Alternative History
During the convention, I read or heard someone say that Bill Clinton would have easily been elected a third time if we didn't limit presidents to 2 terms. I started thinking about that a little. If we didn't have the 22nd Amendment, and if we didn't have a broad consensus against 3 or more terms, what might have happened?

It's virtually certain Ronald Reagan would have been elected to a third term. I think that this might have changed history very little; the Berlin wall would have fallen, Iraq probably would have invaded Kuwait and we probably would have led a coalition against Iraq. And the Iran-Contra investigation would have continued until 1992. By 1992, it probably would have been difficult to disguise the effect Alzheimer's disease was starting to have on Ronald Reagan, and the country would have been ready for a change - particularly if the economy wasn't doing well.

Enter a revitalized Democratic party led by a rising young star named Bill Clinton. It's unlikely Clinton's policies would have been much different - balanced budget, failed health care plan, etc., etc. - and equally unlikely that he wouldn't have been dogged by scandal. Nevertheless, 8 years of peace and prosperity would have led to his election for a third term.

And there's little doubt that third term would have been interesting, starting with a recession followed by a wave of corporate scandals. But that would have been quickly overshadowed by other events. Richard Clarke's book indicates that the Clinton White House knew who Osama Bin Laden was and what his intentions were. Would they have been as diligent in the summer of 2001 as they were in December 1999? Would Al-Quaeda have reformulated their plans and found some other way to effectively attack the US?

I'm guessing the answer to both is yes, and that we would have found ourselves in a war on terror, and probably would joined with the Northern Alliance to throw the Taliban out of Afghanistan. Beyond that, only wild speculation is possible. But the big picture, I think, would look remarkably similar. I do think Clinton's economic policies would have served the nation better than Bush's, but we'd still be recovering from a recession.

And this election? Would Clinton run a fourth time? Or would he step aside in favor of, say, his Vice President? And after the defeat of John McCain in 2000, who would the Republicans run? Perhaps the brightest hope of the Republican Party, the three-term Governer of Texas, son of Ronald Reagan's Vice President, George W. Bush?

Would it be Bush and Gore in 2004?

Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead
Besides listening to too much Warren Zevon...
1) Check out Gentoo for OS/X
2) Check out TextPattern
3) Write about what Rhapsody and ITunes really lack (compared to Waterloo Records)

The Serendipitous Summer Visitor Departs

An unexpected visitor showed up this summer, right next to the Meyer Lemon I planted in the spring:





People walking by would compliment us on it, and we'd reply that we hadn't planted it, it had just shown up. It got to be about 5 feet tall, and the bloom was at least a foot wide.

I had to cut it down today, because the bloom had faded and the bumble bees and hummingbirds have moved on to the Oleander and other things. I took it down almost to the root, but left a bit of stem where another shoot has started. Will it grow into another huge sunflower? Will another turn up unexpectedly next year?

All your renown is like the summer flower that
blooms and dies; because the sunny glow which
brings it forth, soon slays with parching power.
-   Dante Alighieri

The only reason left to use Windows
Rhapsody. I'm hooked. Why don't they port it to the Mac?

iTunes is great for buying music, but it's terrible for checking out new stuff that you may or may not like. Rhapsody is perfect. It's also perfect for collecting all those stupid songs you like but would never purchase otherwise.

And are you noticing how the prices of CD's are starting to come down as iTunes and Rhapsody get more popular?

Learning Lisp, continued
Learning Lisp is a lot easier than it used to be, because you can get all of these things right off the web without spending a penny, and they all work on your Mac:

• GCL (Gnu Common Lisp)


• An online, downloadable copy of Paul Graham's On Lisp


• An online, downloadable copy of Guy Steele's Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition

The only quibble is that you may need to download additional GNU libraries, like gettext. I probably should be using Fink, but I haven't gotten around to it.

"What a beautiful world this will be, what a glorious time to be free" Donald Fagan, "I.G.Y", The Nightfly (1982)

#!@&*Blogger
What happened to preview mode? I had to rewrite the previous post 10 times before I got it to look right. (And it still sucks, but that can't be blamed on the tool).

Blogging tools are the flint axes of software. I use MoveableType at work for an internal blog I set up, and it's only incrementally better. It isn't really fair to compare them to, say, my IDE, since one is a native program and the other is HTML-based. But is it that hard to do some simple WYSIWYG features? Like highlighting a piece of text you want to link and having a window pop up to enter the URL, instead of #!@&%$ A HREF=blah, blah, blah. Would it be that friggin' hard?

