Pro Bono Geek

And Now for Something Completely Different

2009-02-15T17:03:00.000-08:00

The migration turned out to be a whole bunch easier than expected. Three cheers for WordPress' built-in Blogger migration support. It's not 100% perfect, and I'm not set on the theme either, but it's good enough to kiss Blogger goodbye.

Update your bookmarks: http://blog.probonogeek.org

Update your feed readers: http://blog.probonogeek.org/feed

Thanks for all the good times, hope to see you 'round me new place.

Time for a Change

2009-02-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

I started this blog with a tip of the hat to my earlier efforts at an online journal and a hope that Blogger would be a more permanent home than past attempts. By any objective measure, Blogger has been a complete success, clocking a total of 289 posts since April of 2005. Less prolific than, say, Wonkette's twenty posts a day, but not too shabby for a dude whose never kept a blog longer than a year.

Recently, I've grown frustrated with Blogger. It's a fine platform, and having someone else deal with the hosting is certainly a plus... but in the end, it's a service over which I have no control. It does exactly what Google wants it to do, and nothing more. For a long time I didn't want more... but times, they are a changing. The first hint of longing came when friends launched two new blogs with WordPress, Minor Failures and GeekBeer. Both blogs have gravatar support, an idea with which I am absolutely smitten. Then, most recently, I posted some code examples and found the Blogger support for showing that code was most disappointing. Combined with the byzantine themeing system, the inability to change the blog's domain name, and the general need to refresh the look & feel of the site; one gets a very compelling case to switch blogging platforms.

I administer dozens of WordPress blogs for work and thus have a deal of familiarity not only with general hosting and administration concerns, but also the internal code structure. PHP isn't my first choice of languages, but it's always fun to contribute when you can. So, gentle readers, this marks my last second-to-last post with Blogger. I'm going to take a few days to write a conversion script that will port as much content as possible from the old blog to the new one and find a reasonable theme from which to start customization. Soon as the new blog isn't embarrassing to look at, I will switch the Apache configuration so that blog.probonogeek.org points to the WordPress deployment instead of redirecting you to Blogger. Once that is done I will make a final post letting readers know where the new RSS feed is at and then leave good old reliable http://probonogeek.blogspot.com behind.

The Trouble with Enumerables

2009-02-11T17:49:00.000-08:00

Quite a lot of political postings for what's suppose to be a technical journal recently... time for a return to our traditional values!

Today's topic is Enumerables. Originally I thought this post was going to be about iterators, but on reflection, iterators aren't really the trouble here... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Ruby, dynamic scripting language of MVC fame, has this Enumerable concept. What it does is takes a set of objects and performs actions on that set of objects, sometimes returning a modified set, sometimes returning a single element from the set. The available actions are known as iterators, and some of the more common ones are each, select, and collect.

The underlying mechanic for all of these iterators is the each iterator, that does nothing more than return each item in the set, one at a time. You can then wrap the each iterator with additional functionality to generate all the additional iterators... so, if you wanted to go through each item in the set until you find an item that meets an established criteria, you would use detect. Or, if you wanted all of the items that meet the criteria, you would use select. The big upside is that you get really clean looking code since you are using all this built in magic instead of writing your own.

Let's look at a bit of code to see what I'm talking about. We start with an array of hashes describing a person, with their name and address:

  person_array = [
    {
      :name    => 'alice',
      :address => '123 Fake Street'
    },{
      :name    => 'bob',
      :address => '1600 Pennsylvania Avenue'
    },{
      :name    => 'charlie'
      :address => 'Infinite Loop'
    }
  ]

Now, we want to know alice's address, so we can use the detect iterator to find a hash with a :name value that equals "alice"

  person = person_array.detect { |person| person[:name] == 'alice' }
  puts person[:address]

Which, one must admit, is pretty slick. In that one little line of code we go all the looping, variable checking, and returning behavior. You can even take it a step further and wrap the whole thing in a method:

  def address_for(name,person_array)
    person = person_array.detect { |person| person[:name] == name }
    return person[:address]
  end

Now, you're probably asking, if I think all of this is so slick, why title this post The Trouble with Enumerables? The reason these little guys are trouble is because they can hide inefficient implementations behind clean looking code because it teaches developers to treat all sets of data as equivalent.

But, the truth is, sets of data are not equal in the eye's of their maker. In fact, in the dynamic language world there are really two different kinds of sets, each with their own particular strengths and weaknesses. On one hand, you have the arrays, which is ordered data, meaning that each item in the set is stored in a specific order, 0..n, and you can loop through that safe in the knowledge that you're going to get the data in the same order every time. On the other hand you have hashes, which is keyed data, meaning that each item is stored based on a hashed key value, such that you can find it again quickly by just repeating the hash algorithm.

Let's return to the code example from above. I used an array there, but if I know I want to use that data to find addresses based on a name, it would be much faster if I used a hash that looked like this:

  person_hash = {
    :alice   => '123 Fake Street',
    :bob     => '1600 Pennsylvania Avenue',
    :charlie => 'Infinite Loop'
  }

Then to access alice's address all we would need to do is:

puts person_hash[:alice]

We can even wrap it in the same method as above:

  def address_for(name,person_hash)
    return person_hash[name]
  end

Now, the output is the same in both cases, "123 Fake Street", but the two implementations differ in important ways. The first one (with the array) is an O(n) speed function, meaning that to find the desired result under the worse case scenario, it will take n runs of the function to do so (n being the number of items in the array). That's because we have to look at each item in the array to see which one has a :name value of "alice". The second implementation (with the hash) is just O(1), or whatever constant number you want to put in between the parentheses. No matter how many items are in the hash, it will take the same amount of time to find alice's address.

Which is why Enumerables are trouble. Because they are so darn easy to use they hide the fact that you may have traded a possible constant time function for a linear time function with no actual gain in functionality.

So, my fellow ruby developers (and any other language that has enumerable like functionality), the next time you reach for your favorite iterator, ask yourself, am I using this because it's easy and looks clean, or am I using it because it's the best tool for the job? There are plenty of good reasons to using an enumerable, but if your sole reason is because it's "easy and clean," then you are only asking for trouble down the road when you put your code into production and suddenly that array of four items you tested during development has become 4,000 items and that one function is slowing everything down, to say nothing of all the other functions where you made the same short-sighted decision.

Thoughts on Stimulus

2009-02-09T10:54:00.001-08:00

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) has a piece in the Washington Post this morning entitled, Why I Support the Stimulus. Beside the rather boring title, I think -- in general -- I agree. There has been much machination about how the Obama administration failed to play this properly, but I think that's wrong... both in function and form.

Functionally, this is a stimulus bill (though, I prefer the term recovery bill, not sure why that language isn't used more frequently) whose primary purpose is to get the economy moving through a large scale injection of government spending. Period, full stop. It is not a green energy bill, or a universal health care bill, or an education reform bill. Those partisans who saw the stimulus as an opportunity to attach their personal pet project, regardless of how meretricious the idea might be, are guilty of the same sin as when the Republicans used September 11th to push through only tangentially related policy objectives through a hurried congressional approval process.

Specter, a moderate Republican, has joined with other Senate moderates to trim many of these programs. The folks over at Think Progress' Wonk Room would have you believe the sky is falling and that these Senators oppose the programs they are either eliminating or reducing. But there is little evidence of that, and Specter admits that many of the programs being cut are "worthy in themselves." But his point is that we have an appropriations process for this sort of thing, and with that process comes deliberation, transparency, and accountability. Just as anti-war activists were angered by the Bush Administration's refusal to fund the Iraq War through the normal appropriations in an effort to hide the real cost, so too should we be angry when any other administration tries to go through the back door.

Which brings us to form. This isn't a game! Do you hear me Nate Silver. Obama did not run -- and he did not win -- on the argument that he was going to get his way every time. He was elected on the premise that government is broken because we treat it like a game. There is this great story, which I can't seem to find online now, that I first heard reported on the Daily Show. Leading up to the 2006 midterm elections, where the polls suggested the Democrats where going to seize power in the House (the Senate was still too close to call), a White House official was asked how Bush was going to work together with the new Democratic Committee Chairs. The official responded with a glib response about how, "we are playing this game to win it," implying the Administration wasn't going to entertain the idea that the Republicans would lose their majority. Then, in a moment of absolute political honesty, a reporter gave a follow up... "It isn't a game. The American people want to know how you are going to govern."

And the dude was absolutely right. I've been in politics, I know it's easy to treat the whole thing like a game, with pieces you move around the board and objectives achieved. But this is real life, it has real consequences, and developing strategies based on the philosophy that this is a game, and not governing, is exactly what Obama ran against. He is governing, best he knows how, and helping forge a stimulus bill he believes will get America moving again. The rest of the Congress, they are governing too, in their own way and with their own priorities. But we shouldn't treat this as a game, and we shouldn't say anyone played anything right or wrong. It's not about winning and losing, it's about the our lives.

A Bad Day for American Health Care Reform?

2009-02-03T11:26:00.001-08:00

Today Sen. Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader from South Dakota, asked President Obama to withdraw his nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services. I will admit that when Daschle was first nominated, I was very excited. I thought, here was a man who knows the Senate better than most, is a passionate advocate for change in health care, and may be the one guy who can shepherd universal health care through the Congress. I honestly don't know how he would perform as an administrator, but you can solve that with a good Deputy Secretary. But this guy, this guy was going to make the politics happen.

However, I cannot agree with Sen. Kerry's comment following today's announcement.

I wish Tom Daschle had not decided to withdraw his nomination... While Tom’s decision is a reminder of his loyalty to President Obama and his determination not to be a distraction, this was no ordinary appointment and today is not a good day for the cause of health care reform.

With all due respect to Sen. Kerry, today is not the bad day for the cause of health care reform. The bad day was when Sen. Daschle, a man who served on the Finance Committee of the United State Senate (they write the tax code), failed in his basic obligation to pay his taxes. This isn't the sort of difficult to understand tax situation, like with Sec. Geithner, this is an obvious case of either gross negligence or willful evasion.

If you had asked me before last year's tax season, I might have had a different feeling. Last year I fretted extensively about my taxes because so much of my income was as an independent contractor. As I had failed to make quarterly installments, I had a significant tax burden to pay... and I had to save and scrimp for months to come up with the money by April 15. I didn't have to do that -- a lot of what I earned never got reported as 1099 income -- but I reported it anyway because the law is clear. The law was equally clear for Sen. Daschle, as it is for rest American upper class who seems to be engaging in massive and widespread tax fraud. I wonder, how many people making over a million dollars annually in this country would pass through this kind of scrutiny? It sort of make sense, if you think about it... try and skim off as much off your taxes as you can and bet that if you do get caught, you'll get the mess cleared up through lawyers. It's a win-win... unless you are the average tax payer who can't afford tax lawyers and whose only real option is to pay to the best of their ability and pray they aren't audited.

Yes, I too wish Sen. Daschle could have served as the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, but I wish even more that he had shown a basic level of respect to his fellow citizens and the law and shouldered his share of the burden, instead of trying to get away with tax evasion until suddenly it became a political issue.

It's just like John Stewart said on the Daily Show.... "pay your f*cking taxes."

Frost/Nixon

2009-01-25T23:04:00.000-08:00

This afternoon Sarah and I took in a matinée at the local two screen cineplex, finally seeing Frost/Nixon. If you are a fan of political biographies, I highly recommend it. The movie centers around a series of interviews between David Frost, a British talk show personality, and Richard M. Nixon, the 37th President of the United States.

Two things really struck me about the movie...

First, what would it take for a modern day politician to agree to a series of interviews on such a broad range of subjects with no editorial control? Where are the interviews with Roland Regan, George H. W. Bush, or Bill Clinton? Sure, they have memoirs -- tightly controller spin jobs designed to white-wash the record for the sake of legacy -- but where is the inquisitor? Who forces our political leaders to see beyond their own self-image and face the facts of their administration? Say what you will about Richard Nixon, but it took guts to agree to that interview, and it showed a nature of his character you don't often see.

Second, I think my young age takes me out of the target demo for this movie. Viewers are supposed to be rooting against Nixon, or at least rooting for his eventual admission... which is not to saw I wasn't. But I found I was doing it more out of a desire for a NASCAR crash than for some sort of political reckoning. Perhaps if I were of the Watergate generation, I would feel an attachment... but Nixon was so long ago for me that the movie could have just as easily been about Ulysses S. Grant. Which begs the question: what will future generations think of our rage towards the Bush Administration?

Reflections on the new Administration

2009-01-20T20:25:00.000-08:00

As I watch the Obamas dance in, what I am told, is their fifth ball of the evening, I can't help but pen some thoughts on the new Administration and what it means to me. CNN reports a crowd of 2.2 million were on hand to see the speech in person and there were predictions that the TV viewership would surpass any other TV event in history. Polling indicates that President Obama enjoys higher approval ratings than any incoming President. Globally... well, all I can is my Aunt -- my Aunt who lives in Nicaragua and has more or less dedicated her life to fighting U.S. policy in Latin America -- is genuinely proud of her country's President, and may even, one day, call him her President.

Obama is now at the Western Ball, which includes not only my home state of Washington, but my adopted state of California. Seems like a good time to think about what this all means for me. I already wrote a few words about transitioning from the Loyal Opposition to the Party in Power. But there are other personal implications. For example, this is the very first time I have voted for a winning presidential candidate. It's also the first time I gave any serious money to a candidate... like, got fancy high donor letters thanking me sort of serious. It's the first time I feel like I contributed, both morally and materially, to a campaign that mattered.

It's also a great honor to know people who are preparing to join the White House staff. For the first time my generation is in a position to contribute in a very direct way to our nation. They may not be the most high level jobs ever, but they are in the halls of power and they begin the process of training to, one day, run the nation. My hat is off to them, for their sacrifice (those jobs don't pay well, or offer much in the way of rest and relaxation) and for accepting the heavy burden that comes with being the future. I hope some day I can join them.

To the Administration as a whole, I have but a few words. I told one of my friends who is starting a new White House job that they will have the unique opportunity to make the world a better place, and not just in the metaphorical sense... they could actually go into the office in the morning, and thanks to their work, come out that evening the world would actually be a better place. After saying it, I realized I had transfered my unrealistic expectations of Obama onto his team... which I suppose is only natural, if a tad unfair.

My words then, are this... it's okay to fail in meeting our soaring expectations. But it is not okay to fail alone. The government of America is powerful and can do great things, but the people of America are more powerful yet and we are your greatest resource. If you try to carry the burden alone, and fail, you will not only have squandered an opportunity, you will have turned against the ideals of the campaign you work for. Have enough humility to understand your limitations and seek the wisdom of your fellow countrymen as you seek to fulfill our greatest destiny.

With that I say, good luck America. We've done a great thing today but much remains to be done. Let's roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Engagement

2008-12-27T19:42:00.000-08:00

Sarah and I got back from our two week trip to Nicaragua visiting my Aunt and taking in the sights. I'm hoping to get photos online soon, but am still waiting for a little DNS magic before the new photo site goes live.

In the meantime, just to make it even more internet official (as if posting it on Facebook wasn't good enough), on December 20th I asked Sarah to marry me, and to the hushed surprise of everyone, she said "yes." The engagement will probably be about three years, which we realize is a tad long... but makes sense given Sarah's academic schedule.

Thanks to everyone who provided assistance and advice to the planning and execution of the proposal, I will see you at the wedding!

No, amazon cannot decide you're a felon, but...

2008-12-03T18:32:00.000-08:00

The Don--who came up with these names?--asked me if I would comment on the Lori Drew verdict. Instead of posting on his blog, I figured I'd post here and link from there, thus keeping all the juicy page views for me and my Google AdWords empire (I kid, I kid).

The general story here is that person did something most folks agree was bad, but since none of our existing criminal statutes really fit the action in question, the prosecutors in the case used the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to seek conviction for what amounts to a violation of the MySpace Terms of Service. The Don expressed understandable apprehension to the idea that a corporation like Amazon could wield their TOS in such a way as to make site visitors into felons. But first a little context might assist in seeing if this is really a sign of the end of the world, or just another day in America.

Let's start with the concept of trespass law. Now, there are some folks who say trespass law is stupid and people should be able to go where ever they like. If you fall into this group, you can just stop reading now, because I can't help you. But assuming you agree that trespass law is good and proper, you have to ask yourself some questions. Consider your personal dwelling. If someone comes into your house uninvited they are obviously trespassing. It's a clear cut case and criminal prosecutors will have no problem getting a conviction. Let's change the fact pattern slightly and say instead of a house, it's a store with a large public area for browsing the merchandise, and an employees' only area in the back. Now, if someone goes into the public space, they aren't trespassing, right? They have been invited into the space by the owner and are what we in the legal business would call an invitee. But once the visitor goes into the employees' only space, they move from the invitee column into the trespasser column.

The question then is what makes the distinction between the public space where you're an invitee and the private space where you're a trespasser? The answer is private law. In the case of the store it's enforced by a little sign posted on the door to the employee area that says "Employees Only." Two little words, perhaps, but two words backed by the power of the state penal system. Essentially what we've done is say in the law "we think there are some places you shouldn't be able to go, but since we can't specify all those places, we are going to empower private law to specify on a case-by-case basis." Now, of course, there are limits, like clear notice and the moderating force of a jury. I realistically can't imagine a jury convicting someone mistakenly entering into an employee area, no matter how well marked it may have been.

These same principles apply to the internet just as well as they do to the physical word. In fact, there is a rather famous example of this sort of private law backed by criminal law that is clear as day... it's called the DMCA. I wrote a post years ago on this very topic, feel free to read it if you have a moment. Owners of copyrighted materials can seek federal criminal prosecution if you break a "technological measure," which could really be just as simple as a little button that says don't copy me. The slashdot crowd goes crazy over this... how can it be a crime to break such a stupid technological measure, they demand to know! To which I ask, is it any more or less of a crime if I break into a locker with a tiny pad lock instead of a huge deadbolt? I certainly shouldn't think so.

Which brings us back around to the Lori Drew verdict. MySpace makes clear that you are an invitee into their online space so long as you conform to their Terms of Service. The moment you stop conforming to their TOS, you become a trespasser... just as if you had entered into the employees only area. This isn't to say that every violation of an online TOS is going to result in criminal prosecution, because we have prosecutors, judges, and juries all in the business of continuously evaluating what is and isn't worth prosecuting on a day-by-day basis. Just because you engage in felonious acts doesn't make you a felon, or we'd all be in the slammer. What it does mean is if you engage in activity that you know is wrong--even if that activity is solely online--and it ends up with someone dying, you'd best get yourself a lawyer.

Promotion

2008-11-22T09:39:00.000-08:00

Seven days ago marked my year anniversary with Articulated Man, which Sarah and I celebrated with a bottle of wine we have been saving from her trip through the Champaign region in France. It was most delightful.

On Wednesday I flew into Chicago for a week long Development Sprint, which is serving as the kickoff for a large internal development project that will hopefully be the engine of the company for the next couple of election cycles. I had requested an annual review to go over whatever stuff I might be able to improve upon, and since I was going to be in town we figured we could just do it in person, which we did last night.

The good news is that I seem to be doing well and got positive reviews. The better news is that I am receiving a raise and a title promotion to reflect the job I actual do, as opposed to the one I was hired for. Which is not to say I don't still do that job, which was "Developer", but that I really do a ton more stuff on a day-to-day basis that Developer really doesn't encapsulate. The cool part is that I get to select my own title.

The current list of possibilities include:

Lead Systems Administrator
Systems Director
Information Systems Director
Information Technology Director
Information Technology Manager

I'm not a big fan of the first, since "Systems Administrator" evokes images of a dude working in the basement... and while I don't really have a problem with that image per se, it really isn't the sort of title I would want to use as a platform to go other places. Don't get me wrong, I expect to be with AM for many years to come, but someday I'd like to go into policy and sysadmin doesn't exactly scream policy proficiency. But the term director and manager are certainly more sexy and can mean some cool things going forwards. I'm open to suggestions if there are others out there, otherwise I plan to make my decision in a couple of days.

Update:

I went with Information Systems Director.

No Longer the Loyal Opposition

2008-11-18T16:04:00.000-08:00

Obama won... yay! But wait, wasn't that like two weeks ago? Why am I just posting this now? Well, in part because I had wanted to wait until we had a solid electoral count against which I could compare my predictions, and silly Missouri is too close to call and the Obama campaign won't just concede it, so folks who call things things are unwilling to put their ass on the line. Which is fine, except there are other things I want to write about, but not before my loyal opposition piece I've been writing in my head the past two weeks. So, here we are...

First, predictions. Let us first assume that Obama will not win Missouri, because the vote count is heading that way and it hasn't changed since election night. Which gives McCain 173 electoral votes and Obama a whopping 365. I had predicted a 355/183 split, so I was only off by 10 votes... also known as Indiana. Silly Lake County broke more for Obama then I had expected. It was actually very surreal, after Ohio was called for Obama and the race was essentially over, that I started rooting for McCain in Indiana, because that was the one state that my prediction was heading the wrong direction. But, I suppose if I have to be wrong on a state, I prefer to be wrong in the way that gets more votes for my guy. Also, bonus points for having called the electoral vote coming out of Omaha, Nebraska for Obama.

Next, a little ethnographic film about that fateful moment when the polls on the west coast closed and the election was called.

Yes, that's me in the white shirt and the American Flag tie. Exact same outfit as 2004. I think we have the start of a good little tradition.

And now, a special comment. I realized the day after the election that my relationship with my government had radically changed. Since my political inception, there has either been a Republican President or a Republican Congress... and for five years we had both! (And one crazy year we had a Republican President and a Republican House with a Democratic Senate.) This is the first time when my party is truly, and unapologetically in power.

That really changes how you relate to what's going on in Washington. Until now, if something bad happened it was all too easy to say, yup, that's bad... silly Republicans. It also meant that ideals I supported were generally in opposition to the majority ideals. In such instances you take up the mantle of the loyal opposition. You may object to the outcome, but as a loyal American you recognize the political process for what it is. Obama's election and growth of Democratic majorities in the House and Senate change everything.

Now it's not enough to just say, "silly Republicans", because they aren't the ones doing the bad things. It's going to be us. And don't give me the line about the Senate filibuster... by the time Alaska and Minnesota are resolved, I fully expect a 59 vote majority in the Senate. Even if we fail to pickup the runoff in GA, as I expect will be the case, it should be trivial to pick up a single republican vote on all manner of issues, assuming we have unity among the caucus.

And that's the whole issue. Now that the Democrats are in charge, will be have unity? I'm not talking about the sort of unity where we all go jump off a bridge together, but the kind of unity where members vote as a governing coalition for the betterment of America, not just their own personal political prospects. What of us rank and file Democrats? Are we going to become the ditto heads of the Democratic party, walking around as if our newly elected leaders can do no wrong? Maybe we'll swing the other way, and demonstrate that liberals really are never satisfied.

I honestly don't know what happens next. I'm excited for change and I'm excited to have a voice that matters. But there's a lot of scary stuff out there, and it will take more than just a really smart president (though that's certainly a prerequisite). I don't doubt Obama will rise to the task... but will we?

Predictions: 37 Hours Out

2008-11-03T08:11:00.000-08:00

Just spent some time on the Washington Post "Pick Your President" tool and put together my final predictions for tomorrow. Final tally: 354 for Obama / 184 for McCain.

<p><strong>><a href='http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008/pick-your-president/'>2008 Election Contest: Pick Your President</a></strong> - Predict the winner of the 2008 presidential election.</p>

Should be a fun night of watching the results come in.

My First Rails Application

2008-10-22T17:23:00.000-07:00

Last week Articulated Man launched my first solo Rail's application, a voter's guide for New England federal races. The site was sponsored by the New England Alliance for Children's Health, whose site we did earlier in the year as just a standard site. The voter's guide required a bit more functionality, thus the decision was made to develop in Rails and use it as my first stab at Rails development.

The site turned out great, mostly because we have outstanding designers who can make anything look good. I also learned quite a bit about the nuts and bolts of a Rails site, which is something you don't really get from just reading the book.

While it's still too soon to make any firm declarations about Rails, I will say it was very nice to have some provided structure when building the application. With LegSim, and pretty much any other project I've done, I had to build everything out of whole cloth... thus, LegSim is rather amorphous, having changed throughout the years and never following a clearly defined structure. With Rails you get that out of the box... perhaps more structure than I would prefer, but I think I'd prefer too much structure over too little, at least at my current stage as a developer.

Speaking of LegSim, the UW Congress course has started up again this quarter, giving me a boost of excitement to get developing again. Already some good stuff happening there as I integrate what I've learned since doing web development full time. Sadly, Archon and LegSim v5 have been put on hold until later, as I need to have a finished product well before either of those technologies will be ready for prime time. But some day--some day soon--LegSim will be rewritten and be better than ever!

A Dutch Experiment

2008-10-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

While visiting The Netherlands earlier this year, Sarah introduced me to Bitterballen, a dutch snack food traditionally eaten with beer. They were so good that all of us visiting Americans insisted on ordering them at every meal where it made sense. After leaving the country, I figured I wouldn't get to eat them again until I returned. But this weekend I decided nuts to that and went about researching how to make them myself.

