The New Road

The Hurricane

I've been thinking about what to say about Hurricane Katrina. It's unlike anything I have ever seen. Which is saying something since my wife, family, and friends and I are all survivors of Andrew. But to say that we were survivors is a bit of an overstatement. We were just at the fringe of the destructive path and while it was noisy, scary and somewhat destructive. It was nothing like what happened further south. After the storm Lori and I were ok, so I went to work doing temporary roofing for University of Miami staff whose houses were further south. I saw the destruction there first hand. Life and property was essentially re-arranged as if by some enormous three year old on a temper tantrum.

And the worst of Andrew, I have to say, is nothing in comparison to Katrina. Basically if you lived through the storm with Andrew, you were going to make it. Katrina is a completely different story. The situation is actually getting worse as time goes on. The water is getting deeper and nastier. It's filled up with oil, gasoline, fire ants, dead people and sewage. And not only that there are gas leaks, and roving bands of looters who will kill you for defending your property.

This is like something out of Mad Max. Actually, it's worse than Mad Max. This is like the movie between the current time and the time of Mad Max, where the world goes to hell and a lot of good people die because they don't yet want to fight over gasoline with hand strapped crossbows. And to me, that movie would be scarier than Mad Max.

It's certainly the worst natural disaster I have seen in America in my life time. I've been to New Orleans, hell, just recently in fact. Most of what you seen in these pictures, below water or destroyed. And that sucks. I love New Orleans. It's a dirty, smelly, scary, mean and wonderful town. One of the last few interesting cities in America. And to me, the city with the most innate charm.

Will it come back? Certainly. It will take two to three years, but it will come back. It won't be the same. It will be a lot of the new New Orleans, which is typified by the gaudy downtown casino. Or, unfortunately, there could be another super storm. Which is possible, unfortunately, because we are only half way through the season and the gulf is very hot.

Megan and Oso

Megan and Oso from a recent hike:

The sounds of Foo

Here are some sounds I picked up at Foo Camp. The first is a conversation I had with Martin Fowler and Dave Thomas about Ruby on Rails, FIT, and the Cookbook series of books. It seems to me like Martin Fowler has the dynamic languages bug. Martin is the guy that has the Liverpool accent. Dave has a British accent too, but it's been tempered by his having lived in Texas for years.

Then there is Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon) on a homebrew segue. Of course I had to get the sound of the high pressure marshmallow gun. Turn down your speakers for that one. And then a less interesting one with a dude giving a run down of all of the techniques for getting 3D output from a computer.

The Aristrocrats

I went to see The Aristrocrats with Lori tonight. I thought it was hysterically funny, but I wouldn't want to see it all again. Though I may catch bits and peices.

The hype is real. It's straight up rude. I've been on the Internet for a long time and have seen and read a lot. So very little shocks me. This movie actually found a way to shock me. Two couples that walked out ahead of us.

There were parts of it that had me rolling. When Carlin told the joke I was in tears. I particularly liked the Christopher Walken impression. Phyllis Diller was great. Actually, it was almost all great with the exception of the mime. Oh, yeah, the South Park stuff was awesome, and I'm not a South Park fan.

Anyway, huge warnings on this. This is in no way shape or form a movie that people with any puritanical streak would in any way enjoy. Here is a good test for you, if you liked Bad Santa, you might be ok with this movie. If you thought Bad Santa was gross, nasty or in poor taste. Stay away from this flick.

Also, if you are the kind of person who feels awkward watching a movie that is primarily about sex in the company of a theatre full of people, then wait for the video.

Open Source music?

Here is an idea for you. Could be stupid. Could be genius. Don't know.

How about open source music? Let's say that you are just starting out in the music biz. Does it make sense to set up a way for registered people to interact with you about your lyrics or music before it goes public? So that you can get feedback early and make better songs. You could also get lyrics and sound samples from your fan base. And I think the fan base would be even more enthusiastic because it's music that they have had a part in creating. Seems to me like it would be a great outlet for people who have parts of good lyrical ideas, or a little musical talent, such that they could feel a part of something bigger.

Just an idea. Seems like it could be an amazing success, or a catastrophic failure.

Anyway, obviously I was thinking about Jacqueline's site when I was coming up with this idea. But, obviously, whatever she is going to do she is going to do and I don't have anything to do with that. I'm just the bit jockey on the site. I just thought this was an interesting idea in extending the open source idea into different art forms.

You know what interests me about it. It's the whole "American Idol" thing. We want to be critics, and we want to interact before people become so mega-star that they have their own thing entirely. And the idea here would be that people actually wouldn't say, "That sucks" or "That rocks", but provide real constructive feedback, "I liked this because... I didn't like this because ... and here is how you could make it better."

Jacqueline's site

As most of you have seen Jacqueline is the person I'm constantly sparring with on the site. In the real world we have a slightly better relationship as this service, which I run, also hosts her Socks on a Rooster blog. I also developed the graphics for that.

Anyway, I'm not trying to pump myself up without a purpose here. The reason I mention this stuff is that a couple of weeks back she asked me to help her set up another site that would support her blossoming country singer career. (Country or Western? Hell, I don't know. Never could tell the difference anyway.) I happily agreed as long as I had the time.

