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.

Time Sharing

From Lispy at the Lisp at 50 conference last week...

"Steele asked what's his one idea that could have had the most
practical impact if it had actually gotten implemented. McCarthy said,
if IBM had taken his ideas about time sharing… then things would have
been quite a bit better in the 1960's. At this point, JonL stood up
and started clapping."

http://lispy.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/lisp50-notes-part-iii-mccarthy-reaffirms-the-importance-of-having-access-to-the-abstract-syntax/

(I think we still may be paying for that gaff in many data centers.)

Factor Talk at Galois

From the pdxfunc email list...

Factor is a programming language which has been in development for a little over 5 years. Factor is influenced by Forth, Lisp, Smalltalk. Factor takes the best ideas from Forth -- simplicity, short, succint, code, emphasis on interactive testing, and meta-programming. Factor also brings modern high-level language features such as garbage collection, object orientation and functional programming familiar to users of languages such as Lisp, Smalltalk and Python...

In this talk, I will give the rationale for Factor's creation, present an overview of the language, and show how Factor can be used to solve real-world problems with a minimum of fuss. At the same time, I will emphasize Factor's extensible syntax, meta-programming and reflection capabilities, and show that these features, which are unheard of in the world of mainstream programming languages, make programs easier to write, more robust, and fun.

Enterprise 2.0

Bob Warfield writes...

"Very little in the way of Enterprise Software has properly understood
the potential impact the web has on that niche or how to even begin to
respond to it."

http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/is-enterprise-20-a-real-trend-or-a-bubble-that-has-burst/

Every success I have seen in enterprise IT has been based on making
essential data better, and/or making the technology of getting to that
data simpler. Web 2.0, and by extension Enterprise 2.0, is about
"social" computing. The societies withing and around an enterprise are
by necessity based on the core information of that enterprise.

The web now *is* the way to make data better and accessing it simpler.
If the future of your enterprise IT is not making it more like the
web, what the heck *is* the future of your enterprise?

Intel p0wned by Apple

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2008/10/intel_backtracks_after_trashin.html

Smalltalk and CPUs

Interesting stuff from OOPSLA 2008 re: Smalltalk and CPUs -
historical, and multiple.

http://goran.krampe.se/blog/OOPSLA/OOPSLA08-more.rdoc

Antennae for Flex

If you're doing Flex then try Antennae esp. if you like the SDK more
than Eclipse. Provides a lot of tools, templates, utils. Ant-based.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails&postId=7322&productId=2

Facts, More or Less

From the Oregonian today (surry, no link)...

* 12 - percentage of Republicans who believed in June that Obama is a Muslim
* 14 - percentage now

Finally...
* 90 - perentage of the human brain that consists of fat.

Can't we just get the election over with?

Somebody's really going to F something up in the next two weeks...

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/10/22/818/

Smalltalk Superpowers

Michael L-S's report out on the Smalltalk Superpowers day at OOPSLA...

"After each snippet, the group would give it thumbs up or thumbs down.
Thumbs down meaning it's evil and thumbs up meaning it's good. We
generally judged by whether we would want to use this technique for an
actual production system.. it's a sign of success if you get all
thumbs down in my opinion :)...

When we have an evil talk, we dim the lights. When we have a "for
good" we turn the lights back on. It adds to the atmosphere."

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/mls/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=Smalltalk_Superpowers__OOPSLA_08&entry=3401977970

P&G Goes Direct, More Or Less

Financial Times on Proctor and Gamble's moves toward direct-selling products over the web...

Procter & Gamble is testing its ability to use the internet to sell its toothpaste, household cleaners and nappies directly to US households, in a potential long-term strategic challenge to its retail partners...

In another indication of the flux, Wal-Mart, P&G’s largest customer, is hiring a strategy executive whose tasks include assessing the potential effect of direct-to-consumer sales by its own suppliers.

Nappies? Oh yeah... Financial Times is a UK publication.

Emacs: Query Replace Over Multiple Files

I've received a number of comments on my earlier Query Replace post. Today Kaom Te asked about query replace over multiple files.

One of my favorite shell commands is "find" and in particular, emacs supports "find" as part of its "dired" mode. (dired == directory editing)

Type "meta-x find-dired" and emacs will prompt you through the arguments to "find" multiple files in various ways. The result is a dired buffer listing all the matching files, which you can operate on as with any dired buffer, including query/replace.

The other common way to query and replace over multiple files is to use "tags". Tag files are like indexes you build over various kinds of sources. Tag files can be built for multiple source directories and files in C, Java, Lisp, Erlang, HTML, etc.

Then, of course, there is an emacs function called "tags-query-replace" which will perform a query/replace over the files in your TAGS file with fewer steps than using "find-dired". Tags have many other uses as well since they understand the definitions of the source format, e.g. "meta-." can be used to open a buffer on the definition of the name currently under the cursor ("point" in emacs).