After checking out several different recipes on the internet, I settled on the following:

4 tbl. butter or margarine
1/2 lb ground beef or veal
1/4 cup carrot, finely diced
1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
A grating of fresh nutmeg
1 tbl. fresh lemon juice
2 tbl. parsley, finely chopped
5 tbl. flour
1 cup beef broth or milk
1/2 cup dry bread crumbs
1 egg, beaten with 1 tsp. water
Oil for deep frying
Heat one tablespoon of the butter in a large skillet over moderate heat and cook the meat, carrots, and onions until the meat is browned and the carrots are tender. Drain the meat in a colander, then place in a mixing bowl. Add the salt, pepper, nutmeg, lemon juice, and parsley and stir to combine. Set the meat mixture aside. Heat the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter in a saucepan over moderate heat and stir in the flour to make a roux. Cook this for 2 to 3 minutes, then add the beef broth or milk. Continue heating, stirring constantly, until the sauce boils and becomes quite thick. Combine the sauce with the meat mixture, stirring to combine them thoroughly, and chill this mixture for at least two hours in the refrigerator, until it has become solid. When the mixture has solidified, roll it into balls about 1 inches in diameter, using your hands. Roll the balls in the bread crumbs, then in the egg and water mixture, then in the bread crumbs again. Fry a few at a time in a deep fryer with at least 2 inches of oil at 375 degrees until golden (about 2 to 3 minutes). Drain on paper towels and serve immediately.

I chose my friend's final debate watching party as the testing grounds, hoping that a wide group of people could give feedback. Sadly attendance was far less than the previous debate parties, but overall the reviews were positive.

Preparing for construction

I made the constituent elements the day before. The green bowl there is a three times the recipe above and took several hours to prepare.

Ready for frying

Each of these balls has a double coating of breadcrumbs. In retrospect, I wish I had made them a bit smaller.

The deep fry!

It was not easy to keep the temperature constant. Poor Mike was constantly checking the temperature and adjusting the heat.

The first batch

I feel this was the best batch in terms of color. I didn't have a proper timer to count the frying time, leading to uneven cooking.

Ready for muching

This is the first 16, but I would end up making 13 more, for a total of 29 delicious little balls. I also have easily half of the filling left over. Looks like I'm going to have to make more this weekend.

These Voters

2008-10-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

During the end of the Democratic Primary, as Obama was narrowly loosing states to Hillary Clinton after a series of victories that put him so far in the lead it was virtually impossible for Clinton to catch up, the talking heads had a lot of fun declaring Obama was having difficulties with these voters. These voters were generally poor working white voters in West Virgina, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, but sometimes these voters referred to women, seemingly, in general. The "proof" behind these assertions was that Clinton had done better in those demographics, often by as much as 10 whole points! And so the conventional wisdom went that someone who supported Clinton must not like Obama... and thus electoral doom awaited him come the general election.

Here we are, less than a month away from November 4th, and Obama is leading nearly every contested state and in every demographic--except racists and the deeply conservative--and is on his way to an electoral landslide of 340+. Obviously all these voters didn't end up having as many reservations about Obama as original prognosticated. Could it have been these voters just generally liked Clinton more, but in a race between Obama and McCain there really is no contest? Did anyone actually expect those traditional democratic voters to switch party? Honestly?

What strikes me is that for all the punditry's willingness to advise the Obama campaign about these voters, you don't ever hear similar advice directed at the McCain campaign? Where are the commentators mentioning that Obama has a mortal lock on voters with a college education and that McCain just isn't connecting with smart people? Or that Obama has a huge lead among those worried about the economy, implying McCain doesn't resonate with working people? How about his inability to persuade those who live by major bodies of water? (McCain's message just isn't hitting home with people who understand what it means to be really wet!) Why isn't anyone being so blatantly condescending to McCain as was so in vogue with Obama just three months ago?

Truer Words Never Spoken

2008-10-07T17:23:00.001-07:00

I read a lot of Washington Post stories, in particular their editorials, which is really the only way to get analysis these days since reporters are so afraid of being called biased they can't just come out and say "so and so is telling a lie". Today I read the first editorial I've seen of one Anne Applebaum, who is a native Washingtonian (not of the state variety) talking about the supposed "Washington" that we hear politicians claiming to represent middle America are always railing against. She's got an all-star list of politicians who (a) run Washington and (b) are from middle American... and yet, Washington still seems to be this thing that middle America hates. She brings her editorial to a finish with the following paragraph that every one should read.

Washington, however stuffy it may once have been, is no longer in need of "a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street." Washington is in need of expertise, management experience, long-term thinking and more political courage -- from wherever in the country it happens to come. More to the point, Washington needs people who think like national politicians and not like spokesmen for the local business executives who fill their reelection coffers and the local party hacks who plan their campaigns. Let's be frank: The "bailout" bill was passed last week not because members of Congress decided it would work but because it was stuffed with the pork, perks and tax breaks without which no piece of legislation, however important to the nation as a whole, can now pass. Maybe it's unfair to call that "small-town" thinking, but it sure is small-minded. And small-mindedness, not snobbery, is the dominant mind-set of 21st-century Washington.

I wish I could write like that.

Marked-to-Market

2008-10-02T16:59:00.001-07:00

While I wait for the Vice Presidential Debacle--I mean, Debate--to start, I figured I'd drop a quick post about Marked-to-Market, for those trying to make heads or tails of the bailout business up on the Hill this week. Let me start by saying I have not made up my mind about the bailout, and one of the big advantages about not being being a member of Congress is that I'm not required to. I once heard a Congressional Chief of Staff observe that Congress people are paid to have incredibly well informed opinions. And it's true, with a staff of at least six people and all the time in the world to think about issues, I should expect their opinions to be infinitely more informed than my own... not that this makes them right.

Anyway, as everyone knows, the House Republicans killed the bailout bill on Monday saying that government intervention into the market is (a) always bad and (b) unneeded. I don't buy (a), and that certainly makes me wonder about (b), but they seemed so darn certain... and seeing as how these are the people that Wall Street Fat Cats got elected for their "pro-growth" policies and thus should be first in line to give money to their corporate overlords, I wanted to know more about (b) before I dismissed it out of hand.

Members of the Republican Study Committee argue there are a set of non-interventionist options available to unfreeze the currently frozen credit markets. Besides ever popular policies like more tax cuts, their chief proposal is to abolish the Securities Exchange Commission's Marked-to-Market rule. Here's the rule in jist form:

When reporting assets, as all publicly traded companies do, assets must be valued at what they would fetch on the open market

Which is to say, if I have 10 head of cattle which I could sell today for $1000, then I report $1000 worth of cattle as my assets. It also means that even if I believe the cattle will be worth $10,000 in two months time, I cannot state that today... because it's not the current fair market value.

The RSC argues that the Marked-to-Market policy is what has frozen the credit markets because there are no buyers, of any kind, for the toxic securities backed by foreclosed mortgages that started this mess. As a result, financial institutions holding these assets must report them as being worth ZERO dollars. Which, if you think about it, is absurd. Even if the mortgages are in foreclosure, there is a house underneath all that paperwork that is worth something. It may not be worth what it was originally sold for, but it's sure worth more than zero. However, because the SEC requires assets be marked to the current market value, and no one is buying the securities, that's exactly how it is valued.

So, the RSC has a point... maybe if we eliminated the Marked-to-Market rule, the banks could post healthier looking balance sheets, with higher capitalization, and things could start getting better. It just might work... but lest we forget, there was a reason the Marked-to-Market rule exists at all. If estimating the value of something based on some potential future sounds familiar, that's good--means you are paying attention--because that is what Enron did. They valued their various energy trading deals based on a projected value of assets that didn't exist. As a result, Enron looked great on paper, but in reality, it had nothing.

The question then for our well informed Congress people is this... how do you allow holders of these toxic securities to estimate their true value while avoiding Enron type behavior?

Renaissance Faire

2008-09-30T21:52:00.000-07:00

I accepted an invitation from Brett and Timber to attend this year's Northern California Renaissance Faire. It was my first time attending a Faire, which is considered a bit of a cultural necessity in geek circles, so I felt it was time. I took some pictures, which I uploaded to Flickr as an experiment.

I didn't take very many photos of the attendees, though they were by far the most interesting aspect of the faire. The costumes came in a wide varieties, from the simple to the ornate. The only unifying theme I could find was the obsession with corsets on the female form. Since I'm entirely too shy of a photographer to take personal shots, here is one I took of a large group.

Later on this group would setup a life-size game of Janga which they played blind folded...

We took in two different jousting events put on by the Knights of Avalon, a full contact jousting troupe that is also a 501(c)(3) rescuing horses. Interestingly, the Knights of Avalon are sponsored by Monster Energy, if the stickers on Black Knight were to be believed.

Dudes had some serious armor

They actually hit each other with sticks going very fast

Of course, no Faire is complete without food. I purchased a roast beef sandwich that proved unexciting. But Timber purchased bread and cheese, seen here.

You could also purchase this with a sausage, in which case the entire thing was served on a stick

While eating we enjoyed minstrels and players on stage. In addition to the Irish music and dance group shown below, we also saw a rather clever 30 minute bit about Shakespeare that was rather intelligent. You needed to know a decent amount about Shakespeare to appreciate their humor.

The photo of the players was totally lit wrong, so you get this far less exciting photo of music

Perhaps most critical to truly appreciating the event was to join in with the costuming. Brett, as is traditional, was a bump on a log. But Timber got into the act with a garland that matched her dress.

Who wouldn't want ribbons flowing off their head?

I decided to take the whole concept a bit further and made a true investment in ridiculousness. Behold, my new fluffy hat:

Now my Bowler Hat has a friend

It's worth noting that I got a deal on the plumage, talking them down to just $15 for the three extra feathers, which apparently was quit a bargain. Here's another shot of me standing in a rustic setting, with the hat.

Now I have something for Halloween

Blood Money

2008-09-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

The past couple of weeks have been a real eye-opener for ardent believers in the infallibility of market investment. It's not that stocks of actual companies are in trouble, it's that the so called financial sector appears to be in the state of some sort of meltdown. I'm no economist, and I don't follow the market like I follow other things, but I certainly can't say I'm surprised at the situation. For me this goes back to human nature and the basic concepts on which capitalism is based.

Capitalism, as opposed to say, socialism, seems based on the notion that humans are self-interest maximizers. Given the option we will always do what's in our own best interest. Which is a really positive way of saying we are all selfish bastards. In my limited travel of the world, I think that's fairly accurate. But capitalism had the brilliant idea of saying that so long as everyone is acting in their own self-interest, the outcome will be beneficial for everyone. Again, put more brutally by famed economist John Maynard Keynes, "[c]apitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men, will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

Underlying all of the market economy is the notion of risk, and in it's purist form, the individual who takes on the most risk has the greatest potential for profit. I borrow $50,000 to start a business, I've now taken a risk, but if it pays off I'll be much better for it. Of course, if it fails, I'm out $50K. This concept supposedly scales all the way up to the Fortune 500 companies who routinely borrow billions of dollars in the name of investment. At that high level of play it's called leveraging. A company may have $5 billion in fixed assets, but only 10 million excess cash with which to invest. But, it can borrow against those fixed assets and leverage the company millions more. As long as the return on investment is higher than the interest rate on the loan, then it's a profitable deal for the company.

What the past few weeks have demonstrated rather clearly is that the above concept of risk is simply not operative. When a bank buys securities backed by junk mortgages, on the hope that the risk will pay off, the bank is not the the only actor taking on risk, they are just the only one doing so voluntarily. Turns out that the entire financial system takes on risk, from the lowest bank depositor, up to the federal government, all the way back down to the lowest taxpayer.

The result is that risk takers are not, in fact, risk takers... they are risk distributors, with the added bonus that all of the benefits of the risk flow to just to them, while the negative fall out will be distributed. This creates a perverse incentive for risk takers to assume more risk than the profit margins would suggest, because the full weight of the risk is not theirs to shoulder. Suddenly the idea of buying complex securities with shoddy accounting backed by junk mortgages doesn't sound so bad. Suddenly the idea of over-leveraging your company begins to make market sense. Suddenly approving mortgages to risky borrowers in order to cash in on the soaring housing market is the best way to meet quarterly earning projections. The next thing you know we've got a system stuffed full of so much unwise risk that it simply cannot hold under its own weight... and that brings us to today.

I entitled this post Blood Money not in reference to the funds these risk takers extract from us as depositors, pensioners, and tax payers, but rather as a proposal for the reverse. We often hear pure market advocates say taxes on the rich--though, generally in this context they are referred to as "risk takers"--should be cut to encourage investment. The thought goes that these rich folks won't be sufficiently self-interested if they know the government is going to tax their income. I've never really been convinced by this argument, seeing as how if I have the opportunity to make $100, and in one universe the government is going to take $40 and in the other the government is going to take $45, I will still go for the $100, because in both universes the residual earnings is still greater than zero. The only situation where I wouldn't act is one where the risk of failing is so great that the $5 profit margin is actually determinative. But I digress :)

The point is that lowering taxes on the highest tax bracket has always been justified because these folks are the so called wealth creators, through their clever risk taking strategies, and that if we tax them, we will destroy their ingenuity. But now we find ourselves in a situation where the rich are asking for a $700 billion bailout, financed by taxes, because they assumed too much risk... and we, as tax payers, are probably going to give them an amount in that neighborhood because the risk takers figured out a away to ensure that we already bear the risk, even though we were never in line for any of the profits.

Students of history will note a bit of a cycle here... whether with the Savings & Loan bailout, or the auto industry bailout, risk takers are always figuring out ways to trap us regular Joes with the risk, while pocketing the profits during good times. My suggestion then, is that it's time for us to claim our share of the profits. Here are a few ideas just off the top of my head: we could go back to treating profits from investment just like normal income, ending the preferential tax treatment of those whose entire earnings come from their own existing wealth; we could enact windfall taxes on industry in boom cycles (I'm looking at you, oil sector) which has the added bonus of cooling off those boom industries so they don't overextend and then crash out, leaving us holding the bag; we could even revisit the assumed knowledge that lower taxes on the high income bracket somehow benefits us all. That way, when times are good and the risk takers are rolling in the dough, so are we... and when times are tough and the risk takers come groveling for a bailout, there won't have to be a discussion about Wall Street vs. Main Street, because we will have the money on hand and know that by helping the risk takers out today, we will be getting all that money back from them tomorrow.

Pushing Algebra

2008-09-22T08:45:00.000-07:00

Today I was going to write about market stabilization, moral hazard, and top bracket taxation... or maybe I was finally going to say something about Sarah Palin... or maybe just a quick post about Nginx to follow up on my much maligned posting from some months ago. But all of that is going to have to take a back seat because today's Washington Post has brought to my attention a new crises in American schools... the rush to teach algebra.

First, a bit about my experience with math. I was privately schooled through seventh grade, where I excelled in math... and a good thing to, because I was awful at spelling at the time... for that matter, I still am awful at spelling. When I transfered to public school in 8th grade I was placed in a remedial math class, which is to say it was behind what was traditionally taught to 8th graders and even more behind what was taught in the advanced 8th grade math class. After a few weeks of acing every test and answering every question in class, I was given an aptitude test where I did well enough to advance not just to the traditional class, not just to the advanced 8th grade class, but all the way to the advanced 9th grade class... the highest level of math offered at my junior high. (I often wonder why this test was not administered before school even started...)

I chose to go into the advance 8th grade class (quit frankly, I was having enough social integration issues as it was, the last thing I needed to do was take a math class with a bunch of folks a grade above me). This began my journey through public school math. As I said, I was good at math, and got either As or high Bs in Algebra I and Geometry (which I eventually became a 9th grader). I also did quite well in Algebra II / Trigonometry in 10th grade. But by 11th grade the ranks of advanced math were getting pretty thin. We still had enough students to support two full classes of advanced math, but that was down from four full classes at the junior high level. 11th grade advanced math, known as Pre-Calculus, changed everything. This class was extraordinarily challenging. In the one class I can truthfully say I always did my homework and always studied for tests, I also received the only C in my entire high school career. The number of people competing for valedictorian dropped to one, and the eventual saluditorian would only be eligible because she was not even at Woodinville High School in 11th grade to have her GPA washed up against the rocks like the rest of us. In 12th grade I excelled once again, getting straight As through Calculus and doing very well on the practice AP tests (though I never actually took them).

The point of retelling this story is that I was good at math, one of the best in my class of 400 or so students, and yet even I struggled through the Algebra to Calculus track that one begins by taking Algebra in 8th grade. Students who took Algebra in 9th grade, which was the norm at my school, had a much easier time and a more gradual progression into advanced mathematics. So I'm left wondering why, in God's name, are we pushing algebra on every 8th grade student? Is this some new arbitrary standard we have decided to push because it sounds catchy? Has anyone figured out what we are going to do with all of these students when they get to Calculus, having left a trail of Cs behind them? I'm all for having a system that pushes students to excel, but math is a foundation based learning experience, and advanced math in junior high and high school requires
mastery of advanced math in elementary, not happy wishes and talk of the "new civil right."

Seriously folks, America has always resisted tracks as anathema to our egalitarian sense of education, and I generally agree. But the response shouldn't be an arbitrary decision that this particular level of math is right for everyone just because it makes for good headlines.

"Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city"

2008-09-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

This week marks an new chapter in my employment with Articulated Man. As of Monday I have my own office situated in downtown Santa Cruz. The office is actually part of a larger office space housing the venerable Stone Soup literary magazine. It's amazing how many people I've mentioned this to know who/what Stone Soup is. But truth is the office culture doesn't provide much opportunity for me to interact with them, so it's really just me.

The space is roughly that of a Haggett Hall double room, sans beds and hexagonal shape, so it's not exactly spacious. But, there is more than enough room for a desk, some shelves, and most importantly, my still relatively new bike that I'm always worried will be stolen when I lock it up on a bike rack. I think all those years on the UW campus have put the fear of bike theft into me. On the plus side, it has windows overlooking one of the major streets in town and on Wednesdays it looks right over the Farmer's Market.

I made the move for several reasons. First, Sarah is back from Holland and will be spending more time around the apartment when she is not at school. While I love her dearly, two people shouldn't occupy such a small space 24 hours a day... a little separation does, in fact, make the heart fonder. More importantly, I feel like I've been drifting at work recently. Not that what I've been doing is uninteresting, but that I haven't been really focusing the way I feel I could be, or the company deserves from me. The hope is having an office will provide a dedicated place to concentrate and dig into what I've got to do.

Making the switch isn't going to be easy. Before the relocation, my morning consisted of getting out of bed at 8:55am, stopping in the kitchen for a bowl of cereal, and then the arduous 30 second commute to my desk in the living room to be "at work" by 9. Now things are a bit different. I'm up before 8am to check email and make sure there are no emergencies. Then from 9am to 10am I'm exercising, showering, and biking to my new office. Then I'm at the office until 5pm or when I get done with what needs to be done. It's quite a bit more regimented, which was sort of the point.

Currently I'm working off my laptop, which I bought three years ago as a note taking device for law school, not as a web development platform. So far it has not been up to the challenge. The hope is some added RAM will fix things, but expectations are not high and I'm mentally preparing to relocate my desktop over there until I have a better solution. I did get a fancy new monitor and keyboard, so that's exciting.

For those who made it all the way to the bottom of the post, I have a little treat for you. Starting this week I'm going to be doing a little more political blogging than I have been, probably going through until the elections. Handful of topics have arisen that I feel the need to talk about, and since Sarah hears from me every day, I guess it's time I blab to you all.

Chrome: Speculation

2008-09-02T23:44:00.000-07:00

If you are a geek and you haven't heard about Chrome, then you've been living under a rock since Monday when it was first leaked. If you aren't a geek, your failure to notice the news is acceptable, understandable, forgivable. But now it's on my blog, and you have no excuse, so get wise.

There are more than a handful of interesting things to say about Chrome, and none of them require me to even have tried Chrome, since it's not yet available for Linux uses... here are each of those interesting things in no particular order.

1) The Comic Book

Google used an unorthodox approach to explaining the technology driving their fancy new browser. Instead of your standard, boring white paper, Google released a freaking comic book! It's still a point-by-point review of the problems of current day browsers and Google's proposed solutions, but it goes a step further with use of clever pictures to describe complex technical problems. It reminds me of an excellent video on Trusted Computing circulated years back (worth a watch if you haven't seen it before). Now, let's not fool ourselves, the Chrome comic book is not for the faint hearted... processes versus threads, memory footprint, hidden class transitions, incremental garbage collection... this isn't kids stuff and certainly not for public consumption. Were it excels is communicated complex ideas to folks with a shared vocabulary but without shared expertise. I don't develop browsers, and probably never will, but I still understood the message. A contributor to Debian Planet quipped, "I think it would be good if we had a set of comics that explained all the aspects of how computers work," and I couldn't agree more. I suppose that's one advantage of having serious cash to throw around.

2) Open Source as Market Motivator

It's my belief that Google has zero interest competing with the likes of Firefox and Internet Explorer, giants that they are... or even the lesser three: Safari, Opera, and Konqueror (being the origins of WebKit... KDE for the win!). Chrome will never be as big as those browsers and Google doesn't care. Google's purpose, stated in various press releases, developers conference, and in the freakin' comic itself, is to improve the ecosystem in which they operate: the web. Google wants more content online, and more users searching for that content, in order to feed the growing advertising business on which Google's billions are based. Chrome isn't about challenging FF or IE for market share, it is about challenging FF and IE to be better.

To accomplish these goals they have open-sourced the browser and all of its fancy doodads. Some clever things here. First, they used WebKit as their rendering engine, and as I mentioned, I love WebKit because it is based on KHTML, which was one of the first good open-source HTML renders and is still in use by Konqueror. What's unique about WebKit is that neither FF (which uses Gecko) or IE (which uses something I will refer to simply as the suck) use it. So, here you've got an entire implementation of a radical new way of building a web browser, with all sorts of cool features just begging for adoption and neither of the big players have a leg up... both will have to tear out parts and re-implement based around their rendering system. And re-implement they shall! If Chrome can deliver on all of Google's lofty promises, then users are going to gravitate to whichever browser can best deliver the same results.

3) Process vs. Threads

This is the big thing that Chrome is supposed to offer. Modern day browsers utilize tabs to allow users to visit many pages at once, which is handy... but in order to visit multiple pages like that, the browser has to be able to do many things at once. Until now, that was down with threads.

To help visualize a thread, imagine you have a fourteen year old kid and you tell him to deliver newspapers along a street. Off he goes and does his thing and he does it very well. Then, the next day, you tell the kid while he's delivering the papers you'd also like him to compose an opera. So, he goes and delivers a few papers, and then stops and jots down a few notes, maybe a harmony or two, then back to paper delivery. He gets it done, but all that bouncing from one to another causes him to do it a bit slower. The next day you ask him to do all those things he was already doing and do your taxes (does anyone else get a cat on the second result?!). This time, when he switches over to doing your taxes, his poor little fourteen year old brain can't handle it and the whole operation goes to hell... no papers get delivered, no opera is composed, and certainly not tax returns. That's threading... one "person" switching between various jobs.

Now, with processes, it's like you have THREE fourteen year old boys to do your bidding... one goes off to deliver the papers, one composes the opera, and the final does your taxes. Even if the third kid can't deliver, his epic failure doesn't impact the performance of the other two. You may still get audited, but at least you'll know the papers are delivered and opera lovers can rave about the latest wunderkind.

IE and FF use threads (though, rumor on the street is that IE8 beta is process based)... so if one thread goes wonky, you probably lose the entire browser. Chrome is different, it uses separate processes for each tab, that way if one has a problem, the others aren't impacted. If, at this point, you are saying "big deal, how often does my browser crash?" you are right where I am. I use my browser for everything all day... 10 - 15 tabs at once is standard operating procedure for me. Maybe I'm not visiting the nefarious parts of the internets. But here's what is cool about their concept. It's not one process per HTTP request or page fetch, it's one process per tab/domain. Which means that so long are you are browsing around CNN.com, you operate within a single process, sharing memory for various javascript fun within that domain. But once you leave CNN.com to visit, say, nytimes.com, the old process is killed and a new one, with fresh uncluttered memory, is spawned. Which, if you don't know much about the AJAX security model, is really a clever approach. AJAX is sandboxed by design, meaning AJAX scripts running on a page at cnn.com can ONLY talk with cnn.com servers... it cannot make a request off to washingtonpost.com or whatever... it's all isolated. So now, when you go to gmail.com and sit there for HOURS, with its memory consuming javascript, it is all washed away the moment you move to a new domain. Now that, my friends, is good news.

Of course, it comes with a cost... those processes each need their own memory, and while it may be virtual memory at first, once they start doing a lot of writing, and you get all those page faults, it's gonna be real memory... and then we'll see what happens on less-than-modern computers that don't have 2 GBs of memory to throw around just to read their daily web comics.

4) Javascript: V8

I like javascript and have no patience for its detractors. If you haven't used the likes of prototype or jquery, you have no concept of what javascript is capable of or how it can be extended to do whatever you might possibly want to do. Having said that, Javascript can be slow... painfully slow... on underpowered computers (like my laptop, now three years old). You can hear it chugging away on some javascript code. It's my observation, however, that it's not the javascript engine at fault, it's the javascript itself... folks relying too much on their framework and object oriented design and not enough on smart coding.

For example, I recently retooled a javascript library that reordered a sequence of pulldown menus (known as select elements in HTML lingo). The previous version of the library iterated through the list of selects SO many times, it wasn't even funny (and I find most HTML/javascript base conversations to be hilarious!). So, although I had to sacrifice a bit of encapsulation to do it, I was able to rewrite the library to be significantly faster... and my CPU thanked me for the effort. So, what does this have to do with Chrome?