Now I have a night or two free coming up so I want to get that site on the road and I've been looking around at some sites of other country stars. I came up with these; Brooks and Dunn, Faith Hill, Leann Rimes, Toby Keith, Patty Loveless, Neal McCoy, Trisha Yearwood, Shania Twain and Kenny Chesney. I honestly don't know these folks. I would be interested in what you guys have to say about these sites.

For me I think the Patty Loveless site is the nicest. It's not the sex kitten stuff that Trisha Yearwood's is. Is that a bedroom shot?

From this admittedly brief survey I have come to these conclusions. First, that it's all about the image. And in the case of men that means strong poses, strong lettering, strong colors and maybe logos that connote the country lifestyle. For women the colors are softer, the type is softer and serif as opposed to sans-serif. and the pictures go one of two ways.

Which leads me to my second point. There seem to be two directions here for women; sex kitten or songstress. Where the sex kitten sites are all about the images, the look. The low cut stuff. The bedroom photos. And the songstress stuff has photos that are further away with looks that are more stern. Those images also maintain the detail where the sexy stuff is softer and more airbrushed. Same thing in Rock and Blues, there are your sex-kittens like early Madonna, and your songstress types like Bonnie Raitt. The songstress moves your ears, the sex-kitten moves you... somewhere else. That being said though, Bonnie is still cute.

Anyway, I figure I could use the site setup stuff to evaluate some PHP products and then see which fits best and use the evaluation process as the foundation of an article on PHP blog/wiki/forum systems.

I hope Jacqueline is ok with my posting this. If she is ok with it I might put up the site designs to get some feedback before I do all of the coding behind it. It would be better to get some feedback on a bad direction early while it's still easy to fix.

Two more books

I got my copy of Podcasting Hacks at Foo camp. Damn, it looks fracking great. I can't believe I am an O'Reilly author now. I'm so proud of that book and the work I put into it. It was a lot of research and time and I think it turned out great.

Now I am in the process of uploading my next book, PHP Hacks, to the editor. Which means that I'm going to be going hands-off pretty soon. That's good news for me since I can now relax a little bit. What's interesting about this one is that O'Reilly is going to do an electronic beta distribution thing. So it should be out in the next couple of months, at least electronically. The Hacks style is perfect for this since each hack is pretty much self-contained.

Anyway, two books in one year. Gotta love it. I couldn't have done it without Lori's help, and my O'Reilly editors Brian and Brett.

Maybe another book next year, maybe not. I have to try and figure out how to have a healthy life while I both work a regular job and do the writing thing. I wish I could make enough money with the writing. I would love to invert the model where I was doing mainly writing with some implementation stuff on my off time.

Coulter/O'Reilly

Copied from Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O'Reilly:

COULTER: If things have been going worse why isn’t the elite Republican Guard massing
outside Manhattan right now?

O’REILLY: Well, because we’re not in any danger of losing the war there, that’s not the
danger. We’re not going to lose as long as we’re there and as long as we’re in South
Vietnam we weren’t going to lose. That’s the biggest myth in the world that the USA …

COULTER: We did lose.

O’REILLY: … lost the war. We didn’t lose the war.

COULTER: Yeah, we kind of did. I think we did lose that one.

O’REILLY: I don’t. I disagree with you. But that’s a debate for another day.

COULTER: They’re living under communism, Bill.

Leave it to Bill to make Ann Coulter look sane.

A9 Mapping Service

Ok, this is cool. You have to work hard to find a nice set of pictures. But once you get the hang of it, it's not a bad interface.

Update. Here is one in Miami.

Spoon, fork and knife use

Ok, this is probably going to be controversial, but, what is the right way to use a fork, spoon or knife. And does it bother you when you see someone doing it the way you don't like? It seems to me that there are two schools of thought on the fork/spoon/knife use.

One is using the utensil like a pencil or pen. Where the handle of the thing is held on three points by the first two fingers and the thumb.

Two is where the utensil is held primarily behind the knuckles with the thumb pushing against the top.

Anyway, just curious here. Which way do you do it? And does it peeve you when see someone doing it differently?

Fracking red light cameras

I like technology, obviously, but it can be misused. Red light cameras are an abomination. I'm not Pat Robertson mad about this. I'm not going to call for the assasination of the programmers behind it. But, come on, have some ethics, guys. Next time someone asks you to program a red light camera, just say no.

BTW, doesn't PAT stand for 'Preachers Assassination Threats'?

Bolton hijinx

While the Sheehan/Bush thing continues John Bolton is quietly doing some scary shit at the U.N. He sent hundreds of changes to the charter to the Secretary General. Including, and this baffles me, a repeal of the 1999 initiative to reduce world poverty. How does that make any sense? How is that not the most evil, terrible thing. Seriously, you don't have to take the provision out to have it ignored. The imperial hubris of the neocon trash in this administration is jaw dropping.

Foo Pics

Here are some of my pictures from Foo Camp.

This is Tim O'Reilly giving the start off speech. He talked about who was there, allowed us all to introduce ourselves very quickly, then presented the board where we choreographed the sessions.

The board.

These were just a few of the more amusing topics.

There was a lot of fun stuff to do as well.

The foo frisbee.

Segues to play with.

