My Thoughts Exactly

Why your wetmachine page hasn't finished loading

,

It’s because the server that hosts the little “linkbox” that normally sits on the right-hand side of the page is down.

I’ve been meaning to convert that app to a stand-alone “SOLO” app for some months now but I never seem to get around to it. I’ll take this as one more strong nudge in that direction. No time to do so this morning, however and alas, as I’m off to the airport soon with a ton of things to do first (including putting up the link to Part Three of our Cory Doctorow interview. . .).

But if you happen to be the Wetmachine webmaster and you’re reading this, feel free to comment out the linkblox. The server that hosted it got rooted on a php exploit and it may be down for a while.

Footnote to Bishop Berkeley

In the spring of 1997 I spent a week as a parent chaperon with my son’s 7th grade class at an ecology-themed camp in Sharon, Massachusetts. There I met this guy, who was a 7th grade math teacher, but more interestingly, the illustrator of the graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.

Now, as you may know, Auster writes austere post-modern metafictional stories about the nature of reality and our inability to use language to apprehend or transmit it.

Anyway, I got along really well with Karasik and we spent a lot of time walking in the woods together, talking philosophy and deep bullshit, when the students were in class. On the last afternoon that we were to spend together, we found ourselves silently sitting side by side on a fallen tree in the woods. Neither of us spoke for a long while. It was a beautiful day with not a cloud in the sky and not the least bit of wind. Then, somewhere nearby, a tree fell over, crashing to the ground with an incongruous roar. Soon afterwards all was again silent.

Karasik and I looked at each other.

Continue reading

Every Republican is a Bush Republican

, ,

A short political announcement, and then we can get back to the usual Wetmachine technophilc-phobic goodness. (Warning: Extreme Metaphor Mashup Alert!)

Now that Preznit Bush’s poll numbers are permanently pegged in the Nixonian range, and with White House scandals, travesties, abominations and shotgun blasts to the face dominating the news, we see the predictable yet despicable and revolting spectacle of Republicans slithering off the good ship George W. Bush — or trying to, at least.

The Great Republican “Oh Shit!” (GROS) kind of crystallized with the Dubai Ports fiasco, when the warm waters heated up by years of Arab-bashing xenophobia met the cool air of Cheney-Rice Boogeymanophobia and gave rise to perfect storm Hell No. So much potential energy was bound up in Hell No — the equivalent of 30 MegaLou Dobbs — that the very levies of Washington DC were imperiled– and remain so. Iraq teeters on the edge of the abyss, and signs abound that the mythical people of the heartland are starting to wake up and ask what the fuck that’s all about. And so Republicans with hearts full of dread must face the harsh reality that Bush himself has become their New Orleans, and their Dunkirk.

And so they try to make their escape.

Well, let’s just watch them, shall we?

But remember: Every Republican is a Bush Republican. Every Republican is an Abu Grahib Republican, a Katrina Republican, a trillion-dollar-deficit Republican, a Haliburton Republican, a Yellow Cake Republican, a Claude Allen Republican, a Plame-outing Republican, a stonewall-the-911-commission Republican, a Bill O’Reilly sexual predator Republican, an Ann Coulter murder-the-judges Republican, a Jack Abramoff hitman-in-Miami Republican, an 8.8 billion missing dollars in the Green Zone Republican, a twenty-five-hundred dead soldiers Republican.

Mitt Romney is a Bush Republican. John McCain is a Bush Republican. Bill Frist is a Bush Republican. Newt Gingrich is a Bush Republican. Colin Powell is a Bush Republican, and Michael Powell is a Bush Republican. Olympia Snowe is a Bush Republican and Chuck Hagel and Lincoln Chafee too. They’re all complicit in this, the imperial reign of our delusional Nero: any one of them who has run for office in the last five years with an (R) behind his or her name. Now just watch them sing!

OpenLaszlo == Ajax

, , , , ,

OpenLaszlo, for which I am the documentation guy, now compiles to DHTML as well as to Macromedia Flash (swf). That means that you can take the same LZX source and compile it to either swf or DHTML, and it will just work. So there is now a completely OpenSource stack for doing web apps.

OpenLaszlo is much more robust and full featured than any other Ajax toolkit. And, the architecture includes a client abstraction layer, which means that we worry about browser inconsistencies so you don’t have to. The upshot of all this is that if you want to build a real web application, you should use OpenLaszlo instead of some Ajax toolkit. Of course if you just want to spruce up a web page, Dojo or Rico or something like that might be appropriate. But I think you would have to be nuts to use them for building a real application.

We’re not yet shipping a “production” version — that’s scheduled for “sometime in 2006”– but the prototype version is getting more robust by the day, and there is a very credible demo up on the website.

The Realpolitic of Bits — More of Cory Doctorow’s conversation with Wetmachine

, , , , ,

As mentioned here, Cory Doctorow (“world’s most wired human” etc), recently spent an hour talking with me and wetmechanic Gary Gray. In part two of our talk you’ll hear Cory say, “what the mafia likes is high-margin goods” and “there is no more thankless job in the world than being the Pecksniff who tells people that what they want is bad.” He also waxes eloquent on: cathedrals after the Reformation: the collapse and possible restoration of the serendipitous market for books: the making of films suited to the economics of the internet, and more.

You’ll also get to hear me mumbling, muttering, interrupting myself, and being generally inaudible but nevertheless somehow compelling. As a bonus, Wetmachine fanboys and -girls (I know you’re out there!) who play close attention will even hear the legendary Gary making an observation about movies and symphonic music!