Well, Chrome has a new javascript engine, V8, which is supposed to be a lot faster for various reasons. I guess that's great... but, at least for the vast majority of javascript code out there, the real problem isn't the engine, it's the code. Google has an answer for that too, but the day I choose to learn Java is the day I choose to dust off the law degree.

5) Gears Out-of-the-Box

When I first learned about Gears, I wasn't excited. Then I went to Google I/O and I got a little excited so I tried it out... Firebug threw so many errors, and everything ran so slow, that I lost all my excitement the threw it out. I will say that the idea of a more robust javascript interface to the filesystem and to other hardware resources is a great idea... as is a persistent data storage system beyond cookies. But Google's got an uphill battle here. Until the majority of users have Gears installed, or a browser with Gears like features, no web developer is going to utilize those tools, thus there will be no incentive for users to actually install them. I honestly have no clue how Flash managed to get installed on nearly every browser out there... but I don't see how any plugin that is as invasive as Gears is going to be able to repeat that miracle a second time. So, Gears out of the box?! Yeah, just another browser with propriatary extensions that are tempting, but should not be used.

6) User Interface

I haven't seen it yet, so I don't know... one friend says it's really hard to get used to. I reserve the right to be obstinate.

In Conclusion

Hell if I know... Google is a complete mystery. But, by and large, they haven't steered me wrong, even if some believe what they are doing is more like sharecroping than software development. I'll be the first to try Chrome soon as they release that Linux version... and while Google's at it, maybe a Linux Picasa client?

Netroots Nation 2008: The Good Side

2008-07-19T12:08:00.001-07:00

I'm still drafting a post about the Bad Side of Netroots Nation--and trust me, there's lots to say--but I wanted to post about a very positive experience I just had, and it's name is Lawrence Lessig. Regular readers already know about my love affair with Prof. Lessig, and I told my company (who paid to send me here) that I was attending for the sole purpose of declaring my undying love to the professor. I just left his keynote speech and it was so good that I plumb forgot to prostrate myself before the entire liberal blogger community. But that's okay, because his speech was just damn good. I'm hoping he will post the slides and audio, but (a) he probably won't for months and, (b) you probably won't take the time to watch it. But that's okay, because I'm going to summarize his point, which is both simple and powerful.

He argues that the recent 9% job performance rating for Congress is a product of trust, or a lack thereof. Which stands in contrast to the claim that the rating is a product of policy outcomes. If you had asked me yesterday why Congress rating is so low, I would have pointed to their failure to end the Iraq War. But that answer never really seemed to be complete to me. Every vote has winners and losers, and there is no way that Congress is voting such that 91% of the entire country is losing. There's something more fundamental than policy outcome going on here, and whatever it is, it crosses the the isle to include an ultra-super-majority of the American population. Trust, it seems to me, fills in the gap. I buy the idea that 91% of the American people simply don't trust the product coming out of Congress, regardless of which side they fall on a particular issue.

Which isn't to say that Congress deserved our trust back when the rating was higher... more likely, we simply didn't have the needed information to "build" our lack of trust. But with the advent of blogging and increased political access of all stripes, it's becoming all too painfully obvious.

What I found most compelling about Lessig's presentation about trust was not that members of Congress are undeserving of our trust. In fact, he went so far as to say that this decade's Congress is far more deserving of our trust than any Congress before... not that this Congress is good, but that the past was so bad. What he pointed out is that there is culture in Washington, an accepted culture, whose byproduct is untrustworthiness. As an example he pointed to the bankruptcy bill, which in the late 90s First Lady Hillary Clinton opposed... but then in 2004 Senator Hillary Clinton supported. Clinton received significant donations from credit card companies during that time, leading to the claim that her vote was bought. She says the money isn't responsible for her changed position, and as Lessig said, "I believe her." The problem, he says, is that it creates the appearance of being bought and lessens trustworthiness. Hence the 9%.

He went on to pitch a new organization, change-congress.org, which has become his new passion, having put his free-culture crusade on hold. Which is not to say the free-culture fight isn't important, or that so many other issues aren't important. In fact, he's willing to say all these other issues are more important than the issue of trustworthiness. What makes trustworthiness worth his time, and I agree everyone's time, is not that it's the most important problem, but that it's the first problem. It is a pipeline problem that must be overcome before anything else can be really solved.

So, to Prof. Lessig, I was originally very disappointed when I heard you were leaving the free-culture fight, but now that I've heard your argument and see your direction, I applaud your decision, and I'm excited to start working on this, the first problem.

Don't be Fooled by .us.com

2008-07-01T12:23:00.000-07:00

I got an email today from Network Solutions declaring "Is the .COM Domain You Want Taken? Get the .US.COM & Save" and thought to myself, "wow, they are finally starting to advertise the .us TLD!" Here in the States we sort of take the .com and .org top level domains for granted. But in much of the rest of the world websites use their country code TLD... so, in the United Kingdom you will see lots of .uk domains. Personally, I prefer this, as it helps identify the site's situs (to use a legal term)... don't believe the hype of pure virtual existence, websites have tangible form in the physical world.

Trouble with this advertisement from Network Solutions is that they are not, in fact, advertising a .us TLD... they are advertising subdomains of the .us.com domain. Note the .com is at the end, not preceding the .us like with .com.au (I just set one of these up yesterday, nothing special about Australia). So, what we've got going here is somebody (presumably Network Solutions or a subsidiary) spent the $20 necessary to register us.com--a process that is no different than when I registered prbonogeek.org--and is now going to sell subdomains of their domain for $20 per year and are passing it off as a ".COM Alternative!"

Now, I can't speak for anyone else, but the idea of giving $20 to some dude who happened to buy the us.com domain when I could just as easily purchase a .us domain for the same price through a legitimate registrar, seems awfully silly. To further bolster my claim, have a look at the actual us.com site... looks like a google link farm to me. Having said that, if anyone wants to purchase subdomains for probonogeek.org, I'm offering them at the competitive price of only $15/y!

Political Roundup

2008-06-27T09:41:00.001-07:00

Lots of stuff in the news recently that I wanted to offer my two cents on in the interest of totally destroying my political credibility when I seek political office in 20 years.

2nd Amendment Ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller

I will come right out and say it that the Court got this right. The traditional theory to explain gun control in light of the 2nd Amendment is that the right is a collective right given form through state militias (or what we might call today, the State Guard). I've been searching for words to help describe why I feel this just didn't cut it for me, because it runs counter to the usual liberal song and dance that, in general, I subscribe to. Thankfully, I found those words today in an OpEd by Eugene Robinson.

I've never been able to understand why the Founders would stick a collective right into the middle of the greatest charter of individual rights and freedoms ever written -- and give it such pride of place -- the No. 2 position, right behind such bedrock freedoms as speech and religion.

Makes you think... what if the 4th Amendment (restrictions against unlawful search and seizure) had been interpreted as a collective right... or Freedom of Speech? I may not agree with the 2nd Amendment, but it's on the books and it deserves the same constitutional force as all the other amendments.

Obama Campaign Pledges

There are three at issue... a commitment to stay in the Public Campaign Finance program, a commitment to engage in a different kind of politics vis-a-vis the general election, and a commitment to filibuster any FISA amendments that included retroactive immunity for telcoms. I give a thumbs up to getting out of public financing. Obama is raising tons of money across the spectrum of donors and he should continue to do so. The Republicans have fought dirty in the past and I see no reason to believe 2008 will be any different. I give a thumbs down to the Obama campaign's refusal to engage in Town Hall meetings with John McCain. I don't care if they are McCain's best format... they are formats where you have actual discussion and are tons better than traditional debates found in previous Presidential elections. And as for FISA... well, I suppose that's politics and everyone can changes their mind sometimes, which brings us to...

Telecommunications Immunity in FISA

I've thought long and hard about this since it became apparent that immunity for the telecommunication company's involvement in the Bush Administration surveillance program was all but a sure thing. For a long time, I was really upset. I even watched most of Sen. Dodd's floor speech where he railed against the decent from the Rule of Law into the Rule of Man. In theory, I agree... but in politics, I think theory must give way to the practical.

So I asked myself to try a little thought experiment... what would I do if I was an executive of a major telecommunications company? Lets assume I'm your standard executive whose primary concern is the financial well-being of my company, it's shortly after September 11th and representatives of the President of the United States shows up in my office saying "for the good of the country, we need your help." I, of course, ask the question any good executive worried about the financial well-being of my company would ask, "what are the legal implications?" to which the representatives say, "the President has authorized this under his Article II powers to defend the country as Commander & Chief." What, realistically, is the chance that my follow up is going to be, "you know, I think we should go to Congress and get explicit approval" or "how about we draft up a brief and ask the Courts to weigh in?" No, I think the most realistic response is going to be, "if you provide my company with a legal document from the President authorizing this activity, then we will provide assistance." To do otherwise is to tempt the wrath of the President and the ire of the American people just after the largest terrorist attack in the country's history.

Now, of course, I don't agree with the President or his advisers. The program itself goes too far and the President lacks the authority to authorize the violation of the law. But there are specifically delineated tools at the disposal of the Congress and the American people to restrain, and if necessary remove, the President for such violations of the law. The telcoms, in my view, are less-than-innocent bystanders in this case. Did they break the law? Probably, yes. Did they do so under what amounts to duress under Presidential order? Seems like, yes. Is the one who we should be going after sitting in the Oval Office? Absolutely, yes. Which is why the immunity provision in the FISA amendments is actually a sort of poetic justice. Every time one of the telcoms gets a suit against them dropped, they must produce documented proof, in open court, that the President specifically authorized the activity in question... every time the public will hear, the President told us to break the law. Whether or not that leads to any legal ramifications for the suits against the government, I'm unsure. But I think in the political/historical context, it will mean a lot to have the world hear, over and over again, that the Rule of Law was put aside because the President said so.

So now we will turn to the proper tools, whether that is individual suits against the government or political actions by the Congress, is up to those who wield those tools. But I think these sorts of approaches go after the true villains of the piece and are preferred over attacking the middlemen.

Getting Back Up...

2008-06-24T17:44:00.000-07:00

The probonogeek.org server is starting to come back from the dead. I took down the slice following my recent hack and awaited instructions from my hosting provider. Sadly, this experience made them reconsider entering this business and they have terminated the beta slice program that in which I was a part. They pointed me towards slicehost, which is a competitor with Linode, which we use at work. Anyway, I thought it would be a good opportunity to try something new, so I signed up for a slice and got the ball rolling on a new server.

Remember kids, security first...

niles@zion:~/exploit$ ./exploit
-----------------------------------
 Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit
 By qaaz
-----------------------------------
[+] mmap: 0x100000000000 .. 0x100000001000
[+] page: 0x100000000000
[+] page: 0x100000000038
[+] mmap: 0x4000 .. 0x5000
[+] page: 0x4000
[+] page: 0x4038
[+] mmap: 0x1000 .. 0x2000
[+] page: 0x1000
[+] mmap: 0x2b7638001000 .. 0x2b7638033000
[-] vmsplice: Bad address

Now I just need to restore my Subversion and Apache servers and I'll be rocking and rolling once again!

Hacked

2008-06-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

Today I received a very unhappy email from a fellow saying my webserver had launched an attack against his FTP server and that I needed to stop it or he would contact the Federal Authorities. I was unbelieving at first, to be perfectly honest, and asked him to produce logs verifying the attack. But then I went and checked my server and discovered it was running a script named ftp_scanner, which seemed to be attempting brute force attacks against random FTP servers. ack.

I quickly killed all the ftp_scanner processes, found the offending script on the server (cleverly hidden in /tmp/.../ so as to be both hidden from a standard 'ls' and appear like a system file when running 'ls -a'). The immediate problem addressed, I tried to figure out how this could have happened. To my horror, I discovered that Thursday of last week someone had run a brute force attack against my SSH server and happened upon one of my users whose password was the same as her username. double ack!

A little back story is useful here... on Friday my server went down in a sort of funky way. I could still ping it, but http and ssh access were denied. It took all weekend working with my provider to get it re-enabled. They said it was because CPU usage had spiked, and since it's a virtualized server, my slice was shutoff to prevent damage to the larger system. I should have investigated then, but I just figured the detection systems were borked and thought nothing of it. Bad idea.

Two days later, the intrepid attackers struck again... and I would never have known if not for the email from the poor guy whose server my server was attacking. But that's not the worst of it. While cleaning things up, I noticed an SSH login to the 'news' account, which is a system user account that you cannot usually log into. It was then that I discovered the /etc/shadow password file had been compromised to enable a variety of logins that should not have been. This, unfortunately, was the worse possible news. If the attackers could change /etc/shadow, it meant they had manged to obtain root level access to my server. ack, ack, ack.

I went back to the /tmp/.../ folder to poke around the contents. It was then that I discovered the Linux vmsplice Local Root Exploit. And indeed, running the tests described my system was vulnerable, and the entire slice had been compromised. Since I don't run tripwire, or anything like that, I was pretty much screwed. oh, ack...

All user data is now backed up onto my local desktop and the slice is scheduled to be cleared. Once the kernel is secured I will have to start building the system from the ground up all over again.

Oh, and if "Not Rick" is out there, I'm sorry to have caused you any trouble... but contacting me via means that prevent me from replying makes it difficult to apologize or explain the situation.

On Citzenship, the 14th Amendment, and Political Discourse

2008-06-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

Unless you live in a some sort of political cave, by now you know the United States Supreme Court ruled that the denial of Habeas Corpus to detainees held in Guantanamo Bay by the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is unconstitutional. It was a 5-4 split decision with the dissenters saying some very nasty things that makes one think they were not talking to the legal world at large, but rather trading in fear mongering so often employed by those convinced of the "Islamofascist" threat. However, it is not my intent to quibble with either side of the decision... I think it's pretty clear I support the majority's approach here. No, my problem is with the political discourse that has emerged since the decisions announcement.

Republicans in Congress, in particular Senators who have enough personal clout to actually matter, have declared they will do whatever it takes to undo this "harmful" decision. John McCain and Lindsay Graham have both spoken of legislative efforts to narrow the scope of the decision. This, in of itself, is fine. In fact, it's what is supposed to happen. The political branches make a law, the Court review the law with facts, rules whether it passes Constitutional muster, and if it doesn't, the political branches go and give it another try. The problem is when these Senators craft their words as combative... that they will fight for the little guy to see justice done in the face of an evil, overbearing Supreme Court. It makes it sound as if the Senators are white knights out to rectify deep wrongs inflicted upon the helpless, regardless of the consequences. Passing over the obvious fact that it is the Courts, not the Congress, that is trying to grant some small level of humanity to the helpless, this sort of dialog only serves to tarnish the view of the Court in the public eye. The long term consequences of that tarnishing is no worse that the presidential reputation destroying effects of the last eight years of the Bush Administration. The Courts are our courts, and when we tear them down, we do ourselves no service.

This, however, is just a minor quibble... my real objection is to the language used to vilify not the Court itself, but the decision they rendered. Here is a typical example from John McCain, "[the detainees] are not citizens, they do not have the rights of citizens." This is a true statement. The detainees are not citizens, and ergo do not have the rights of citizenship. So what?

Implicit in Sen. McCain's language is that the rights granted by the Constitution are to be enjoyed by citizens, and citizens alone. Three interesting observations emerge from the language.

First, a simple word frequency analysis (a common tool of political scientist) of the United States Constitution reveals that the drafters and subsequent amenders were not very interested in the concept of citizenship beyond the right to vote. The term appears in the Constitution (including amendments) a grand total of of nine times. Five instances are in relation to the federal and state privileges and immunities clauses (more on that in a moment) and the other four times relate to voting rights or apportionment of representatives.

Second, the Constitution is not a positive rights document. Meaning the rights are not granted to citizens... the First Amendment does not say "you have the right to say whatever", it says (paraphrasing) "the government does not have the right to stop you from saying whatever." Our Constitution is a negative rights document, by which power is taken away from the government, not granted to the people. You can read through nearly every clause and you'll find they are all phrased as "the government can or cannot do X". So going back to the first point, when we talk about "privileges and immunities", there really aren't any constitutional privileges or immunities beyond the right to vote, most are defined by statute.

So, let's take a look at the language of the Constitution that relates to Habeas Corpus:

The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

And here we find yet another negative right... "shall not be suspended." The clause is found in Section 8 of Article I, which is a big list of the things Congress is forbidden from doing. In other words, Congress may not suspend Habeas Corpus, except under specific circumstances (which the court, in other cases stemming from the Civil War, has made clear cannot be a case-by-case basis... either the writ is entirely suspended for everyone, or it is not). Note there is no mention of citizenship, simply that the Congress may not suspend. I admit I'm glossing over some interesting bits of Federal Con Law here... like could the Congress abolish the writ altogether forever? Many suggest that the Congress could do that, but that's different from denying the writ to just a subset of the population.

Finally, conservatives have been increasingly pushing this notion of citizenship. It is part of the dialog surrounding immigration rights and so called "illegals." The concept of citizenship infers a right to be here, and all others walk a fine line... heaven help you if you upset us, or we will deport you in a flash. The next step in that project seems to be to redefine the what it means to be a citizen. As I already demonstrated, the Constitution is primarily concerned with the right to vote... but now we see state legislation stripping illegal immigrants of their right to access social benefits, deny access to state colleges, even attempts to discriminate against their children. Some have gone so far as to propose altering the Constitution such that being born in the United States is not enough to establish citizenship.

So far these efforts are targeted at those who come to the States illegally... but it seems only a matter of time before the citizenship discourse gets to the point where we turn a suspicious eye to the legal immigrants who are not citizens. What then? Will John McCain declare that the First Amendment only applies to citizens?

Pillars of LegSim: Naming

2008-06-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

This is a technology posting, but I'm asking a question to my political science readers, so I'm going to keep it simple. Future "Pillars of LegSim" postings will be more technical.

I am presently in the think of redeveloping LegSim, but in a way I would never have contemplated even six months ago. The current version of LegSim (v4.1) is what's known as a CGI application, which means each and every time you ask LegSim to do something, it loads the whole program, executes, and then unloads. Sort of like if you had fire up your email client every time you wanted to send a single email. This is silly and making it better is, as David would say, "a solved problem." And indeed, there are all manner of pre-existing web development frameworks that could be made to do what I want to do (Ruby On Rails, CakePHP, Zope... just to one from each of the big languages). Thing is, I like Perl... and at the risk of sounding like a language snob (not the Sarah kind of language snob mind you), I would like to stick with Perl, the original Perl language.

Of course, there are frameworks in Perl... like Catalyst, which actually got it start at the University of Washington back when I was an undergraduate. But, bottom line, I don't want to have to learn someone else system and I don't want to have to fight when it tries to tell me how things ought to be done. I would just use Rails if I wanted that experience. So, I'm writing my own. Which is exciting, I've enjoyed it so far. Done right, I can use the framework not just for LegSim, but for other projects I might want to take on. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Faithful readers, I turn to you to ask a simple question... what should I call this thing? My first thought was to name it after the first Speaker of the House of Representatives... but that turned out to be Frederick Muhlenber, and I'm not naming my framework after no Muhlenber. We are working on a CMS system built on top of Rails at work, which is codenamed Pericles (a name my boss will likely change). I like Pericles, having come up with it myself, but I'm not sure if I want to reuse the name.

The current leader in this contest is Astraea, the daughter of Zeus and Themis who would eventually ascend into the heavens and become Virgo. She's also the Goddess of Justice, with the scales and stuff. While I like the sound, I'm not thrilled with the mythos. I'm looking for something more "governmenty" than justice (hence my initial interest in Pericles). Anyone have suggestions... needs to be a cool sounding word, cannot be in common use (to avoid confusion), and has some sort of tie in with government.

Drop me a line via email or a comment if you have any good ideas.

p.s. If anyone recommends Perl on Rails, I will ban you forever.

Updated - 6/11/2008

A friend wrote to suggest Solon, one of the fathers of Athenian democracy. The wikipedia page makes him sound like a pretty cool guy. But while reviewing the background I learned Solon eventually became an Archon of Athens, which was a sort of executive position within the Greek governmental system, both during it's tyrannical and democratic days. But here's the really cool part... the years in which no Archon was appointed where known as anarchy, meaning, literally, "no Archon." How cool is that?!

So, bonus points for Solon, but at the moment, the top choice is Archon.

Google vs. Privately Owned Community

2008-06-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

This isn't really a story about Google, but I was tipped off by a tech-legal blogger about the story because of Google's involvement with the St. Paul suburb of North Oaks, Minnesota. The basic story boils down to (1) North Oaks residents actually own the roads in their town and have a trespassing ordinance, (2) Google violated that ordinance when it took photos of the town for its Street View program, (3) North Oaks city council requested the photos of the entire city be removed, (4) Google complied.

From a Public Relations standpoint, I have no argument with Google's decision... however, I do think there is a dangerous first amendment precedent waiting in the wings here. In Marsh v. Alabama the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that First Amendment activity was still protected in the town of Chickasaw, Alabama even though every square inch of the town was private property owned by the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation. The company had baned religious leafleting and the Court said the company was the State in that situation and thus must abide by the First Amendment.

I think the situation in Chickasaw, Alabama is analogues to North Oaks, Minnesota... except, instead of a for-profit company owning the streets, individuals bound by their deeds through the North Oaks Home Owners Association own the streets. But the situation is otherwise the same in that a private entity is attempting to get around the State Action doctrine by abolishing the State. But in so doing, they create a new State in all but name, and thus under Marsh must allow First Amendment activities. There remains the question of whether taking photos from streets is a First Amendment activity, a question I am not immediately familiar with, although I believe it is protected.

Either way, I imagine Google complied for the same reason it complies with requests from private citizens... it doesn't have to under the law, but it does out of respect for privacy. My question now is what happens if a "citizen" of North Oaks, Minnesota writes to Google saying they wish to opt back into Street View?

Why is this so upsetting?

2008-06-01T09:53:00.001-07:00

Regular users of Google properties will have noticed that the Google favicon has changed. Here's a side-by-side comparison from blogoscoped.com.

The old icon reflected Google culture as I saw it, colorful, yet professional. This new logo drops the color scheme and switches to a lowercase "g". It's the sort of favicon I would expect on a kids-oriented site. If their goal here is to appear as an "underdog"--as suggested by the blogoscoped.com article--then they are seriously misreading their audience.

Maybe this will grow on me, but it had better start growing soon, 'cause at the moment it is nothing more than an eyesore on my bookmark toolbar.

Putting Ruby into Words

2008-05-31T14:09:00.000-07:00

Since I've started learning about Ruby and reading some of the community blogs and books, I have this sense. I am the first to admit that it's a poorly defined sense, but somewhere deep inside of me, something was wrong with the community. Thankfully, there are Debian Developers out there with the same feelings who have a better way with words. To lazy to read the link? No problem, here's the critical bit:

What's troubled me for some time about the post-Rails Ruby community is that it has a distinct bent away from its Free Software roots. I understand Matz actually used to use (not sure about today) Debian Unstable, and Ruby traditionally displayed its roots quite strongly, with a Perl heritage and a community consisting largely of hardcore *NIX people. With the advent of Rails, the move has been towards things like TextMate and OSX. Software like Gems (no relation to Gemstone) fits in fine with one of these systems, but not so well with modern Free Software systems, and I think it's symptomatic of the change. Given this propensity in the Ruby community, and given the numbers Gemstone is posting, I'd be surprised if lots of Rubyists don't move that way as soon as it's available.

I couldn't agree more! When I first learned the preferred editor for Rails development is an OS X only commercial app, I was literally speechless.

There are other examples of this divergence from the Free Software world. For example, Rails recent decision to abandon Trac, a reliable ticketing system used by a whole set of large FOSS projects. Rails now uses Lighthouse, itself a Rails application, that is decidedly closed source. If this sort of behavior continues, I think you'll see a spike in useful stuff coming out of commercial shops followed by a slow decline as the ecosystem that comprises free Ruby code begins to shrink and eventually die off. At which point you've got a free language whose community and ecosystem is more about commercial interests than free software.

Voters' Intent Vindicated

2008-05-27T08:52:00.000-07:00

Time for a political posting, boys and girls... I actually have a second political post in the works, but I'm still waiting for all the facts to trickle in on that one.

Today I was excited to read in the Seattle Times that Washington State's top-two primary system is going to produce as many as a dozen single-party races in the general election. Huzzah! This is great news for many districts who would generally face a very boring general election. First, here's a little history.

Washington used to be the home of the Blanket Primary where voters could vote for whichever candidate they wanted in each race regardless of party alignment... so, they could vote in the Democratic Primary for governor, while voting in the Republican Primary for their local legislative races. Everyone was happy.
In the late 90s (I think), California adopts a similar system, which is then challenged in court by the state parties. The suit goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled the Blanket Primary is a violation of the 1st Amendment Right of association... in this case, the Party's right of association.
Washington State parties, realizing an opportunity to gain more control over their own nomination process, launch a similar lawsuit, which inevitably leads to the invalidation of Washington's long practiced Blanked Primary.
In 2004 Washington State voters adopt I-872, an initiative that institutes a "top-two" primary, where the top two vote getters in an essentially non-partisan primary advance to the general election... meaning in liberal Seattle, two Democrats could appear on the general election ballot, and in conservative Eastern Washington, two Republicans could appear on the general election ballot.
Washington State parties again sue, and win, in Federal District and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, blocking the rules from going into effect.
The U.S. Supreme Court overturns the lower court's ruling, reinstating the top-two system... this is something I had totally missed, as I guess I'm not as plugged into the Washington State political machine as I once was.
Now, in 2008, Washington State will have it's first top-two primary vote!