Slotcar racing, hacked in the O'Reilly tradition.

A still for the brave of heart who would take on the 180 proof output of this beast.

And, of course, the tents of the people too drunk who passed out.

I got some sound as well and I'll listen through that in the next couple of days and see what good stuff I can pick out.

Who the hell is this guy?

Obviously I'm not surprised that Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, but come on. That's a terrorist act. Somebody on the right needs to condemn this guy. He is out of control.

Poker legality

I had a few questions about whether or not it was legal to play poker at Foo Camp or at my house.

Penal Code Sec. 337j

(a) It is unlawful for any person, as owner, lessee, or employee, whether for hire or not, either solely or in conjunction with others, to do any of the following without having first procured and thereafter maintained in effect all federal, state, and local licenses required by law:

(1) To deal, operate, carry on, conduct, maintain, or expose for play in this state any controlled game.

...

2) As used in this section, "controlled game" does not include any of the following:
(A) The game of bingo conducted pursuant to Section 326.5.
(B) Parimutuel racing on horse races regulated by the California Horse Racing Board.
(C) Any lottery game conducted by the California State Lottery.
(D) Games played with cards in private homes or residences, in which no person makes money for operating the game, except as a player.

So as long as I don't make any money as the house in my house, then it's perfectly legal in California (and lots of other states) to do that.

That being said, whether it's legal on a company premises or not is gray I would say, at best. For all intents and purposes we were camping there, thus making our temporary home. And as such, it should be legal to do anything in at the camp that we would do at home.

Foo Camp, First Day

Wow, what a first day at Foo Camp! I've never been to anything like this. The people are incredible and the atmosphere is electric. Everyone is excited about what they are doing, or have done, and want to talk and talk about it. So far I've met bunch of very cool folks. Notably I met Tim O'Reilly again and we spent some time playing slot cars. He is excited about Podcasting Hacks, which I got an advanced copy of. I also met with my editor on Podcasting Hacks, great guy. And we spent a while playing with a high end Meade telescope that, while it had every modern gadget including GPS and self-levelling, couldn't find the moon.

I had dinner with Larry Wall, Dave Thomas, Andy Hunt, and Doug Kaye. And had a long conversation with Ward Cunningham about his newest work on cheap and easy to program microcontrollers. In fact, I would have to say that a large contingent of these folks either into cutting edge web services, or some hardware type thing. Or do one of those things in the day, and another at night. I also met Phillip Torrone, who was impressed with Podcasting Hacks and is going to plug it at some of his speaking engagements.

I'm just blown away by this. It's been, even on the first day, the most positive and inspirational conference I have ever been to. Even in how it's self-organizing it's unique and interesting. Take for example the fact that there is no set schedule. They simply block up the day by time and room on a big chart and people just take pens and write what they are going to talk about, on topics as diverse as religion to 3D printing.

By the way, here is one cool thing that was already talked about, Instructables which is a site like Slashdot but with instructions on how to make stuff from brownies to stretch bikes. Another is Smugmug which is a new photo sharing site. And finally there is Greasemonkey which allows you to alter the DOM of the document running in the browser from your own Javascript. And yet another is the Yahoo! Significant Terms stuff which I may end up using in the news analysis tool.

On a lighter note, there was a two hour poker fiesta last night where I made $40.

How cool is this?

I've been trading emails with some folks that want some advice about code generation and today one of them sent me a gift:

When I was in Tanzania, I stayed with a family that lives in Old Moshi at the foothills of Kilimanjaro. One day we hiked three hours up the foothills to a water fall. About two hours up, I stopped in front what looked like a log cabin. It was really cool, a log cabin surrounded by banana and avocado trees that sat on a hill looking down into a valley of coffee plants. About 15 feet from the log cabin, in a gully, a man was working at a forge with a giant bellows (see attached picture). He and the other people who live on this mountain are Chagga. Anyway, I wanted to take a picture and asked the people I was with to ask him if he minded. He turned out to be very friendly and showed us a number of artifacts that he had in his cabin including a ceremonial horn that was over 100 years old (a rams horn with silver decoration that is used to call people to meeting), a kind of giant dipper with handle (used to drink ceremonial banana beer - yes, they brew beer from bananas in Tanzania), etc. The man is a craftsman and makes both metal and wooden items for market and showed us some bowls, etc. that he was taking into town (that weren't for sale because they were "spoken for"). Anyway, I asked him if he would please consider selling me one small bowl that I admired....and he did.

Now, it's yours.

Long story short, it's a small token of thanks, but one that has an interesting history...from the man with the forge on the foothills of Kilimanjaro.

That is SO COOL. I can't wait to see what the bowl looks like.

I'm trying to describe what these folks do. It's basically giving access to impoverished people. But I'm really not sure about the specifics.

The hypocrisy of the right is legend. I love how people who say that speaking against Bush's failed foreign policy in Iraq is un-American. Let's see what the chicken hawks on the right said about Clinton's policy in Bosian, while our troops were fighting there.

"You can support the troops but not the president." --Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."
--Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
--Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."
--Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
--Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."
--Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
--Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

I particularly like the Hannity quote since all Cindy Sheehan wants is the same answers. And the things Hannity says about Cindy are, unkind, to say the least.

