall suck,
no matter what the implementation language?

But today I believe it is possible once again to say that Smalltalk is
at the forefront of user interaction. It just has more company in the
way of other languages and frameworks.

I would off as evidence Seaside, Croquet, and even the work Michael
Lucas-Smith, et. al, are doing with VW and Cairo.

Don't expect the innovation in UIs to be happening at the level of
traditional desktop widgets. Not that there's not room for improvement
there. For my money that's happening with Flash/Flex and, ahem,
SIlverspoon. As of a year or so ago there was a Smalltalk running in
both those environments, but the blog seems to have turned its lights
off.

VW could be a good VM / environment in competition with those in
search of a widespread audience, but that does mean it's a good use at
this time of development and marketing resources. So probably "Ho,
hum. Things are happening elsewhere for Smalltalk as they are for
other languages."

Server-side Actionscript

http://www.swartzfager.org/blog/index.cfm/2008/11/19/Sneak-Announcements-at-MAX--Serverside-ActionScript-and-Durango

Those Crazy Patents!

A clever patent...

"A method of providing Resource-Event-Agent (REA) model based security, the method comprising: identifying an association between a first object and a second object in an REA model; creating an association class for the association between the first object and the second object, the association class defining security between the first object and the second object."

http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?IA=US2004023829&DISPLAY=CLAIMS

Yes, this patent (or is it still just an application for a patent?) is for associating a set of security properties to an association between to objects. Damn clever of them. Never would have thought of that.

No Silver Scrum Bullets

Bob Martin...

"Of course it's true that a two day certification course is neither necessary nor sufficient to create a good software leader. It's also true that the certificate you get for attending a CSM course is good for little more than showing that you paid to attend a two day CSM course. It's also true that scrum leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to engineering practices. But it is neither the purpose of scrum nor of CSMs to make engineers out of us, or to instill the disciplines of craftsmanship within us. That's our job!"

http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2008/11/16/dirty-rotten-scrumdrels

Yes! There is no process description for any creative, collaborative activity anywhere in the world, in any language or notation, that can make up for a lack of brain waves. Process descriptions are at best the starting battle tactics of a long, hard war.

When I taught, and now when I talk, about "agile" my key point is that these are merely tools that may help communication among collaborators who have (or should have) a shared objective. The tools will not do the thinking or the communicating for you.

15 Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools

http://saravananrk.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/15-helpful-in-browser-web-development-tools/

Improv

I attended the second of seven intro to improv classes at the Brody
Theater tonight. Last week was mostly group games - improv in a big
circle, mostly actions, some sounds and words. Tonight we transitioned
from whole-group action games to small group emotion and scene
games... limited to sounds and/or gestures still. A lot of good
lessons learned both classes - I won't write those here - the
instructor is emailing them and I may list them or pick a few out in
more detail if the mood strikes me.

Several of the games have involved quite a bit of movement. I have an
injured right shoulder from an accumulation of abuse, the least of
which is not my physical enthusiasm at the Oregon State game Saturday.
But I played through the pain tonight, and now I am in continuing
discomfort - and I fear a good deal of pain in the night and the
morning. I need heat.

http://www.brodytheater.com/classes.html

A lot of these games are very, very easy and fun - e.g. for an improv
session at an open space conference.

Caching and the Tool What Drew It

Nice article on HTTP caching...

http://tomayko.com/writings/things-caches-do

Handy tool that draws the diagrams...

http://www.websequencediagrams.com/

Saving for a Rainy Day

Oregon didn't. We loved our kick back a year ago though. Spent it
on... well, we spent it.

http://www.blueoregon.com/2008/11/we-could-really.html

Now we've got 7.something unemployment, crumbling bridges, and a
crumbling economy.

Didn't some god tell some ancient people some time long ago to save up
your food store for the lean times?

ScalaCheck

ScalaCheck is derived from, and expands on, QuickCheck for Haskell.
Similar kinds of tools have been developed for Erlang, etc. Seems to
be useful for Java and other languages as well. I've not tried it yet,
but plan to.

One thing to note - I don't see these xCheck tools as replacements for
TDD and unit tests per se. Rather they are an addition to them, and
are more of a functional test tool. But I've not used any of the
xChecks for more than kicking the tires so far.

http://code.google.com/p/scalacheck/

Nothing New

What Jim is observing is a problem, but I don't see this as a decline
from a previous position. This has been a problem all along...