Chris Buckley Loses Job

From the Christian Science Monitor...

"Buckley, the son of famed conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.,
this week lost his job as a columnist at the National Review, the
magazine his father started, over a blog he posted on the Daily Beast
endorsing Barack Obama.

(The blog's title: "Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama.)

Buckley offered to resign when, as he put it, "It became clear that
National Review had a serious problem on its hands." The magazine
accepted his resignation.

Today, in a followup post on the Daily Beast, Buckley says his
original post has prompted a "tsunami" of response.

Response at the Daily Beast has been running 7-to-1 in favor of his
post, says Buckley. But at the National Review Online, according to
Buckley, "That's been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against.".

"In fact," he adds, "the only thing the Right can't quite decide is
whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and
shot. Lethal injection would be too painless."

Yet despite the charges of patricide being hurled at Buckley
(literally), he points out that, "My father in his day endorsed a
number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K.
Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was
John Kenneth Galbraith…. He liked to mix it up.""

http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/10/16/christopher-buckley-and-the-oddities-of-truth/

Are politics in the US divided forever?

Agile Means Truthfullness

"true agility is really less about process and more about principle"

http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/agile-truthfulness

A Bit of History - Smalltalk and Java Edition

Interesting story behind IBM's VisualAge for Smalltalk and Java, and
what became Eclipse from Rick DeNatale...

http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/articles/2008/10/15/will-it-go-round-in-circles

via Randall Schwartz...

http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/library/post/rick-denatale-fills-in-some-looping-smalltalk-history.html?_c=feed-atom

The Big Xfer

Gotta love McCain's rhetoric about Obama's tax plan as a
"redistribution of wealth".

Um, John - have you heard about this Wall Street bailout thing? Buy a paper!

Oh, and please, "Joe the Plumber" - apparently your plant is also a
racist. "tap dancing better than Sammy Davis Jr."???

What did Dylan write about getting out of the new world if you can't
lend a hand?

QOTD

"Planning to use this Friday's poker winnings to buy Iceland"

http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/statuses/961718837

From Powells

Two nice finds browsing the shelves at Powell's over the weekend.

• "Concurrent Euclid, The Unix System, and Tunis", (1983) - $5.50, used, very good condition.
• "Modeling Reality - How Computers Mirror Life", (2004) - $17.98, new.

More as I read through them.

The Development of Chez Scheme

Kent Dybvig...

"Chez Scheme Version 1 was completed in 1984 and released in 1985. I am amazed to find myself working on it still more than two decades later. If asked in 1985 to look forward twenty years, I would have said that Chez Scheme and Scheme itself would have long since found their way into the bit bucket of history. After all, the oldest languages then were no older than Scheme is today, and many languages had come and gone. Many languages have come and gone since, but Scheme, with its roots in the circa-1960 Lisp, lives on. The user community now is larger and more diverse than
ever, so with any luck, the language and implementation will last at least another two decades. It's a scary thought."

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~dyb/pubs/hocs.pdf

I started using various Lisps in school, but my first taste of Common Lisp was the one being developed by Data General in 1984 in DG's RTP facility. I was up in Masachusetts, but a few of us there started prototyping CAD applications with DG's Common Lisp. And we went to AAAI and the L&FP conference in Austin in 1984 right when AI was booming and the DG compiler folks were debuting their CL.

Around that time I learned from the RPT folks that their Common Lisp was derived from Dybvig's PhD work on Scheme n RTP at UNC. At which point I wondered how great it would have been to preserve Scheme in the system as well as CL.

The paper above from Dybvig explains more of what was happening, especially from his POV. Interesting reading from back in the early days of Scheme.

Days of yore.

Web Velocity

Web Velocity is looking nice.

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=Web_Velocity_Progress&entry=3401361244

Dynamic Languages on the the Desktop

Ted's looking for examples of popular (for some definition of popular)
desktop applications written in dynamic languages...

http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/10/10/retry-dynamic-languages-for-desktop-apps/

Certainly emacs.

I've used several Smalltalk desktop applications over the years. The
one perhaps most in the mainstream would be James Robertson's Bottom
Feeder.

There are a number of Adobe AIR applications available now.

Would this also include AJAX applications like gmail? Certainly gmail
is popular.

Oregon State - We're Number 17

Oregon State is #17 in power rating...

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/sagarin/fbt08.htm

...and they beat power rated #2, USC.

Shaping up to another good year. But oh, what could have been, had
they won at Stanford and Utah.

WiMax Will Be Great - Can We Get It Now Please

Still waiting on WiMax in Portland - still by the end on the year, said hopefully. Meanwhile Jason Hiner of TechRepublic...

