Electric Josh

Lair
This space's silence yesterday is due to the fact that the newly clean basement is a completely kick-ass lair. The acoustics are just right for loud, bad guitar playing (and I say playing in only the loosest sense) and the pile of cords and patch cables in the corner goes unnoticed behind the computers, which probably will need to be rehabilitated or tossed before too long. At any rate, while you suckers were frantically hitting Reload on this site, trying desperately to retrieve the (you hoped) daily grains of wisdom I see fit to toss your way, I was learning how to play Lawyers, Guns, and Money, solos and all, before Warren Zevon dies. I'll probably never get that good; despite having an extra cool lair, I'm nowhere near grizzled enough.
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GYWO
There's a new batch of Get Your War On comics out. See? It pays to check the links in the sidebar with some regularity.
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Uh...
From the Boston Globe:

Bush's hourlong speech, delivered as is customary in the crowded House chamber, was interrupted 77 times by applause, including 42 standing ovations.

Each one heartfelt, of course.
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When presidents speak
A couple of years ago, when I was living in Pennsylvania, the President went on TV and explained how he had, well, yes, been misleading (which means he lied) in the most patronizing, sing-songy voice imaginable. Only that president's wife ever talked more annoyingly. Well, now there's the warbling of Lieberman and Gore, the uncomprehending staccato of the current President (he says nukular, for God's sake!). Donald Rumsfeld is an excellent speaker, and should speak instead of the President at all times. As Dad says, "Even presidents I like are totally impossible to listen to."

A colleague pointed out to me last year that the last several years of Presidential speeches he'd seen reminded him strongly ("in fact, kind of disturbingly," he said with his rich Russian accent) of the addresses that the Soviet Premier used to give before the Politburo. The speeches would be interrupted with wild, standing ovations which would erupt every several seconds, almost irrespective of what was being said. "The clapping, of course, meant nothing." So that happens in America, too, now.

In that spirit, I won't be listening tonight, but will instead read the transcript in text form tomorrow. Links [added the next day]:

• New York Times
• The Globe has only excerpts.
• ABC News
• Holy crap! C-Span has every state of the union address since Truman (except for Reagan's last two, oddly), including last night's.

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How to count crowds
This sort of thing is done all the time, and shouldn't be hard. Take a bunch of pictures of all parts of the crowd. Better yet, have a news helicopter scan the whole crowd from above with a video camera and then stitch together a single, big image using some clever image processing. Then digitally sign the image and post it to a web site that both the insane left and the insane right can download it and do their own analysis. Since the picture (or set of pictures) is digitally signed, nobody can forge denser or sparser crowds. Because everyone can see the same picture there's less opportunity to fudge the analysis, or to just make up numbers. It's certainly not nearly as hard as exit polling.
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1, 2, 3,...
So the vigilant Tom Tomorrow alerts us from his usual place in the sidebar of this account of the MLK weekend antiwar march in Washington. If it is to be believed, it would seem that media outlets are reliably, systematically undercounting the size of antiwar marches. Damn liberal media.

Of course, my excellent (formerly Serbian) colleague points out that that's a pretty small protest. "Do you mean you've heard that it wasn't very big, or are you saying that a quarter million people is 'pretty small'?" I asked him. "Yes. It's a tiny fraction of the voting population. Even 250,000 people is pretty small compared to protests that actually get something done."
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Cancer
Warren Zevon is about to die.

''I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years,'' he told Letterman. ''It's one of those phobias that didn't pay off.''

Poor guy.
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Basement

For those of us who have been getting all proud of ourselves because thought we were becoming less slovenly than we were when we were students, cleaning the basement is a humbling experience. It seems that even marrying a non-slob hasn't helped me as much as I had thought. We have boxes of crap down here whose contents we haven't even wondered about since moving in a year and a half ago. Mason jars and pint glasses, a FedEx box of cocktail napkins marked "Extremely Urgent", review materials for the bar exam K took a year and a half ago. There are two hand-me-down printers I had completely forgotten about, sitting in boxes under the stairs, hopefully ignorant of the one we bought about six months ago. (I feel only a little less like an idiot than I might otherwise because both old printers are alleged by their original owners to have suffered subtle mechanical failures, and probably wouldn't work anyway.)

Empty boxes were taking up about half of the storage space in the basement. Small storage units occupying a larger one, thus making it small, too. The lava lamp on the fireplace down here hasn't been turned on in at least six months, so that's running. The ridiculous teal naugahide glider I'm sitting on (the internet works from down here!) has been covered in crap, unused.