News reasons are 'just cuz'

A couple of conservative commentators have been piping up about the reasons for the Iraq war. Feeling the need to placate justifiably pissed Americans. The O'Reilly replacement guy say that it's just because Saddam was a bad guy. Then my local idiot in the 6PM hour gave as his first reason that we wanted to test our military which had been down-sized with Clinton. This was, just a test.

"Lowering expectations" about Iraq

The new administration line on Iraq appears to be lowering our expectations about the outcome:

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society where the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

I'm not worried about my own expecations. Sending us to a war based on a set of lies is not right, no matter what the outcome. And I'm worried that the administration cares more about being able to paint this as a limited success to their base, then about the Iraqi people. Though I don't find that surprsing.

Let's just look at this in the large as a set of before and afters. The before picture in Iraq is pretty bad. There is a dictator who squanders what little funds come into the country through the sanctions on his own lifestyle, and who kills anyone who protests.

Now what we are saying is that the sanctions have been lifted. But the country is in a shambles after two years of war and an ongoing insurgency. There is no continuous power. Potable water and food are in short supply. The number one cause of death is "by mistake" where people are gunned down simply for being in a traffic jam. Jobs are non-existant, and the nation's one source of wealth, it's oil generating capacity, is shot to hell.

And that's just on the ground. Politically it's even worse. Most of the country will be governed by sharia law where women can't hold office, must dress in burkahs and are second class citizens. And the government will be made up of religious sects with probably warlords duking it out for power. Which is the same state you would see in a place like Ethiopia or Afghanistan pre-Taliban.

One has to look at the before and after in a "at what cost" to judge this war. Saddam was bad to be sure. Ousting him from power is a fine result. But would that be worth say, killing every man, woman and child in Iraq. Obviously not, right? So there is a line somewhere that defines what is an acceptable cost for the goal of removing Saddam and what is not. I'd argue that the cost to America for having gone into this war on a false pretext. Combined with the cost to Iraqis of a country which is effectively in ruins where their daily lives are far worse. That is over the cost line.

It would have been far better to leave Saddam in power and confined than to have this result.

Actually, let me put it a different, perhaps more succint way. Our first reason for going into this war was WMDs. Obviously everyone knows that there were no WMDs so that part of the war was a failure. Then came the second reason, which was to liberate the Iraqi people from the clutches of a madman. Well, you can't liberate people only to hand them over warlords and call it a success. And saying this: "The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy..." means that there will be warlords, dictators and the like.

This is sad but was inevitable after the election of November 2nd.

Spoons Across America

I had never heard of Spoons Across America, but it's pretty cool.

More friends as you get old

The HBO Six Feet Under is just about to wrap up it's run. The last two episodes have been really intense. In this last one, Brenda, one of the characters was recently widowed. She was talking to her brother and said, "I thought that as I became older my circle of friends would grow." Having understood that at this point she was losing more friends than she was making.

I really sympathized with that sentiment. It's been a long time since I made a new friend and I think it's because I'm not concentrating on it. Foo Camp will be a real opportunity for me to make some new friends from my peer group. I should take advantage of that.

Podcasting Hacks is on the way

The book is at the printer. So it should be on my doorstep sometime the week or early next week. I can't wait to see it. My own O'Reilly book! Rock.

The book that ate my summer

I'm just noticing now that half of summer is gone and I haven't really done any summer stuff. PHP Hacks, which was supposed to be a walk in the park is turning out to be a lot more work than I expected. I was well ahead of schedule, as usual. But I started to turn down the engines a bit and I got a big surprise last week. It turns out my editor and I had vastly different impressions of who was handling the contributors. As a result where I was responsible for around 60 hacks, and had about 71 in hand, I now am potentially responsible for 95 hacks with about thirty days left to deliver on that.

I put on the after burners and by tonight I should be at 88. Then by the time I get to Sebastapol for Foo Camp I should be in low 90s. But that's with three still left at 50%. Anyway, I know that doesn't sound bad but I was counting on this section of the time to work smooth out the work I had already done. You know, annotate it with research, clean up the writing, add alternative examples, that sort of thing. Now that all goes out the window on a mad dash to the finish line. Ugh.

Anyway, on the upside, I picked up Alannis Morrisette's "Jagged Little Pill Acoustic", which is an remixed version of "Jagged Little Pill". There doesn't seem to be anything acoustic about it. But who gives a fuck. It's got so much fracking low end that it will leave half of your electrons in the next room over extended listenings. Sweet.

Not sure what to say about this

I'm not sure what to say about this. But I do have some observations.

First, the animation is smoking hot. Whoever put the Flash together, well, wow. Seriously. It's hard to keep up intensity when you are doing pixel manipulations.

Anyway, after that, wo. What the fuck. First, they looked uber pissed. Though the glasses are smoking hot. But what's up with the attitude? I thought getting into the WWJD was all about the Joy.

Second, for mimes they do a lot of talking. Or at least the announcer does. What's up with that.

Then there is the whole ego thing. Nations choice? Prophets to the World? Set them apart? Huh?

Anyway, funny as shit. Great stuff.

My Office

Because I'm working away from the Leverage central office so much I decided it would be best to just rent a little executive suite for myself. There were a lot of options but the one I found most appealing was in a little forested office complex in Fremont.