What Sprint has launched in Baltimore is the first U.S. deployment of Mobile WiMAX, based on the 802.16e protocol. This version of WiMAX can be used for stationary modems, but it can also provide roaming Internet access across large areas and at highway driving speeds. So if you have Xohm WiMAX as your Internet service in Baltimore, your connection is good not only in your office or your house but anywhere you go in the city and throughout most of the metro area. It’s like combining your Cable Internet account with a 3G broadband account.

The limitation, of course, is that it is only in Baltimore for now. However, Sprint is preparing to launch its next two Xohm networks in Washington, D.C. and Chicago before the end of the year. Then it plans to light up Philadelphia, Dallas/Fort Worth, Boston, and Providence, Rhode Island. Meanwhile, Clearwire is prepping Mobile WiMAX networks in Portland, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Sprint and Clearwire networks will interoperate...

Ultimately, both Sprint and Intel want to replace the current cellular model with a platform that is open to devices and applications and ties into all of the development that is already happening on the Internet.

Now, to start, Sprint’s first Xohm network in Baltimore does not expressly try go after telephony. That would be silly to do since the coverage is so limited at this point. However, I have seen prototype WiMAX phones from Motorola and others, and there are even reports that the Google G1 will eventually include a WiMAX chip or be released in a WiMAX version.

Arab v. Family

"At a town-hall event Friday in Minnesota, McCain took the microphone
from a woman who had called Obama an Arab. McCain said, "No, ma'am,"
and he called Obama "a decent, family man.""

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081011/ap_on_el_pr/obama

Somewhere around half the US voters want this person to lead the free world.

TriSano at GOSCON

Mike's speaking at GOSCON...

http://fuzzypanic.blogspot.com/2008/10/trisano-goscon.html

This looks like a good time for government agencies, local, state, and
federal to become more collaborative and open.

Lightroom and Lightweight Languages

Interesting write up on Adobe Lightroom, written largely in Lua, via
Ted Leung...

http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/10/09/lua-in-lightroom/

The Open Source Conference Dance

Er, shuffle, *they* call it...

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2008/10/open_source_conference_shuffle.html

Newspaper Woes

The Oregonian's been laying people off and offering early retirement,
etc. Apparently, not surprisingly, advertisement revenue is way, way,
way down.

Now from across the river comes news of Chapter 11 from the Vancouver,
WA paper, the Columbian...

http://www.oregonmediainsiders.com/node/1701

First the Internet, now the economy.

Pot Meets Kettle Big Time - 2008 Edition

Via Tim Riley

Optimistic Networking

"In the last few weeks of financial crisis many of us have discovered
that the powers-that-be are just making it up as they go along and the
emperor really doesn't have much to wear. But out of this crisis in
confidence something new and potentially powerful is rising: the
networked public sphere is turning its attention to how Washington
actually works (or fails to work). Powered and connected by the
Internet, a critical mass -- in both senses of the word -- is forming
around what we can do to fix both our political and economic systems."

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

Maybe. That would be a good outcome.

Straws

I'm listening to talk about the coordinated rate cuts, ongoing bailouts, etc. People are speculating whether or when these actions will help. Very little of what I've heard or read addresses what seems to be at the heart of getting credit flowing - whether or not my organization knows what our true assets are worth, why would we extend anything to yours, not knowing what yours are worth either?

That seems to be at the heart of the Fed going straight to dealing commercial paper - eliminate the middlemen, because the middlemen have essentially eliminated themselves. This seems like the ultimate race to the bottom. But no one knows where the bottom is.

It is kind of an interesting time, as long as the basic supply chains remain functional. Huh.

Fed now buying commercial paper

So now the Fed is directly responsible for ensuring companies can make
their payrolls. Hmm.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95471631

The Keating Five: Hey, John McCain - I *thought* I recognized you!

http://keatingeconomics.com/

Finally people seem willing to call BS on McCain. The only problem is how far the Republicans are will to go to smear the opposition when the Republicans' backs are up against the wall. There is a lot at stake in this to the rich and powerful who feel entitled to remain rich and powerful.

Big Bottom

"Just talked to trader in Brooklyn who says he's hopeful we're near
the bottom. And why not, you know?"

http://twitter.com/planetmoney/statuses/948618425

An entertaining activity may be to go back through the last six months
or so of financial news to find all the predictions about having hit
bottom.

No. We will know we've hit bottom as we are on the way *up*. There are
still far too many people claiming no one knows who owes what to whom
in order to even guess where the bottom may be.

This seems to be far deeper than any first level financial system
apologist could fathom. They will not know where bottom is.

BTW, Here's your man for leading the bailout...

Yes, he is from Goldman Sachs. But you can trust him. Certainly.

I mean, there's a flag right there, behind him.

I bet he's even a Republican.

The Art of the Interpreter

Another classic came to mind this week, The Art of the Interpreter (PDF) (PS). Steele and Sussman, 1978.