So why am I, an avowed Democrat, excited about the prospects of a top-two primary system?! First, lets address the sole remaining challenge to the top-two system, that voters have a right to vote for their chosen party in the general election. I don't see how anyone has the right to vote for someone specific... I didn't have the right to vote for Bill Clinton for President in 2000, nor did I have the right to vote for Barack Obama in 2004. I get to vote for who appears on the ballot as determined by fair and open rules. Anyone can run in the primary and try to get on the final ballot, so I don't see that as a valid criticism.

On the positive side, for the first time in a very long time, there will be actual general election challenges in what would otherwise be considered "safe" seats. Take, for example, Frank Chopp of the 43rd District (my old district). He's a good man, and Speaker of the House, and I was always happy to vote for him. But if he were to go off the deep end, there would be nothing I could do about it, because as the Speaker of the House he would dominate any primary challenge by local Democrats attempting to replace him. But, with a top-two system, come the general election a centrist democrat challenger has a legitimate chance against an entrenched force because conservatives, who would normally rally around a doomed Republican challenger, now have the opportunity to vote for the centrist Democrat in the general election. If a majority of the voters back Chopp, then clearly he didn't go off the deep end after all, but in the previous closed primary system, voters would have the dubious choice between an "off the deep end Democrat" and whatever crazy Republican had decided to mount a quixotic challenge in one of the bluest districts in the State.

Good luck to those candidates who find themselves in a one-party race come the general, I know it won't be easy... but it's for the best when you consider the alternative we see in places like Chicago. Don't get me wrong, parties are good, but not an absolute good.

NGINX... why?!

2008-05-26T11:44:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has any relationship with Rails development has, at this point, heard of Nginx. The point of Nginx is to replace the Apache, a the definitive global webserver that Rails devs feel is simply too slow for their lightening fast development framework. It's not the first time the Rails community has snubbed Apache, nor will it the last. Those Rails devs are simply fickle folks.

So, fine, let the Rails devs frolic with their uberfast webserver... what about the rest of us mere mortals? Is Nginx a good route for you? Let me say here and now, the answer to that question is almost always a strong, resilient, and durable no. The reasons for the rejection are many, so let's start with the funny ones first and proceed to the more technical ones.

First, it behaves in inexplicable ways for different browsers. Check out this screen shot of Penny-Arcade loaded in Firefox (on the top) and Konquerer (on the bottom) at the same time.

Click to see full resolution

This happened with multiple reloads (cache disabled)... it always worked with Firefox, always "failed" with Konqueror. Oh, and that "Bad Gateway" message is a something you should get used to if you are thinking about deploying Nginx, because it's an all too common sight (more about that later on).

Second, the primary documentation is in Russian. Yes, Русский. From what I can gather, the primary developers are Russian, which is great... yay global open source development! But, a webserver is a complicated beast, hence the great forests that are clear cut each year to produce the necessary library of books on Apache and MS Information Server. Let me be clear that when I say primary, I do mean to imply there is secondary documentation. This is secondary documentation in the same way that warning labels will list sixteen life threatening things you could do written in English, followed by a single warning in Spanish that translates to "Danger."

Third, nginx does not support .htaccess files. Anyone who spends much time building custom websites knows the power of these magic little files that alters the way Apache treats a particular folder. Securing a folder with basic authentication is two line simple lines and a password file. Nginx takes a different approach, where different means stop bugging us to add .htaccess support. Instead, every directive, for every folder, regardless of it's scope, must go into a master configuration file. You can split the conf file into many smaller files, but they are all loaded when the server starts and given global effect. The common approach here is to split each hosted domain into a conf file... but that only helps keep things organized, because in the end of the day, every conf file has global implications.

Third and a half, nginx requires you to have apache support tools lying around to do stuff. This really isn't worth a whole new point, because everyone already has apache lying around... but lets say you wanted to create a password file for basic authentication. There is no nginx utility to generate those handy hash values, you have to use htpasswd, available from your apache distribution.

Fourth, Nginx doesn't actually do anything beyond serve static HTML and binary assets... which is to say, it doesn't run php or perl or any of the other P's that you might find in the LAMP stack. What it does is take requests and proxies them to other servers that do know how to execute that code. This is great in the Rails world, which long ago decided to have Rails be it's on little server that you submit requests to and get responses back. Even under Apache, the standard approach is to run Rails as a cluster of Mongrel servers that Apache talks to via a proxy connection. In the world of PHP and Perl, this approach is somewhat counter-intuitive. Apache's mod_php loads a php interpreter into Apache, allowing Apache to do all the heavy lifting for you... ditto with mod_perl. Even ruby has a mod_ruby (although, it's still premature). With nginx, everything is it's own standalone server.

So, what if your php project needs to know something about the webserver (like the root folder, or a basic auth username)? Well, you need to know that ahead of time and setup the proxy (which you defined in that global conf file I mentioned in #3) to pass those variables to your application server, otherwise it won't be around for you to use. Better yet, what if the proxy server is down? Nginx will great you with a handy "Bad Gateway" message and no further information. Good luck debugging the underlying server, since it really only knows how to talk in http requests... perhaps you can code your own debugger with LWP.

Finally, I am left with the question why? The ostensible reason is that it's faster and can therefore handle more requests. Even if we accept that as true (*grumble, grumble*), it only accomplishes that speed by passing the buck off to other servers. When you find a non-responsive site it's not because the static assets like images and HTML text are being served slowly... it's because the dynamic content generated by php/perl/python/ruby/whatever and the underly database from which the data is drawn cannot keep up. Nginx suffers that same failing... while requiring just as many resources because you now have to run so many different servers for each of the languages you want to code it.

If you are developing Rails, then by all means, enjoy this flavor of the month until some new exciting technology comes along and all the little Ruby lemmings go marching off in a new direction. For everyone else writing applications that are meant to stand the test of time, stay with Apache, it hasn't let us down yet.

Working with SPF Records

2008-05-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

Today I finally sat down and learned enough about SPF records to actually get one deployed on a site I'm setting up. What's an SPF record, you're wondering? Perhaps you are too lazy to click one of my provided links. No problem, here is a description anyone can understand.

So email is more like a normal letter than you might expected--not surprising, since most systems are built modeled after existing systems--and includes things like a sending address and a return address. In the world of email, these are the "To:" header and the "From:" header, respectively. So, if I were to send you an email, the top of it would look something like:

To: "John Doe" <jdoe@example.com>
From: "Sean Kellogg" <skellogg@probonogeek.org>
Subject: A message
...

Thus, you would know the email was from me and treat it appropriately.

Trouble is, just like a return address on an envelope, there is no way to be certain the return address is accurate. I could stamp all of my envelopes with 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and it would still get delivered (well... maybe, not sure how USPS would respond to that particular address). Point is, I could send the following email to you just as easily as the one above.

To: "John Doe" <jdoe@example.com>
From: "Bill Gates <bill.gates@microsoft.com>
Subject: A message
...

and the mail system would happily send it off your your mailbox. So, you've got one class of people who are trying to steal your identity. The other class of folks are those who are more interested in masking their own. This group is known as spammers. I would say all spam today is sent using forged headers, such that the From: header is set to either a non-existent email address or some poor unsuspecting by-standard.

Enter SPF records, which are a mechanism to validate the From headers. Basically, as a domain manager, you declare a set number of machines which are authorized to send mail on behalf of the domain. Then, mail service providers are responsible for checking that declaration to ensure that the originating server is one of the authorized senders. In the microsoft.com example, the mailhost would figure out all the valid servers that can send email on behalf of microsoft.com, realize my server is not one of them, and reject the email.

The only part left is to figure out how to write SPF records. Turns out it's not as hard as I expected, once you know how. I recommend the following wizard as a great starting point for defining your SPF records. All you need to do is specify the domain you are managing, and then list the various servers you want to authorize to send on your behalf.

Of course, that last part is easier said than done in some cases. The domain I was doing this for uses google apps for mail delivery, and lord only knows how many different servers are involved with the gmail setup. Thankfully, the SPF folks were prepared for that! There is an "include" directive as part of the SPF spec that allows you to say, "in addition to these settings, include the settings from this other SPF record." Then you just point at the gmail SPF record and your set.

I'll be honest though, I'm not certain about this whole SPF system. For example, I use the washingtonpost.com article sender to send stuff to friends and colleagues. Those emails are generated by washingtonpost.com servers and set the From: header to my address. Except, if the recipient host is set to enforce SPF records, it's going to get the email and say, woah, washingtonpost.com is not authorized to send for probonogeek.org! Not sure how this problem gets resolved, but there needs to be a way for address holders to authorize third party sites to send email on their behalf on a one-at-a-time basis. Any bight ideas out there?

My Parts Per Million

2008-05-11T22:24:00.000-07:00

My company did a website for a water testing device manufacture (I realize, not our usual political fare... not every client can be running for President). The client was so pleased with the new site they sent us a nice gift basket and a few of their products. Once quick USPS shipment and I am the proud owner of an HMDigital TDS-4.

So, I drew myself a glass of tap water (I don't filter my water, but Sarah does... I'll test hers once she gets a new filter) and gave it a go. My Santa Cruz tap water measures in at 216 TDS PPM. That's right, 216 Total Dissolved Solids parts per million. The back of the product says the EPA's Maximum Contaminant Levels of TDS for human consumption is 500 ppm. I'm not sure if 216 is good, great, acceptable, below average, I just know it's not the maximum contaminant level... huzzah?!

Great thing is, this device is portable, so I can start taking it to restaurants and provide reviews on water quality. It's a whole new world of eating out metrics. Oh sure, we could go out to there, but the TDS was a little high last time...

AJAX File Upload: The Cake is a Lie

2008-05-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

For a long time I have been smitten with the idea of AJAX. By now everyone has experienced AJAX, even if they don't know it yet. AJAX powers web 2.0 sites like Flickr and Gmail. Allowing the user to interact with a website without a page-refresh is a strangely liberating technology... finally my applications have state! But the true holy grail of AJAX lies with the mysterious mechanism of file uploading. No doubt you've done this before, in a non-ajax fashion. While filling out some innocuous HTML form you are presented by a seemingly innocent file selection dialog box, perhaps selecting the latest photo of you kitty, to send along with the other information. This basic file uploading capability is made possible by creating a special HTML form, like so:

<form action='upload.cgi' method='post' enctype='multipart/form-data'>
  ...HTML form fields go here...
  <input type='file' name='my_picture'>
  ...maybe some more HTML form fields go here...
  <input type='submit' value='Down the Tubes!'>
</form>

That enctype business there tells your browser to send a special sort of HTTP request that can contain binary data. Generally requests just send text, but by enabling binary data transmission, we can send photos, mp3s, pdfs, anything within the size limit of the protocol. Trouble is, ajax requests are built such that you cannot change the enctype to multipart/form-data! Even with the cross-browser prowess of Prototype (my preferred javascript framework), there is just no way to change the nature of the HTTP request. It's either text or bust.

So, how do internet giants like Flickr and Facebook do it? What is the secret ingredient? A little googling reveals the answer as satisfactory, yet unsatisfying. Allow me to explain. To start, we need to redefine our objectives... since we can't "use AJAX to upload a file" our objective needs to be "make it appear like we are using AJAX to upload a file." When we say, "use AJAX" what we really mean is communicate with the server without a page reload. But we must remember the earlier lesson, you can only upload a file use a multipart/form-data form. Put another way, we have to call submit() on that form... there is no other path to the promised land.

HTML Forms are a tricky thing. Left to their own devices, when you call submit(), the entire page reloads. So that's out. But, we can set a target for the form, such that calling submit() causes the form to load in the target window. Setting target='_new' will create an entirely new window where the form will be processed. This is sort of cool, in that the underlying window remains unchanged. But we certainly don't want new windows popup up all the time. Yuck.

We could set the target to an embedded iframe in the main window itself. This is a lot closer, because there is no messy popup business. But now you've got this iframe reloading, which isn't exactly the seamless experience we are shooting for. The final piece to our puzzle then is to make the iframe hidden with style='display: none;' attribute.

So, now are form from above looks like this.

<form action='upload.cgi' method='post' target='empty_iframe' 
      enctype='multipart/form-data'>
  ...HTML form fields go here...
  <input type='file' name='my_picture'>
  ...maybe some more HTML form fields go here...
  <input type='submit' value='Down the Tubes!'>
</form>
<iframe src='about:blank' name='empty_iframe' 
        style='display: none;'></iframe>

Now, when you hit the submit button the form sends the data, including the file, off to the server and the response comes back to the invisible iframe. To the user, nothing seems to have changed. You can add a little pre-process magic with javascript, like hiding the form, but what if you want to do post-process magic? With a traditional AJAX request you could get an XML payload back, or javascript if you use a framework like Prototype. Turns out you can do something similar with the iframe trick. You can call methods on the parent window from within the iframe by sending javascript inside of a <script> tag.

Your output to the iframe will looking something like this:

<script type='text/javascript'>
  window.top.window.function();
</script>

You can call as many functions from within the script tags as you like, just remember that the iframe has no sense of the variables available from within the parent window, so that can complicate things. But a little forth-thought can go a long way to making the magic happen. You can also do some cool things like insert and remove the iframe on the fly so that it's only there during the form processing bit.

Now that you know how it works, it should be obvious how this is all a lie... a horrible, horrible lie. There isn't anything the least bit AJAX-Y about this. In fact, if you accept this as a valid method of asynchronous server communication, then you can pretty much never use the XMLHttpRequest object ever again... just communicate via hidden iframes! I realize that file uploading is a serious security concern (we don't want malicious coders to be able to upload files from your harddrive without your knowledge), and I know that AJAX presents it's own security concerns... but there has got to be a better way. I hope that future revisions to the XMLHttpRequest object provide a way to send multipart/form-data responses so we can ditch this awful, messy hack.

A Fantastic Waste of Time

2008-04-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

Following a series of random links today, I discovered a wonderful invention of the internet, known as the AutoMotivator.

Here's a small taste of what is possible:

The Danger of Abitrary Strings

2008-04-21T22:12:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine recently pointed out a rather unique "feature" that cnn.com appears to be introducing: the ability to print headlines directly to a t-shirt for, I don't really know... live blogging purposes? Maybe.

Anyway, whether by his own brilliance or act of God, Tom noted that the webpage used to generate these print-on-demand t-shirts is nothing more than your average GET string. So, when you click on the headline "Nail polish color may tip off politics" the browser sends that string to the t-shirt generator as the URL "headline=Nail%20polish%20color%20may%20tip%20off%20politics". But, GET strings have significant security implications, in that it is trivial for the end user to alter those strings, resulting in rather humorous results.

For example, you could request a t-shirt that says "CNN is stupid". Tom had other ideas. I figured, if you can say something silly, what's to stop you from saying something newsworthy.

Just in case CNN fix this little glitch, here's a snapshot of the last link's output

As Tom noted, it seems all very familiar. While CNN was stupid enough to allow their tool to be used for subversive ends, they learned Nike's lesson and prohibit you from actually purchasing t-shirts with unauthorized headlines. Which gets to the point of this post. Developers of applications are often looking for flexibility in the constant drive to make code do whatever the client requests. My own company is certainly not immune to this siren's call. But sometimes that flexibility can lead to real issues..

The right way to build such a t-shirt tool is to pass a unique ID to that t-shirt application that corresponds to the particular story in the CNN database. The tool then goes and fetches the headline and publication date and prepares a delightful, non-embarrassing, headline t-shirt. Of course, that leads to the dreaded coupling, where two seemingly unrelated pieces of technology become reliant on one another... a significant violation of the Agile principles. But you know what, I think I prefer heresy over being fired.

Newest Family Member

2008-03-27T09:20:00.000-07:00

Last night Sarah and I adopted a two year old cat from our local animal shelter. She came with the name Ginny, but we are fairly certain we are going to change that... just not sure to what.

Ginny?

She's very playful... and doesn't seem inclined to sleep at night, thus ensuring both Sarah and got very little sleep. Hopefully tomorrow she will fall into a more regular sleeping pattern.

Update

Ginny turned out to be name Sage... who knew?!

The Tagging Paradigm

2008-03-22T09:21:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my first installment on technical rumination... let's all hope by the time it's posted I've actually had something valuable to say that is more than just jargon filed ramblings. I've actually been thinking about this topic for a while now, ever since a conversation I had with David (sorry Mr. Morgan, you are no longer the only David in my life). He (David) is in the process of laying the initial foundations for a our company's new CMS system. It's actual a very interesting process, building a CMS system, because you are making decisions with significant longterm impact that are not easily changed--regardless of how agile one might be--because once the system is in use with clients, there's no easy way to retrain. So David and I spend several hours every week discussing long term implications, naming strategies, and general paradigms. Most recently we discussed the implications of a tagging based system.

For those not immediately familiar with tagging, here's a brief intro as I see it (which means get out your salt shakers, because I'm not going to fall into the boosters club on this one). Tagging is part of the the semantic web (SW) movement. For purposes fair-play, here is a direct quote from the W3C's FAQ on the main goals of SW:

The Semantic Web allows two things.

1. It allows data to be surfaced in the form of real data, so that a program doesn’t have to strip the formatting and pictures and ads off a Web page and guess where the data on it is.
2. it allows people to write (or generate) files which explain—to a machine—the relationship between different sets of data. For example, one is able to make a “semantic link” between a database with a “zip-code” column and a form with a “zip” field that they actually mean the same – they are the same abstract concept. This allows machines to follow links and hence automatically integrate data from many different sources.

So, the idea is to take the human-readable content and convert it into machine readable content in a way that makes sense and allows for all sorts of cool functionality. The best example of this in today's world is an RSS feed, which takes blog posts (just like this one) and converts it into data that an RSS reader can understand and synthesize into a format that you, as the reader, desire. So far, so good.

Tagging fits into the semantic web concept as the chief mechanism for aggregating data. So, imagine we have three bits of data: bit one [1] is tagged as "blue" and "red"; bit two [2] is tagged as "red" and "yellow"; and the final bit [3] is tagged as "yellow" and "blue". Now we can ask for all the bits tagged as blue [1,3], all the bills tagged as blue and red [1], the bits tagged as blue or red [1,2,3], or even all the bits tagged blue and not red [3]. The power of this approach is obvious... the problem with tagging is that in the rush to embrace the approach no one seems to be talking about the weaknesses.

Before I get into that, let me say something about my general philosophy when it comes to Computer Science. My general belief is that the original computer science folks were really smart and figured out nearly everything truly neat that was to be discovered based on the hardware available at the time. Linus Torvalds said it best, when commenting on Microsoft's claim that they held patents on technology in the Linux Kernel: pretty much everything about operating systems was figured out in the 60s and 70s. If you believe this--as I do--then you begin to see that the only true innovations left are a combination of hardware and software... here I'm thinking parallel programming made possible by dual-core CPUs.

Which brings us back to tags... why, if they have such power, are they really only now coming into vogue? Several possibly reasons to be suspicious come to mind.

1) Tags are unstructured data.

When talking about this with David, he said he sees tags as lists, but I don't think that's right. A list implies an order, with a start, an end, and clearly defined order between the two. But going back to our bits, if I ask for all the blue bits, the results could be [1,3] or it could be [3,1]. There is nothing about a list of tags that says either is right or wrong. It's better to say a list is a collection. Of course, I can impose an order on the collection by sorting the elements, but then the ordering is coming from within the data and is not part of the collection itself. This means (a) I have to order the collection every time I want to work with it, (b) I cannot apply arbitrary order to the collection unless I start storing meta data about the order in the items themselves.

2) Tags will never be as efficient as an actual list.

In the world of web development, the easiest way to create a list is to just use a table in your relational database. This is handy because it's just one table and you don't have to mess with JOIN statements that are inherently slower than a single table SELECT statement. Tagging, however, requires three tables. 1) a table of the data to be tagged, 2) a table of the tags, 3) a table pairing the first and second tables together. So, now you've got three tables and two joins, which is just not going to be as fast as a simple SELECT.

3) Over reliance on tags could replace good design.

Of course, developers already know this even if they are rushing to embrace the tagging concept. They know it because they are still using foreign keys in their tables to provide the usual one-to-one and one-to-many relationships. To demonstrate this, consider a recent project involving an online election tool I wrote. For this I had a table of polls, a table of choices, and a table of votes. The choices table had a poll_id field that linked the poll together with the choices, thus allowing me to ask for all the choices associated with the particular poll, or find the poll of the particular choice. The votes then had a choice_id and a poll_id, so I could do the same lookups. I did this because it was efficient and easy to understand... but one could envision doing the same thing with tags. Come up with a tag name for the poll itself and then just tag all the choices and votes with the poll tag. We'd get the same result, but it would require a lot more joining and be overall less-efficient.

4) In a collaborative web setting, tagging makes too many assumptions about users.

While researching for this post (that's right, research!) I discovered an excellent essay by internet luminary Cory Doctorow entitled Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia. He has seven reasons why the meta-data system championed by the semantic web is doomed to failure. It's short and worth a read, but the items I want to draw attention to are: (2) people are lazy and (7) there's more than one way to describe something.

4.a) People are lazy.

This blog has a tagging system, provided at no cost by the fine folks a blogger.com. If you scroll down you'll see a GIANT list of tags I've used over the years on various stories. It's a mess, and as you'll see, very few tags have more than one or two posts. I don't consider myself a lazy person, but the truth is that I haven't put in the time to organize and categorize each story... and since the tagging options available to me are limited only by my imaginative vocabulary, chances are the list of tags is only going to continue to grow... making an increasingly useless tag system for my readers.

4.b) There's more than one way to describe something.

This is the kicker, and Cory hits it right on the head when he says, "No, I'm not watching cartoons! It's cultural anthropology." Both are fair ways of describing something like The Simpsons or The Family Guy. Unless we want to go around tagging everything with all the possible synonyms (whether agreed to or not) those left with the dubious task of aggregating data based on the tags are going to have a difficult time find everything they seek.

5) Namespace Collision

The final argument is especially geeky, so hold on tight. In the real world, when I'm talking with Sarah about "David" she knows I'm talking about David at work, because our namespace has "David" mapped to "David Chelimsky who works at Articulated Man," but when I talk to Sheridan about "David" he knows I'm talking about "David Morgan who works at Ernst & Young" because that is our shared namespace. Two people, both tagged with "David", but they point to different people depending on the context in which I say the name. You run into the same problem whenever you search on google and the results are not 100% what you are looking for. Humans don't really think in terms of namespace, but for computers it's a necessity. Without a clear context, you end up with namespace collision. So, how do we solve the two Davids dilemma? We could provide more exhaustive tagging... so, now I tag them as "David Morgan" and "David Chelimsky"... but what if I know two David Morgans? Do I provide a tag that is really long and includes date of birth and social security number? Thing is, developers already use the social security number approach, by assigning every object a unique identification number. It's not especially human readable, but it does resolve the namespace collision.

Just like Cory, I don't walk away from tagging with a sense of abandonment, just healthy skepticism. I think there are two primary lessons to pull out of all of this that govern when tags make sense. 1) When the aggregation of data is truly arbitrary. This is how we avoid a tagging regime for the polling system I described above. There was a clear object hierarchy there and using the tables to describe that hierarchy was far more concise than tags. 2) when the data has a clear enough context to avoid namespace collisions. You don't want to be tagging by a persons name... there are just too few names in the world. But, if you are working with a theatre company, tagging by the particular performance ("Romeo & Juliet", "Midsummer Night's Dream", etc) might do the trick 3) When the act of tagging itself is centrally controlled. This is to say, allowing the public and large to apply tags leads to pretty useless tags (see slashdot.org as an excellent example of useless tags... not to say they aren't funny). But if the tagging regime is centrally controlled, then you can rely on a uniform scheme of description and prevent the laziness problem that I face. If I had come up with a uniform system at the beginning, it would be useful today.

I will wait to see how tags unfold in the larger internet. Done in limited situations and with the proper structure, there is real power... but just beyond that ridge is a desert of poorly organized and inefficiently accessible data.

Changing Course

2008-03-16T16:56:00.000-07:00

I started this blog a while ago now... back when I was still in law school. I've stuck with Blogger as a platform for longer than any other, so I feel like I have something invested here. Since it's inception, Pro Bono Geek has been a decidedly political blog, emphasizing the Pro Bono over the Geek. My law school and student government experience provided a lot of good fodder for blogging... and while the online comments I received were never great in number, I was always surprised at how many people at least read what I posted and told me in the "real" world.

But since I've moved to Santa Cruz, I've been posting a lot less. I think being out-of-sync from actual political discourse has been a big part. My political world is pretty much Sarah and the Washington Post. On top of that, I'm not entirely certain I have anything new to contribute to the larger discussion. For the most part I'm just recycling what you can read elsewhere tempered by a bit of market-idealism. Yes, I've got the occasional intellectual property rant, but I think those were more for me than anyone else.

The question remains: if the blog is to continue, what will it be about? I think, perhaps, the answer to this question lies where I started this post: Pro Bono Geek. Except, this time, maybe we need a bit more geek. I feel like I'm got an interesting viewpoint on the larger technical universe right now. Author of the world's formost legislative simulation website, a sprawling Perl CGI application in desperate need of love (mod_perl anyone?); system administrator for one of the largest Zope deployments around hosting some of the biggest names in Democratic politics; a lieutenant of David Chelimsky world renowned Agile evangelist and core contributor to R-Spec with whom I will developing some kick-ass stuff in the next couple of years; power-user of Debian GNU/Linux and KDE; and javascript wizard for a leader in political web design. For better or worse, my life has taken a decided turn towards the geeky end of my personality, and it's time I embrace that way of life.

