Life, Politics, and the Fourth of July
Today's the Fourth of July
Another June has gone by
and when they light up our town I just think
what a waste of gunpowder and sky

Aimee Mann, Fourth of July

Actually, I like fireworks. And the above isn't even relevant to my hometown. Santa Cruz does not have a Fourth of July fireworks celebration. You'd have to drive up to Scotts Valley for that. (SV, BTW, is the kind of place that would gladly have accepted Mr. Rumsfeld's suggestion that they structure their Fourth around the war in Iraq. Heck, they probably did.) What we do have is a fireworks celebration in October to celebrate the founding of the city. The first year I lived here, I thought it was a little weird. Now I really like it; we can walk down to the beach on a beautiful fall evening with friends and neighbors and watch a fantastic display over the big curve of the bay. And there are no tourists around to clog up the roads and the beach and act stupid.

Favorite bumpersticker: "They call it tourist season, so why can't we shoot them?"

But I digress. The real question is, does failure to wrap ourselves in the flag indicate we (including me) are unpatriotic? Or does it indicate that we/me believe that symbolic gestures ultimately don't amount to much? Well, since I served my country/pay taxes/vote (most elections)/etc., I choose the latter.

I love my country. I'm still willing to give my life to defend it. America is an oasis in human history - there have been others, but we're the biggest and longest-lasting one. But I don't subscribe to the "my country, right or wrong" point of view. That's unworthy of any thinking adult. What we are - as a nation, a society, and a culture - still falls short of what we could be. And we should aspire to be more than what we are - to be truly great (not merely powerful); to advance the causes of freedom and justice; to bring prosperity to all; to live up to all of our ideals. Thomas Jefferson reputedly said "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance". What we need to remember is that Jefferson was warning us against internal enemies as much as external ones; our history is, among many other things, a constant battle between those who would defend the letter and spirit of our founding fathers' legacy and those who would sacrifice it for their own self-interest. The only way that ever ends is if we give away our liberty. We're still a long way from that, but we're not winning the battle either.

This shouldn't be taken as a polemic against the current administration. All of our politicians on both sides of the aisle are failing us. A few notable exceptions (e.g., Robert Byrd, John McCain) are isolated and mostly powerless. And it's a bad time for the system to have become corrupted. We're well into one of those great transformations in human history that fundamentally alter our world. As Peter Drucker puts it, "Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation...Within a few short decades society rearranges itself - its worldview; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born" (Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society). Is our current and future leadership up to the task of successfully guiding us through this transformation? Or are they going to follow the lead of so many elites in history who abdicated their responsibilities in order to enrich themselves?

Today, the most fundamental act of patriotism may be to look at our society, decide what we don't like about it, and then do something about it. Then again, has that ever not been the case?

War and Peace
"Microsoft Word documents are notorious for containing private information in file headers which people would sometimes rather not share". Looks like Tony Blair's people forgot to cover up their tracks. One more piece of evidence that the WMD hype went way, way over the top.

Perhaps that's why a poll indicates the majority of Americans believe the administration stretched the truth about the Iraqi WMD's and alleged ties to al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden.

No WMDs have been found. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, though battered, are still out there and active. The Administration is trying to create an international peacekeeping force to take some of the burden off of the overstretched US military forces. Unrest in Iraq may be on the rise.

Some good news. Protests in Iran appear to have resumed. Colin Powell has stated that the US does not intend to intervene, suggesting it would be wiser to leave the internal conflict in Iran to play itself out.

Theology
Robert Martin writes: "For millenia we have searched the heavens to find messages from the gods. Today we found such a message...Now we know what God thinks of us".