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/decline-of-agile

"James Shore has declared agile to be in decline. He cites the many
teams doing 'sprints' and stand-up meetings, without adopting any of
the technical practices necessary to produce high-quality software
over the long-haul. In his estimation, this has led to thousands of
Scrum teams doing agile so poorly that they will almost certainly
fail, and possibly take the agile movement with them.

James lays a large portion of the blame on Scrum, and the
misapplication of Scrum. He compares Scrum with Extreme Programming
(XP) and notes that Scrum intentionally leaves out the engineering
practices that XP includes. Scrum is silent on topics such as pair
programming, test driven development, continuous integration, and test
automation. Without such practices, a team can quickly build a large,
buggy, and unmaintainable code base. This then becomes a weight around
the neck of the team, preventing them from responding quickly to
change, as an agile team should.

James thinks it's not all the fault of Scrum, however, as each team
must take responsible for its own success or failure. Many are
choosing to adopt only the superficial, and easy, parts of Scrum such
as short development sprints and daily stand-up meetings, while
ignoring harder, yet critical practices such as reflecting and
improving. Via this process, teams are empowered to identify and adopt
the engineering practices that they need to deliver shippable software
every iteration. Unfortunately, many teams fail to take this step."

Edison

Back a long time ago when I'd just started my full-time professional
programming career I was using Common Lisp and a couple of different
Modula-like languages. My employer, Data General, also had an Ada
compiler which I dinked around with. And we had a home-grown
compiler-compiler and a home-grown Ada-ish like language. Not long
after the Mac 512 was out and I had ExperLisp, MacScheme, Manx C, and
who can remember what else.

I was immersed in languages. Reading the journal "Software Practice
and Experience" I believe was the first time I encountered Per Brinch
Hansen's language, Edison.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Brinch_Hansen

"The Design of Edison" (pdf): http://brinch-hansen.net/papers/1981b.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-personal-computer-Brinch-Hansen/dp/0137302673

I absolutely fell in love with Edison for many months. I built a
mini-Edison compiler and run-time in Common Lisp. The Edison book had
all the source code, in Edison.

Edison is Brinch Hansen's really nice attempt at a minimalist
Concurrent Pascal. If you can imagine a Pascal that is more Pascal
than Pascal, then you've imagined Edison.

"In designing the programming language Edison I tried to do two things:
(1) to achieve simplicity by questioning the necessity of a number of well-
known language concepts, and (2) to gain new insight by deliberately ap-
proaching language design with a philosophy that is completely different
from the spirit in which Concurrent Pascal was designed."

"The first viewpoint gradually led to the omission of many language fea-
tures..."

"reals
subrange types
variant records
files
pointers
unnamed types
goto statements
case statements
repeat statements
for statements
with statements
cycle statements
init statements
multiple class instances
parameterized classes
monitors
process modules
process queues"

Ultimately Edison did not hold my attention as a minimalist language.
I was discovering Scheme as a minimalist Lisp about the same time, and
Scheme did hold my attention. I never had a full Edison running, but I
still think building something large-ish in it would have been time
well spent.

I've been building a very simple, minimalist Lisp in ActionScript 3
based on a renewed interest in building simple operating systems in
Lisp. I started re-reading "The Design of Edison" from SP&E, and I
just ordered the Edison book, as it's been 15-20 years since I sold my
original.

http://twitter.com/patrickdlogan/status/960085525

Good times.

Service Frame-querks

More from Patrick Mueller's sudden blogginess...

"The level of functionality we have today, provided by the browsers, for components/modularity of javascript code is <script src="">. Basically, all the power, flexibility, and functionality of the C preprocessor's #include statement (good and bad). But I'm looking at my calendar to see what year this is again. Doh!

The big JavaScript frameworks build their component stories on top of this, and the whole thing just gives me the willies looking at it."

http://pmuellr.blogspot.com/2008/11/javascript-service-frameworks.html

Patrick also mentions Java's service frame-querkiness with class loaders, jar files, etc. I don't know much about OSGi - which he and others suggest plugs some holes.

Dang. I agree these are issues. I am wondering though how simple a language can be, and fill the service frame-querkiness some other way. For one thing, language-level frame-querks don't play well together across multiple languages. Unless you cram them together into a single VM and make them all conform to some base-level language concepts.

Patrick heads in this direction when he writes about GoogleGears WorkerPools as a potential mechanism for better service isolation...

The great thing about the WorkerPool stuff is that it brings another dimension to the JavaScript story - separate environments / contexts / spaces. The ability to have a bunch of code running, separated into protected object spaces, with very explicit communication channels open between these spaces.