We examine the effects of various language design decisions on the programming styles available to a user of the language, with particular emphasis on the ability to incrementally construct modular systems. At each step we exhibit an interactive... interpreter for the language under consideration.

Update: an anonymous commenter is looking for a non-broken link. Here's one I just succeeded with...

http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html

Here comes the BS

If she can't win on truth, maybe the fundamentalist christian can win on lies.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20081006/pl_bloomberg/aj7yeq09er4q_1

How revealing.

Economist.com - "Economists are overwhelmingly pro-Obama"

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12342127

Money Talks

As Steve Dekorte writes, we now know who our members of congress truly
represent. I've not been a fan of direct democracy. The idea of a
deliberative body of representatives appeals to me. I'm rapidly
becoming more favorable toward direct democracy. Not that that would
bring perfection, but at least that would bring direct responsibility.

Direct democracy as most anything though would work better in a
decentralized system. There are no easy answers but over and over the
primary lesson is smaller is better.

As it turns out overwhelmingly those who voted yes are those who
receive the most money from the banking lobby. Although the law that
passed gives the administration the _option_ of taking part ownership
of the institutions it bails out, what is the likelihood of Paulson,
an owner, siding with the taxpayers over his best buddies, also
owners? Zero, that's the likelihood. These are crooks and they've
taken us to the cleaners.

http://www.dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=3621

Required listening and reading

This American Life's episode this morning was on the debt crisis. I'll
listen to it at least a couple more times I am sure.

The reporters also have a blog and twitter thing...

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/

This is excellent background for everyone to understand how we got
here, how bad it is, and what actions could help going forward.

You Too Can Debate. You Betcha!

Voodoo Donuts

I tend to stay away from Voodoo Donuts. But I dashed into Coffee Time on NW 21st yesterday to get out of the rain, and there they were in the case. Just above a tray of so-called healthy, peanut-cranberry "cookies". If you've never had the pleasure of a Voodoo donut...

They are kind of the culinary equivalent of that Neil Young performance I just blogged about. Coffee Time's a good place though, in spite of some of their choices in pastries and cookies.

Worst. Idea. In. Music. Ever.

I'm crazy about the Beatles and really like Neil Young. However will I ever be able to remove this performance from the recesses of my mind? Ever?

Oh dear.

Fools Errand

Says the Motley Fool...

"The genius financial products that kept your eyes deep in Cristal and
vacation homes nearly caused the global financial system to seize up."

(via Steve Dekorte... http://www.dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=3619)

But, hey. There's still time for the whole system to seize up. $700b
is just used grease to try keeping the gears spinning a while longer.

Oh, yeah. Anyone thinking this is going to do any significant, lasting
good doesn't understand:

* the financial system (which I *don't*), or...
* how the US Congress works (which I *do*, sorta-kinda)
* human nature (ditto).

How Oregon voted in the massive debt giveaway

It's about time to get rid of Wu anyway. Now that he's voted yea on
the bailout, all the more reason.

Defazio and Blumenauer vote no. Thanks for trying!

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll681.xml

You're Darn Right

Tim Riley, funniest newsman on the planet after Jon Stewart...

"84% said Palin did better than expected.

"Yur darn right," "Doggone it," "say it isn't so Joe," "Ya" instead of
you were just of few of the folksyisms used by Palin to appeal to the
Tonya Hardening crowd. It had no substance. Therefore, it worked
flawlessly as planned. Her base ate it up like a heapin' bowl of
mashed 'taters.

Proving one needent wear red high heels to run a household, modern man
Joe Biden teared up like a woman."

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/745/

What's On The Cloud Vs. What The Cloud Is On

No one but Microsoft would *run* their cloud on Windows. That's a big
distinction. Amazon will run Windows for you. On their
non-Windows-based cloud.

Meanwhile Microsoft will come up with a new OS for their cloud. Will
that be for everyone's cloud. Or just their cloud? Is this another
attempt to carve out a proprietary product that no one else can
(easily) emulate? As in "my code is written for Microsoft's
proprietary Windows Cloud OS. It won't run on the Windows Server that
Amazon supports."

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/web_services_browser/ballmer_looks_to_the_cloud_and_says_windows.html

This Is Science

""When I teach about messenger RNA carrying information from the cell
nucleus to sequence enzyme production," Borass added, "I could care
less what you feel about it. I want you to learn it. The issue is how
well does theory account for observable phenomena and so far nothing
better than evolutionary science has emerged to explain biological
processes.""

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/26/palin_science_creationism/

What About The Whips

Phil Windley...

"I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I find it hard to believe
that Pelosi is stupid or naive. That leaves me wondering why this came
up for a vote today if she thought it would lose."

http://www.windley.com/archives/2008/09/did_pelosi_screw_up_or_is_she_crazy_like_a_fox.shtml

I'd say she either knew it would lose (if so, good for her) or she
thought the vote would pressure enough fence sitters to land on the
yea side.