Joel on Software, btw, has some really good essays on the subject of improving HTML-based client apps here and here. He actually starts talking about towards the end of this article here and he's still talking about it here.

Friggin A HREF=#!@&*!^$

Learning Lisp
I've decided to learn Lisp.

Of all of the new technical kicks I could go on, this seems the least likely. I haven't even mentioned to my other hacker friends, because I'll get quizzical looks and disparging remarks. But I picked up Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters this week at the bookstore (literally - I haven't bought it yet, but fully intend to) and started reading. I've read many of his essays - and the new book mostly expands on those essays - but he convinced me about the value and relevance of Lisp in a way he hadn't before.

The three main points that convinced me were:

• All other languages are gradually evolving into Lisp.
  
• You can express things in Lisp, easily, that you can't express in other languages.
  
• The right way to write programs is bottom-up, not top-down.
  

All of these things come together in a single, compelling idea:
The programs you write in Lisp will be fundamentally different - you will get a larger language with more abstract operators and a smaller program written in it.

I've been trying to work towards something roughly similar lately by trying to build systems that consist of two kinds of components - low-level components that solve generic problems and high-level components that reflect and provide solutions in terms of the problem domain. This is hardly an original idea, but I've seen very few systems that really attempted to model their problem domains in non-naive ways. Most "systems", frankly, are collections of code that lump together the features their designers and builders thought were important at the time they were building the system. I'm in the process of trying to rework/replace one of those kinds of systems right now.

I'm thinking in terms of building blocks - constructing something, lego-like, out of pre-fab materials, with the language as the mortar. The blocks and language are made out of the same material - the language - but they're conceptually and cognitively different.

Graham is suggesting something much more elegant. He's talking about expressing the solution directly, in the language itself. The difference is subtle - especially since I'm not expressing it very well - but huge. And it resonates with me to the point where I feel compelled to try to become proficient in the language. Even, possibly, to write real systems in it.

I still firmly believe Dennis Ritchie's dictum that the way to learn a language is to write programs in the language. I've gotten myself back up to speed in the basics (I noodled around in Interleaf Lisp about 10 years ago, but never really learned to use the idioms of the language properly). So now I need to pick some programs to write.

Kenny Boy
I just finished reading Robert Bryce's Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron last week, which was by coincidence the same week Ken Lay finally got indicted.

Bryce's book is lucidly written, funny as hell, sharp, and incisive. It's in the same league as James Stewart's Den of Thieves. He gives a surprisingly comprehensive look at the entire energy industry as well as a lot of insight into the people who drove Enron into the ground.

Kenny Boy, meanwhile, is making a very public defense that he didn't know what was going on and that Andrew Fastow was the evil genius behind it all. After reading Bryce's book, you can almost believe the "I was clueless defense" - Lay frequently comes across as downright stupid - except for his actions on October 23, 2001.

Bryce's core thesis is an old Texas saying: "Fish rot at the head". Lay proves it. He's either a liar or an irresponsible, incompetent fool. What kind of leader defends himself by saying "I didn't know what was going on" when the company he's Chairman and CEO of collapses in the biggest financial scandal ever?

But even if he's indicted, the SOB will probably get to keep most of his ill-gotten gains. Just like Michael Milliken. Crime does pay, if you practice it at a high enough level.

War and Peace
I felt compelled to write this comment to this post by Brad DeLong about Sy Hersh's assertions that the White House is covering up a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing w/r/t Abu Ghraib:

If it's true, why isn't this a front-page article on the NYT, and why isn't it the lead story on the nightly news? If it's true, why hasn't anyone else stepped forward?

If it's not true, then why is Sy Hersh telling these stories?

I hope what he's saying isn't true, because it's horrible beyond belief. I fear that it's true, because I have no faith in the decency, honesty, or competence of the Bush administration. But assertions of this kind demand incontrovertible facts. Where are they?

As usual, I found it difficult to convey exactly what I'm thinking in a few short words. So here are some more:

The last thing I want to see is more pictures/videos of American soldiers and/or civilians degrading Iraqi prisoners. But if they exist, and are significantly worse than what we've already seen, then someone in a position to know and with sufficient credibility needs to come forward and admit the truth - with sufficient and undeniable evidence to back them up. If they don't, then someone equally informed and credible (the latter of which means not someone from the administration) needs to squelch the rumours.