As it turns out my office is in a section with a suite of five offices. There is a little waiting area and then the set of five doors. When I first toured around the office I didn't really notice what types of other services were being offered. As it turns out, all of the other offices are psychiatrists or psychologists.

That turns out to be interesting for two reasons. First, the walls of the office are specially sound dampened. That's awesome since that means I can turn up the tunes even louder and nobody will notice. It's pretty amazing actually. You have to be right up at the door to hear the treble of my stereo. Though the bass rumble from the sub woofer radiates nicely through the walls as if they were nothing.

The other interesting thing is the reactions that I get when I go out of my office to go to lunch or the bathroom. Most of the time the waiting area is vacant, but sometimes I get people waiting for their own appointments or for those of their loved ones. What's interesting is their expressions, especially with the men. The men really don't want you to know they are there. They don't want to be noticed because it's a shrink's office and that means they have mental problems. It's crazy, amusing and sad all at once. How did mental illness get this stigma in our society?

Maybe I'll put up some pictures of the office sometime. It's not much to look at. But it is comfortable and pleasant.

Best movie EVER

Oh shit. This is the best thing EVER.

I'm not sure this is as mean-spirited as some people will take it. It seems like an homage of love to me.

Great Star Wars captions

Here are some excellent manglings in translation:

That is what became of "who could have done this?"

Talking Points Memo - Update

The Talking Points Memo that I referred to in the previous blog entry was Bill O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" segment that he does in every one of his shows. If you want to see the segment for yourself go here and scroll down about 2/3rds of the page.

Cindy Sheehan - Talking Points Memo

Tonight on the memo the memo apologizes to Cindy Sheehan.
Michelle Malkin, and the memo, were despicable in our display of partisan political smear.
Cindy, you are an honorable and courageous woman.
These are traits that the memo itself could never attain.
Or really, the memo thinks Bill could never attain these things because the memo itself is just a construct.
Anyway, the memo digresses.
The smear attack is something the memo will truly regret for now and for the rest of the memo's life.

The memo rescinds it's support for the war.
The troops should be brought home immediately and the memo implores the President to do so.

The President should resign.
He started this war based on a web of lies and deception.
Never before has there been such an anti-American administration in the White House.
Never before has there been an administration that has done so much to hurt this country.

The memo is sick of lying for the right.
The memo is sick of our soldiers dying needlessly for the imperial hubris of the right.
The world is worse off with Bush and the neo-cons in control.
The memo think it's finally time to come out and say it, so there it is.

As for the memo.
First off, it's tired of being voiced by a schmuck like me, Bill O'Reilly.
Second, it's tired of being referred to in multiple persons.
Third, it's tired of smearing good people like Cindy Sheehan.
From here on out the memo will stop being a lap-dog of the neo-con right.
The memo becomes ill when it thinks about how it sold out it's own ideals and honor for a little fleeting fame.

No longer will the memo accuse people who legitimately oppose this war of being un-American traitors.
In fact the memo now believes that those opposing this war do so out of a great love of country and patriotism.
The memo beseechs it's audience to have another look at the facts of the situation and to do what is morally correct and right, to oppose this illegal war.

The memo is sorry, Cindy.
The memo is nothing but a slave to the right wing spin machine and as such it often finds itself saying things it finds repugnant.
The memo knows that this won't make up for the disgusting things were said.
But the memo now pledges that it won't be a tool of the right any longer.
Even if that costs the memo it's job within the right wing propaganda machine called Fox News.

And that's the memo.

Improving your podcasts

My first article on podcasting is out in support of the new Podcasting Hacks book.

I can't wait to get my hands on the book. I can't believe I'm going to have an O'Reilly book with my name on it. That freaking rocks!

Detainee prosecution rigged

The prosecution against the terrorists at Gitmo may be rigged according to the prosecutors:

In one, Major Robert Preston described the cases being prepared against the detainees as "marginal" and "a fraud on the American people". He added: "Surely they don't expect that this fairly half-assed effort is all that we have been able to put together after all this time?"

Of course the liberal mainstream media is all over it... or not. Yeah, there is nothing like liberal media bias.

Seriously! This adminstration lying, cheating, deceiving the American people. No! I just can't believe...

Strange he should use the term half assed. That's one of my Dad's favorite expressions. My Dad who is a neocon and always was. He was a neocon in that uncomfortable period between Nixon I and Nixon II (i.e. Bush II). That silly time after the imperial Republican hubris was revealed and the nation went liberal for a while. When The Muppets and Mork and Mindy were popular and teaching crazy values like tolerance. When we sang catchy jingles about "peace and perfect harmony" around the world.

Now we are back with a lying, cheating, stealing Republican administration who acts with imperial hubris. Tolerance is now a dirty word and kids are tought strong American values like hatred for gays and Muslims. Given thoughtful ideals like "It is your God-given right to destroy any man or woman calling themselves doctors who willingly slaughter innocent children." And led around like sheep into the maw of infinite war.

Yes, the world is a much better place because of the marvelous neocon agenda.

Speaking of neocon hubris. I love that Rumsfeld showed up to Congress with literal blank pages in his report where he was supposed to be describing Iraqi security force readiness. That takes balls.