I'm not sure why Phil's putting this all on the Dems though. There
were more Republicans voting no than Dems. And there are majority and
minority whips whose job it is to ensure they have the votes from
their own members.

Either way though, good for each of them for voting no.

At Least REST / Atom Is Now A Marketing Ploy?

Roy Fielding...

"REST (as in Representational State Transfer), happens to be defined
by my dissertation. I am getting tired of big companies making idiotic
claims about REST and their so-called RESTful architectures. The only
similarity between CMIS and REST is that they both have four-letter
acronyms....

REST is an architectural style, not a protocol, and thus announcing it
as a protocol binding is absurdly ignorant behavior for a group of
technology companies. The RESTish protocol binding actually being
proposed by CMIS is AtomPub, or at least it would be if not for the
huge number of unnecessary protocol extensions that tunnel the Web
Services interface through fake-Atom and fake-HTTP... Are there any
REST constraints that this binding doesn't violate?...

It is obvious that the SOAP binding was designed first and the AtomPub
binding added for marketing reasons."

http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/no-rest-in-cmis

Iggy and Ziggy on the Dinah Shore TV show

Iggy and David Bowie perform and talk with Dinah. I think that's Rosemary Clooney to Dinah's right. Yes, George's aunt, the big band singer.

"But you cut yourself with a bottle." -Dinah to Iggy

"Iggy invented punk rock." -Dinah to Rosemary Clooney.

Gimme Danger - Iggy Pop and the Stooges

Thank You Local Representatives

"Oregon's Democratic Representatives Earl Blumenauer (3rd District),
David Wu (1st District) and Peter DeFazio (4th District) opposed the
plan in Monday's floor vote...

"It was, at the core, not the best bill," Blumenauer said in a
prepared statement. "I am convinced that it would have passed if it
were paid for with a fee on the finance industry to pay for its own
bailout, and if homeowners were given the same bankruptcy protections
as rich people's third and fourth home, and business properties."...

The Portland Tribune/Fox 12 News poll showed Democrats in the
tri-county area are evenly split over the bailout, while Republicans
are solidly against it. Independents registered the most skepticism,
though, with 33 percent supporting the bailout and 63 percent opposed.

Partisan differences about the bailout dovetail with anxieties about
the economy, the poll showed.

Among Democrats, 93 percent said they were somewhat or very worried
about the national economy, compared to 75 percent of Republicans.
Democrats tend to have lower incomes than Republicans, on average, in
the tri-county area."

http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=122274756905171200

"Gotcha! Journalism"

I love the talking point being used to protect and defend the hapless Republican VP candidate. I heard Palin use the phrase a week or so ago. And now, following the link below, McCain and Palin use it more than once in this interview. McCain says...

"I understand this 'gotcha! journalism'..."

As if it is not legitimate to question a candidate's ability to think
and speak clearly about the responsibilities of the desired office.

Gotcha!!

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/718/

LinuxCon - Portland - September 2009

From th Silicon Forest blog...

"The Linux Foundation plans to announce Tuesday that it will launch a
big, new annual conference in Portland next September....

Linux Foundation director Jim Zemlin told me this afternoon that the
conference aims to link up Linux users and developers and to focus on
providing resources for them all to use Linux more efficiently for
whatever it is they need.

"We're going to have tracks, or little mini-conferences, at the
event," he said. Some will focus on mobile computing, some on embedded
systems, some on desktop Linux, etc. The Linux Plumbers Conference,
which brought 300 to Portland this month, will be held concurrently
with the new LinuxCon next year.

What you won't see: "All the big booths and the marketing pitches,"
Zemlin told me."

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2008/09/linuxcon_the_antioscon.html

September is a great month to be in Portland. Usually.

Mark Watson: "Sometimes our system works"

What he said. Thank you, congress.

http://markwatson.com/blog/2008/09/sometimes-our-system-works-house.html

Mobile WiMax Arrives - But Still Not In Portland

Dang.

"Baltimore got the first taste of commercial WiMAX today, when Sprint
launched service there...

At one time, Portland had been slated to be the first city to get
mobile WiMAX. Intel and Clearwire have been testing WiMAX here for
many months, but for unexplained reasons service has never arrived.
The company continues plugging away, though, and says it'll launch
here sometime by year's end."

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2008/09/mobile_wimax_finally_arrives_b.html

lightbot

Avi Bryant just twittered (tweeted?) this game... it's great...

http://games.wegame.com/puzzle/lightbot/

http://twitter.com/avibryant/statuses/938769774

Pier CMS, well "next generation wiki" really

Pier is a "next generation wiki" really. It's called a CMS. The
presentation on the home page briefly shows a number of good looking
sites built with Pier.

http://www.piercms.com/

Built on Seaside in Smalltalk. Now with more documentation, supporting
videos, etc.