I find it difficult to believe that what we already know as established fact was the work of a few low-ranking enlisted soldiers. It's impossible for me to believe that the unit's NCO's and officers weren't aware of what was going on. It's equally impossible to believe that they were aware but weren't responsible - that is, that they hadn't given the orders allowing torture and humiliation. It's difficult for me to believe that there's no connection between what happened at Abu Ghraib and what happened at other places in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's equally difficult to believe there's no connection between the administration's discussions on the use of torture, the denial of Geneva Convention rights, and what happened at Abu Ghraib and other places.

But there's a big gulf between belief and proof. The best possible thing that can happen now is for the truth - all of it, without exception - to come out. If, in fact, it was just a few out-of-control enlisted troops this needs to be something the evidence supports and can be believed by any reasonable person. If, in fact, this was encouraged and directed at the highest levels of government this too needs to be established beyond reasonable doubt and appropriate actions taken. Because that gives us a chance to act on the truth and do the right things. In fact, it is the only thing that can help us in the eyes of the rest of the world, because it would show that at least we are willing and able to punish those who exceed the limits of the law and of human decency.

War And Peace
The Onion gives us the good news in Iraq.

"... the vast majority of Iraqis are still alive—as many as 99 percent. While 10,000 or so Iraqi civilians have been killed, pretty much everyone is not dead. According to U.S. Department of Defense statistics, of the approximately 24 million Iraqis who were not killed, nearly all are not in a military prison. Bremer said "a good number" of those Iraqis who are in jail have been charged with a crime, and most of them have enjoyed a prison stay free of guard-dog attacks, low-watt electrocutions, and sexual humiliation."

Way to go, Operation Freedom!

Come November...
A passing comment by Brad Delong caught my eye:

But there is an election coming up. If George W. Bush loses it, things may still be OK.

Yes, I thought, but what happens if he wins?

Let's rewind to 2001. After the election debacle fades, the Bush administration (with the help of a compliant Congress) proceeds to act as if they've been granted a mandate. This behavior is reinforced by 9/11 - if you're not with them, you're against them. Whatever else you can say about this administration, you have to admit they've been extremely successful at carrying out their policies.

Of course, unless you're a rabid partisan ideologue, you'd also have to admit that their record of accomplishment has been dismal at best and an utter failure at worst. As bad as the situation in Iraq looks now, the present state of affairs pales next to the long-term consequences of this misadventure. But that's only one of potential disasters confronting this administration. The torture scandal that began with Abu Ghraib is still breaking. That $8B no-bid Halliburton contract is receiving an increasing amount of scrutiny. The economy is still short about 1.3 million jobs since January 2001, and while corporate profits are rising, wages are not. The Valerie Plame affair is before a grand jury and the President has engaged personal counsel. We're still waiting to find out if Ahmad Chalabi is an Iranian spy.

You'd think that all that, on top of an increasingly unpopular war, would be enough to send GWB home. It's hard to believe that none of the potential crises facing his administration won't boil over.

But what if none of them do? What if Bush survives, and gets enough votes to win the election?

I'm afraid it will be taken as a complete vindication of the administration's policies. Any margin of victory, no matter how slim, will be treated as if it were a mandate, a la Reagan in `84 (or Nixon in `72). And that will be used to justify any or all of the following:

• More tax cuts for the rich


• More cuts in benefits for the poor


• Further curtailing of civil liberties (Patriot II, anyone?)


• Privatization of Social Security

It's hard to believe that they'll be able to indulge in any significant military adventurism post-Iraq, but you never know. The Neo-cons may find also redemption in a Bush victory, and if they do, they'll resume the drumbeat for regime change.

I'm back
Over three months have passed since my last post, mainly due to the 60-hour weeks I've been working since mid-February. We're all exhibiting the signs of burnout, the most classic of which is exhibiting no more than a dull sense of relief (as opposed to exhilaration (or even moderate satisfaction)) when the last few things come together.

The other reason for not writing is that I've discovered a new passion. When we bought a house last December, we inherited an overgrown mess. Worse, we had to tent the house to kill all the termites and beetles in and under it, which also appeared to have killed off a gorgeously rampant Bouganvillea and a lovely Mexican Sage on the side of the house. So we started to clean things up as best we could and hoped the neighbors wouldn't think too badly of us.