There is little that's language-dependent about that. And this lowers the burden on what must be "in" the language per se.

We Have A Problem: Citi

From portfolio.com...

"America, we have a problem. Citigroup is the largest bank in America,
with a balance sheet of over $2 trillion -- and it's also the most
dysfunctional. Since Vikram Pandit took over, Citi has lost not only
$20 billion but also more than 70% of its market capitalization,
making it now worth significantly less than, say, Genentech.
...
Citi might well turn out to be Hank Paulson's largest and biggest headache."

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2008/11/13/citis-desperate-straits?tid=true

IntelliJ now supports Flex

http://www.jamesward.com/wordpress/2008/11/13/intellij-idea-80-adds-flex-support/

Whatsits

Patrick Mueller writes...

It's time to stop thinking we can apply bandages to the status quo and make everything better. We want to believe. Just another gadget or framework is going to make everything better! We've brainwashed ourselves.

Big Picture: A+

Big Picture honors Veteran's Day and current military with an incredible sequence, including the following...

What struck me most are the A+ marks on this soldier's boots.

Now in print from Lulu: "Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming in Java, third edition"

http://markwatson.com/blog/2008/11/my-new-book-practical-artificial.html

Purchased PDF and print, based on reviewing the free book (same content):

http://www.markwatson.com/opencontent/

Instant Runoff Elections

(Now with correct spelling of the Democratic party. Surry.)

Oregon said no the measure for "open primaries". I was mixed on this
measure. I joined the Democratic party this year specifically to vote in
the primary. I have yet to drop my party affiliation, although I still
consider myself an independent. And in spite of the fact that I vote
Democratic nearly 100% because the few politicians I actually believe in
are Dems, and because the others tend to come across to me as the
better of bad choices.

I voted no on the measure for two reasons: I'd heard mixed reviews for
open primaries run in other locations, so on that count I decided to
be conservative by keeping the current closed primary. My ultimate
reason for a no vote: I am more interested in "instant runoff"
elections than "open primaries". I believe if we had passed this
measure then the odds of getting a measure for instant runoff passed
in the next few years would be significantly lower.

From Blue Oregon, "it's time for instant runoff"...

http://www.blueoregon.com/2008/11/its-time-for-in.html

Instant runoff seems to provide a means of encouraging "third party"
candidates, and of supporting voting for those candidates without
"wasting" a vote.

Cool For A Day

"For a day, at least, newspapers were cool again."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/politics/2008/11/the_people_want_papers.html

I stopped at a store early Wednesday evening to buy a paper, for
reasons unrelated to the election. I was surprised to hear the clerk
say they were sold out, and she said so was the drugstore a block down
the street.

A President's CTO?

From Bob Warfield...

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/who-should-obama-hire-to-be-americas-cto/

I don't think a single CTO or CIO, whatever that would mean in the
context of an administration, makes sense whatsoever.

What would make more sense to me would be a collection of people
meeting peridoically in a "roundtable" like format for ongoing general
topics a president should be aware of. Or perhaps a "technology
council" to address specific issues that would benefit an
administration by producing a "recommendation" on that specific issue.

-Patrick

New PC Business Model

From James Robertson...

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=The_Ground_Shifts_in_the_PC_Space&entry=3403023822

I wonder when Apple will be forced into that market. I'm sure it will
be distinguished nonetheless.

The business model is interesting. If these boxes will come with a
WiMax antenna, then a contract with ClearWire / Sprint / whomever
would be interesting.

Oregon's Two Dem Sens: Go Mount Hood!

Oregon now has two Democrat senators.

http://www.blueoregon.com/2008/11/smith-concedes.html

It's not easy to replace a senator, especially in Oregon. Now there
are two Democrats. The pair are both relatively young and could remain
in office together for many terms.

Not so long ago Oregon had two fairly moderate Republicans who did
very well serving together for a long time. Mark Hatfield served five
terms and especially stands out for me as a true "maverick". He stood
up to his party and the senate generally on several military issues
including the Vietnam War.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hatfield

Bob Packwood had his share of problems, but all in all was on the
better side of the senator scale.

Wyden and Merkly can do good things for Oregon and the country. For my
own interest, we should get a decent wilderness bill passed. Oregon is
woefully low on land actually designated as wilderness. In the
Portland area specifically they should come up with a better Mount
Hood Wilderness act than Wyden could get with Smith. And they should
be able to get it passed through a Democrat Senate and House.