There are two old Macs down here. The 7200 was my college graduation present from my mom, and got me quite nicely through grad school, where it served variously as my primary research machine, my first Linux box, the first box on which I ever played with Python, C++, and relational databases, and the first non-food object I ever owned that depreciated by two orders of magnitude. The SE/30 was a hand-me-down from a faculty member at Lehigh who had moved on to bigger and better computers, but hey, this was a $4,000 machine when it was new thirteen years ago. It now runs Scheme and MORE. If I could connect it to the internet then I'd have a pretty kickass blogging machine, but alas, the ports out the back of the thing are pretty old, and none accept Ethernet. The 7200's disk won't spin up, and the SE/30's screen is gone. Sad.

There are two air conditioners down here, one that we use every summer and the other that has sat idle in the basement for about a year. The latter has a funky 220V plug, and currently serves as a table for the 7200's monitor. The former is unbelievably heavy, and I haven't exercised regularly since the one day in the fall that I moved it from the bedroom upstairs to its current spot atop the dropcloth pile in the corner. The furnace is super loud.

O, how Lighting and cheap Plastic shelving make everything Better.
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Why, indeed?
The author of the projects below that I've been wading through asks if there are any good reasons to use Java to build web stuff. I've been doing it professionally for a bit over two years, and can't think of one (as I noted in the comments).
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python, web
Now I'm wasting untold amounts of time digging through PyCS, which is one of these, and at some point I'll figure out what's happening. Open source; no docs. Alas.

This is exactly the sort of thing I spend days, at work, doing, digging through the useless, tautological "documentation" for the Java-based app server we have gone and based our entire suite of products on. The differences here are that I have the source code to dig through and read, and that I'm using a language that doesn't make me want to hop bluntly out the window. I have, for example, been measuring memory use in a way that takes about 15 minutes per data point. Hop!

It's amazing what keeps computer types happy, and that I play with this stuff instead of going to the gym is something on which I brood a lot.
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Gaspig
Ranting about SUV's is good for the soul. To help your soul, visit gaspig and ignore the overwrought opening graphic. At the Burlington airport, just as SUV's were getting popular (this is, like, ten years ago already) Barb and I saw a Chevy Suburban with a custom Vermont (!) license plate reading gashog. Disdain isn't the right word, but it's the first one that comes to mind.
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Reading stuff you disagree with...
...is obviously not too popular among the folks whose reading lists were inspected and mapped here. How cool is it that such an obvious pattern pops out? [Answer: quite.] This is the sort of thing that makes people want to be scientists. Part of a whole site for a company that sells software to make graphs like this...
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The public domain's Dred Scott decision
Argh, so it looks like the public domain is about to die a slow death. Holy crap, is curtailing the public domain the opposite of what copyrights are supposed to be for, or what? Constitution, Article 1, Section 8:

The Congress shall have the power to...promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries...

The court said that "limited times" can be interpreted really, really loosely. 14 years, maybe 28 has become the rest of the author's life plus 90 years. Twenty years ago it was life plus 70 years. How much anyone want to bet that Disney or someone will purchase legislation 20 years from now that makes it life plus 110 years.

Everyone with a website seems pretty worked up about this, which is good. Here are some good starting points:

• Boing Boing,
• Copyfight,
• Doc Searls,
• Lessig himself,
• even the National Review (old article)!

Lessig notes:

But if there is any good that might come from my loss, let it be the anger and passion that now gets to swell against the unchecked power that the Supreme Court has said Congress has. When the Free Software Foundation, Intel, Phillis Schlafly, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, Kenneth Arrow, Brewster Kahle, and hundreds of creators and innovators all stand on one side saying, "this makes no sense," then it makes no sense. Let that be enough to move people to do something about it. Our courts will not.

Now that I've spent some time trying to read everything I can about this I'm super pissed. I'd say that it's enough to get one to drop his current career and become a lawyer, if only I hadn't just watched my dear wife do the same. Time to join the EFF, again.
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Unmonitored elections
So we finally hear the reason that the Voter News Service, the exit polling pool set up by the six big news networks, failed to perform even the tiniest fraction of the exit polling it was set up for: crappy computer programming. Of course, the worst and most important programming decision was made before the programmers were even hired:

After the 2000 fiasco, a vice president from each network was on the board. That new board took bids from computing companies to completely rewrite the VNS system. One stipulation: That the new system use more flexible and current programming languages-Java and the Extensible Markup Language- rather than OS 390 to gather, compute and deliver data to the media outlets. The idea: Data could then easily be provided instantaneously to subscribers over the Internet.