The quintessential Santa Cruz garden is an abundant mixture of plantings in a informal arrangement that are more often the result of the whims and passions of their owners than they are of a carefully arranged design by a landscaper or architect. I've admired many of these gardens - you see them all over the city, and I can honestly say that almost every house on my block has one. Slowly and tentatively, I caught the bug too, starting with a Star Jasmine that I planted along the back fence and escalating into weekly purchases at one or more of the garden shops around town. By March, I'd dug out the two raised beds at the front of the house, replanted everything, and found myself with this.

And a few other things, like this Blue Hibiscus:




More later...

War and Peace
This, my friends, is how the peace will really be lost. Whether or not Chalabi is the titular head of the government or the power behind the throne is probably of small consequence; either way, it's the direct equivalent of, say, installing the Shah on the throne of Iran or helping Pinochet overthrow Allende in Chile. Or supporting Somoza, Marcos, Suharto, the Saud family, etc., etc. You can even make an analogy to supporting a previous ruler of Iraq in his war against the Mullahs who overthrew the Shah.

Here's a prediction: If Chalabi and his cronies gain power, they will be overthrown, perhaps peaceably, more likely violently, within a decade. Their overthrow will be accomplished by rebels who will be, among other things, violently anti-American. The resulting chaos will, once again, undermine any efforts to stabilize the Middle East and bring Islam into the 21st Century.

We haven't learned a damn thing in the last 50 years.

Cynicism and Misdirection
There's been a great to-do about last week's proposal by GWB to amend the constitution to defend the sacred institution of marriage by limiting it to heterosexual couples.

Over the years, I've increasingly become something of a strict Constitutionalist, as well as believing in balanced budgets and State's rights. In fact, I've become a Republican. A Jefferson/Madison Republican, that is. So repeated soundings about amending the Constitution for the (non J/M)-Republican issue du jour (before it was balanced budgets, today it's gay marriages) strike me as a dangerous disrespect for one of the foundations of this nation.

But that reaction entirely misses the point. If you think about it, you realize that the administration has to know that there are at least 35-40 Democratic Senators who are likely to oppose the Amendment, and maybe as many as 5-10 Republicans. So they must realize there's virtually no chance it would pass.

Here's my take: the administration wouldn't want it to pass. They probably don't even want it to come up for a vote. They just want to float it out there and engineer/manipulate the resultant controversy. One big reason for floating it is to pander to the right-wing fundamentalists. Why? To tighten up support from that important constituency prior to the Convention and the election. But that's not who they're really aiming at. They're really aiming at the swing voters - the ones that elected Clinton in `92 and `96 and the ones they got just enough of in 2000. Most of those voters are reasonably tolerant folks who nonetheless are a little uncomfortable with the idea of same-sex marriages. If you're looking for a wedge to tip some more of those voters to your side then whipping up a controversy, standing foursquare for some sacred institution supposedly under threat, and subtly manipulating the other side into positions that you can cast as extreme is a proven winner.

It's a bit of risk - it could backfire - but it's a hell of a good strategy. Especially if you don't give a damn about any of these constituencies beyond capturing their votes.

Calling this cynical is like calling the sky blue. Almost all politicians will do whatever it takes to get elected. I've repeatedly said that you can't understand large-scale politics without understanding large-scale public relations. But no presidential administration has so completely sacrificed conviction and policy in favor of electioneering like this one since the Nixon White House.

More From Yesterday's Paper

Buried on Page 18A:

“County officials challenge state over voting machines”
Santa Clara county officials are pushing back against California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's directive to require security measures to safeguard the integrity of electronic voting systems. Officials in 9 other counties are supporting Santa Clara. All of these counties recently bought new touch-screen voting machines.

Why the pushback? Simple bureaucratic politics is my guess. Someone or some group in each county authorized the purchase of these machines and stands to get blamed if the machines are found to be flawed or unusable.

Now, I don't subscribe to any conspiracy theories about the Diebold voting machines. Various companies, including Diebold, rushed these machines into production after the 2000 election debacle because they saw a chance to make a quick buck. The investors out for a quick buck couldn't care less about security issues or quality software development processes; those things just cost more money and delay the release of the product. So the engineers - who probably don't have much experience in or knowledge about building secure systems - realized that the thing is badly flawed and will constantly need to be fixed using field-expedient methods. So they put in things like wireless network cards and simple locks that make it easy to replace memory cards and firmware.