Any Seaside component is a component that can plug right into Pier.

And it's far easier to build a component in Seaside than any other web
framework.

I tinkered with Seaside a while back, but recently tried it again.
There is a lot more documentation now. Whole books and tutorials on
the web.

From iTunes' genius playlist

iTunes' genius play list just dished up for me...

Tower of Power	"You're Still A Young Man"
Al Green	"Take Me To The River"
The Temptations	"How Deep Is Your Love"
Al Green and Lyle Lovett	"Ain't It Funny How Time Just Slips Away"
Timmy Thomas	"Why Can't We Live Together"

The one from Green and Lovett is from "Live on Letterman" - there've been great
performances on Letterman for decades going back to NBC.

Yes, that's The Temptations covering the Bee Gees. I actually have a
handful of good covers of that song. Another good one is by Adeaze,
with great harmonies, but also with a great acoustic guitar
arrangement.

I have fond memories of "Saturday Night Fever".

Absolutely Fabulous

This Wii commercial shakes out into the youtube page. Wow...

http://www.youtube.com/experiencewii

via James Robertson...

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&printTitle=Cool_Ad&entry=3399882592

JVM Language Summit

Ted Leung has a good write-up of the recent JVM Language Summit...

http://www.sauria.com/blog/2008/09/27/the-first-annual-jvm-language-summit/

oops

"Chinese regulators have told domestic banks to stop interbank lending
to U.S. financial institutions to prevent possible losses during the
financial crisis, the South China Morning Post reported on Thursday."

http://www.dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=3602

Mark Watson's Book

Mark Watson has a draft available for the 3rd edition of his Java AI
book. The book is and will continue to be freely available. I've
enjoyed enough of it so far to know I will happily pay my good money
for it.

http://markwatson.com/blog/2008/09/looking-for-reviewers-for-my-book.html

Very pragmatic and educational.

People not interested in "AI" per se could still be interested in
several chapters. One is on the semantic web, RDF, etc.

Another chapter on rule systems has a good section on Drools. There've
been a couple projects in our office here that had a good experience
with Drools.

Defazio - An Oregon Congressman to be proud of

Rep. Peter Defazio, (D) Oregon, on the bailout...

I've always appreciated Defazio from down in the valley. Now more than ever.

"We should not be rolled by our Wall Street exec who's masquerading as Secretary of the Treasury." -Defazio

The Legislative Language of Thieves

Legislators are pointing out the new bailout compromise withholds
"golden parachutes" from companies bought out with taxpayers' money.

However most companies will not be bought outright. They will have their
bad debts purchased.

For these companies who get to sell their bad debts to us, well, their
executives will have some less severe restrictions on their
parachutes. But forget parachutes for the moment, what about all the
bonuses and so on they've been paid over the last few years while
driving the economy and their own companies into the ground?

If you're not yet thinking this is a great scam, what do you think of it?

"All of this was done in a way to insulate Main Street and everyday
Americans from the crisis on Wall Street," Ms. Pelosi said at the news
conference.

Uh-huh.

Secretary Paulson, preeminent "socialist". When and how it suits him and his buddies.

Can we talk about the problem with *their* sense of entitlement?

Scary Bad

Via http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/09/27/715/...

A Space Black Out

"When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of
2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts
into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion
spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space
program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome
facility in Kazakhstan."

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/the_baikonur_cosmodrome.html

Really? Wow.

The Ties That Bind

"Nancy Pfotenhauer, a senior economic adviser to McCain, has been all
over the airwaves in recent days touting McCain's decision to
"suspend" his campaign over the bailout. But her husband, Kurt
Pfotenhauer, worked until late last year as the top lobbyist for the
Mortgage Bankers Association, a trade group that in recent years
downplayed fears of a housing bubble, only to be proved spectacularly
wrong."

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/09/mccain_advisers_husband_heads.php

You Said How Much?

Paul Newman

Gone. Damn.

My boyhood movie heros were Paul Newman and Steve McQueen.

They were the epitome of cool, and always will be for me.

Query Replace

Maybe emacs users should do more to promote it. Emacs has a reputation of being overwhelming. But we don't promote emacs enough. There are great reasons to learn and use it. I don't think emacs is difficult to learn, there is a great help system and an interactive tutorial to begin.

Emacs does have a ton of functionality. A co-worker asked me about the enormity of the emacs key sequences, not to mention the number of functions that can be run by name. I've used emacs for 27 years, so I'm not the one to speculate on the effort to learn it.

But one thing to remember is that across all the different editing "modes" (for editing this language or that one, or text, or email, or file systems, or what have you) most of the commands are the same and others simply apply the same concept to a specific mode. e.g. what does it mean to go forward and backward by a word or a sentence or an expression or function definition?