Folks, XML is just text. It happens to be composed of letters and numbers and lots of "<" and ">" characters. You can write XML by hand, or with a BASIC program, or Pascal, or assembly language, or Lisp, or Perl, or any programming language at all. To limit yourself to Java just because you need XML output is analogous to demanding that one's home be powered by electricity exclusively from a particular power plant. All programming languages can generate text. I speak from long personal experience when I beg you to believe that writing Java programs to run on the Weblogic platform is among the most difficult, problematic, and unstable ways to generate XML. It's difficult because Java makes you think about things other than the problem at hand, and it's problematic because Weblogic is incredibly hard to configure exactly right.

Then, it seems, they decided that an entirely new database should be created on an entirely new platform, and that the new database should merge two preexisting datasets, each of which sat in a different schema. Did nobody ask the programmers whether this was possible in the time they had?

The databases which housed the election results and local demographics for more than 4,600 precincts were running on both IBM's DB2 and a version of Oracle 7. They were to be consolidated into Oracle 8i database software.

"This caused all kinds of problems," one source close to VNS says. "You're not only talking about a clash in culture and expertise but you're also talking about trying to create places for data to fit that just aren't there."

"The fields just didn't match up," one network analyst says.

Of course the worst problem, and the one without which the project probably would have succeeded anyway, was that not enough testing time was scheduled. Either way, this sounds like an excellent case study for business schools, or a good subject for an introductory programming book: How To Fail To Write Software In 21 Days. Geez.
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Okay, name the movie
"Times are changin', Betty. These nerds are a threat to our way of life."
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Magic hovercars from the future
What could be better than a car that burns no carbon and is driven essentially by the sorts of electronic control systems that get used in avionics? Yes, folks, it's the hydrogen-powered fuel cell prototype car, which, like all snazzy, efficient car technologies, is Seven To Ten Years Off™.
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Imagining computers before there were any
The Atlantic is running an old piece by Vannevar Bush (no relation to the Presidents, I think, but I can't be sure) about what the (then-) coming computer revolution was going to look like. Is it just me, or is writing of this free, almost unbearably optimistic sort hard to find nowadays?
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Girlz
My adult life has thus far consisted of a series of nerdy pursuits that are great fun. Proof that I find them fun can be found in today's New York Times, wherein we learn that the dearth of women in computing is just as bad as that in physics. Why, oh, why would anyone choose to lurk in a physics lab in a basement for years, or try to make a computer hop through unbelievably arcane hoops, unless said pursuits were fun, if perverse? It's a sickness, I tell you.
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Babies
One of my audience of five is having a baby. Congratulations, Adam and Lee!
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SUV's and terrorism update
So there's a whole website about the ads that Arianna Huffington got together about how SUV's cause terrorism. What great fun! As though one needed another reason to despise these stupid things. (Okay, fine, the one Scissorfight logo is pretty cool.) A couple of the articles linked to from the Huffington site---or reproduced there...whatever---note that people in general are actually starting to notice that such a grotesque waste of fuel might actually be bad. Hey, if safety (especially that of others), expense, tendency to roll over, difficulty of parking, and sheer overall ridiculousness aren't enough to help people avoid making such retarded purchasing decisions, maybe concerns about national security can help.

Somewhere in my scattered mind lies a really amusing rant about SUV's, but I can't formulate it now.
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Formatting
Man, formatting a web page is a real pain in the ass. Avoid doing so at all costs. Turns you into a nerd and stuff.
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Thphtpthpt
So Berkeley Breathed of Bloom County fame has rematerialized in an Onion AV Club interview, which, I think, is a rerun. (It's good that the Onion is finally setting up reruns instead of just sitting there statically for a month. How come I can't take a couple months off every year?) I kind of grew up on Bloom County, although apparently only people in a very narrow range of ages actually have any idea what Bloom County is. Weird.
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Let's run the network ourselves
This sort of thing is pretty exciting. There are already companies (like this one) that will act as a telephone/internet gateway, which basically means that you can get your phone service delivered via internet. So one pays for the service and the internet connection and gets free, unlimited calls anywhere in the US. Split the internet connection several ways and you end up connecting to the rest of the world for cheap. Clay Shirky explains here why phone companies are somewhat screwed by this, and why that's probably good.
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DVD Jon not guilty
Gosh this is good news! Now we have the unbelievably stupid state of affairs regarding linking to the software he was accused of trying to destroy the universe with: that this is legal while this is illegal.
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Illegal art
A super cool art exhibition called Illegal Art consists of material that spawned copyright lawsuits, the idea being that everything in the exhibition would have been totally impossible if people hadn't played fast and loose with copyright laws. There are mp3's for the downloading, including some by Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys. Nice.
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One last fit of liberalism
A happy fun new link to Cursor, where descriptions of a liberal media bias aren't totally out of the question, has been added to the sidebar. I put it there because descriptions of the regular media as biased to the right aren't totally out of the question anymore. Now I'll shut up fabout politics for a while, since nobody cares much about what I think. You should be thinking for yourself, anyway.
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Cynics and Communists in our midst!
In Canada there's suddenly all sorts of wry doubt that the five terrorist suspects that leaked into the US over the holidays weren't a cynical fabrication.