Google Maps

As part of the PHP Hacks book I'm doing a hack on using Google's Mapping API. To test it out I used some old images from hikes I used to take up mission peak and then attached them to the map with markers. Here is the result. It's ridiculously simple to do. I'm blown away by how cool the Google Maps API is.

Hint: Clicking on the red markers will bring up different images from a hike up the hill.

Megan's pictures

Here are some of the pictures Megan took on the train:

She actually took about 60, but most were of her shirt from a distance of about a centimeter.

Schooling Newt

I'm just saying that at #198 on the Amazon Reviewer rankings I am schooling ass all over Newt Gingrich who is at #611.

Rumsfeld and Iran

I wish I could believe Rummy when he says stuff like:

"What you do know of certain knowledge is the Iranians did not stop it from coming in..."

This is important stuff. An Iranian connection would be bad.

That being said, I then have to realize that the neocons were planning for war with Iran this summer, but the Iraq war went bad. So that makes me think that this is more war posturing with Iran.

And then I think about how this man said that we would be greeted with flowers and chocolates when we liberated Iraq. That it would take a month. That Iraq would pay for it's own recovery. That Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples. That he was absolutely certain that Iraq possessed WMDs. That the WMDs were located "east, west, north, south, all over". That he just couldn't get our troops up-armored HumVees. And on and on.

He is a liar. He is an incompetent.

I so want to believe our government because these are troubling times. We deserve a government we can trust.

Rock balancing video

Oh yeah, this is some crazy stuff. Love it.

Amazon reviewer ranking

My Amazon reviewer ranking is at #200 now. That's pretty good. I think I could drill it down into the low hundred mark. I'm not sure I could break 100 long run though.

I had a look around at the other 200 and most of them review fiction, music or movies. In fact there are only two other reviewers that review computer books in the top two hundred; Michael J Woznicki and W Boudville. So I think that's really cool. That means that while I'm ranked 200 out of 100,000 overall, I'm #3 for technical book reviewers.

Freepers on Cindy Sheehan

I was curious to see what the Freepers thought of Cindy Sheehan, the woman waiting for an audience with Bush in Crawford to discuss her son who died in his war. As you would expect they accuse her of aiding and abetting the enemy, as well as saying that she should be harshly interrogated by the Secret Service. Nice.

Anyway, I found this line:

"If everyone in this country would have banded togeather after 9-11 and said we won't stand for this and supported the US military 100% this thing would have been over long ago.

Instead we have to fight a PC war supervised by the ACLU and the U.N.

We know who the countries who sponsor this type of crime are and they should be no more than smoking holes right now."

Which I think is going to become the Republican talking line as we start to pull out of Iraq. It's not the fact that we went to war with the wrong people. It's not the fact that there was no after action planning. It's not the fact that we never found the WMDs. It's not the fact that we didn't expect a protracted insurgency. It's not the fact that we let them loot their own country. It's not one of the liteny of failures.

No, it's the fault of the people who were smart enough to see the ramifications of this type of "they should be no more than smoking holes right now" mentality. Classic Republican "blame everyone else" crap. The same type of idiocy that leads people to believe that Vietname was winnable an that Nixon was actually a good guy.

What's really offensive here is this supposition that 100% of Americans weren't "banded together after 9/11". 100% of Americans were with the war in Afghanistan after 9/11. It's only when Bush exploited 9/11 and lied his way into Iraq that 50% of Americans decided that it was bullshit. What, is 9/11 some sort of blank check. Yes, I support finding and killing those who perpetrated 9/11. But none of those people were in Iraq, or are in there now.

Megans first pictures

Megan took her first pictures yesterday. I'll post them late today or tomorrow. I took her on the train to go see the fish yesterday. I forgot to bring along toys and stuff so I had to find something for her to play with on the train. The only thing I had was Lori's small camera. So I turned it on, handed it over, and told her to be careful. She was careful, and she was enthralled.

Another think she was taken with were the snakes at the Academy of Sciences. Normally she is in love with the fish. But this time it was all about the snakes. In particular these tiny little snakes that were about a foot and a half long but super thin. I mean, like a millimeter thin. These things were amazing. How anything that is so small could live is beyond me. Anyway, these were fishing snakes, so they would sit on the water and then dive down to catch fish. Amazing.

News/Blog Analysis system

If you will remember back a while ago I put up a simple test of a link graph that was hooked up to CNN and other news sources. That was for an article that I wrote for IBM Developer Works. At the time I thought to myself, "What would happen if I threw this algorithm at the same data over time." So I set up my machine to record the RSS feeds from around 20 different sources and set out to write some code to analyze the whole mess.

I became a little more pressed when it was clear that the invitation to Foo Camp entailed actually coming up with something cool. So, I set out to write a serious News/Blog Analysis system based on some of the work from the Link Graph article. Tonight I have the first version of the result.

Download the zipped tar file and unpack it into any directory. Then use Firefox to open the index.html file. I'm serious here about the Firefox thing. I've only tested it on one other browser and that was Safari. And Safari just cannot launch this bad boy.

If you want to try out this thing without downloading it to your machine, click here. Once again though, I have only tried this with Firefox and you will wait about a minute for the data to download.