Software, Work, and Learning
My last day at my old job. Thinking back, I'm appalled to realize how little I learned over the past year working there. Almost everything was a rehash of what I've done before or work that wasn't worth doing. And I'd already had the experience of watching bad management run a perfectly good company into the ground. It hadn't hit me before, because I've learned so much outside of my day job. My other milestone today was that I finally finished the first alpha version of Chrysalis and sent out an announcement to a bunch of other developers I know. Even if it never goes beyond being a vanity project, the time and effort I've invested have totally been worth it. I've deepened and refined my skills, learned lots of new stuff (ant, xml, html, various dusty corners of Java, etc.), and put together something that amounts to an on-line portfolio of my work. I don't know if my new employer looked at Chrysalis after I told them about it, but I think they were at least impressed by the fact that I'd done my own Open Source project and was more than willing to show them my actual code. Slam-dunking most of their interview questions probably helped, too ;-).

I'm looking forward to the new job. It will be real learning experience, I have no doubt, and there's good reason to be optimistic about how successful they'll be. I want to write a book about high-performance techniques in Oracle and this will be the perfect job to give me lots of real-world feedback. Work on Chrysalis will slow down for a little while, but that's OK. It's got enough momentum now to sustain itself for a long time; I expect to be working on it for the next few years.

Software
Fred Brooks was right when he wrote that turning a simple program into a programming systems product took 9X the effort of just writing the simple program. A big part of that 9X is writing user docs in HTML.

Music and Code
Paco de Lucia's Siroco - maybe the greatest flamenco album ever made - is the perfect music to motivate you to finish the last gnarly parts of a code release.

Business and Injustice
I bought a real newspaper for the first time in months and sat down to read it while sampling some of the local barbeque. Alas, the BBQ here on the NorCal Riviera is as bad as the Mexican food; times like these are when I really miss living in Texas. Reading the paper proved more interesting. An article on page 3 entitled "Study: E-waste program dangerous" (online version here) compared Dell's e-waste recycling program with H-P's. Dell subcontracts out to a company called Unicor. Unicor, based in Washington state, employs 1,100 convicts who they pay anywhere from 20 cents to $1.26 an hour to handle and dispose of cathode ray tubes and other unsafe tech by-products. The study says the Dell/Unicor program exposes the prison laborers to dangerous chemicals, partially due to the low-tech working environment. The study contrasted this with H-P's program, which pays civilian workers $8 to $13 dollars an hour plus benefits, and minimizes their exposure to chemicals and other toxins.

Now we know one reason why Dell's prices are lower than the competition's.

Several things about this really disturb me. First, there are plenty of unconvicted citizens who need a decent job, and $8-13 an hour in a safe working environment surely beats unemployment. Second, most of the prisoners doing this kind of work are going to be the "safer" ones, i.e., they're in for non-violent crimes or misdemeanors. So putting them to work for third-world wages is exploitative to the extreme. Even if you don't care about the inmates' working conditions, you should realize that your and my taxes will have to pay the cost of their getting sick from performing unsafe work. I should also point out that our taxes are already paying the costs of their incarceration, thus providing a totally subsidized pool of labor for subcontractors who use prison laborers. I don't doubt the folks who run Unicor think that this is just good business. And it is, at least for those born without the scruples or ethics genes.

It's a sad comment on this society that this story is buried on page 3 of the business section and will probably only outrage Unicor's management (who are already on record calling the study "deeply flawed" and "disturbing"). If the matter is brought to HP's management's attention, they'll probably close their facilities and outsource to the prison contractors, too.

All so you can get a few bucks off the price of your computer. I have two Dell computers here in my home. I won't be buying another.

Business and Justice
The Labor Department on Thursday sued Enron, its former top executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, and its board for failing to protect the retirement assets of its employees.

Finally. Here's hoping this is followed by indictments of Lay and Skilling.

War and Peace
Are we winning or losing the peace?

It's still far too early to say. The latest posts from Salam Pax and G In Baghdad hardly give one reason for optimism, though. Neither does this story in the Washington Post. Some additional data points here and here.

I think we needed a post-war analogue to the the Powell doctrine of striking the enemy with overwhelming force; a doctrine of rebuilding the occupied infrastructure with overwhelming rapidity - a high-impact Marshall Plan for the new century. Unfortunately, it's a little too late for that in Afghanistan and Iraq. See what a retired US general says about “ the consequences of failing to prepare for victory”.