Feeling Like Joe Berkovitz

I read Joe's blog for Flex/Flash information. But he captured my
position well this morning...

"I don't know who Barack Obama really is, or what he will do about the
dire place our country has been taken to. All I know is this: for a
change we elected someone who is candid about our problems, and is
obviously an intelligent and kind person. In America, something as
simple as this is something to be proud of: look at where we've been.
Elections are in the realm of appearances, but we are emerging from an
era in which we have both appeared and acted monstrously, to others
and to each other. So, for a moment, I'm celebrating this result.
And hoping for some real action to follow."

http://www.joeberkovitz.com/blog/2008/11/05/a-brief-moment-of-pride/

It's going to be a tough row to hoe. Obama seems to have the
leadership skills and disposition to make good things happen. Put
working across the aisle aside for a moment... the Democrat party in
and of itself is extremely diverse. Even with decent majorities in
Congress this will be a fair bit like herding cats. Tigers and lions
maybe.

WTF

From a tweet by Patrick Mueller...

Our Westford, MA office actually has a building named "WTF4"? Is there a WTF1..3 also? WTF?

California Prop 8

California Prop 8 is leading. Sorry California - you seem to have as many ignorant asses as the rest of the country.

Do we get to keep the married friends we've already gathered?

To LtU w/Love

"Via Patrick (who was once a LtU contributor), two interesting blog posts:..."

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3052

Still an avid reader - just had to drop off some extra-curricular
activities a while back.

Word Play

Please to be explaining this one to me from the Financial Times...

In recent days, lawyers for the nine banks that received the government funds held talks over how to respond to calls for pay restraint from Congress and state regulators, according to people familiar with the situation.

The companies – Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, State Street and Wells Fargo – said they would not spend public money on compensation, the people added. Wall Street executives say that banks will pay bonuses from earnings and existing cash resources, like in previous years, and use the government capital for acquisitions and to replenish their depleted balance sheets...

The banks declined to comment on the conference call. Wall Street executives say that after one of the worst years for the industry, average bonuses will be down sharply this year.

However, they argue that they will still have to pay substantial compensation to star bankers and traders in order to avoid a brain drain from the industry into rival sectors such as private equity and hedge funds.

Let's say I have $100 and the government bails me out with another $100 and says, "You cannot spend this on booze." But then let's say I spend $100 on booze, saying, "I used my own money."

Did I follow the instructions of my benefactor?

For crying out loud. I think we can afford to let these folks go, or live on a few billion less in bonuses.

Open Source Bridge in PDX

Here's a presentation from the first meeting of folks organizing the Open Source Bridge conference for Portland next summer...

A blog and etc. is in place.

NPR's Slip of the Pen

Hilarious slip-up...

Former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein tells Fareed Zakaria that he will vote for Barack Obama. Duberstein lambasted McCain for selecting Sarah Palin on MSNBC today.

Yesterday on Talk of the Nation, Lawrence Eagleburger -- Bush 41's Secretary of State -- said he will vote for McCain even though he does not believe Sarah Palin is "prepared to take over the brains* reins of the presidency." He added that, given some training, she would be "adequate".

*We apologize for the error. NPR's rush transcript was inaccurate.

Not to mention thsi makes two more less-than-ringing endorsements of McCain's leadership.

Why the hell would we want these people anywhere near our elections?

From Blue Oregon...

There's some REALLY weird shit happening here in Oregon.

Here's an email from Evergreen Defense and Security Services Inc. to the Douglas County Clerk offering their services to prevent violence at "voting centers" throughout Oregon. EDSS is based in McMinnville, but apparently they don't know that we vote by mail here.

http://www.blueoregon.com/2008/10/evergreen-defen.html

Evergreen is one spooky (literally) company. I've been reading stories
of their various CIA-related misadventures for 20 years.

You see them on the way to Lincoln City from Portland, near the
McMinville airport.

Don Ross & Andy McKee - Ebony Coast

The older one sent me this nice guitar duo performance...

...soothing music, even for a scary Halloween.

Amazing Journey

I love watching Keith Moon play lead guitar lines on his drum set...

McCain - getting Alzheimer's before our eyes?

Campaigns take their toll, I'm sure...

"You're all the Joe the Plumber, so stand up..."

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/10/30/859/

AIG - Where did the cash go?

