Author: John

Cyber-Farmer Boy

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In a prior lifetime I expected that my carreer would revolve around agricultural economics and/’or farm management in developing countries. I did a master’s degree in Agricultural Economics at Purdue in the late 1970’s. For my master’s thesis I went to west Africa, where I had been in Peace Corps, and gathered data on an irrigated farm built by the World Bank and managed by the Food and Agricultural Organization of United Nations — and used the data to build a linear programming model, and an integer programming model of the farm.

The guts of the model (which I did not write) was 4,000 lines of FORTRAN IV. All my data was manually transferred onto punch cards. In summer/fall 1979 I spent about 18 hours a day refining that model. Each iteration took about 20 minutes to run on a Control Data Corporation Cyber 6000, and the results came in the form of a bunch of numbers on a 180-column form-fed print-out. I would read the numbers and imagine the farm in my head.

I thought building a farm simulator was the coolest, most fun thing — not to mention important — that one could possibly do in this world. Life takes its twists and turns, and I ended up doing other things. But I have often daydreamed that if I won the lottery I would go back to school in Agricultural Economics & try to pick up where I left off.

So it is with a certain degree of wistfulness that I include this

link.

Check out the John Deere game.

Prove my father wrong — vote Kerry!

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A Wetmachine Quasi-Editorial Endorsement (speaking for myself only, not all Wetmachiners).

I was talking with my old man last night by telephone. He’s a retired guy, spent his whole life in finance. Was Chief Financial Officer for three different multi-national companies, and at one time president of a national society of CFOs. A depression kid who came from nothing, he was a “Flying Fortress” navigator in 1945, worked his way through college (driving 18-wheelers) and put all seven of his children through college, and several of us through private high school as well. He follows monetary policy as naturally as I follow baseball. He voted for Eisenhower and Nixon, and has always extolled the values of work, private enterprise, and initiative.

My brother Mike and I went to Xavier High School in New York CIty, a Jesuit, military school whose most famous grad is Antonin Scalia. My father’s motto is “a place for everything and everything in its place.”

What do you suppose he thinks about Kerry and Bush?

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Sinclair-Pappas-FCC-FEC- Paging Harold Feld!

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I know Harold has just posted that he expect to be swamped until after election day, but I, for one, am very anxious to hear a Sausage Factory opinion on all the Sinclair Broadcasting fiasco, the Pappas

story, and other issues related to the public airwaves, media consolidation, and democracy.


We know you’re busy, Harold, and we’ll all wait if we have to. But this is just to let you know that there are at least a few of us out here who really do look to Sausage Factory to help us make sense of this confusing, and scary, nexus.

Open Laszlo

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Here’s a write-up lifted from the site of Oliver Steele., Laszlo’s chief software architect. (I’m the Laszlo “doc guy.”)

As of today, the Laszlo platform for building rich internet applications is open source. This includes everything: the server software, the client software, the examples, the documentation, the language — the whole platform. Like Mozilla, this is open source with a corporate sponsor; and like Mozilla, it’s honest-to-goodness open source — no dual licensing, no poison pill. It uses the Common Public License, listed on OpenSource.org.

OpenLaszlo.org has the source distribution for our new release, LPS 2.2, which also includes support for SOAP and XML-RPC, and over 500 new pages of documentation. For developing Laszlo applications, as opposed to hacking on the source to the Laszlo compiler and runtime, I recommend the binary distribution instead, which comes with installers for MacOS, Linux, and Windows. (You don’t have to actually write any code to see some neat stuff in the standard installation.) If you want to see some examples of the kinds of applications you can write, take a look at the customer showcase, the demos, and at MyLaszlo.com. If you want to dive into the source code, look at Laszlo Explorer and the Developers Guide.

Today is part one: the source code is available, the license is free. Part two is to open up our development process, including our source repository and bug tracking systems, so that you don’t have to be at Laszlo Systems (the company) to see what’s going with Laszlo (the open source project). Currently we’re in send-mail-to-the-dev-list mode for questions, and send-us-a-patch mode for contributions — about on a par with some of my other open source projects, but we can use those corporate sponsorship $$ to do better.

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Orson coming to your kitchen by way of your TV

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Another reason I want to set my wayback machine to about 1890. (And another reason I’m glad we got rid of television in my house.) From the story:

Sealey said advertisers would gain an unprecedented ability to see how their spending affected sales, especially as retailers adopt radio-frequency identification. RFID, the system that could replace bar coding, tracks the movement of individual products such as groceries from a few feet away.

In about five years, Ad-ID and RFID could be used together, he said.

“Then we could measure whether we delivered the commercial to you, and, as I am monitoring your pantry, whether you bought the product, too,” he said.

Technoparanoia and the future of Democracy

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Are you afraid that technology could be used to

steal the USian presidental election? I am.

Are you afriad that technology could prevent us from getting it back again? I am. (I’m thinking of surveilance technology, combined with data mining and the like–“Patriot Act, Orwellian stuff”– that could thwart a democratic counter-coup in the name of fighting “terrorists.”)

Suggestion: Let’s bombard our senators and congressmen, govenors, secretaries of state, newspaper editors and anybody else we can think of — before it’s too late.

Update: Futher suggestion — support black box voting, an organization that’s tackling this issue head-on.

Ted Turner rails against FCC and big media

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John here, pretending he’s Harold, with a link to a story about the FCC and big media. It’s by Ted Turner of CNN fame, & published in

The Washington Monthly.

His line of reasoning will be familar to loyal readers of Harold’s Tales of the Sausage Factory but it is refreshing to see it coming from the pen of a wildly successful media mogul.

Some tidbits:

Unless we have a climate that will allow more independent media companies to survive, a dangerously high percentage of what we see–and what we don’t see–will be shaped by the profit motives and political interests of large, publicly traded conglomerates. The economy will suffer, and so will the quality of our public life.

Big media today wants to own the faucet, pipeline, water, and the reservoir. The rain clouds come next.

I’ve included one more teaser in the extended section, but you’ll have more fun if you skip that and just follow the link to the article. It’s well written with Turner’s trademark directness, and it’s scary stuff from somebody who knows what he’s talking about.

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Book Swap Musings

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I’ve published two books that I wrote. Since doing that I’ve developed an appreciation for self-publishers and self-published books. (Would now be a good time to mention that my Acts of the Apostles won Writer’s Digest’s National

Self Published Book award, first in a field of over 300? No? It wouldn’t?)

Anyway, from time to time reports of various self-published books have caught my eye, and I’ve written to the writer/publishers to suggest a book swap. In this way I’ve grown a collection of about 20 self-published books. Some of them have been awful, none have been great, but a few have been not bad, not bad at all.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a technoparanoid thriller about nanotechnology gone amok, written by a guy about my age in Wisconsin.

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