Guerilla action against the coalition forces appears to be on the upswing, as evidenced here, here, and here.

Is the news all bad or is it only bad news that gets reported?

The documents seized several days ago may lead to some discoveries of WMDs. Or not. Perhaps I'm far too cynical, but does this story have the fingerprints of the Administration's spin machine all over it?

But hey, Bechtel, Halliburton, and WorldCom are making hay out of the occupation. Now that Enron can't sell electricity in the US anymore, will they turn their attention to Iraq?

Very little news out of Iran, so it's hard to know if the protests have been crushed or if they'll resume. Here's hoping we don't have a replay of what happened in 1999. Ending the rule of the Mullahs would be a real victory for freedom and self-determination.

Weather With You
Late Spring is when the winds off the Pacific shift from W to NW; hence, days usually begin and end with a cool haze of fog all along the coast. Occasionally (like maybe once every other year) the winds will shift radically and come from the southeast. When this happens, temperatures in the Bay Areas (SF and Monterey) rise dramatically. We're in the middle of one of those radical shifts right now. I know this, because I started my day in SC (high 92°), went to the city (SF) for lunch (high 95°), and finished my day in the Valley (high 101°). It wasn't as bad as 2 years ago, when the temp in SF rose to 103° - I remember it well, because I was trapped in my no-AC apartment recovering from surgery. Today the heat didn't bug me too much; probably all those years in Texas (high today in Austin: 96°).

Worst thing about the weather: It causes a thermal inversion in the Valley, so all the smog gets trapped. Coming down the hill, you see a dirty gray blanket over San Jose. You'd think there'd been a forest fire recently if you were anywhere else.

Best thing about the weather: It doesn't stay hot here. After sweltering all day in the Valley and the City, you come home to SC in the evening, roll down the windows, open the sunroof, and let in the delicious cool while you listen to Bebel Gilberto sing Samba e Amor. Any haze you see is just a whisp of fog.

Cars
Is it just me, or does the Lexus SC look like a supersonic, 21st century Karmann Ghia? Speaking of which, why doesn't VW bring the Ghia back?

Software

Found lots of interesting stuff surfing:

Random Hacks posits a third alternative to the showdown between Microsoft and Open Source as to the future of software development.

Artima is a software community-oriented site with lots of good content that also hosts a remarkable set of weblogs. Among other things, a good interview with Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas (the Pragmatic Programmer guys) on the value of storing persistent data in plain text and the ways they feel XML is being misused. Bruce Eckel's interview on Artima and some of the entries in his weblog have convinced me to give Python, a language I'd previously dismissed, a try.

The only problem is that I still want to learn Ruby. Plus I need to finish crossing the t's and dotting the i's on Chrysalis so I can put out an initial alpha release and then work on adding support for MySQL. Plus I need to get working on finishing my series of essays on software development. Not to mention that I start a new job in a week. And there's that biography of Frida Kahlo I'm trying to read.

Software - Ted Codd's Legacy
I'm re-reading Codd's 3-page monograph on Data Models, originally published in 1980, and I'm struck once again by the sheer elegance of the man's ideas.

“Numerous authors appear to think of a data model as nothing more than a collection of data structure types. This is like trying to understand the way the human body functions by studying anatomy but omitting physiology. The operators and integrity rules are essential to any understanding of how the structures behave.”

What's sad is that so few people doing software development actually understand these concepts. If they did, we'd have database management systems that correctly implemented the relational model. And then we'd have simpler systems that could manage data more reliably and effectively, and could build simpler and more reliable applications on top of them.

I've been predictiing for the past few years that the relational model gets "rediscovered" about 10-15 years from now when all the current data management fads and fictions have finally been shown to be hollow and hopelessly flawed. I'm assuming Codd's reputation gets refurbished at about the same time.

Ideology - Things that make me go hmmm
Glenn Reynolds, who should know better, implies anyone who's questioning our efforts in rebuilding Iraq is a fifth columnist who will cost us the war. This comes at the end of a link to a thought-provoking article by Victor Davis Hansen in the National Review Online.