See an emacs command summary. I could not quote a lot of these for you without acting out the sequences with my hands. Emacs is now in my physical hand memory.

My favorite emacs function may be "query replace". This function at first may seem not unlike any kind of interactive find-and-replace dialog on a Mac or Windows.

But query replace (found on the meta-percent key combination for those following along at home) is enormously rich. First, query replace will attempt to preserve case in the replaced text. e.g. if you replace "foo" with "bar" and the function encounters "FOO" then you have the option of replacing it with "BAR" and if it encounters "Foo" then the replacement will be "Bar".

What if you want to replace a found match but then edit that particular match slightly differenty before continuing on? (Otherwise you have to remember to go back, and where to go back to, to edit that specific replacement. And what if there are several variations?)

In this case when prompted for a replacement, type control-r for a "recusrive edit". Now you are in a position to edit that specific replacement before continuing with the search for the next match. If you want to do the replace and then review the replaced text before continuing with the next match, do this: type comma "," to do the replace but remain at that spot. You can type control-r to recursively edit the replaced text or do the usual to continue on.

control-meta-c escapes the recursive edit and continues with the search.

What if you made a mistake with the previous match? Either you should have made the replacement and didn't, or you should not have made the replacement. Type "^" and query replace takes you back to the location of the previous match with the text in the state as you left it.

Enough already. Emacs is one helluva tool. There may be other tools with just as broad and deep an array of functions. If you don't have one already, give emacs a try.

Vote No

I'm not sure everyone deserves to stay in their homes under all
circumstances, but that's not the real problem by and large.

The real problem is the so called "bail out" - just look at the wolves
lining up for a piece of the action. Look at the terms and conditions.

http://VoteNoBailout.org

That's reason enough to say "no, thanks".

Here is some bad assets

From the Portland Tribune...

Hey

Hey, look at me. http://twitter.com/patrickdlogan

Decentralize Now

Peter Saint-Andre...

"Radical decentralization has got to be a big part of any solution to
what ails America, and busting up the country into its 50 constituent
states would be a step in the right direction"

https://stpeter.im/?p=2305

I'm for it - with one exception - the state boundaries are artificial.
We have states and cities bordering each other on rivers. The lines
should be drawn around a more natural "bio-region" as they say.

For example the right size for where I live would be the Columbia
River Watershed.

Radical decentralization would be the best move this country could
make. All the more reason it will never happen, in this cynic's
opinion.

Fiasco on the Grandest of Scales

Steve Dekorte...

"Frankly, I'm amazed there aren't (yet) riots in the streets. These public purchases of overpriced assets are a transference of wealth from the poor and middle class to the wealthy on the grandest of scales. Apparently "liquidity" means the ability of the wealthy to unload their bad investments on the public.

The most absurd result of all this is the blame being placed on the "free market" when it is exactly the lack of a free market in currency (via handing a monopoly on currency that caused credit bubble."

http://www.dekorte.com/blog/blog.cgi?do=item&id=3592

Me here...

People generally are disconnected from Washington DC, or even their state and local governments. At least locally they see levies and propositions on an understandable level: do they want to spend $X on the fire department or a library.

At the national level, I've been surprised for years that we're willing to just spend incredible amounts of money on the aftermath of a war that had always been based on documented lies.

This current fiasco is just more of the numbingly same. Paulson - "Give me $700B on the condition that you must have no oversight into how that money is spent."

Oh, did you know that's the condition? That's spelled out literally in the proposal. I will never vote for any of my representatives who back such legislation.

Folks - at least fellow citizens of the USA - we are being *taken to the cleaners* on this. This is a *fiasco* of the grandest of scales. Look around at who's already lined up to get their piece of the action. There is no way this much money can be put on the table without a lot of shady behavior.

In this case enough of the shenanigans are taking place right out in the open to cause riots in the streets.

As for whether a purely free market could do better - I'm not the expert. I'm skeptical there could be such a thing as a "purely free market". It's a system, and people work the system for their own goals. Sometimes those goals are admirable. Most often not.

The term "free market" is used by most politicians and financiers as rhetoric to get what they want, for themselves and their cronies. Period. That's human nature.

OTBC's New Home

This is a good move... it puts the Open Technology Business Center
right on the Max line. The old home was a couple miles and a bad bus
ride off the Max line.

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2008/09/otbc_picks_new_home_new_model.html

Maybe they'll have some events to draw me back - I went to an open
house and then never found my way back mostly because of the
inconvenience of the location.

http://www.otbc.org/upcoming_events.html

Spotted in Portland: Clearwire WiMax Trucks

WiMax is being rolled out now in Portland, supposedly. Here's a sighting...

http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2008/09/clearwire_lurks.html

As I wrote previously, I've used the service in Seattle, and I like
it. The Seattle service is, or at least has been, slightly under full
WiMax. And apparently the throughput for an individual is dependent on
who's using it nearby, etc.