To that end, I'm going to start posting again (trying for once a week) about the interesting technical/geeky stuff I'm doing... tragically, not everything I do can be disclosed, but it's not like a Google-NDA, so I'm freer than most to discuss my latest thoughts on all manner of topics. For some of you, this may be that final excuse to kick me off your RSS reader... and I understand that. For others, you might finally be interested in what I write here. Others may be interested in just continued life updates, and I'm hoping to get back into the swing of that too, but no promises.

Oh, and if you were hoping I would stop posting political content all together, I have some bad news for you.

In Defence of our Nomination Process

2008-02-14T12:07:00.000-08:00

Seems this presidential election cycle has uncovered a new American past-time: complaining about the nomination process. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a blogger, newspaper editorialist, or relative who has a beef with the rules that govern this process. Mind you, their complaints are not directed at the candidates themselves, the ire is reserved for the cold and impersonal regulations that govern the candidates' behavior.

I'm going to pretty much ignore the Republican process here, because this is about "our" process, not "their" process. Let their own youthful rules wonks defend that momentum obsessed coronation processes. This is a rebuttal to the critiques of the Democratic party. There are four major complaints I've heard leveled this cycle, so allow me to take them one at a time:

Caucuses are Out-Dated

I read this one just today at my alma-mater's newspaper. Yes, I still read The Daily... old habits die hard. Of course, this argument is also being implicitly made by the Clinton campaign because the scheduling of the caucuses, one hour on a weekend, tend to be unfavorable to working class voters that Clinton believed she had wrapped up (c.f. Potomac Primary exit polls). Folks also like to throw in absentee voters, especially military folks, who are simply unable to participate. These aren't bad points, but they make a fundamental assumption about the nomination process that is not, and never has been, true.

It seems caucus nay-sayers are under the mistaken impression they have an unalienable right to participate in the nomination process. Well, I suggest everyone break out your pocket constitution and see if you can find any reference to such a right... while you're there, check to see if there is any mention of nominations at all. None? That's because nominations are a construction of political parties, a way for party members to decide who to place the party's resources behind. Turns out, for practical reasons, you cannot get elected to the office of President in a nation of America's size without the resources of either the Democratic or Republican party, but it's not a Constitutional requirement, and no one has an inalienable right to participate in that decision.

Starting from that understanding, the decision to caucus instead of hold a primary is really a matter of regional and historical preference. Primaries are impersonal but efficient, caucuses are more home-town but unwieldy. But the decision to use either one is made by members of the party, not the states and not the general electorate. The Washington State Democratic Party is responsible for deciding how it is going to allocate its delegates based on shared objectives and values. This ensures that the party faithful have their say in the process, because being a member of the faithful comes with a cost...

Consider, in 2004 I caucused for Howard Dean... but John Kerry ended up with the nomination. And like a good party faithful, I voted for Mr. Kerry. I didn't vote Nader, Bush, or just stay home. I accepted my party's nominee because the party faithful had decided to back Kerry... but more importantly, because in the general election I really had no other choice. The caucus was my one chance to cast a meaningful ballot.

Super Delegates are Non-Democratic

This is a long identified "flaw" in the Democratic nomination process.. nearly 25% of the delegates are individuals who are not pledged going into the convention. But it's simply incorrect to consider them "unelected" or "unaccountable." Super Delegates are elected representatives, DNC committee members, and interest group representatives (like union leaders). These are the folks who make decisions for us ALL the time, because they were elected to do so. Being a part of the nomination process is a natural role for them to hold.

What really gets me about this argument is the claim that Super Delegates could "make the difference"... the difference?! Depending on the margin between the two candidates, Wyoming could make the difference. Any block of votes can tip any election, there is nothing special about the Super Delegates. That doesn't stop pundits from assigning near super levels of coordination to these elected representatives. There is an assumption that if Clinton and Obama show up in Denver with only a few hundred delegates gap between them, then the Super Delegates will simply "chose" the winner. I'd just like to see that actually happen! Can you imagine all the Democratic members of Congress, State governors, DNC committee members, and interest groups going into a room and deciding "let's all vote for so and so." These folks can't agree on a response to the war, were they stand on fiscal discipline, or just how much spying the government should be allowed to do on it's own people... why do we think they'll be able to agree on a single candidate for president? The only shared criteria I've been able to decipher is that the candidate not be named George W. Bush, but beyond that, I think these Super Delegates are going to behave like the independent rational actors we elected them to be. If the state's cannot figure it out between now and Denver, I can think of no better group of people to act as a tie breaker than our elected leaders.

Proportional Representation is Unfair

I don't even get this... but a Washington Post editorialist who shall remain nameless (*cough* Ruth Marcus *cough*) seems to be making the argument. The core point seems to be, Clinton won California, so why doesn't she have a HUGE lead? That's how it works in the General, darn it! Yeah, well, your complaints ought to be directed at the General Election, not the primaries. Winner-take-all only makes sense if your objective is to have a coronation like the Republicans have. But, if your intention is to reflect the subtleties of the Democratic party, then you've got to do the proportional thing. Having said that, there is some strange math with congressional districts that have an odd number of delegates. I can't really defend that, except to say that electoral math is a long held tradition in this country, and you've got to be willing to play the game.

It's All Too Confusing

Good! It's supposed to be confusing. Systems that are fair often are, because an "easy" system is also one that can be manipulated and controlled in scary ways (see the discussion about winner-takes-all). But, let's address a common critique that confusing means non-transparent. Transparency has become a big buzzword this decade, and for good reason. I'm all for transparency. But that something is confusing does not mean it's not transparent. Perhaps it takes some knowledge and a little research to understand, but as long as the information is there for anyone to examine, then it's transparent.

Great example... our judicial system. Amazingly transparent. All of the briefs, court records, and decisions are right there for anyone to look at. It's way more transparent then the legislative branch (let's not even get started about the executive branch). Trouble is, all those documents are complicated and require training to understand... which is to say, it's complicated. But the fact that I can follow a judicial decision from the very start of the incident all the way to the final determination is the kind of transparency we can only dream of in the other branches.

So, to those who complain they don't understand the nomination process... check out Wikipedia or ask someone involved with your local state political party. No one is trying to hide the ball here, we're just making sure the rules ensure a fair resolution to the single most important question facing Democrats today: who will represent our party in the race for the President of the United States.

Someone Has to Win? Really?

2007-12-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite political blogs is The Fix, a regular feature of www.washingtonpost.com, written by Chris Cillizza. On Fridays The Fix has a special feature called The Line where he gives a rundown of the horserace as he sees it. Today's The Line is entitled, "Someone Has to Win the GOP Nomination." So far, I'm willing to accept that someone must eventually win the GOP Nomination. Where I disagree with the esteemed political writer is:

What gets lost in all of the negativity about the Republican field is that in less than two months, someone will be the party nominee. Put simply: Someone has to win this thing.

Less than two months?! That's just a bald-face lie.

Yes, it is true that a majority of delegates will be decided within the next two months, but if things go as they have been, there is no certainty that any one candidate will have amassed the number of delegates necessary to win the nomination. Granted, it's been many a year since this has happened, but there used to be a time when the nominee was chosen at the convention by elected delegates doing more than just waving signs and clapping their hands. If a clear winner does not emerge from the pack to claim a majority, then the convention will once again reign supreme. All the political commentary about the split nomination race seems to miss the actual process of the nomination and how it functions in reality. The nomination is not chosen by an election where a plurality is enough. Strict rules govern the processes, and fifty years of not needing to use them doesn't make them any less relevant.

This has an interesting impact on the decisions of the national party to strips delegates from states violating the nominating calendar, namely Florida and Michigan. Conventional wisdom says this is all positioning because the eventual nominee, who will control the Rules Committee, will seat the delegates anyway. But what if the Rules Committee seats are split among the candidates and thus lack the majority votes to change the rules? What then?

So no, no one has to win anything in the next two months. But if someone doesn't, well, then we are in for some interesting times come convention time.

The Court & The Public

2007-12-05T23:26:00.001-08:00

In the past week I have read no fewer than three different editorials about the need for the Supreme Court to allow cameras into oral arguments, or at a minimum release same day tapes of the proceedings. Most recently I read this anemic editorial by the Washington Post. The outcry is the same... people deserve the right to see the proceedings of the court because it's a public institution. I couldn't agree more with the objective, transparency of public institutions is paramount to good decision making... even courts, who are the least participatory of our political institutions.

Where these critics go wrong is in thinking that cameras make a difference... or that oral arguments are someone the "functioning" of the court. The events leading up to a legal decision are a complex web of filings and briefs, of which oral arguments is but one tiny piece. Lawyers generally agree that cases are won and lost on the brief... oral argument is just an chance to run through the briefs and address questions raised by the justices. But it's not like the questions are unexpected and no Supreme Court practitioner worth their salt leaves an unanswered question in hopes the topic comes up during orals. It's all there, in the brief, which are publicly available.

Yet, this isn't even the most amazing part about how incredibly transparent our legal process really is. Consider for a moment the House of Representatives. On a given day the 425 members cast votes on a number of different issues. Now imagine if each of those members had to write down why they voted the way the did, had to cite previous votes by themselves and those who held the seat before them as justification, and had to provide a detailed step-by-step analysis of their thinking. Wouldn't that be something? If the members of Congress had to publicly justify every single one of their votes! How would constituents feel if their member wrote they voted for a particular provision because they got a fat donation check!

Of course, House members don't have to justify their votes... nor do Senators... nor do Presidents (except in the case of a Veto, which is a whole other can of worms). Two out of three branches of government may exercise their constitution powers without a single word of explanation and routinely do so. The Court, in shocking contrast, explains everything. Complete with citations, justifications, historical narratives, transcripts, finds of fact, depositions, and the decisions of the District and Appellate Court from which the appeal originated. It's an overwhelming amount of information and quite frankly more transparency than your average Joe is really interested in. But, it's the law, and the law isn't easy... the law is complex, and no matter how simplistic campaigns may make governing seem, we should never allow the law to become a sound-byte.

So why then fixate on oral arguments? It is but one small (some might argue insignificant) part of the process. When a whole world of records is available to analyze, why are we getting all worked up over this? Lawyers, who have the most to gain from a transparent court, have never demanded it... so why suddenly is everyone else?

I don't have an answer, but I fear it's part of a larger trend to treat the court (federal or state, doesn't seem to matter) as just another political body, whose officials should be subject to the whim of the electorate and the twenty-four hour media machine. It's a bad trend that strikes a blow at yet another of our critical institutions designed to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. What I do know is that someday I want to attend an oral argument, not for the knowledge, but for the singular experience. If I ever want to know what actually happened in a case, I'll crack open a book.

State Quarter Quiz

2007-11-27T11:06:00.000-08:00

I've been a collector of state quarters since the first year they came out. In fact, just this year I collected the Washington State quarter, an event I've been anticipating for eight years!

I got a quiz in the mail a few days ago testing ones knowledge of the backs of the state quarters with the text removed. Go ahead, give it a try. I got 17 out of 20 right, but some of them are mighty tricky.

Seeing the quarter backs without the words made me appreciate the state histories and landscapes that we so often forget about. Divorced from my contemporary perception, I begin to remember that each of the states has their own complicated story of what it means to be from Utah or from Kentucky or wherever. Sometimes I wonder if our obsession with being "true" Americans has devalued our own state identities, which have a rich value in of themselves.

If you didn't the first time, take the quiz and reflect, for just a moment, on how little we really know about our 49 other neighbors.

Life is Sweet

2007-11-20T17:06:00.000-08:00

I realize it's been an unforgivably long time since I last posted... and that post was some strange rant about the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which doesn't exactly make for the most stimulating reading. I apologize and hope to do better in the coming months. But let me take this opportunity to tell you, my faithful readers, what's up in my world.

First, I'm writing this post from the deck of my new apartment, sitting in my new deck furniture, overlooking palm trees and the pool, and only a block from the beach. The complex itself is sort of old, but it's undergoing a lot of refurbishment, with new appliances, new landscaping, structural improvements, and a "purge" of sorts to remove members of the community who are not quite responsible tenants. The rent is a tad steep, but I figure if I'm going to live in a California beach town, I ought to live by the beach.

Sarah and I just finished a bit of a spending spree to decorate our new place. In addition to the deck furniture, we bought a sofa and this sort of mini-couch sleeper thing, a super cool "storage" ottoman, a side table, a "C" table (truly the most brilliant development in furniture production in the past 50 years), a table lamp and a floor lamp.

And how, you might be wondering, did I manage to afford all of this? No, not mail fraud, but that's a good guess. No, it turns out that my skills as a webdeveloper are in high demand, especially when you have good customer relation skills. After founding Pro Bono Geek a few months ago I ended up earning way more than I had ever expected. So much I felt compelled to go on this orgy of spending I described above.

All this time I've been working at Evans Data Corporation. Things were going very well there, with a successful corporate site launch and a massive reorganization of their IT infrastructure. But 40 hours a week at EDC followed by 30+ hours a week doing consulting from home, I was finding myself a bit worn thin. And just around that time I got a job offer to come on full time with Articulated Man as a web developer, making a whole ton more than I was at EDC!

Of course, Pro Bono Geek and Articulated Man are/were essentially competitors, although we had worked on several projects collaboratively. But with my new employment came the end of my private consulting work. Which is great, because I'm still making good money, doing what I enjoy, and I don't have to put in 70+ hours a week to do it. As a bonus -- as in signing bonus -- I was able to get a new car!

That's right, as of this weekend, I'm an official car "possessor." I say posses because I didn't end up buying it outright, but instead I'm leasing it. Still not sure why I decided to go that route, but it felt right at the time and I haven't been able to come up with a slam-dunk argument against it. So, I've got a three year lease and we'll see where I stand at the end of it.

Oh, what kind of car is it? It's a 2008 Magnetic Grey Prius (this is a photo of a 2007... couldn't find a 2008 online). It has a start button, I kid you not, and so long as the key is in my pocket the door unlocks automatically and the car will start without having to put the key in the ignition. The thing is unlike anything I have ever seen before. It's not the kind of car I would say is a blast to drive... not that it's not fun, but it's no sports car. What it is is the kind of car I won't feel bad driving around town to do errands.

Now, the close reader may have been wondering, how was it I was able to move to the beach and yet still get to my old job downtown. That's a good question, and if you didn't think to ask it, you're not paying close enough attention. Either that, or you didn't know me well enough to learn my most closely guarded secret. As a child I never learned how to ride a bike. That's right, never complete with italics and everything. So, when work became a 40 minute walk it was not just a simple matter of hopping on the bike. But with the help of some very dedicated friends I managed to teach myself how at the ripe old age of 26. Now I'm a regular speed machine, zipping up and down the streets of Santa Cruz on my new Trek hybrid bike. It's a hybrid because it's half mountain bike (good for hills and stability) / half street bike (good for going fast).

So, that's the sum of things. I'm headed out now to attend my first Santa Cruz Obama organizers meeting to see if there's something I can do to help with the campaign. Looking forwards to meeting some new people, since the new job is home based.

Thanks to anyone who kept checking during my hiatus, I promise to be better for at least a little while.

Stupid Federal Appeals Court...

2007-08-03T07:48:00.000-07:00

It's been months, months, since I last blogged, which is really a shame because there are so many interesting things I could have blogged about. Supreme Court rulings, 2008 Presidential Primary shenanigans, new web projects, plans to move, looking at new cars, etc, etc. And yet, for whatever reason, I didn't "pick up my pen" and it is my loss.

But today I read something that really makes my blood boil, so I'm back at the keyboard ready to take a stand. Feel free to read my primary source first, but if don't have the time, here's the summary. Pharmaceutical companies hold patents on drugs that give them sole authority over who gets to manufacture the drug. As a general rule, they elect to only allow themselves to make the drug, which means they have zero competition and without competition they can set whatever prices they want. Most non U.S. countries combat this by regulating the price of drugs, the result is in the United States drug costs are quite a bit higher than any where else in the world.

So, the District of Columbia, in their own effort to combat what they see as excessive prices, adopted a city ordinance that allows for a civil suit if the cost of a patented drug is 30% higher than in Canada, Germany, Australia or the United Kingdom. On appeal to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals--my least favorite court for a number of reasons I've previously blogged about--deemed this to be in violation of the patent laws and an illegal usurpation of federal power.

I say fooey to that. But D.C. Council member David A. Catania has a more nuanced responce.

It implies that patents would ban any legislation that affects the ability of patent holders to charge whatever they please, which is absurd. The Supreme Court has already upheld legislation that mandates price discounts to participate in Medicaid formularies. And no one has argued that states cannot enforce antitrust and other rules that limit monopoly prices of drugs indirectly -- although the full logical thrust of the opinion would do just that.

I tend to agree. Patents only authorize the patent holder to control manufacture and use, it does not convey absolute pricing control, although absent regulation it is the natural result of a patent. But if this court ruling is correct, it means that if I obtain a patent on gun, which a state later decides to ban, or at least regulate, for safety reasons, the state would be in violation of the Patent Act and unable to do so. Essentially, anything patented is beyond state regulation! (The Congress, I presume, can still regulate under the ruling since they have the authority to trump the Patent Act.)

As is well documented, on the topic of patent law interpretation (as opposed to patent application) the Federal Circuit has a very poor record. If the Supreme Court accepts cert, and I pray they do, you can bet the farm they will overturn as they have nearly everytime the Federal Circuit has claimed its specialized area of law trumps all others.

When will Congress realize that giving an appeals court exclusive jurisdiction over a single area of law while denying them any jurisdiction over other areas ensures that the exclusive area will become paramount in all matters? Laws must be balanced with consideration to the competing interests and a specialized court like the Fed Circuit is tantamount to pressing down on one side of the scales.

A New Playbook in Dealing with the Internet

2007-05-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have read about the number which must not be named incident a few weeks back. For those who didn't, there is this number that certain powers that be wish to keep secret. In so doing, issues various cease and desist orders which caused quite a stir and increased the spread of the number far more than if they had never done anything. A classic case of misunderstanding the reality in which you find yourself.

Today the Washington Post brings a story of a young girl from California who has found herself in the middle of a media storm. Due to her excellence in sports and attractive looks, her photo has spread across the internet on blogs and messages boards. Someone even setup a fake Facebook account under her name. The attention has often been sexual in nature and cause grief for the girl and her family.

What impresses me about her story is that she, or at least those who are advising her, have rejected the misguided approach of the copyright maximalists. Instead of sending out cease and desist letters to anyone who ever touched the photo, instead of threaten slander suits against those who speak her name, instead of crying to the media about how unfair it all is, this young girl has chosen to embrace the media storm. Not in the Brittany Spears, "It'll make me famous" sort of way, but in the "okay, if you're really interested, here's my story" sort of way. I predict that by opening up, embracing the storm instead of fighting against it, the frenzy will die down much quicker than otherwise.

Of course, I could be wrong and this may end up stoking the fires, but my gut says that now that she's obtainable, in that her life is not clouded in mystery, she'll be far less of a target for those who obsess about the impossible. Nothing destroys a fantasy like a healthy dose of real life.

My Green Thumb?

2007-05-20T11:59:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't have believed it a year ago if you had told me, "Sean, you're going to be able to grow living plants and keep them alive," but, believed or not, it would appear to be true. As evidence, I submit the following photograph

My glorious impatiens

I planted these about a month ago in the planter pot I got Sarah for her birthday (technically these are her flowers that I grow on her behalf). When I first got them I expected two, maybe three, blooms per pot. But now, with some tender love, consistent watering, and the eclectic mix of music played by the neighboring spa, my little flowers are blooming all over the place. More than a dozen in some pots.

The bottom six pots have a mix of different color impatiens and are all doing splendidly. The top pot has a flower that Sarah purchased, so I don't know the species, but it has had a tougher go of things. At first it started dying, dropped all of its flowers and the stalks flopped over the edge of the pot. But I kept watering it, trimmed away the dead bits, and slowly but surely the plant has risen once again.

Due to the nature of the porch it lives on, I have to rotate the pot with some frequency to ensure every flower gets roughly the same amount of sun. I haven't decided if they do better in the sunlight or in the shade, but I know that not turning the pot leads one side to die and the other to do better, so rotation is now part of regular maintenance. In addition, I water my little plants with a trusty spray bottle, which I feel more realistically simulates rain water like the flowers long since forgotten ancestors must have known before cultivation and greenhouses forever changed flower production in the industrialized world.

Sarah is also trying her hand at flower care this season, having killed off her long lived green plant. Here's a wide shot of our little garden.

Sarah's plants are in the green planter and brown terracotta planter

She is also keeping a hanging plant which lives up in the rafters

I'm not quite sure how she gets up there to water it?

Sarah's project is quite a bit more ambitious than mine, but since these are the first plants I've ever successfully grown, I'm happy with the results to date.

A Tough Spot

2007-05-06T20:03:00.000-07:00

Recently Circuit City fired 3,400 employees who were earning above the defined pay range for the associate position at the big red store. Before I go any further, let me say that I know a guy who manages a department in the local Santa Cruz Circuit City, and I've had the opportunity to talk business with him on several occasions... so I have some sense of the nature of their business.

Stores like BestBuy, Walmart, Costco and Circuit City are in a all hands on deck battle for big ticket sales. The margins on computers and gadgets isn't enough to warrant those big buildings and the flashy adds... it's all about moving those TVs. And at the end of the day, a slick salesman only goes so far. You have to keep cost low if you want to compete. Consider Costco... I can't say I've ever seen a salesman on their TV floor, but maybe I wasn't looking. Certainly not as many as at Circuit City. So, when faced with the prospect of posting huge quarterly loses, Circuit City let thousands go, hired new younger workers with low pay, and told the old workers they could reapply 10 weeks down the road (at lower pay).

Not only were they upfront about the situation with the associates, they were upfront with the public. According to the Seattle Times, in exchange for their openness they are getting a boycott.

Which makes me confused as to what Circuit City should have done here? According to my manager friend, the best Circuit Cities are near colleges and have a healthy churn of college kids who take the associate jobs for a few years, work their way up the pay scale, then leave to make room for a new salesman. The churn ensures the pay never gets too high. But not every town that needs a Circuit City has a college, so some salesmen stick around for longer than is desirable. Strikes me as they have three options:

1) do nothing, post huge loses and file for bankruptcy
2) do what they did, get hit with a boycott
3) do what they did, but keep it private so the public never finds out

Now, of course, #3 is rife with risks for the company. Should they be found out, they would be vilified in the press and likely become the target of... of a... of a boycott?! Wait, isn't that what happens under #2? Guess that makes it worth the risk then, wouldn't you say? Is that what we want? I don't think that having corporations make wide scale employment decisions without any public explanation is a very good idea, but we leave them little choice if this is the response they can expect for their frankness.

It's just like the politician who lies to his constituency. If telling the truth leads to an assured electoral defeat, what possible reason would they have to be honest?

I don't know if there is an easy solution to the problem. We could criminalize the lack of disclosure, I suppose. But that's certainly pretty extreme. We could turn a blind eye to corporate mistreatment of workers... not much of an ideal situation either. I think, ultimately, the best idea is to accept that some stores opporate on a low pay worker model, and if we don't like that we should avoid those companies all together, not just become morally indignant when they have to be a little more ruthless than normal.

Doing Good Work

2007-04-25T21:55:00.000-07:00

I realize there are a number of items I haven't really announced that are worth announcing, so here they are...

1) I am officially employed, full time, by the fine people at Evans Data Corporation, a small survey company here in Santa Cruz. (I would provide a link, but their site is awful... hence my employment.) While the job isn't even remotely related to my law degree, it is an excellent opportunity to gain some real experience in the "corporate" world as well as get to know some regular folks beyond Sarah's graduate friends.

2) Just as exciting, if not more exciting, is that today Planned Parenthood launched its Wall of Protest site, which is web response to the recent Supreme Court decision about the partial birth abortion ban. (Note to constitutional scholars: what is scare about this decision is not that Congress can limit choice in this particular way, but that Congress can regulate in this area at all because it paves the way for a complete Federal ban should Roe v. Wade ever fall. What ever happened to enumerated powers?!) Anyway, working on the site has been great as have the people who coordinated the whole thing. Another company did the flash stuff, but I put together all the submission mechanisms and administrative tools. If you are a supporter of choice in this country, go visit the site and post something... if you aren't a supporter, prepare to be bested by my various security mechanisms :)

3) Sarah, my GF, started a blog of her own about stuff. Check it out. That photo of her, by the way, is from a moving San Fransisco cable car taken on our two day trip during Spring Break.

That's all for now... in the future I hope to be buying a car, so there may be photos a comin'.

The California Lawyers Say It's So...

2007-04-09T23:51:00.000-07:00

Today, in the mail, I received two very important letters.

The first informed me that a settlement has been reached in the case of Rodriguez, et al. v. West Publishing Corp., d/b/a BAR/BRI, and Kaplan, Inc. For those following along at home, I'm "et al." Turns out BAR/BRI has been engaged in a little anti-trust no no resulting in a class action. And since no class is sufficiently classy without me, I was asked to tag along. There is $47 million in an escrow account which the lawyers get first crack at (to all you class action nay-sayers... those lawyers are welcome to their share in my opinion. I didn't have to lift a finger, will be getting some money back, and BAR/BRI is going to stop the antitrust behavior. Not a bad outcome for such an "inefficient" system). Then us plaintiffs get our share of the remainder, pro rated, based on the fee we paid. The pool includes all BAR/BRI customers in all states from 1997 - 2006, but since California's bar is one of the most expensive and the fee increased each year, my pro rata should be exceptionally pro, if you know what I mean. The award can be as much as 30% of my fee... which would be nearly $1000.