The first thing you should see is the new dynamic link graph:

Click the image if you want to see it larger. So what is this telling us? This is showing us that the big story on the selected day was Hurricane Dennis. To change the date use the date control on the right hand side of the window:

Clicking (not dragging) on the slider will change the date. So will pressing the play, stop and pause buttons. Those will change the date at the rate of once a second. Giving you an animation of the graph.

Currently the graph is only showing the major network news sources. You can change that by clicking in the buttons in the Source portion of the panel.

Just click on an item to either add or remove it from the list of sources being used for the display. There is no way to add an arbitrary source of information to the system.

The final section on the right controls the words that are available.

Each word or term is assigned to one or more classes. For example, the term karlrove is both a person and political. You can enable or disable whole classes by clicking on the class you wish to enable or disable.

If you select a word then an option will appear in this panel to remove the word from the display. Removed words appear in the section below the 'bad words' line. You can add them back into the display by clicking on them again. I would use drag and drop, but frankly I'm too tired for that.

Ok. That concludes the right hand portion of the display.

The real fun starts when you click on a word.

Here I have clicked on the term marijuana. The first thing to notice is that other terms have been hilighted as well. Those are terms that are related by being in the same articles as the selected term. In this case it pretty clearly points out that there is something to do with marijuana in California that has something to do with the Supreme Court. If you will remember that around 7/9/05 the Supreme Court had just upheld some challenges to states rights concerning medical marijuana.

Ok, so let's jump ahead a little and click on karlrove.

He shows up a lot, so that's not surprising to see him related to a lot of terms. I'm not sure why he is related to Harry Potter. It could have been a reference in an article that covered various topics of the day.

It's also worth noting that on the right hand side of the window things have changed as well. The sources that referenced the selected term on the given day are shown in bold. In this case a whole bunch of blogs covered the topic, but only NBC and the Washington Post actually had stories on it. So much for liberal media bias.

But don't we have this data over time? Where is that? Click on the Timeline tab.

That shows us the articles that mentioned Karl Rove, over time by source. The brown bars are each one article. Clicking on the brown bar will open up a new window and take you to the article.

If you want to read the titles of the articles click on the Articles tab.

Not much to talk about there. This is more of a "show me the money" report.

Now, for the really, really cool stuff. And to see Karl Rove escape from the media eye in graphs:

This the the Prevalence tab and it shows the sources that referenced the selected word and the number of counts of that word as a function of time. As you can see Al Franken was the most vocal about Karl, but that spiked about mid-July and has been dropping since. Other media outlets spiked in early July and then fell off. Only the Huffington Post seems to be holding the torch, but even that light is fading. Curiously Michelle Malkin, noted right wing blogger and Fox regular, also seems to be vocal about the story.

The Related tab shows the terms related to the selected term by source:

Only the sources selected in the Sources panel are shown in the Related tab.

So what next for this system? I really don't know. I'll probably keep it rolling. Maybe add a feature or two. Probably try to get it compatible with IE and maybe Safari. The problem is really the maintenance of the data. The data requires hand pruning which is very tiresome. Most days bring about 200 new terms and a host of new names that need to be turned into terms. It's not something I can keep up with myself.

In addition, while I think this was an interesting experiment in how far you can push DHTML it's obviously not practical for multiple months worth of data. So something a little less interactive but more scalable that included a server in the solution is probably the way to go.

Let me know if this interests you and if you have any suggestions for how it can be improved beyond just browser compatibility and bug fixes. By the way, this is pre-alpha software and is completely without warranty. If it eats your machine or your browser, that is notable, but unintended.

Sweet Bush video

This is too funny.

For a Few Dollars More

I TiVo'd "For a Few Dollars More" off the Westerns channel a couple of days ago and now I'm slowly watching it like a good book on tape. When did they stop making good cheesy westerns like this?

Back story on Megan cooking video

I didn't give this video enough back story. Yes, Megan can speak English. The story is that before the bath Megan and I were having fun yelling back and forth at each other in make up gibberish with each of us changing or modifying the sound each time. It's just one of the bazillion-and-a-half made up games you get when you have a kid. So that's why she made up names for each of her creations on the side of the tub. Last night the creations were more conventional; cake, darba (pasta), sheba (pizza), cupcakes, etc.

That reminds me of another story. For months now Lori and I have been offering Megan a choice of three different shapes of pasta whenever we make Darba (pasta) for dinner. She has fun making the choice and feeling involved. Last night we ran out of pasta, so Megan and I went to the store to pick out some more. I don't think she had ever done that before because when we entered the pasta aisle her eyes went wide and she had furious fun picking out bag after bag of the different shapes and colors. Her impression when first entering the aisle... "Wow".

It's nice to have a kid at the age where the little things are still stimulating.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming

Finally what we sort of knew about NBC being TiVo unfriendly with their show times is confirmed, and they are changing back so that shows start and end properly on the hour or half hour.

Megan Movies

Here are some new movies of Megan.

Megan jumping in the pool:

Megan explaining what she is cooking in the bath.

War Casualty Flash Movie

Here is a cold and haunting flash movie that shows coalition casualties over time in Iraq. It doesn't appear to show soldiers that died in Germany or en route to Germany, which increases the number of war dead quite substantially.