"Regulators are now looking into whether AIG knew it was coming in for
major losses months ago -- losses that weren't apparent on the
company's balance sheet."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2008/10/tracking_aigs_bailout.html

Um. Gee. Yes. Hey, regulators, there's this thing that's been around a
while now called "off-balance sheet" items.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-balance-sheet

Companies have been pushing the limits on those for years. AIG is just
one of the more extreme examples.

Oh Dear - "Dynamic Declarations"

Jim Hugunin writes from the MSFT PDC...

"Anders Hejlsberg delivered an amazing talk on the Future of C# which
he shows for the first time how we've added dynamic typing to that
language with a static type called 'dynamic' – yes, you read that
right."

http://blogs.msdn.com/hugunin/archive/2008/10/29/dynamic-language-runtime-talk-at-pdc.aspx

Pull the plug. This show is over.

Growing Up

Scott Simon of NPR writes...

"Spokane, a handsome and civilized city, is not a border town like San
Diego, a port city like Seattle, or a commercial crossroads like
Chicago. And yet, like so many other medium-sized Americans cities, it
has become internationalized.

Seeing that woman reminded me of something I never tire of observing
as I am fortunate enough to make appearances in support of our local
stations. The diversity of America is deep and amazing. It now reaches
into all states, all kinds of places, large and small communities,
from Washington State to the Florida Keys. The faces of America come
from all over the world."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/sundaysoapbox/2008/10/is_this_spokaneor_the_serenget.html

StAX(Mate) and WAX

I'm experimenting with StAX(Mate) for reading and WAX for writing some
largish, uglish XML. If you have any thoughts...

Why StAXMate?

http://www.cowtowncoder.com/blog/archives/2006/10/entry_27.html

Why WAX?

http://www.ociweb.com/mark/programming/WAX.html

They both seem to be simple and yet potentially relatively efficient.
I just hope they work without the usual disjointedness at the config
level that seems inherent in many XML librees.

Emacs Rectangles

emacs rectangle commands: list them like this... "control-h a" runs the "apropos" command. Then type "rectangle", and see the list.

A rectangle in emacs is defined just as a "region" is: between the "mark" and the "point". Set the "mark" using control-space. Then navigate the cursor to some other character. The location of the cursor is the "point". These two locations are the beginning and end of the region, and they are also the opposite corners of the current rectangle, for rectangle commands.

The two I use most are "kill-rectangle" at "control-x r k" and yank that back in over and over with "yank-rectangle" at "control-x r y".

Em, but maybe you need to store a number of rectangles and yank them back in randomly. well...

"copy-rectangle-to-register" at "control-x r r". what? you do know about emacs registers, right? super-cool... next time.

How to (count) votes

From the Register...

"With just a week to go before the US presidential election,
academics, politicians, and voters are voicing increased distrust of
the electronic voting machines that will be used to cast ballots.

In early balloting in West Virginia, Texas, and Tennessee, voters
using e-voting machines made by Nebraska-based Election Systems &
Software (ES&S) have reported the "flipping" of their vote from the
presidential candidate they selected to the candidate's rival. In some
cases, voters said their choice had been changed from Democrat Barack
Obama to Republican John McCain while others reported just the
opposite."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/28/evoting_fears/

This is ridiculous. Here's how you do it: you should put a piece of
paper with your vote on it in a box. At all times that box is being
observed by someone from the Democrats and someone from the
Republicans. Those two take the box to a central or regional center
for counting. The counting is performed simultaneously by the
Democrats and the Repuiblicans.

Who cares if we get the results the same night or several days later?

Noonan, er, Time

Peggy Noonan, who I admire more now than I ever did when she was in
the Reagan administration, writes...

"More than ever on the campaign trail, the candidates are dropping
their G's. Hardworkin' families are strainin' and tryin'a get ahead.
It's not only Sarah Palin but Mr. McCain, too, occasionally Mr. Obama,
and, of course, George W. Bush when he darts out like the bird in a
cuckoo clock to tell us we are in crisis. All of the candidates say
"mom and dad": "our moms and dads who are struggling." This is Mr.
Bush's former communications adviser Karen Hughes's contribution to
our democratic life, that you cannot speak like an adult in politics
now, that's too austere and detached, snobby. No one can say mothers
and fathers, it's all now the faux down-home, patronizing—and
infantilizing—moms and dads. Do politicians ever remember that in a
nation obsessed with politics, our children—sorry, our kids—look to
political figures for a model as to how adults sound?"

http://www.peggynoonan.com/article.php?article=438

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History

http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hh

I'm really enjoying this podcast. It's like having the best of the
History Channel on in the background while working away.