Still this is convenient, relatively cheap, relatively fast, wireless
anywhere in the city.

Poor Geneva

From The Loughran-Guijarro Scale of system failure...

"7. Loss of small city few people care about. this is why CERN is in Geneva."

http://www.1060.org/blogxter/entry?publicid=C0ECDF2558EE0EC9815CBFFBF8B9CBBB

Poor Geneva.

Treasure Alright

Paul Krugman:

"Treasury needs to explain why this is supposed to work — not try
to panic Congress into giving it a blank check. Otherwise, no deal."

http://www.blueoregon.com/2008/09/the-administrat.html

You can bet there are a number of people figuring to make a pile of
money on this eventually. Some people will be figuring just how they
escape this, under the radar, with their large salaries and bonuses
intact. Others see an opportunity to come back around later and scoop
up assets out of the government's hands like the Oklahoma Land Rush
all over again. But just the valuable assets. The government gets to
keep the busted assets for sure.

Fortunes may be stashed for a while, but they will be enhanced and
made on this fiasco. Little will trickle down to anyone not already in
the game.

That's the only thing my pea brain can fathom in all this.

What This Is Not

"This is not a spending program," Paulson said.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/09/21/politics/politico/thecrypt/main4463279.shtml

Well, as long as we're clear on that point.

Licensing Bikes???

http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=122188941823604900

Cisco's Jabber, Inc.

Cisco buys Jabber, Inc. That must be seen as good news for XMPP generally.

Jabber, Inc. employee and major force in XMPP standardization answers
some questions...

https://stpeter.im/?p=2282

Listening to..

Little Feat:

• "Chinese Work Songs"
• "High Wire Act"
• "Live at the Ram's Head"
• "Waiting for Columbus"

In case you're interested.

"They say time loves a hero, but only time will tell.
If he's real, he's a legend from heaven.
If he ain't he was sent here from hell..."

McCAN-DO

http://timrileylive.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/659/

Apparently McCain says he knows how to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden
but will not make his strategy known unless he's elected president.

Do you appreciate being held hostage by John McCAN-DO-BUT-WONT or is
he merely a charlatan?

Why would he not be collaborating now with the present administration,
assuming he knows something they do not?

Gotta love politics. Of course he's blowing smoke, but sadly, people
probably buy into these games when they should be shaming him, and
running him off of every stage.

OSCON Moves to San Jose!

OSCON is moving from Portland to San Jose? Who wants to spend a week
in San Jose?

Sorry San Jose -- I can happily fly into your airport and rent a car
up to San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Half Moon Bay, and other
destinations. But I've never seen a reason to actually stay in San
Jose overnight. A great part of the atmosphere of OSCON is the
atmosphere of Portland. That all goes away now.

People blog from all over the world how great Portland is, and how
they're looking forward to OSCON in Portland. I'm not able to envision
a similar response to San Jose.

http://siliconflorist.com/2008/09/10/oscon-gone/

Dear Football

My friend the viking (and so you might gather, good-sized former-football player) captures my sentiments exactly...

Dear football. Thank you for coming back. Love, me.

I can't really explain it for myself. I love baseball more than football, and so look forward to September pennent races and then October.

But American football, pro, college, and high school, started this past week. What I like about football is you have one game a week per your favorite teams. You have time to talk about the games and teams between games, and listen to all kinds of talk all week on sports radio.

It's really a tradition for my family and me now, going back to pre-teen years.

Oh, and I hope the Buckeyes take some bennies or something before they meet USC on Saturday. And I hope Beanie Wells gets over that foot injury.

More of the Same

A Democrat may be willing to throw a (political) punch?

Real Money

My blog is worth $31,049.70.
How much is your blog worth?

Umk.

Semantic Web, Meet Intranet. Intranet, Meet Semantic Web

From the Sun Babelfish Blog, on Sun generating FOAF from their LDAP...

"So what can one do with foaf that one could not so easily do with
ldap? Well the semantic web is all about linking and meshing
information. So one really simple thing to do is to link an external
foaf file with the internal one. I did this by adding an owl:sameAs
statement to my public foaf file that links my public and my sun id.
(It would be better to link the internal foaf file to the external
one, but that would have required a bit more work internally)."

http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/sun_intranet_foaf_experiment

Generating the FOAF is a good first step, but then it seems another
step is to make that editable by the subjects.

Engineering With Resources

What I appreciate about the following two pages is they each
illustrate a bit of engineering within the constraints of the system.
They are examples of attempting to use the system in your favor, in
these two cases, HTTP.

http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/paper-tigers-and-hidden-dragons

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/11265