The other letter, this one from a different group of lawyers, wrote to tell me I am a moral person. It's strange to get a letter from lawyers saying, "yes good sir, you are moral enough to be one of us," but there it is. I posted it on my refrigerator with my new shiny UW Alumni Magnet (it says I'm an Alumni by the power vested in the UW Alumni Board of Trustees... what power do you suppose that could be? The power to ask for money on a bimonthly basis?)

So, that completes the final hurdle to becoming a licensed lawyer in the State of California: Ethics Bar, check; Bar Exam, check; moral character evaluation, check; ridiculous application fee, check. The only thing left is for the Supreme Court to complete the paperwork and send me a form asking for dues. That's right, my very first act as a licensed lawyer will be to pay yet more dues.

Now if only I had one of those fancy law jobs so I could afford to pay 'em. I suppose I do have that settlement money coming...

Learn the Truth

2007-04-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

Quickly, watch this video before NBC files a DMCA takedown notice against YouTube on behalf of Cadbury.

The world must know!

On Dancing and War

2007-04-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

There is an opinion columnist who writes for the Post that I lovingly referr to as the "scowley faced man" (this is in contrast to "big foreheaded man"). Add Mr. Novak, and these the individuals represent the triumvirate conservative bloc of the Post. Reading their articles usually makes me pretty upset because of the highly selective tunnel vision when it comes to evaluating facts.

Today is no different.

Mr. Krauthammer argues, with great force but little precision, that the multinational institutions of the UN and the EU failed to protect the 15 British sailors who were captured last week by Iran. The EU refused to impose requested tarriffs and the UN refused to condemn the Iranian action. This, according to Mr. Krauthammer, shows the irrelevance of multinational institutions. In the end, it was the Americans who solved the problem.

There's an old saying, "dance with the one who brought you" that is awfully applicable in this situation. Britian chose to become involved with the Iraq war over the objections of other member EU nations and without the support of the UN. The Prime Minister bought what President Bush was selling and have been at our side from the beginning, all the while thumbing his nose at the multinational institutions. In the international order that's their choice; no country is obligated to participate in transnational organizations.

But there are consequences for ones actions. Why, if the EU does not support the military action in Iraq, would anyone expect the EU to support economic sanctions on behalf of a country who has defined that collective will? If Michigan suddenly declared war on Canada, invaded, and had a group of their soldiers captured, would the United States be obligated to impose sanctions against our largest trading partner?

What, a silly analogy you say? Of course it's a silly analogy, the United States would never allow Michigan to attack Canada, the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from engaging in foreign relations. It's one the cohering factors of the Union. Michigan need not fear the U.S. turning a blind eye, and the U.S. need not fear Michigan going on some fool's errand. Such is not the case with the EU, because if it were, the EU would never have permitted the UK to join the American's Iraqi adventure, the sailors would never have been in/near/adjacent to Iranian waters, and there wouldn't even be a question of whether sanctions were needed.

Does the fact that the resolution to this crises came out of American action mean the EU, or the UN, is incompetent or unnecessary? No, it just shows you're best bet is to dance with the one who brought you.

The Source of Facts

2007-04-03T14:16:00.000-07:00

Much ado has been made regarding the U.S. decision to tinker with the daylight savings time. Regardless of the intentions behind the Congressional experiment (reducing power consumption) I prefer the change. So there's my bias.

Now, let's talk about the other bias. Ars Technica is running a little piece which can only be described as gloating about the failure of the switch to actually save power. Not sure why it's worth gloating about, but okay. Their source is an even shorter article by Reuters, which doesn't seem very interested in gloating (at least there still some objective journalism in the world) about the apparent failure to conserve. But now you should be wondering, who is the Reuters' source?

Here's the direct quote from the article

"There might have been a small increase in morning lighting, and a slightly larger decline in evening lighting usage," said a spokeswoman at New Jersey utility Public Service Enterprise Group Inc, but that modest decline will have no impact on its overall sales or earnings.

Which means there source is the venerable Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. That's not a link to their homepage, by the way, that's a link to their stock price. Yes, that's correct, PSEG is a privately held, for profit company.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with for profit utilities (although, the argument could be made...) what I'm saying is that no for profit company is going to come out and announce, for no good reason, "the government's regulation has cut national power consumption and as a result, earnings are down." It's just not gonna happen. There is every incentive for them to say, "silly government, you cannot stop us, for we are the power company... everyone needs our electricity!" Check out that link again, check out their stock price for the past few days following the article (April 2nd). Up almost 3 dollars! Interesting, no?

Now, I'm not saying that power company is lying. I don't have the facts to say that--but I think that a serious news agency like Reuters, and less serious news, um, reporting... er... opinion site like Ars, should look beyond to the source of their facts before they declare something to be a failure.

Giving The District a Vote

2007-03-22T18:28:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post reports today that efforts to grant the District of Columbia an actual, factual, vote in the House of Representatives was derailed by a poisin pill amendment, offered by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), overriding the District's strict anti-gun laws. Very clever on the Republican's part in one of two ways. Either it puts Democrats from conservative districts in a tough spot (voting against gun freedom), or, it forces the Democratic Leadership to bring the bill up for consideration under a closed rule, thus reversing on a pledge to run the House in a more open manner.

House procedural maneuvering aside, none of this may matter as the President has said he will veto the bill should it reach his desk. He, or at least his advisors, believe the law is unconstitutional. The first clause of Article I, Section 2 of the Constution reads:

The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen every second year by the people of the several states, and the electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislature.

Which supports the President's claim... states get representatives, not districts. It's worth noting that the President also stated the the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act was unconstitutional, and yet is bears his signature.

Of course, the Democrats have their own legal argument. They point to Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 (the Enclave Clause), which says:

To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings

This clause has been read to mean the Congress can do pretty much whatever it wants within the confines of the District (makes me a little sad for the residents of DC... would you want Congress to effectively be your city council and state legislature all at the same time?).

Unfortunately, I have to side with the Republicans on this one, at least as far as the legal argument goes. There are two problems with using the enclave clause. First, it makes no meaningful distinction between the District of Columbia and military bases. Both are governed under the same clause and Congress may legislate with equal force. Which means if the District can be granted representation under the enclave clause then so can all of the military bases around the country.

Second, and for me more powerful, is the 23rd Amendment, which grants the District representation in the electoral college as if it were a state (with the minor provision that they can never get more votes than the smallest state, so they are pretty much stuck at three votes). If the Democrats were right about the enclave clause, this amendment would never have been necessary, Congress could have simply granted the District electoral representation by legislative action. Instead they went to all the trouble of assembling 2/3rds of the House and the Senate and a majority in 3/4ths of all the state legislatures.

Given this precedence, it is hard to argue that legislation, even if well intended, can alter the voting rights clearly outlined by the Constition. There have been efforts to grant the District either statehood or full voting rights under another constitutional amendment akin to the 23rd. The statehood route poses many complications (for example, could the new state pass a law ousting the national government?) and is not really consistent with the founders vision of a national capital free from state intervention. The full voting rights option, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward. The key obstacle is history--it's been tried before and failed--and partisan positioning--Republicans won't vote to grant representation to a Democratic stronghold unless they get the same in return.

But perhaps both can be overcome is sufficient political will. If the voting rights folks can frame the issue correctly, show how the Republicans are preventing a giant city from participating in self-governance, focus on representation in the House by dropping the demand for Senators, and then really push the issue when it goes out into the states, then maybe they have a chance. As for the current effort, I sincerely doubt it.

Must Share Funny Video

2007-03-21T00:06:00.000-07:00

Sarah's father set her a link to a MadTV sketch that is truly inspired. It is a MUST see.

Because the copyright on this video is, err, dubious, I'm just going to provide a link back to YouTube, where you can watch the video and Google can deal with the liability.

Enjoy.

Seeking Special Protection

2007-03-09T08:22:00.000-08:00

We all know about Arthur Anderson, the big accounting firm that went down with Enron in 2002. Suddenly we went from having "The Big Five" accounting firms to "The Big Four." See, the Federal Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) imposes pretty significant reporting requirements on any publically traded firms. Both before and after the adoption of Sarbanse-Oxly, many of these reporting requirements can only be fulfilled by an outside accounting firm. The large companies rely exclusively on the Big Four to fullfill their outside auditing needs.

But, did you know that before there was The Big Five there was The Big Eight? Presumably there was also the Big 12 and the Not Quite as Big 17. The accounting business, like so many businesses, have been seeking efficiency through mergers since the 70's. Taking smaller companies and merging them into successively larger companies. So imagine my surprise when I read in the Washington Post today that these same companies are seeking legislative protection from liability because, and I quote, "We just don't want to be put out of business."

There tactic here is classic. Since they provide such a valuable and necessary service, they will argue that it is better, for society as a whole, if they are essentially immune from suit so as to ensure the few of them that remain continue to function. It would be worse, they will say, for there to be only three or two firms than for one of them to engage in fraud and get off the hook. It's the same argument the airlines make when they get huge federal bailouts.

The critical difference between airlines and accounting firms is that there is only so much market capacity for airlines. Given the huge capital resources needed to run airlines, terminals, ticketing, etc, it is safe to conclude that there is an optimal number of airlines and that it is a relatively small number. But the accounting firms only real capital cost is in brain power. The more clients they have, the more brains they need to employ. My guess is the whole thing scales rather well... which is why they merged together in the first place. If there is no lost efficiency from merging two firms, both with 50 employees into a single firm with 100 employees (maybe less), then you're going to do it on the grounds of eliminating competition. It's a no brainer (excuse the pun).

I consider this classic short term profit driven thinking. One of the central principles of computing, especially network computing, is to reduce the number of single points of failure. You never want a system to rely on one part which, should it fail, the entire system will go down. The same principle applies to civilization. You don't want everyone employed in the same job, you don't want your food source to be in one location, you don't want all your energy to come from the same kind of fuel. The more you diversify the better prepared we are for unforeseen, yet inevitable, changes in circumstances. It's the same principle behind a diversified stock portfolio.

Yet everytime one of these accounting firms merged together, we got closer and closer to a single point of failure. Now the four firms are so huge and have such an iron grip on the market that it is near impossible for a new market entry. The public traded companies have no choice but to hire one of the Big Four, and thus no medium sized accounting firm can ever become Big #5. Now the possibility of a bankruptcy due to a civil lawsuit is a big deal... the investment system needs these firms to survive, regardless of the cost.

Which brings me the final thought of who, exactly, bears these costs? See, when there is fraud, and that fraud is aided by an accounting firm, the investors have civil recourse to recover lost funds. When a company goes bankrupt, like Enron did, there's not a lot of money available to make those investors whole. To be clear, "investor" should conjure up both thoughts of already rich billions as well as the middle class saving for their kid's college and industrial workers pensions (the stock market, it's not just for elite any more!). If the purpose of the civil justice system is to make those damaged whole again, then going after an accounting firm who helped perpetrate the fraud just makes sense. If the SEC, or Congress, goes along with the Big Four's wishes, don't think those unrecoverable damages just go away. Instead, all those damages felt by the collapse of a public company will be carried by investors, while the accountants who both aided and likely benefited by the fraud, will continue to operate without any punishment or financial loss. Talk about a single point of failure.

Supreme Court Docket Watch

2007-02-27T12:57:00.000-08:00

The decision to grant or deny Supreme Court review has been made in two important cases, one involving the Washington State primary and the other involving criminal sentencing. I've blogged about the Washington State primary system before, my belief that the state parties are shooting themselves in the foot, and that the courts holdings so far have been rather inflexible given the political nature of the question.

Well, now we are going to get the Supreme Court's opinion on whether the top-two system is constitutional or not. Louisiana has been using the system for years, so they better be on the lookout... remember, it was California, who adopted Washington's previous system, that went to the Supreme Court last time. If Washington loses like California lost, a national precedent will have been set.

Legal mumbo-jumbo aside, I have to wonder what the courts are doing with all of this? If the blanket primary is unconstitutional, and the top-two is unconstitutional, it begins to seem as if the Constitution has a preferred sort of primary, even though the constitution makes no mention of a primary and the founders, through Federalist 10, make clear that factions--only possible through primaries--are to be avoided. Personally, I found the District Court and 9th Circuit court opinions on the top-two system to be less than convincing. Their holding boils down to relying on the earlier blanket primary holding in California Democratic Party vs. Jones, concluding that anything which diminishes a political party's right to "speak" by selecting a candidate is unconstitutional.

Given that free speech is generally a balancing test, I don't think the courts really gave the question the appropriate scrutiny it deserves. The whole idea behind the top-two system is to say the parties don't get to decide who appears on the general ballot. They can use whatever system they want to pick who gets to use the party political apparatus, but such authority does not extend to deciding who gets to run for office. Put another way, it's not limiting the party's right to speak, it's saying the state isn't going to listen.

The other case, involving a 200 year sentence for a man found with 20 pictures of child pornography on this computer, was denied review. The case sought to question whether such a long sentences (10 years for each photo), served consecutively (instead of concurrently, as most jurisdictions would do) violated the ban against cruel and unusual punishment. The state court review only asked whether the 10 years per photo was fair, and having decided in the affirmative, it did not question the state's decision to apply the sentence consecutively.

What's interesting about this case to me is the quote in the article from a Professor Berman.

For a host of good reasons, the justices think they have a role in regulating extreme corporate punishment, but I fear the court doesn’t embrace a role in regulating extreme individual punishment.

He is referring to the court's decisions limiting punitive damages, such as the rough guideline that the punitive should never be more than nine times the actual damages.

For me, the critical distinction here revolves around state decision making. In the case of punitive damages, the decisions are made by juries within the context of judge made common law. Which gives the Supreme Court a critical role in forming, and revising, those precedents. The criminal punishment, on the other hand, is not by common law. Because of the due process clause of the Constitution (5th or 14th Amendment, take your pick), all crimes, and their punishments, must be the product of the legislature. Which means Arizona's decision to impose consecutive terms, instead of concurrent terms, was made by the state legislature. If the result is seen as excessive, then the political process is the proper route for change.

Thinking About the British Withdrawl

2007-02-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

The big news the past two days is that the British are withdrawing forcing from Iraq. There has been a lot of political back-and-forth about this development, with the White House calling it a "good-news story" and the anti-war movement asking why the British get to leave and the Americans don't. Obviously this is all very complicated, but I want to focus on a particular quote out of the Washington Post.

Tony Snow, White House Press Secretary, is quoted as saying

The fact that they have made some progress on the ground is going to enable them to move some of the forces out, and that's ultimately the kind of thing that we want to be able to see throughout Iraq.

The paragraph right before the quote, which is not sourced, reads

The White House argued that comparing the British situation in Basra and the U.S. position in Baghdad fundamentally distorts reality. The south, where the British have been in charge, has no Sunni insurgency and far less violence than Baghdad or Anbar.

Anyone else find that very interesting?

Why is the one populated area where the British forces are most concentrated the one populated area where there is "no insurgency and far less violence?" Strikes me as there are two critical differences between the areas: the occupier and the occupied. But do we really think there is some great difference between the Iraqis in Baghdad and the Iraqis in Basra? Or, could it be that the demoralizing events of Abu Ghraib and the slow response to the evolving situation by the American military leadership have engendered such ill-will towards the U.S. that our troops are simply incapable of being effective in the way the British troops have been?

I am reading a book on Iraq right now, and I'm learning a lot of interesting things about the situation... but at the moment I am far from an expert. But the one thing that bother me vary much are claims from the right about how we must stay in Iraq in order to win the fight... but what if it's not possible to win the fight? What if the window where all the troop increases in the world has already passed? To use a poker analogy, you don't stay in the game when all your holding is pocket 4s and the flop came down all face cards. Sure, you can try and bluff your way out... but this is international warfare against a player with nothing to lose. It's true, if you fold you cannot win... but this is not the ideal time to be bluffing.

Earthquake!

2007-02-21T14:25:00.000-08:00

About four minutes ago I felt a very unnatural shaking in the apartment. At first I thought nothing of it, but then decided to see if there was a place where earthquake data was easily available.

Lo and behold: USGS Earthquake Hazards Program

They don't know the magnitude yet, and it hasn't been reviewed by a seismologist, but I can certainly vouch that it happened.

Nothing big, didn't even rattle the pictures on the wall, but it's vary cool to see how fast this information is available.

Update

The USGS now reports it was a 3.0 magnitude quake and about 15 miles north of my current location.

Art Update

I put a little tag by Santa Cruz, in case you didn't know where it was located

Sneaky Rules of the Senate

2007-02-17T12:31:00.000-08:00

On Friday Democrats in the House of Representatives flexed their new majority muscle to pass a non-binding resolution opposing the surge/escalation in Iraq. The resolution was brief, to the point, and palatable enough to garner the support of 17 Republicans on top of all but two Democrats.

So impressed by the resolution, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid scheduled a rare Saturday vote on identical language (as opposed to the 14 page whopper they had tried to adopt the week before). It was my thinking that this was a pretty clever move on the Majority Leader's part. To end the Republican filibuster Reid needed a 3/5ths majority and I figured the Saturday vote would mean fewer Republicans and thus a lower absolute vote total.

Indeed, when the vote was taken it came to 56-34--nine Republicans absent and Democratic Sen. Johnson of South Dakota still recovering from brain surgery. Now 56 plus 34 is 90, and 56 is 3/5ths of 90... so why was the Washington Post story reporting the filibuster had held?

Because Senate Rule 22 says so, that's why. The threshold is not based on the number of votes cast as it is with nearly all other votes in both the House and Senate. Rather, it is based on the number of Senators "duly chosen and sworn." Which means if there are 100 seated Senators, you need 60 affirmative votes to end a filibuster. Just as importantly, a "present" or "absent" vote is equivalent to a no vote. The only reason the minority even bother to vote, as far as I can see, is to avoid accusations of laziness back home.

In the end, Reid ends up looking like the fool. Democratic presidential candidates had to leave the campaign trail to go in for the vote, Republicans were allow out to play, and the Republicans continue to prevent a Senate resolution on Iraq. But don't think this fight is over... there is a mighty big appropriations bill working its way down the pike, and I think Rep. Murtha is going to have a few things to say about it.

They Knew it Was Going to Be Easy

2007-02-13T14:06:00.000-08:00

News from the hacker community... the digital rights management (DRM) technology that protects HD-DVD and Blu-Ray high definition video discs has been broken. That's really not news as it was an inevitability.

The Slashdot commentary on this was interesting and pointed out something I hadn't thought of before. I will refrain from quoting the whole comment and instead paraphrase: it is impossible to secure a message when the recipient and the attacker are the same person. And now you are asking, what does that mean?

Okay, quick cryptography lesson from someone who only understands the basic. Assume two people (Bob and Alice) who want to send communication between eachother privately. In order for this communication to occur they must use one of several encryption methodologies. In general, this is done by both Bob and Alice knowing a "secret" and using that secret to encrypt and decrypt the message. Now, a third person (Charles) wants to listen in, but can't because he doesn't know the secret. Works pretty well, for the most part.

Now with DRM, the paradigm is different. Alice (played by the record label or movie studio) wants to send a message to Bob (played by you and I) that he can only listen/watch in certain circumstances. But Bob also wants to watch his DVD in a non-authorized fashion (say, with a Linux box)... which means Bob has a dual identity. He is both Bob and Charles. Any secret Bob knows, Charles knows... and now the gig is up. It may be that Bob doesn't know what the secret is, exactly, that he knows, but it is only a matter of time before smart people figure it out. That's what happened with DVDs several years ago, and that's what happened with the next generation systems.

But this is not what I want to talk about. The title of this post is "They Knew it Was Going to Be Easy" because the makers of DRM knew everything I just said above. They are not, contrary to the opining of the Slashdot crowd, stupid. In fact, they knew this so well that they got a law passed to criminalize the activity... a little something known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. §1201(A) reads:

No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title

Which makes the breaking of DRM a against the law... even if the DRM is really stupid.

So yes, it is easy... but so is bopping someone on the nose. Doesn't take anything more than one of my fists and decent aim. Which is why we pass laws in the first place, to create artificial incentives which conform behavior in a particular manner as established by the legislative process (I love this link!). The media companies said they wanted to keep pirates from breaking into their stuff, they recognized it couldn't be done with technology alone, so they appealed to the legislature and got the needed protection.

Which is to say... they knew it was going to be easy.

The Political Mechanics of Troop Funding

2007-02-12T00:42:00.000-08:00

I thought I would share a small observation regarding the debate over troop funding with regards to the Iraq war. A lot has been said over whether the Congress should exercise its authority over the "purse" to bring the troops home, with every presidential candidate or wannabe making some sort of statement. Pretty much every politician is against it, and maybe for good reason... such a vote could easily be portrayed as abandoning the troops.

But that's not what this post is about, this post is about the mechanics of such a vote. First stop is the Constitution, Article I, Section 8 which lists off the Enumerated Powers of Congress. Among them is the following.

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

Which is very significant.

For the most part the Federal Government is funded on an annual basis through a set of 13 appropriations bills. The government ceases to function without those bills, such as the infamous government shutdown when the House Republicans and President Clinton could not agree on a budget. Now, if a hypothetical Congress truly wanted to write a hypothetical President a blank check for a war, they could just appropriate a hundred billion, gazillion dollars to be spent over the next 100 years and be done with it... but thanks to the clause quoted above, they are Constitutionally barred from doing so. They must affirmatively vote to fund the war a least once every two years.

Which brings us back to Iraq. There will be a new Defense Appropriation bill this year (and thanks to the Iraq Study Group Report, that bill will include the cost of the war, instead of a separate emergency appropriations bill of the past few years). Without this bill the war ends... period, end of story.

I remember an interview committee I once was part of where we reviewed perspective candidates for a lobbying position. The outgoing lobbyist asked one of the candidates, "what's the easiest thing to do in the legislature?" to which the candidate correctly responded: kill a bill.

See, there is only one way to pass a bill through Congress, but there are about a thousand ways to not pass it. And here's a kicker... even if the Senate, its ranks bursting with presidential contenders, votes to fund the war, the House can refuse to do so, and that's the ball game. Even a single Senator can filibuster (absent a Budget Resolution) the entire war if he wanted to; requiring a full 60 Senators to vote to fund the war.

Here's the last critical bit on mechanics. A failure to act is not subject to the presidential veto. He can yell and scream all he wants, but the President lacks the Constitutional authority to compell legislative action. He can't even dismiss the legislature and call new elections, which is a power generally held by most other executive figures in the world.

In the end of the day, the United States Congress really does hold all the cards.

Smart Words from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs

2007-02-07T22:07:00.000-08:00

Buried in a story about the shift of 7 GOP Senators to now back the war resolution debate in the Washington Post, having earlier voted to block the debate, is this gem of a quote. I reproduce it without alteration from the Post's article.

A top Pentagon leader weighed in yesterday on the war debate and appeared to undercut the argument advanced by the White House and many GOP lawmakers that a congressional debate challenging the Bush plan would hurt troop morale.

"There's no doubt in my mind that the dialogue here in Washington strengthens our democracy. Period," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee. He added that potential enemies may take some comfort from the rancor but said they "don't have a clue how democracy works."

Fantastic! I really couldn't have said it better myself, and I hope the Bush Administration was listening. It is our debate, and even our dissent, which makes us strong. If our enemies take this as a sign of weakness, they do so at their peril.

Copyrights in the News

2007-02-05T11:31:00.000-08:00

I've got three different copyright stories, all within a 24 hour period. Clearly the world is beginning to take notice.

First up, the "creator" of the Electric Slide has issued a DMCA take down notice to YouTube for videos where the Electric Slide is being performed incorrectly. First, to silence all of those "the DMCA goes to far" folks (of which I am, arguably, one of... but not in this case), the DMCA is only involved here because YouTube has a chance to avoid contributory liability by taking down the material. The original poster of the material can then serve notice to YouTube that the material is not infringing, at which point YouTube must repost it. Then, YouTube having done its part, it's up to the two parties to resolve the issue. The real issue here is one of basic copyright law.

Which presents an interesting question: can dance moves be copyrighted? The expert from the CNet article (Jason Schultz of the EFF) seems to pass this question off as if it's a no-brainer. Just like a song, performing it without permission is a violation of the §106 of the Copyright Act. But I'm not convinced. To perform a dance I must follow a series of steps, also known as instructions. A series of instructions is generally referred to as a process... and processes, as a rule, are not copyrightable. They are not copyrightable because in this country we protect processes through the patent system. It's very easy to state the rule: "patent ideas, copyright expression." I could make the case that dance steps could be either, but by law it cannot be both.

That's not even the most interesting question... see, the videos he wants taken down show the dance performed incorrectly. Which means that if it were patented, he would have no action (except, maybe, for this thing called the Doctrine of Equivalents, and I don't want to talk about that). On the copyright front, there is no literal copying, so you get into a whole fair use thing. Not to mention, if the rights holder is saying "I grant a license to people to dance this correctly," is there an implied license to dance it incorrectly?!

Next story, from the Washington Post, the GW Hatchet ran a story a few days ago which was picked up by the local TV station. Who in turn did not bother to credit the paper. They argue the idea of the story cannot be protected, thus they have no responsibility to attribute, much less seek permission. But, the Post reports the story used direct quotes from the college paper... that is copyright infringement. But putting that aside, I think the legal obsession with copyright has gone too far. It's not a question of whether the paper is bound by law to attribute, but whether it was the right thing to do.