Asked what might have triggered the initial FBI allegation about the five Middle Eastern men entering the U.S. from Canada, the Mountie replied caustically: "It was a slow week at the White House. They needed something to stir the pot because nothing was happening in Iraq."

Story here.
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bzero
This bzero project by this dude in New Zealand is busy trying to clone everything that Dave at Userland is doing with Radio and whatnot. I've discovered that I can update this toy blog quite nicely from the bzero command line interface, and that Movable Type, which runs the site you're reading, is capable of responding to the very same command line tool. This is good. But, arrrrgh! it's not quite together yet, so I'll be updating this site in the most painful possible fashion---typing in a web browser---for the forseeable future. Bummer.

An even bigger bummer, of course, is that I can't get the source code. Argh. Alas. Update: the aforementioned dude, Philip Pearson, points out correctly that I don't need the source code in order to wrap an interface around his code. True, but the code would great fun to play with.
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Sitting in traffic, looking at snow
So it turns out that about 40 miles of the ride up to Vermont is clogged with people heading up to ski and (hopefully) spend a pile of money over the weekend. That is, traffic is stopped. Despite really enjoying the company of family, we have no desire to be in the stationary line of metal boxes on 93, or, worse, one of the city cars slid off the road because we rarely need and thus don't have snow tires, so we'll be heading up tomorrow instead. When I was a kid growing up in Vermont, we'd make great fun of all the Massholes who tried to drive 65 miles an hour on three inches of packed, wet snow and more or less invariably ended up slid sideways off the road ten miles ahead, flashers futilely blinking and headlights pointlessly on.

(Driving slowly helped, but such was the magic of the Nokia Hakkapelitta snow tire, a tire that looked more suitable for a mountain bike, and sounded like one when the car was at speed. Driving a Volkswagen or a Saab gently at 40 mph was pretty routine even in several inches of packed snow with these suckers on the wheels. The superb grip allowed one to safely get around all sorts of less well-wheeled cars. When I lived up there and had cars and tires to match, I'd typically drive through storms at 50 in the right-hand lane, where the greater traffic volume had swept more of the snow away, until I came up on a car driving at 35, at which point I'd slow down to 36, move into the relatively treacherous left lane, make a perfectly safe pass, get back over, and speed back up. Periodically, I'd be blown past by a car with Mass. plates. They'd go off the road, and I'd pass them back before long.)

At any rate, I know about the nasty traffic because of this site. Online traffic updates like that are a great idea, but holy crap are they badly implemented. Mostly I just don't trust the information they contain. Instead, traffic maps should look like this.
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Hope I look this good when they finally catch me
The year's best mug shots have been gathered (one isn't sure from where) and presented for, I suppose, our edification. Only one or two scary looking people among them. Man, this is the sort of thing that the web must have been invented for (particle physics be damned!).
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RIAA: Public domain == theft
Our friends at the RIAA are, it seems, suddenly realizing that all the legislation they purchased here in the United States doesn't apply to companies across the pond with older, less thoroughly bought legislation. Copyrights on excellent records (opera and jazz, in this case) are expiring and entering the public domain in Europe. Elvis is next. In ten years the Beatles' songs will start to become public domain. Cool! But:

``The import of those products would be an act of piracy,'' said Neil Turkewitz, the executive vice president international of the Recording Industry Association of America, which has strongly advocated for copyright protections. ``The industry is regretful that these absolutely piratical products are being released.''

The industry association is trying to persuade European Union countries to extend copyright terms. Meanwhile, Mr. Turkewitz said, ``we will try to get these products blocked,'' arguing that customs agents ``have the authority to seize these European recordings even in the absence of an injunction brought by the copyright owners.''

Times article here.
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Editing
So rereading things from a day's distance reveals that I'm a terrible first-draft writer. Stuff here will get edited. You have been warned. (Ooooo!)
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Disneyworld redux
So I had been joking about getting one of these free the mouse T-shirts before going to Disneyworld, but figured that it would be impolitic or stupid or something, given that the only ones there that might get the joke would be militantly against relaxing copyrights, and would probably have had the Disney cops expel me into the swamp or something. Now that we're back, of course, it's time to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation and stuff.
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Phone
The state of Massachusetts has a do not call list. This after I'd recently discovered the magic of making phone spammers disappear almost immediately by politely saying, "Please place me on your 'Do Not Call' list." It stops the call dead in its tracks, which is pretty cool to watch.
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