Vote for republican = Vote for death

In the last two days twenty of our soldiers from Ohio have died in Iraq. Twenty in two days! It's tragic. And it's ironic, since just yesterday there was an election held in Ohio where a Republican rubber-stamper was voted back into office (by the thinnest of margins in a red dominated district). This same rubber-stamper, when asked about Iraq recently, said that no mistakes were made there, period. Such stupidity could be tolerated last year but today it's clear to everyone that the war is lost and that the time to get out is now.

It's so frustrating. These twenty guys died for Bush's arrogance and ignorance only. A vote for a Republican is a vote for death. Deaths of Americans. Deaths of Iraqis. In infinite baseless war waged by the poor.

These people who talk about how they support their troops by voting Republican make me sick. How is putting our troops into an urban warfare meat grinder that does nothing but incense the Arab world and spreads anti-Americanism supporting our troops?

How is it that being a true American means rubber-stamping infinite war? The founding father's weren't rubber stampers. They were rebels. And they built a constitution that was dependent on the populace to monitor the government in order to be successful. It's our role as Americans to ask our leaders why fourteen soldiers who dedicated their lives to ensuring our peace and freedom were killed in a war against an enemy who never attacked us and with whom all shreds of pretense for war have been nullified.

Wake up. Speak out.

FIT (Framework for Integrated Tests)

I just got a new book on Framework for Integrated Tests from Prentice Hall. It's an interesting concept; table driven tests taken to the extreme. The book is ok. It works mainly from the user end and what I really wanted to see was from the infrastructure end. How do they implement the tests from the tabular data set? I think this kind of stuff is applicable to some of the work I've been doing with Excel 2003 and it's XML data format.

The strange thing is that on the back cover is a comment from Grady Booch. And that's on a book which is ostensibly about Agile and Test-Driven Development. Is Grady changing his stripes?

Working two or more jobs

It occurred to me this morning that I have almost never worked just a single job. When I was working at Berkowitz's I was also in high school. Then when I worked for Mark O'Connell I was working a variety of jobs on the one job, and I was working on the side for Jay and Lan. When I worked at Bookman's at first I was working for both Bookman in the lab and with Reeza doing networking. Then I switched over to working for Axon part of the time. At the end of that, right before Australia I was working myself like a dog with Bookman, Axon, and a big contract with Lan simultaneously. Somewhere in there I also found time to write Fret Navigator.

In Australia was the only time I was able to work just the one job. With the extra energy I went into a gym frenzy and lost 80 pounds. When I came back to the States I was working just Axon, but then I started some web work on my own to get the experience. After that I worked at Certive, which, I suppose was just a single job, but it was basically like three as Eric and I held the weight of a whole programming team on our shoulders. And if you count Mel we held the weight of an entire defective company on our shoulders.

After that during the break I did a lot of little side things. Then with Macromedia I got the first book gig and did that as the extra job. Then I started writing articles and the two more books. Now I have what I would consider the most work I have ever had going on at one time.

Currently I have:

• My full-time job at Leverage
• Promoting the Podcasting Hacks book
• The Bound Cast podcast
• Editing (and/or trying to sell) the Code Generation Network
• Two articles pending for IBM, with three more on the way
• The PHP Hacks book which I've got about 75% done
• Preparation for Foo Camp
• Writing the news system which analyses RSS feeds, primarily in prep for Foo Camp
• Book reviews which come in at the rate of about five a week
• Writing a converter for Studio B to munge Microsoft Word into the XML article format used by DeveloperWorks.

And then burning on the back-burner somewhere is my Story project which I still think is really cool. Story is the kind of "Life's work" project that I would need a year of full-time effort to complete.

Anyway, I think I need to gear a lot of the side stuff back a few notches. It's cool to have all of this stuff running. But it's also cool to spend time with Lori and Megan and to concentrate on being a good Dad and a healthy person.

Oh, and I also have to get a few more cartridges for my freaking printer so that I can print out these article contracts! Grrr.... Won't someone please develop a low cost printer that will actually last longer than a couple hundred pages?

Megan this weekend

Lori has been under the weather with the tonsil stuff so it's been up to me to take care of Megan this weekend and today. Megan has been amazing. She almost never cried the entire three day period. She has been happy and very helpful. She put away her own clothes today, she scooped the dog food every day, she's ground the coffee beans, changed her own clothes... it's amazing.

But the really touching thing came today when I told her that as we were coming home we would go shopping for an art project to give to mommy to make her feel better. She asked and asked about it all morning. Then picked out the project at Michaels and talked about how she would make Mommy feel better all the way home. When we got home she went into the bedroom to give Mommy hugs and kisses then ran out to start her projects. I put together the paints and brushes and she painted five little wooden trinkets.

Now normally she doesn't paint that much, I do most of the painting or drawing, but when she understood that it would make Mommy feel better she was a girl with a purpose. She painted and painted, then when she was done I put them out to dry. After that I asked her if she wanted to paint some more. She half-heartedly painted a turtle then walked away from it. It wouldn't have made mommy feel better...

Later before she went to be I asked her if she wanted to give mommy her presents. She ran out and grabbed them then ran into the bedroom to give them. She asked several times if they made mommy feel better. It was so touching. This kid has a heart of gold.