Lastly, Mikhail Gorbachev is appealing to Bill Gates to drop a criminal suit against a Russian school headmaster who is accused of using unlicensed copies of Windows in the school. Apparently former heads of state don't have a lot to do these days. But it raises two interesting points. First, why are we talking criminal charges? Who was harmed in a way that requires punishment beyond restitution? Make the school pay, remove the software, whatever... but jail? Second, Microsoft is in a great position now to push out a marketing and political win. It agrees to give the school the pirated software, free of charge, and lets the guy off the hook. Now you've got another school district locked into the Microsoft hegemony and they get to make nice with the Nobel Peace Prize winner. What I don't understand is why this issue is on Gorbachev's radar. Is this the beginning of a larger campaign for my humane copyright laws?

Don't Believe Everything you Read About Security

2007-02-03T20:52:00.000-08:00

Washington Post has a Q&A up that asks "When I log into my Internet provider's Web-mail page, I don't see the usual lock icon. Isn't it dangerous to send a password over the Internet without encryption?" And proceeds to tell people to fear sites which don't employ the little lock.

It's true, sending passwords over the public lines in clear text is asking for trouble. But that doesn't mean that the little lock is the only way to do it. In fact, that little lock costs a lot of money for websites to purchase (and repurchase, on an annual basis). But there are alternatives that are just as good. LegSim uses such a system, relying on basic cryptography and some intelligence. Just because a site doesn't chose to buy into the SSL certificate racket doesn't mean it can't be trusted.

What I Miss About College

2007-02-03T13:30:00.000-08:00

Learning and student government were great, but what I really enjoyed about college was the collection of brilliant people who, when they put their mind to it, were capable of nearly anything. Here's a great example played out at Dartmouth.

The first 45 seconds of this are a little odd... just keep watching.

Leadership Under Fire

2007-02-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

Big news coming out of the ASUW Student Senate these past weeks, resulting in numerous phone calls from people I haven't heard from in some time. It was nice to talk to people, it wasn't so nice to hear about the destructive path the ASUW seems to be on this year. I'll withhold my commentary on some of these topics until after this Tuesday's vote, but I did want to share some initial thoughts on a Daily article run this Friday.

Seems the UW Libertarian's have decided to pull out of Senate after a vote to extend the conduct code off campus. I happen to agree with the Libertarian's stance on this issue, although not to the extent of leaving the Senate. But in leaving the organization they chose to not just attack the vote, but the Senate itself. The Daily has the store with quotes. The following is a comment I posted to the story.

The Libertarians ought to look back into the ASUW history before it demands "a more democratic and less bureaucratic system." Before the rise of the Senate, the only body capable of making decisions like these was the Board of Directors, a group of students chosen in a single election dominated by popularity contests, an annual battle between the students from greek row, the residence halls, and the ECC. Once elected the students sat in their offices, indifferent to student groups or interests not aligned with their own.

The changes to the Senate over the past five years have strengthened the institution, creating a more democratic forum. One not determined by a single high stakes election, rather, based on organizations of students who take the time to represent their individual and diverse constituencies.

As for bureaucracy… I suggest we consider the alternative. Bureaucracy is how we make things fair. Rules and regulations design to keep power in check. It is these rules that now have the Chair and Vice Chair under a microscope, and it is these rules which shows how the Libertarian Senator had abandoned his responsibilities through poor attendance. The alternative, a Senate without rules, would produce yet another unaccountable political body… and the ASUW already has one of those.

Leaving the Senate is a powerful message, and I certainly understand the Libertarians’ decision to do so based on the Student Conduct Code vote… but taking a sideswipe at the institution itself, just because you lost a political fight, is like burning down the restaurant because you didn’t like the food.

The Coming Primaries

2007-01-28T21:32:00.000-08:00

I've been flirting with writing something about Iraq, especially after reading this op-ed by the National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley. But I'm not going to do it. The whole situation is simply infuriating, and the only thing left to do is wait for this "new" strategy to go the ways of previous "new" strategies and then hope the Republicans bail on the President and the Democrats remember how to use the power of the purse. In the mean time, I would like to share a few thoughts on the upcoming Presidential primary season.

First, there has been much ado about the Democrats proposal to shift around the primary calendar. The big shift's primary change is putting Nevada (home of the Senate Majority Leader, hmmm...) in between Iowa and New Hamshire. It's not a bad idea on it's own; western state, moderate, labor, lots of things the Democrats could use more of in picking its candidate (not to mention running the whole operation).

This, however, has upset a lot of other states who got passed over. Several states have threatened to push their primary forward as well, compressing the primary season even further. The Democratic Party has rules against this, of course. If a state holds its primary in violation of DNC rules, the party can disqualify the state's delegates. This op-ed argues it should be against the law for the DNC to hold such power. While I agree with the idea that "party action" == "state action," I also know that the party will have an easy time in court explaining why it has a compelling interest in organizing the primary schedule (easier for the candidates, historical tradition, etc), where it probably had less of a compelling interest in excluding blacks. So I don't really think the law is going to help here.

What really gets me about the primary calendar is how Iowa (as the first) has been able to literally hijack the Presidency with regards to ethanol subsidies. The state has everything to gain from high subsidies, so I'm not surprised that their delegation pushes them with gusto. But the historical quirk that places Iowa at the front of the calendar should not allow them to blackmail presidential candidates.

So, when I hear that Florida and California, huge states with significant interests of their own, consider moving their primaries forward, I'm not the least surprised. If Iowa showed a willingness to select a candidate based on more then their own petty self-interest, then perhaps this wouldn't be happening. Instead, the early states have shown a willingness to push their advantage to the absolute brink. And now, here we are... the brink. If California or Florida push their primaries up, Iowa will respond by scheduling even earlier. And then the race is on.

I wonder, in a race between a small agrarian state and a state whose economy is the 8th largest in the world, who is going to win?

More Useful Than Originally Intended

2007-01-28T13:26:00.000-08:00

There is a new linux oriented website which I just learned of today called goodbye-microsoft.com. Aside from the likely Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution claim Microsoft has against the venture, I've got to say that I'm very impressed with what's going on here.

The idea is simple. Using nothing more than a webbrowser and Windows, go to a website and download all the necessary bits to install Debian Linux onto a desktop. No optical discs necessary. Besides the obvious marketing value of such a website, it has tremendous functionality value for those of us with laptops.

See, more and more laptops these days are shipped without an optical disc drive. Or, if they have one, it connects via a strange PCMCIA card. Which means that it is very difficult to start the Linux install process (though not impossible). The process itself is nearly painless these days (in stark contrast to my first experience in 2000). But if you can't get the damn thing started then you've got serious problems.

But now, thanks to this brilliant invention, it will be trivial to install Linux on my next laptop.

Keeping Count

2007-01-20T13:41:00.000-08:00

With the 2006 elections less than three months behind us, the 2008 Presidential elections appear to be in full swing. I found this informative list in the New York Times that I felt was worth sharing to demonstrate just how strange the upcoming primary season is going to be. Here is the list, reproduced, for those who are too lazy to click.

Democratic Candidates
OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCED

Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut

John Edwards, former senator from North Carolina

Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa

Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio

ESTABLISHING EXPLORATORY COMMITTEES

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois

Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York

WIDELY MENTIONED

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts

Al Gore, former vice president; from Tennessee

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico

Gen. Wesley Clark, retired NATO commander; from Arkansas

Republican Candidates
OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCED

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas

ESTABLISHING EXPLORATORY COMMITTEES

Senator John McCain of Arizona

Rudolph W. Giuliani, former mayor of New York

Tommy G. Thompson, former governor of Wisconsin

James S. Gilmore III, former governor of Virginia

Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts

Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado

WIDELY MENTIONED

Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska

Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas

Representative Duncan Hunter of California

Gov. George E. Pataki of New York

Newt Gingrich, former House speaker from Georgia

Assuming everyone runs (which is doubtful, but you never know) that means 11 Democrats and 12 Republicans. Talk about a crowded field!

Amending the U.S. Senate Rules

2007-01-18T23:53:00.000-08:00

Now, I don't claim to be an expert on the U.S. Congress, but I do play one on the internet. As a results of my job I keep pretty well informed about the process and procedure of how the legislative branch goes about doing its business. I am, after all, the world's foremost expert on computerized simulations of Congress (shocking, I know).

But even with all that knowledge, I cannot make heads or tails of the first legislative action taken by the Senate. You may have read about it, as it's in all the papers. My commentary is not on the substance of the bill, which seems all well and good, but rather the vehicle through which the action is being taken.

Article I of the Constitution says "Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings," which is the basis for the Rules of the United States Senate and the Rules of the United States House of Representatives. Both sets of rules are very different from eachother, reflecting the unique nature of the chambers. For example, the Senate is home to the filibuster, a somewhat controversial rule that has been used by conservatives and liberals to fight for causes against a majority of senators. The House, with its expansive membership, has the Rules Committee and their special rules which allow for bill by bill modification of the procedure for consideration. This allows the majority to cut off debate, limit amendments, and generally get their way every time.

What's critical here is that both sets of rules are the sole province of the respective chambers. The House sets its rules and there isn't a thing the Senate can do to stop them. So what does this have to do with the new Senate ethics package?

When the House brought up its ethics package the decision was made to use the House Rules as the vehicle instead of actual law. The upside of such a decision is that you don't have to get Senate approval or the President's signature. But the downside (depending on your perspective) is that the rule only exists for the duration of the current Congress. Come the 111th Congress the House can decide to simply not re-up the ethics rules. It's a tradeoff between expediency and permanency.

To make a change to the House Rules the House adopts a House Resolution, known simply as an H.Res. For the 110th Congress the House Rules took the form of H.Res 6. This is a different form of legislation then if the House were to enact a law. In those cases it uses a bill, and refer to them with just an H.R. H.R. 1 was the Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act. Again, the critical difference is that H.Res 6 took effect once approved by the House, where H.R. 1 will require Senate action and is subject to Presidential veto.

The Senate is a little different. First, because the Senate has staggerred six year terms, in each new Congress only 1/3rd of the membership is up for reelection. This means the Senate does not dissolve in the way the House does. The practical result is that the Senate need not approve new rules every two years, it can simply keep the rules from the last Congress and no one would be the wiser.

Which brings me to into the home stretch of this post... the Senate action to amend the Senate Rules took the form of S.1, not S.Res 1. As you may have guessed, an S. is used to adopt laws, just like an H.R., and require bicameral action and are subject to Presidential veto.

But wait, your saying, couldn't it be that the Senate uses the S. designation to amend their rules for reasons of precedent?! Sure, that's possible. But then you have to explain §213, which amends 2 U.S.C. 1605. That's law folks, not just Senate Rules, which means the House gets a say and the President can use his fancy stamp^*.

So what am I (or you, for that matter) supposed to make of all this? If the House does not adopt similar language through an H.R., what becomes of those sections of S.1 that were just related to the Senate Rules? Is it permissible to mix rules changes with law changes? Is there a dependency here, or do the rules go into effect regardless of the outcome to the law amendments? A literal reading of the Constitution says that the Senate may adopt rules, and in this instance they voted 96 - 2 to adopt them.

Strikes me as all very odd.

* Actual presidential veto stamp not featured here. Why are there not photos of the stamp available online? Are we afraid the terrorists will somehow use it against us?

Christmas Time Update

2007-01-10T12:04:00.000-08:00

First, a big thankyou to everyone who made time in their busy holiday schedule to see me while I was up in Seattle. It was nice to talk to people and listen to stories of the rainy city. Overall I'm quite impressed with how things seem to be shaping up without me :)

Second, wanted to share a bit of my family mania with you all, since few of you have ever had the chance to meet my mother and sister. Suffice to say, Christmas is not a spectator's sport in my family. Behold, our handy work:

My mother's log cabin

My sister's beach house

Sarah's vintage house

My Saltbox House

You can see a ton more pictures of construction and decoration on my photo gallery site.

Wrong Tactic for ANWR

2007-01-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

The Democrats, and by extension their friends in the environment lobby, now have control over Congress. Which means the end of efforts to drill in ANWR. Yay! But, according to CNN, the issue is not dead to this Congress. Apparently their are efforts afoot to declare ANWR a "wilderness" and permanently ban drilling.

Now, I am not an environmental scientist and I am unfamiliar with ANWR's current designation (wasn't already a wilderness?) but I am familiar with our governmental system and this seems awfully stupid. Here's why...

There is a current belief that legislation is required to open ANWR to drilling. That is the status quo. Passing new legislation doesn't change that situation. It's not "double" protected. New legislation can always repeal old legislation. The only way to protect something from legislative alteration is to enshrine it in the Constitution. A move even this green would vote against. If the bill were to ball it just means that the legislation to open drilling has to address the current provision which bans drilling and this new provision. Essentially, it maintains the status quo.

But it could actually do harm, depending on certain court rulings. See, if Congress votes on but doesn't not pass the bill then the Bush Administration can make an attempt to open ANWR through Dept. of Interior administrative regulation. The environmentalists will sue, arguing the existing provision protects the area. But then the Bush Administration comes back and says, "are you sure? Congress doesn't seem to think so, or else it wouldn't have consider legislation to make the protect explicit." Which means the issue is unclear and gives the department deference to make a determination.

Which makes Rep. Markey's bill both unnecessary and risky. If you want to protect ANWR the only way to do it is to keep a majority of one of the chambers on your side. Anything short of that is just grandstanding to look good in the papers.

Elections & Trade Secrets

2006-12-30T11:59:00.000-08:00

For those not keeping score, the recent federal elections are not completely over. The race for Florida 13, while certified by the Secretary of State, is not yet settled to the satisfaction of the losing party. In this case a Democrat who appears to have lost because many other people who voted Democrat on other races failed to vote in her race.

At the heart of the controversy are fancy touchscreen voting computers, which lack paper-trail verification, and have been the target of sustained criticism from voter rights groups for the past several years.

The Herald Tribute reports that the challenger's motion to see the voting computer source code has been denied. Based on the article, which lacks sufficient legal description for this law school graduate, the judge felt the case as presented was mostly one of "conjecture" and was insufficient to override the trade secret protection of the voting machine manufacturers.

And so we enter the final realm of IP protection. I've spoken before on copyrights, patents, and trademarks... but trade secret just doesn't make it into the news all the often and yet is the single most important form of protection in the computer industry. The idea is simple: if a company has information they produced and they take reasonable steps to keep in secret, then it is consider a "trade secret" and entitled to protection.

The most common situation in which I've encountered this protection is when one tech company sues another and source code is at the heart of the matter. If one company seeks to discover the source code, the other can argue trade secret protection to prevent a competitor from accessing the source, or worse yet, the code entering public knowledge and losing all protection.

But there is a standard remedy which seems relevant to this election case. Known as a protective order, the moving party can request the source code be reviewed by lawyers (and their experts) who are may review the code and determine if their suspicions are correct. The lawyers are required to keep the information from their client. If the code reveals something relevant to the case, they can go to the judge and say "look, this has a direct impact on the case it must be disclosed to the parties." Then the judge can rule on something substantial.

In the present case, trusted experts could look at the code and make a determination on whether votes could have been improperly counted, present that determination to the judge who could make an informed ruling. Instead the judge seems to have bought the manufacturer's claim of software perfection. Mind you, Microsoft has been saying for years that it is impossible to make bug-free software and thus they should not be liable for damages as a result of their bugs.

I hope the Florida Appeals Court thinks about the precedent being set here when legitimate claims of voter fraud are weighed against trade secrets.

In Town

2006-12-18T00:40:00.000-08:00

I arrived in Seattle on Friday (having walked, ridden on three buses, and airplane, and a car) and I couldn't be happier to be back. The why behind my love for this place is certainly still true. I won't bore you with details, but it has been great to see the city lit up (well, the parts that have electricity, anyway) and see friends and family.

Hopefully if you are someone who reads this blog, I will contact you soon to setup a time to meet while I'm in town. If I don't, chances are I don't know you read this self-defacing trash. Contact me.

Webcomics For Life

2006-12-14T12:26:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine sent me a humorous webcomic that deserves to be shared with a wider audience. I've never heard of this particular strip before, but if you are into math, technology, and humour, it may be for you.

If not, I still think this one is a particularly excellent reflection of me, as a person. I'm not saying the girl has ever left before, but the scenario certainly started out the same way.

Make sure to hang your mouse over the image for a few seconds to uncover one of my life's guiding philosophies.

Here's the strip.

Thoughts on Digital Video

2006-12-12T20:05:00.000-08:00

For those who don't regularly browse youtube content or browse slashdot obsessively... I suggest something which I think is well worth the bits to download.

Here's a link.

But you don't come to Pro Bono Geek for links to the latest media content. There are better blogs written by much more interesting people out there for such things. So, in addition to the link above (which I repeat again here for your convenience), here are some thoughts on digital video...

I've been considering getting Sarah a digital video (DV) camera for Christmas. Not really sure if I can afford to the level of quality I would want to get her, so it may have to be pushed off until after I strike it rich playing the California Lotto. They have a lotto down here, don't they? Anyway, since the idea came into my mind I've been thinking about what I might do if I had access to such technology.

So far... haven't come up with much. Sarah wants/needs the camera for school. Learning how to use it now will make doing ethnographic film making easier when she gets to that point in her graduate studies. So she's got a rationale for the expensive little bobble. I, on the other hand, have really no justification other than it has cool buttons.

I'm an avid fan of The Show with Ze Frank and his show is made possible by a DV camera. But I'm sure not that funny, nor committed, to doing such a thing. It's already risky that I, a person with political ambition, write a blog... heaven forbid if there were sound bytes!

There are other uses for a DV camera. Like, I'm told that a group of guys once went to Los Vegas with a fancy camera and took a bunch of pictures of their exploits. But that may or may not be true. But how often do you really produce that kind of footage? And, after you've created the footage, what in the world are you supposed to do with it? How often do you rewatch home movies?

All of these questions got me thinking... maybe I'm approaching the question all wrong. Perhaps a DV camera is not a means to a particular end, but a tool for general innovation. For example, I have this new case for my media server. The case includes a vaccum florescent display. At first I thought, wow... what am I going to do with that. Now, about a month later, I've written little display and control apps that allow me to manage my media collection without having to turn on the TV. Neat and energy efficient!

So the question becomes, would I have thought of the idea had I never owned the case? Probably not. But since the tool was available my mind got thinking and eventually innovation struck. Perhaps a DV camera, then, is not technology to be purchase because I have particular goals in mind... but because having the technology will present opportunities I would never have even considered... oh, and because Sarah would like it

So Upsetting, It Actually Hurts

2006-12-03T11:30:00.000-08:00

Democrats, as you may have heard, won big in November. What you may not have heard is that Keith Ellison, the new Minnesota Congressman and a Democrat, is the first Muslim to be elected to the House of Representatives. In accordance with his faith he has decided to take his oath of office using the Qur'an, instead of the Bible. This has upset some folks.

The article, if you can call it that, actually hurts to read. It is so full of inaccurate legal and cultural statements that I cringe to think about it. But allow me to share a few quotes which I assure you I am not taking out of context.

What Ellison and his Muslim and leftist supporters are saying is that it is of no consequence what America holds as its holiest book; all that matters is what any individual holds to be his holiest book.

Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don't serve in Congress.

Ellison's doing so will embolden Islamic extremists and make new ones, as Islamists, rightly or wrongly, see the first sign of the realization of their greatest goal -- the Islamicization of America.

When all elected officials take their oaths of office with their hands on the very same book, they all affirm that some unifying value system underlies American civilization. If Keith Ellison is allowed to change that, he will be doing more damage to the unity of America and to the value system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9-11.

Which brings me to one last quote I think is worth sharing on this topic. I think we can all agree that if there is one writing every member of Congress should uphold it is the United States Constitution. It has a valuable passage which I am reminded of everytime someone screams about the need to elect Christian legislators. You'll find this in Article VI of that most venerable document.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Quick Post on Standing and the First Amendment

2006-12-01T15:38:00.000-08:00

Washington Post has an article on the Supreme Court's decision to hear a challenge to the Bush Administration's faith-based initiative program. There are a lot of opinions flying around about the faith-based thing, and I'm not really interested in getting into it (for discussions on religion, I suggest checking out my friends' discussions).

What I am interested in is the Administration's effort to get this case booted on procedural grounds. They argue the plaintifs in the case lack standing, which means the plaintifs have not personally suffered a harm. The plaintifs are suing as tax-payers, meaning the only harm they allege is that their tax dollars are being spent in an unconstitutional manner.

The administration is not wrong in that tax-payer suits are dangerous... to allow any old tax-payer to bring a suit would flood the courts with law suits while providing little context for the court to rule. See, the problem with the average tax-payer is that they have no specific facts, no information, nothing to bring to the table that a judge can consider. As such, we have a doctrine that says general tax-payer status does not count for standing.

The administration, however, is dead wrong when "[i]n written arguments filed with the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Paul Clement said the appeals court had transformed a narrow exception in law into a "roving license" for citizens to challenge any action of the executive branch of government." See the mention of the narrow exception? That's what is known as a bald face lie.

The narrow exception he's referring to, and the only exception I know of to the tax-payer standing doctrine, is for establishment of religion cases. The argument is simple... if the government is, in fact, using tax dollars for unconstitutional establishment of religion (as the plaintifs argue in this case), who exactly suffers a harm other than the general tax-payer? Who, without this exception, has standing to challenge? Certainly not the religious institution receiving the funding. If no one has standing, then the behavior continues without scrutiny.

Which, I suppose, is exactly what the Bush Administration wants in this instance.

IP in the News

2006-11-29T11:37:00.000-08:00

Two stories worth noting/commenting about and then it's back to work on my Kolab replacement technology... and maybe I'll try to find a job.

First up, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments today on a topic near and dear to my heart: obviousness. In order to receive a patent from the United States government an invention must pass a series of tests. They are generally conceived of as: utility, novelty, and nonobvious. At this point utility is pretty much a non-test, as everything has some utility. There used to be a doctrine about public good, but a famous case about those drink dispensers and how they trick you into thinking the juice is fresh (when, in fact, the juice you see is colored water in a continuous cycle) ended any need for public benefit.

Novelty is perhaps the hardest hurdle to cross, because any prior art can nullify your patent. Of course, there is no easy way to access prior art and because trade secret is such a big thing in the technology sector, a lot of prior art is never widely published.

Which leaves us with obviousness. Under the statute, a patent is not to be granted to an idea with someone of "ordinary skill" in the same field could have come up with it. The point being that just because you were first to come up with something anyone could have done does not mean you should have exclusive rights. However, the statute was pretty much eviscerated by the Federal Circuit when they observed that such inquiries have a "hindsight" problem. Essentially, when the court tries to consider the obviousness it does so in the context of the inventions existence. It's obvious because it's already be done. But the Federal Circuit wanted to know if it was obvious at the time of invention.

The Federal Circuit's test on this is odd and I'm not going to get into it because I don't really understand it. Justice Scalia is quoted to have declared it "gobbledygook" and "meaningless." Sounds about right. It's also worth noting that the Supreme Court usually reverses the Federal Circuit if it bothers to take the case, which means the test will likely be rejected and replaced with something better. Which is a good thing.

In the past I have argued the reversal rate reflected a fundamental disconnect between the Federal Circuit and the Judiciary itself. However, my Circuit Court research from last spring makes me doubt that claim. Unlike the regional circuit courts, which can split on the same question, the Federal Circuit holds sole initial appelate jurisdiction over patent claims. Thus there is no such thing as a circuit split in the area of patent law. I suggest this is a bad thing, as it leads to ossification and reduced experimentation, but the Federal Courts Improvement Act of 1982 disagrees with me on this point.

Much of what the Supreme Court does is pick winners in circuit splits, which means one circuit usually gets upheld and the other gets overturned. But in the Federal Circuit context, if the Justices agree with the the Fed Circuit, it's easier and quicker to simply deny cert. The only time they need to bother with a case is when they want to consider overturning a decision. Following the logic, we would expect the only time the Federal Circuit to be upheld is when four justices disagree (enough to grant cert) but can't find a fifth to form a majority. Since most patent decisions are 7-2 or better, we rarely see this situation.

In other news, the first report of a major university selling it's professor's fair use rights has emerged. Apparently Cornell University has entered into an agreement with Association of American Publishers (think RIAA for books) which will significantly constrain the ability for professors to distribute learning materials to students without paying a royalty. Now, I'm not going to say the issue isn't tricky, but this is no Napster situation. Professors are not stealing anything... they are teaching students. Considered by some to be the most noble of all professions.

The heart of the issues is §107 of the Copyright Act, which codifies fair use rights. The act has a four item list which are considered non-exclusive factors to be used in determining a fair use. Since it is a non-exclusive list, there are other factors, but these are the big four. The very first one reads

the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

So, as you can see, the professors might think that their teaching falls under the nonprofit education purpose fair use exemption.

The publishers counter that they produce educational materials for the purpose of making a profit. If the very people who are supposed to be buying these products (teachers and students) can just get them for free, then there is no money to be had and it's time to get out of the business. Which is as good an argument as any.

Of course, for decades (if not centuries) professors would have books placed on reserve at the university library where students could access the book for free. Online reserve, which is at the heart of the agreement, is just a natural extension of the old concept, right?

The article first caught my attention because of the inflammatory headline: "Professors get 'F' in copyright protection knowledge." Which I thought was pretty extreme, given the difficult legal questions at issue. But the article redeemed itself way at the bottom when it recognized that not all matters are legal. Even if the publishers are 100% correct, they are essentially biting the hand that feeds them... the professors they are seeking to limit are the very professors who write the material in the first place. Here's the quote from the article.

At Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass., Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at the Graduate School of Education, says the Internet may let faculty members publish their own material and cut the book industry out of the picture.

"If publishers push too hard, faculty may just decide they no longer need a middleman who collects all the profits in each direction," Dede says.

Which just goes to show you... you might have the best legal argument in the world, but if it doesn't hold up outside of the courtroom your just chasing short term victories in your long plunge off the cliff.

Echoes of History

2006-11-28T22:54:00.000-08:00

I've been reading pretty much every article that has anything to do with defining the current conflict in Iraq. The big debate, for those not obsessed with language politics, is whether Iraq is in a "civil war" or a state of "sectarian conflict." The stakes are quite high for the Bush Administration. With public support already low, the perception that the Iraq conflict is an internal issue will feed public support for troop withdrawl and signal the final defeat of the Bush Doctrine.

As any good war of words, this one focuses on how you define them. The question of what constitutes a "civil war" is key. There are a number of good articles with lots of academic commentary out there, but here is one for your reading that is as good as any. The Administration's line is "you have not yet had a situation . . . where you have two clearly defined and opposing groups vying not only for power but for territory." Thus no civil war.

The comparisons with the United Stats Civil War are also frequent... some in the Administration have gone so far as to require both sides don uniforms to qualify. Not sure if urban warfare requires color coordination, but the point is interesting. See, President Lincoln refused to recognize the Civil War as a civil war. It was a rebellion. He refused to recognize the Confederacy as anything more than upstart political rebels. Of course, history disagrees with Mr. Lincoln. I suggest that regardless of how the current war of words plays out, history will disagree with Mr. Bush as well.

Curse you Kolab

2006-11-28T17:17:00.000-08:00

This weekend I began a colossal undertaking. I was going to install Kolab, the much praised open source groupware solution developed by the Germans. It was going to revolutionize my life... network enabled calendars, contact lists, journaling, and more reliable email. Brilliant.

Today, 72 agonizing hours later, I have totally abandoned my efforts. Oh, I'm sure it could work... eventually. But even I have limits on how many times I'm willing to run full speed into a brick wall. Eventually you remember that it hurts when you do that.

I think the biggest difficulty with the project was the shear number of components that I just simply didn't understand. Kolab combinds a lot of big technology to work its magic. Things like LDAP, SMTP, IMAP, and SASL are just the big acronyms you need to know. Then you have to deal with the particular implementations of those technologies: openLDAP, postfix, cryus, and sasl2. Throw in things like DNS, apache2, and php4 & 5 (technologies I know, but not very well) and you've got a real party.

In the end, the deadweight of all those impenetrable technologies got the better of me. I began to feel like I was tossing stones down a well and using the resulting sounds to not only decide what was down the well, but how to throw the next rock such that whatever was down there would magically convert into an Saturn V Rocket.

But there is a valuable lesson here, the same one the Iraq War is teaching the neo-cons. Understanding a few of the parts is not enough when dealing with interdependent systems. Once you've gone through your old tricks, tried and true though they may be, you are left with a vast network of unknowns, left pulling at various strings in a desperate game of trial and error. After my defeat at the hands of Kolab I was able to purge the entire project, losing nothing more than a few days of productivity. Iraq may prove a different story...

What They Don't Tell You About California

2006-11-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

It's cold here. Don't believe me... read this article from the Santa Cruz daily paper. When I got here I put all my heavy tops (sweaters, sweatshirts, etc) way on the top shelf, boxed up all my winter gear, and superglued my heater's temperature dial to off.

Now it's getting to be 30° below and I have to wear socks in the house. What happened to my beach weather? I thought California was a perpetual summer paradise.

I'm demanding my money back.

Putting a Price on Political Tresspass to Chattels

2006-11-21T18:38:00.000-08:00

Let me start this post off with a valuable terminology lesson. A chattel, which looks a lot like cattle and even covers livestock in its definition, is essentially any kind of property which is not real property. Better stated, a chattel is anything you can own and move.

Having said that, take a look at this article in the Seattle PI about the New Hamshire Democrats suing the Republicans for $4.1 million on a tresspass to chattel theory. Here's a quick summary: Democrats and Republicans in a big fight over a House seat in the 2002 election (yes, four years ago); Democrats spend an estimated $8.2 million on a phone bank get-out-the-vote (GOTV) system; Republicans pay a telemarketer to place "hang up" calls to the phone bank, effectively blocking outgoing calls from the phone bank; Republican incumbent wins 2002 race; bunch of Republicans are sent to jail for their involvement.

It's all well a good that people are being thrown into jail for this behavior, but the Democrats are looking for financial reimbursement. See, the race is lost and there isn't much that can be done about that (although, one wonders if this could have been the deciding factor...), but what about 2004, or 2006, or 2008? Certainly, the Republicans should have to restore the Democrats to the position they would have been but not for their tortious behavior.

Well, that's what this case is about. See, the Republicans are arguing all they owe is $4,974 (the actual cost of the disrupted telephone service and rental costs). Essentially, the only costs the Democrats can show "on paper." Wherease the Democrats are asking for enough money to be able to run the phone bank again. So, whose right?

If the Republicans are right, heaven help us. Because that is the green light to the party (any party) to engage in clearly tortious activity with actual¹ loses as the only penalty. If I may pant an analogy... if I run into your car and it blows up, the Republicans would argue I only owe you a new car. But what if, as a result of your car blowing up, you miss an important business meeting and lose out on a million dollar deal? Or, let's say you suffer serious physical injury that prevents you from certain kinds of valuable work? In those cases, within the realm of foreseeability, the defendant must compensate the plaintiff.

The Republicans acted indefensibly, criminally, and knowingly. It's not enough that those responsible are being thrown in jail... the injured party must be fairly compensated. Shutting down a GOTV system on election day is worth more than $4,974.

1. Actual damages, just the harm immediately suffered, as opposed to special damages, which cover the rest of the kinds of harm.

Important Update

2006-11-17T18:26:00.000-08:00

Today I received unofficial word (official word to arrive via United States Postal Service) that I passed the California Bar Examination. Now all I need is to be found a moral person and I'm in the club.

Here's a pretty picture of my unofficial notification

Click to enlarge

Watching Us (Them?) Lose From Afar

2006-11-17T10:10:00.000-08:00

I think one of the hardest parts about being away from Seattle is watching student politics and knowing that (a) I can't do anything about it, and (b) even if I could, I shouldn't. Case in point, today the Seattle Times is running an article about the UW's new approach to extending the Student Conduct Code. Besides mistakenly identifying the Eric Godfrey, newly appointed Provost for Student Life, as the "the UW's longtime vice provost for student life," the article seems accurate. Essentially, the administration is preparing to back an extension of the conduct code... and apparently the students are going to go along with it.

The fight to keep the conduct code on campus has been raging since I was a junior, but picked up serious steam in 2004 after "riots" in Greek Row. Of course, those "riots" were mostly non-students, but the residents of the area tend to lump all "young people" into the same group. Action was demanded and Rep. Murray (now Sen. Murray) took the task to the legislature. Since then the ASUW has fought to protect the civil rights of its membership and been quite successful. The bill never once got out of committee.

This year seems to be the year we finally lose that battle. I suppose it ought to be they, not we. I'm not a student any more... but detaching from something so tied up with who I am is proving difficult. I'm not saying I'm gonna write the ASUW President a letter, but I sure wish he wouldn't lie down before the fight. There are lots of angles on this, and just because the administration is changing its position doesn't mean the legislature is ready to do the same.

----

In an update to a story I posted Wednesday, the White House has nominated Benjamin Settle to the Tacoma seat on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. Settle's chief qualification seems to be his involvement with former Sen. Gorton (R) election campaigns. Senator Murray, Senator Cantwell, you know what have to do.

The New Seven World Wonders

2006-11-16T12:52:00.000-08:00

Folks over at the NewOpenWorld Foundation have decided to name seven new world wonders. For those not "in the know" six of the seven world wonders have failed the test of time. To name a new seven the organization started with 200 and paired it down the 21 now up for public vote. Feel free to participate.

I voted for the following:

The Acropolis of Athens (450 - 330 B.C.) Athens, Greece
Angkor (12th century) Cambodia
The Pyramid at Chichén Itzá (before 800 A.D.) Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico
The Roman Colosseum (70 - 82 A.D.) Rome, Italy
The Great Wall of China (220 B.C and 1368 - 1644 A.D.) China
The Hagia Sophia (532 - 537 A.D.) Istanbul, Turkey
Sydney Opera House (1954 - 73) Sydney, Australia

I tried to be geographically diverse, but favored older structures over newer structures. The Syndey Opera House, by far the most modern on my list, was not chosen for its location in the Southern Hemisphere so much as I think it's really cool looking. The Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty can be listed once they've stood up for another thousand years. I don't see how The Great Wall wasn't already part of the original World Wonders... perhaps my vote didn't get counted the first time.

White House Messing with a Good Thing

2006-11-15T09:34:00.000-08:00

Seattle Times had a headline running on the front page today reading "Political motives suspected as jobs on bench go unfilled." I first thought... oh no, the Democrats are going to go through with their threats of blocking every Bush judicial appointee until after 2008 when we can get someone blue into the White House. And then I actually read the article. Turns out Democrats aren't the problem.

For better or worse, when it comes to District Court appointments (as opposed to Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court), the Senators from the state in which the District Court resides are king. If the nominee is rejected by one of the Senators the appointment is not confirmed. Of course, that gets tricky when the state elects two Senators from different parties as Washington did during much of the 1990s (Sen. Murray (D) and Sen. Gorton (R)). To resolve this problem the two Senators, with the involvement of the Clinton White House, developed a non-political merit process for reviewing and recommending names to the White House for nomination. An ingenious system that, using local lawyers and judges to select the best federal judges for appointment.

For those who don't know, a District Judge is about the least political kind of judge in the Federal Court system. They do not decide law in the way you hear about activist judges doing... that authority is the province of the Appeals Judge. No, the District Judge is a singular entity, usually presiding in court alone, and holds tremendous power of the litigants in an individual case, but that authority does not extend beyond the courtroom. While that may insulate them from the political aspect, it does raise the spector of judicial bribery. Of course, we have a Federal Judiciary, in part, to reduce that possibility, so it's great that Washington uses this open, non-partisan process to select new Federal Judges.

Well, it turns out that doesn't work for the Bush White House. Recommended names have been either rejected or simply ignored. Apparently the White House feels they are better situated to know what is best for the Western District of Washington than, say, the people whose lives (and livelihoods) actually depend on the court's decisions. Hopefully Murray and Cantwell stand up for the process and refuse any nominee not endorsed by the merit review process.

Linux, Games, and Techno Babble

2006-11-14T10:40:00.000-08:00

I discovered a significant limitation to binary releases last night: they don't really stand the test of time. What is a binary release, you ask? Well, when a software developer writes a program s/he does so in source code format. That source code is then compiled into object code, also know as a binary ('cause it's all, like, ones and zeros). Almost every bit of code you Windows and Mac users download come in the form of binary releases. Linux, however, is different... the source is available (hence, "open source").

But not everything for Linux is available that way. Last night I decided to bust out the one and only commercial Linux game I own: Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (affectionately know as SMAC). The company who ported the game, Loki, went out of business years ago; as did its support network. This wouldn't be a problem, except that many of the libraries that the game relies on have changed significantly since then.

If the game were released in source form, the problem could be resolved by a simple recompile. But the source is gone... probably held by whoever gobbled up the assets of the now defunct Loki.

So, what's a gamer to do? Turns out the fine folks over the Gentoo Wiki have already resolved this dilemma. They have unearthed the original libraries designed to run with SMAC and provided the necessary voodoo command to get everything working.

So, to all those folks looking to resolve this needle in a hay stack problem, here are the libraries in question and the magic incantation is as follows:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/Loki_Compat/ /path/Loki_Compat/ld-linux.so.2 /path/AlphaCentauri/smacx.dynamic

Of course, you will also need the latest patch, which was none-to-easy to find. And applying said patch also required some magic, since it also relies on a broken binary releases. However, you can just unpackage the archive with the --keep flag, edit out the patch verification code (which is what breaks the patch), and then run it just fine.

Public service announcement over.

Post Election Thinking

2006-11-13T10:48:00.000-08:00

Welcome back after our Election Week hiatus. Not exactly planned, but the break did provide me the opportunity to sit back and reflect on the politics of a Democratic Congress. First, a brief pause to enjoy the fall of Senator "Split the 9th Circuit" Burns and Senator "I Hate Gay People" Santorum. I realize that several radical House members have also ridden off into the sunset, but as senators these two pushed policies especially divisive to those of us on the West Coast. Good riddens to bad rubbish.

Next up, quick review of initiatives. Washington State proved to be wiser than originally expected by failing the "give property owners more rights than citizens have over their bodies" initiative and the "rich dead people's heirs are more important than poor people" initiative. Here in California, the state adopted a slew of bond measures designed to upgrade the state's infrastructure (a decidedly unsexy topic), rejected a parental consent for abortion initiative, and adopted yet more draconian sex-offender policies (hello GPS trackers!).

Santa Cruz, notable bastion of liberal politics, soundly rejected Measure G, a proposal to raise the minimum wage an additional $1.25 over the already $1.75 increase approved by Sacramento this year. Like I've already said, I'm not opposed to minimum wage increases, but it has to be done with more study on the economic impact. Policy decisions of this scope should not be made on feelings alone. Hopefully the sponsors of G will come back in a few years with numbers on the State-wide change and we can go from there.

Now, onto the big news... a one seat majority in the Senate and a confirmed 11 seat majority in the House (10 seats remain undecided... but many will end up breaking Republican). I've been reading a lot about the Democrats policy proposals and how they want to govern. It all sounds very good, in abstract... but I wonder how well their ideals will fair once the minority remembers it can use open governance to help position the party to reclaim the majority in 2008. Will ideals prevail over politics?

Of course, now the Democrats have to carry the burden of governing in a divided country. The liberal wing of the party is going to be out for blood, just as the conservative wing of the Republicans have been since '94. Of course, many blame the Republican loss on the conservative wing... I imagine the Democrats are just as susceptible. So, how does one govern to appease their base yet mindful of America's delicate political balance?

Anyone who thinks that question is an easy one has another thing comin' to 'em. Look back at the Vietnam War and see how the Democrats, who held the Congress and the White House, tore itself apart trying to appease both the anti-war faction and the pro-war faction. How exactly are the Senate Democrats going to accomplish anything on the war with a one seat majority where that one seat is held by Senator "Bush is Right on Iraq" Lieberman? And let us not forget the Republican filibuster remains a potent tool.

In other words, I'm not convinced the "American nightmare" is over. The nightmare is not Republican control... it is a bitterly divided body politic, many of whom cannot stand the other side. Fighting over seats in the Congress is important, but it's not going to heal the divisive politics of the Bush Administration. I'm not saying the cure is a Democrat as President, but a President who tries to lead from the center (instead of the extrems) would go a long way.

The Problem with Republican Moderates

2006-11-06T11:08:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of ink recently (original appeared in the NY Times, but no longer available for free) about how the 2006 mid-term elections have a real possibility of making the moderate Republican extinct. I'm the first to acknowledge that, in theory, this is a bad thing. Up in Washington State the moderate Republican has long been extinct. It's a shame really, because many in the GOP are unwilling to vote for a Democrat, regardless of how moderdate they may be, so they cast their vote for the local conservative nut job.

But here's why I'm not going to be shedding any tears on Tuesday if the Ds take the House and the moderate Republican goes the way of the Dodo. As a rank-and-file House Member there is one, and only one, vote that really matters: your vote for Speaker. The Speaker has nearly unchallenged authority to control floor votes thanks to House rules and norms. Which means if the guy you vote for cast his vote for a hardline conservative who is tied to the President's hip it doesn't matter how moderate they are... they won't even get the chance to vote on your issues.

The moderates in the House Republican Caucus continue to support Speaker Hastert (maybe because the alternative in the Republican Caucus would have been worse). Which means sending a moderate to the House only furthers conservative domination. This isn't such a problem in the Senate, where the Majority Leader has far less control and individual Senators wield greater influence.

So go ahead moderates, elect a moderate Republican (like McCain or Specter) to the Senate if you like, but if you want a more moderate House you're going to need to send a Democrat and hope they keep their promises of returning to the fair and open rules abandoned by the House Republican leadership after the '94 elections.

Santa Cruz Wildlife

2006-11-03T21:50:00.000-08:00

Some of Sarah's family came over this weekend and we went touristing to some of the big Santa Cruz sites. I uploaded a bunch of wildlife photos so you can see what you are missing.

Click the image to see a bigger version where you can actually see the butterflies.

Our first stop was Natural Bridges State Park, where every year in October the monarch butterfly flock in masses for the winter. The numbers get up into the 100,000's! The park has a nice viewing area, but my camera is really not up to the task of effectively capturing the little guys. View more photos.

Later we visited the Municipal Wharf where the sea lions congregate. There are some sea level viewing platforms attached to the wharf where you can get right up close and watch 'em. It still haven't personally seen one of these guys jump up from the water onto the planks, but others have and say it's fairly incredible. View more photos.

My Public Service Announcement

2006-11-01T23:57:00.000-08:00

(or, A Miserable Life: Conclusion)

First, thanks to all those who contacted me, both privately and publicly, to wish me the best as I struggled through my throat problems. It meant a lot that people were concerned.

Second, the problem seems to have resolved itself... or, at least become so unnoticeable as to no longer register. My throat definitely feels different than before and I am more aware of its, er, configuration at a conscience level. After what I did to it, is it really any wonder that it would be a little sore?

I really have no idea if it was a popcorn hull or not. For a while the throat pok[ey|i]ness gave way to more of a hair sensation... which would sometimes feel like it was on my tongue (although I could never see it), on the roof of my mouth, and even in my sinuses for a day or two. It was all pretty miserable, and I'm glad that it's over.

I guess my advice to anyone who stumbles upon these posts looking for answers is simple: figure out a way to get to sleep (NyQuil works wonders) and just let your body deal with it naturally. Anything else just increases the torment. Oh, and stay away from the throat cancer bulletin boards.

Copyright Law and Political Ads

2006-10-30T09:23:00.000-08:00

The Seattle Times has an editorial today that has finally pushed me into writing something about the intersection of copyright and political advertisement. For those of you who don't wish to read the article, it's a piece from the Times' Editorial Board calling on Darcy Burner to renounce an ad put out by the DCCC. The add uses a snippet from a TVW broadcast where Rep. Dave Reichert (R) said sometimes he listed to the GOP leadership and sometimes he doesn't. Unfortunately for him, he said it such that a little pruning makes it sound like he's a GOP waterboy.

But the Editorial is not just upset about the careful choice of words, they are upset because it infringes upon the copyright of WTV. So the obvious question is, does it? I haven't done a ton of research on the topic, but my gut says copyright is not an issue here.

First, the footage is being used in a political ad, which means it has ample First Amendment protection (in fact, as political speech it has the most First Amendment protection of all other speech). Second, while TVW isn't a governmental entity, it is a 501 (c)(3) non-profit corporation (meaning it has to be for the public good) and it receives nearly 100% of all funding from the Washington State government. Third, the footage is of a public official making public commentary, which means his words and appearance are newsworthy. There has always been an exception to copyright when the news is at stake (see INS v. AP... although the law is muddled here).

There was a Washington Post editorial a few years back about how President Bush rarely gives press conferences, choosing instead to do one-on-one interviews with private news outlets (CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, etc). As a result, historical snafus on camera become the private copyright of the company which can be forced out of circulation by the White House by threatening to never grant another exclusive interview.

Thankfully Bush has been giving more press conferences of late, so this issue never really matured. But imagine, for a moment, if it did. Would the courts actually uphold a copyright infringement case against a political organization for using footage in an effort to broaden political discourse? I'm fairly certain that was not the purpose of copyright law.

In fact, the Times' Board shot itself in the foot with the following line.

Rather, it is about the use of copyrighted TVW footage without permission, which would never have been granted in this case.

The purpose of the copyright is to ensure those who take the effort to make the copy are properly compensated. To say that the owner of the copyright would refuse the request, even if properly compensated, means the copyright law is being abused.

...and I'm not even going to talk about fair use.

One more thought on this topic regarding YouTube. I've been reading some election blogs which have taken to distributing political ads, and their unique commentary, via the popular video sharing service. This is often the only way to see footage of ads which have been pulled from the air for reasons like embarrassing the candidate, provoking public outrage, spreading untruths, being stupid. These ads live on via YouTube, reviewed and distributed among the political junkies.

Are they legit? First analysis says it's copyright infringement. They aren't copying a few seconds, they are taking the whole kitten-kaboodle. No obvious fair use defense here. But it is political commentary, so it has the whole political speech component. Also, you've got the fact that the distribution is done by private individuals, so the initial producers (the one who pulled the ad in the first place) can claim its not their fault while continuing to get a little bang for their buck on an ad they were forced to pull off the air.

Which means that politics and market forces are going to be more important than the law, but it's still an interesting question.

Because I Already Said It

2006-10-26T17:44:00.000-07:00

Slate has an article up, linked from slashdot, saying something I said 15 days ago. Which just goes to show you, you can get better, more up-to-date news and information by talking with your friends who are experts in the subject than you can by reading traditional news outlets.

It's just like Brother Ze says.

Bad Reporting

2006-10-26T12:18:00.000-07:00

Some days you've got to wonder how much thought really goes into reporting. As evidence, I humbly sumbit the following Seattle Times article. It's in reference to an individual working at the State Department who is resigning to go teach at George Washington University.

Which is all fine and well.

What is not fine and well is all the extra stuff they tacked onto this article which I assume must have come from a press release. There are two fundamentally misreported facts here.

Miller, a Republican, represented the Seattle area in Congress from 1985 to 1993, serving on the House International Relations Committee.

Which makes you think, wow, a Republican representative from Seattle!? He must be pretty moderate to have been elected to the 7th. Ah, but a little research shows he was in the 1st... which was a socially conservative district until about a decade ago when they started electing Democrats. Hmmm... a decade ago... like, 1993? Strikes me that describing the 1st as the "Seattle area" is somewhat disengenous.

Then we have the truly unforgivable mistake. First, let's take a look at language from a nearly identical Seattle PI article.

He later chaired the Discovery Institute before joining the State Department in late 2002.

Which is a fine statement about his involvement in the ultra-conservative thinktank going around the country pushing "intelligent-design." But, now let's take a look at the Times' version.

He later chaired the Discovery Institute, a nonpartisan public-policy think tank conducting research on technology, science and culture, economics and foreign affairs, before joining the State Department in late 2002.

I took the liberty of emphasizing the new words in case they didn't leap off the page and slap you across the face.

Like I said above, the Discovery Institute is hardly just a nonpartisan public-policy think tank. It is the christian conservative thinktank in this country leading the charge on topics like intelligent design. I don't know why this press release, err, newspaper article, is trying to make this guy look like a moderate... but his public track record suggests anything but.

California Elections

2006-10-24T10:52:00.000-07:00

Having posted far too often about my health recently, it's time to get back on topic with a little discussion about the upcoming California state election.

First up, this year is a state executive office year, which has all the biggies up for grabs: Governor, Treasurer, Secretary of State, Lt. Governor. We even get to vote for the Board of Equalization, which is the nation's only directly elected tax oversight authority. Having just recently moved here I don't know beans about most of these candidates, so I'm sticking with the blue team for this round.

The one situation where I took pause was Governor. As you may have read in the papers, California is home of the one, and only, Governator. As shocking as this may sound, I debated voting for the man. Whether or not the Democratic party is willing to admit it, Arnold has done many good, progressive things for this country and done so without drawing too much flack from the Republican controlled national government. A Democrat in his position could not have done as much, in my opinion. That being said, I have high hopes for a serious change in the national government this year. I'm also a little upset that when presented with the opportunity to give the world's 6th largest economy universal healthcare the man in the Mansion broke out the veto pen. So I'm casting my ballot for the other guy.

But the real kicker when it comes to the 2006 ballot isn't the candidates, it's the initiatives. There are five state wide measures, eight state wide propositions, and five Santa Cruz city measures. That's 18 major policy decisions decided by the voters. It's no secret I strongly dislike the initiative process... there simply isn't the infrastructure to properly consider complex issues like sex offender policies (because throwing them into prison for longer terms is not the answer people!).

I'm voting yes on most of the bond measures, no on pretty much everything else. But one no vote I'm casting with particular loudness deals with Santa Cruz Measure G, which would increase the City's minimum wage to $9.25. Let me go on record I am in no way opposed to minimum wage laws. They are an excellent way of addressing known inequalities in barginning power between low-skilled labor and big companies.

There are two things wrong with G. First, the State is already increasing the minimum wage this year from $6.25 to $8 by 2008. The impacts of this change alone will be significant and should be studied before any bigger increases are mandated.

Second, the measure would only impact the City of Santa Cruz, creating what the opponents of G have termed an "Island Economy." Essentially, any company who would benefit from operating outside of the economic zone and has the means to do so, will. It's not like when the state increases the wage... it's hard to move out of such a large jurisdictions. But Santa Cruz is tiny, and several major job providers have already stated they will pick up and move down the road to Watsonville should G pass.

So, I'm voting no. I'm also voting no on a parental notification requirement for an abortion by a minor... look folks, if these kids felt safe talking to their parents about this topic, they would do so of their own volition.