My Thoughts Exactly

Confessions of a Reluctant Unitarian

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I’m a member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Martha’s Vineyard. We have part-time minister and members of the society are regually recruited to fill in & give talks on Sundays. I was shanghai’d a while ago and finally gave my talk last Sunday.

The minister had originally suggested that I talk about “creativity” and “being a writer” or similar. Which is precisely the kind of crap I hate about Unitarianism: navel-gazing passed off as meaningful spiritual activity. So instead I delivered a rant about everything I don’t like about my own so-called religion.

Text below the fold. A few notes follow.

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Benevolent Older Sibling helps us remember who we are

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Here’s a story about government efforts already underway to develop national ID cards (that contain biometric info, natch).

Somehow this tidbit got past Winston Smith at Minitrue, in case yzall are innarested:

On Jan. 19, the agency will hold a public meeting at the Potomac Center Plaza in downtown Washington to discuss policy, privacy and security concerns associated with the development of the new ID card standard. Anyone who wants to attend must preregister by Jan. 11 by e-mailing Sara Caswell, a NIST official, at sara@nist.gov, according to a notice in yesterday’s Federal Register. Questions regarding registration can be directed to Caswell at (301) 975-4634.

Pixiated

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I saw an article about the Pixies in the freebie paper “Metro”.

The Pixies, of course, are the art-noise-punk-pop band out of Boston. They reunited after 13 years. (If you don’t know this band, by golly, stop reading Wetmachine right now and go find them.)

I couldn’t find the story online (but I did find a bunch of nifty stories by googling for “pixies metro”). So let me retype the interesting part relative to Wetmachine themes of the media ecology:

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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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