The book that I recommended to Cory was Illicit by Moises Naim. When I was referring to my own books, which you can find by looking to the left side of this entry, Acts of the Apostles is the first, more accessible book, and Cheap Complex Devices is the less accessible one that I wrote special just for you smart people. The book I have under development is called The Pains, and you’ll be hearing more about it soon.

Podcast

Pitchforks and Torches! Cory Doctorow talks to Wetmachine

, ,

Cory Doctorow–noted spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, of which he is a Fellow; science fiction author; uberblogger of metacool boing boing; alumnus of the legendary Clarion writer’s workshop; and friend of Harold Feld –stopped by Wetmachine last week for a little chat.

To be precise, he joined me and chief Wetmachine mechanic Gary Gray in the lobby of the Sheraton Hilton in Boston, where he had been staying in his capacity of Notable Luminary at Boskone 43. He chatted with us for an hour, and Gary recorded our conversation on one of his nifty gadgets.

I asked Cory to vamp on the four themes:

1) The EFF — in particular, what big fights are coming up in the next five years or so, and how Cory handicaps the good guys’ and bad guys’ prospects;

2) Trends in publishing, (with particular reference to how yours truly can make money on his self-published books);

3) What’s interesting to write about;

4) Clarion.

As you’ll hear if you listen to the podcast, Cory is an articulate guy who talks fast. In the first part of the interview he talks about: how the United States is “creating trade obligations for itself abroad” and cases where “an appointed bureaucrat from the administrative branch [is] subverting what’s going on with elected representatives in Congress”; ominous proposals to change so called “intermediary liability standards” and ways that lawyered-up bullies use copyright laws to shut down legitimate speech without due process; the World Intellectual Property Organization as a bunch of pipsqueaks who are awakening the sleeping giants of internet stakeholders from corporate boardrooms to average human beans like me and you; and how “people are starting to have a burgeoning consciousness of the politics of information freedom.”

The next time the antiliberal forces try to “burn down the library”, Cory says, we need to be there with pitchforks and torches! pitchforks and torches! to tell them we won’t put up with it.

This is our inaugural Wetmachine podcast; apologies in advance for any glitches. The sounds you hear in the background are other people — children mostly– who were hanging about in the lobby. The deep-voiced person who asks the questions, trips over his words, and says “right, right” a lot is me. The reclusive Gary’s voice does not appear in this part, but I believe we got him on one of the other sections, to be posted over the next few days.

Podcast

[update: Sorry for multiple posting noise to any of you on RSS feeds. Gary and I are trying to figure out why the link to mp3 works when he posts and not when I post. . .]

Building the Overmind, one pizza at a time

, , ,

This little simulation is as distressing as it is amusing.

Which, I realize I’m delinquent in commenting on the three-card monte in which Bush & Pointdexter play “now you see it, now you don’t” with Total Information Awareness, but weariness forfends. Don’t worry however. Soon enough John of Wetmachine will make such a blog post about the all-compassing info-maw as to shake the Moloch/Overmind/Military-Industrial-Prison-WarInfotainment Complex to its very foundation!

Globalization in convenient movie format

,

Well I saw Syriana last night and I must say I liked it an awful lot. It’s about the global implications of addiction to oil, and includes a world-weary CIA operative right out of Graham Green taking “joy rides” in Teheran and Beirut, rich sheiks of Araby, power lawyer-lobbyists of the Georgetown set, and an idealistic dreamer in the body of a handsome hedge fund trader. As an added topical bonus there’s even a scene featuring a Texas oliman indulging in gunplay on a ranch stuffed with imported “exotics.” One almost expected a drunk Vice President to make a cameo! This is that film done by what’s his face, Gaghan, who also wrote the screenplay for Traffic, another film about addiction and globalization.

I remember when I was a young man back there in seminary school in the department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue (1978) and chanced into some Milton Friedmanites of the most doctinaire kind (is there any other?). Well they would go on and on spouting their religious beliefs concerning “free” trade and so forth, under the delusion that they were talking about empirical things and not metaphysics. (This type is given a royal send-up in Syriana, in the character portrayed by Tim Blake Nelson, last seen with George Clooney in Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, in which he played one of the dimwitted Foggy Mountain Boys in a fake beard and clownish hayseed atire.) And they would prattle on about how, left unfettered, capital would magically find its way to its most efficient use (kinda like how Lassie found her way home all the way across Scotland without a map in the 1943 classic). The point being that American capital, among others, needed to be free to find its best use in Peruvian jungles or Saudi deserts or Indonesian forrests. Capital knows best.

Well, I would say, that’s fine. But If we send our capital there, unfettered, then presumably the capital of the poor peoples of those regions should be free to come here. Absolutely! they replied. Only ha-ha those people do not have capital. That’s their problem! Poor capital formation!

You miss my point, I rejoined. Their capital is human capital. It resides in their noggins and perforce their bodies.

Ah, I love the smell of capitalism in the morning! It smells like a vast technologically-based unfathomable dark conspiracy! But enough for now, I need to go earn my paycheck.

A useful chronology

, ,

See here for an easy-to-read illustrated guide to some actions by the administration that claims it needs to void the constitution of the United States of America in order to protect us from the boogeyman. (A boogeyman who evidently still resides in the cave (in the rabidly mysogynistic, institutionally antisemitic, nuclear-bomb duty-free-shopping-zone and “partner in the war on boogeymen” known as Pakistan) to which he retreated after the adminstration gave him a free pass out of Afghanistan).

[update: editted for slightly enhanced readability.]