Ann Coulter, who doesn't know any better, resurrects the ghost of Joe McCarthy as a great patriot smeared by treasonous liberals. Actual, unretouched quote: “The left cut down a brave man, but not before the American people heard the truth”.

Fortunately, I can get away from all this and head down to San Diego to “take direct action against the many issues and facets of the system that maintains a world based on power, class, race, sex, and species”.

Or I could just stay home and oppress my loved ones, like any good middle-aged white male.

Life
Yes, I did go to the Farmer's Market this morning, and, yes, I've already eaten all the English shelling peas. But I got two cartons (3 pints each) of Raspberries, so there's plenty of those left. I also added support for Oracle 8i to Chrysalis between snacks.

I've missed a beautiful day up til now, so we're off to the beach with the dogs.

War and Peace, cont.
A grab bag of stuff, all of which I'm still digesting myself.

A really fascinating article in Wired News on how the sysadmins at Iraq's State Company for Internet Services (SCIS) have gotten Iraq back on-line. Apparently, SCIS is still being run by Baathist holdovers with the apparent approval of the Coalition Provisional Authority, according to the lead sysadmin.

That's just one bit of Good News/Bad News from Iraq. A poll says almost 2 out of 3 Iraqis want the U.S. military to stay until Iraq is stable and secure; only 17 percent want American soldiers out now. “But some U.S. lawmakers are increasingly uneasy about the daily killings of soldiers, the stretching thin of troop forces, excessive demands on reservists and the costs of the war.” See this article for a perspective from the troops. Strategic Forecasting takes a pessimistic view of the current situation: “Suppressing a guerrilla operation without alienating the indigenous population represents an extreme challenge to the United States that at this point does not appear avoidable -- and the seriousness of which does not appear to be broadly understood”. The Economist calls these efforts counterproductive.

Other reports suggest that the situation elsewhere in Iraq isn't as bad as it's made out to be, and that the Iraqis are spontaneously organizing themselves to restore services and civil society. At the same time, this article in the NYT says “United States military commanders say foreign fighters are being actively recruited by loyalists to Saddam Hussein to join the resistance against American forces in Iraq”.

It looks like Saddam and his sons are alive and in Iraq. We may have just found documentary evidence of Iraq's WMD program. We'll see.

The latest in a series of continuing operations in Afghanistan is underway. Here's a story about how the civil situation there continues to deteriorate.

There are reports of student arrests in Iran; after 10 days of demonstrations, things appear quiet for the moment. Hopefully, this is just a respite and the reform movement will continue to gather strength. Here's a photo essay of the protesters from Iranian.com. How should the US respond? Read this.

Here's a post making the imperialist argument in US foreign policy. Here's a better, more considered set of ideas.

Some links via Slashdot, Instapundit, The Agonist

Update: Now there's a report that Saddam and one son may have been killed in an operation last Wednesday. DNA tests are being performed.

War and Peace, cont.
More Salam Pax. And I thought the cabbies in NY and SF were a little scary.

More on this later.

Software
Some dirt on SCO from Forbes. Apparently, SCO's parent company has been doing quite well suing other companies for the past several years.

Software - MSFT taking aim at Google?
Prompted by this report about a web crawler called MSNBot, Dave Winer investigates and posts this anonymous email that says it's so. Interesting, in light of the rumours about a possible Google IPO (which Google's co-founder had earlier denied). Here's another recent story from C/Net on the subject.

Now, I'm no lover of Microsoft. But they're perfectly within their rights to compete against Google. And Google needs to take a page from Intuit's book: the only way to defeat MS in head-to-head competition is to continually out-innovate them and then delight your customers better and more often than they do - because MS will surely out-spend you, out-work you, and out-market you. But it can be done; you just have to be (to steal someone else's phrase) insanely great.

Of course, if you are, they may just turn around and buy you. And the government's probably not going to step in to prevent it this time.

Culture
A brilliant post on why real environmentalism (of all kinds) is about protecting the shared commons. Favorite quote:

“Linux is another kind of environmentalism”