When the CEO of Diebold promises to deliver Ohio to the Republican Party in the next election, he's acting as conventional party power broker, not as some sort of evil conspirator who's deliberately created a system he knows his co-conspirators can hack.

When the Diebold folks deny that there are any problems with their systems, they're not engaged in some systematic and well-organized coverup. They're clueless. Dismissing all the evidence of any problems is nothing more than the simple human act of denial.

When California county officials complain about the Secretary of State's directives about security, they're engaged in a bureaucratic turf war. They're not participants in a massive conspiracy to alter the results of elections.

Never ascribe to malice that which can explained by simple incompetence.

It's apparent that no matter how many times independent security experts point out how badly these machines are flawed, there will be no stopping their adoption and use. I'm beginning to think that the best thing that could happen is for a group of white-hat hackers to alter the results of an election in some ridiculous and undeniably obvious way (like having Mickey Mouse be the winner of some race in a Los Angeles county election) and then announce exactly how they did it.

Of course, that would be wrong. And the government and media would probably focus on what a horrible crime had been committed and prosecute the hackers to the full extent of the law (perhaps adding some new provisions to the Patriot Act to allow even greater punishment of the offenders), thus drowning out the issue of how insecure and untrustworthy these machines are.

Instead, it'll be the black-hat hackers who compromise these systems. They'll do their best to cover their tracks. And they'll probably get away with it. All we can hope for is that they're incompetent, too, and that they'll mess up and get caught.

I just found out that the Diebold machines use Microsoft Windows as their OS. So even if you remove the wireless card and the ability to remove and change memory cards and firmware, you still have all the vulnerabilities of the world's most popular and insecure operating system. Unbelievable. What was behind the choice of Windows? Surely, more incompetence. No reasonably knowledgeable software system architect would ever make such a choice.

Yesterday's Paper
Yesterday, I sat down with an actual newspaper (the San Jose Mercury News) while I had a late lunch at my favorite Greek restaurant, and read these tasty tidbits.

“Former CEO of Enron may face criminal indictment”
Yup, they're finally going to go after after Skilling. Looks like the official announcement will be later this week.

“Clinton pushes philanthropy at a personal level”
I've always been ambivalent about Bill Clinton, who I find fascinating but deeply flawed. But I find it ironic, and not a little bit amusing, that the policies and actions of the current administration are probably doing more to rehabilitate his reputation than any words or actions of his supporters.

“Almost all Iraqui exiles misled U.S., officials say”
What? Next you'll tell me that there's no WMD, either! And that it's all the intelligence community's fault!

Two things that distinguish this administration is its near-absolute refusal to take responsibility for the consequences of its policies and its ability to manipulate the tools of large-scale public relations. This is yet another example.

What distinguishes our mass media is the inability to offer any kind of intelligent analysis of how this administration (or the previous one, and any future one) operates.

Robert Glass Doesn't Get Open Source
Robert Glass is one of my favorite writers on the subject of software development, and 10 years from now his book Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering will still have an honored place in the "always relevant" section of my technical library. But, alas, he doesn't understand the relevance or importance of Open Source in any way, shape, or form:

“...open source is most prominently about building software products for no financial compensation...There is a faint whiff of Communism about the concept of working for no financial gain”

Wrong. Open source is primarily about programmers building products for themselves and for other programmers. If you don't get that, you don't get Open Source. There's nothing particularly altruistic about this, and it's worth noting that all of the successful OS projects are meritocracies. It's also worth noting that the best known advocates of Open Source and free software - Eric Raymond and Richard M. Stallman - are libertarians, not communists. The comparison to Communism is a cheap shot - the kind Darl McBride would make - not a serious comparison or analogy.

A much better analogy would be to the writers and scholars of the early Renaissance. They didn't support themselves by publishing their writings and they didn't expect to. The wrote and studied because it was what they did. They supported themselves by seeking the patronage of the wealthy and the powerful. This isn't too different from what Linus Torvalds does, and there's no better example of a wealthy and powerful patron than IBM, which supports a wide variety of OS projects and programmers.

And what kind of things are these programmers building for themselves and others? Tools. Not applications. Tools. Tools made by craftsman, for other craftsman, so that all of these craftsman can get down to the serious work of creating applications for paying customers. In a few short hours, I or any other aspiring programmer can download and install all of the tools they need to create any kind of application for free. I don't need to fork over several thousand of my own dollars for someone else's ideas about what kind of tools I need. I can get the ones I want - for free - from my peers, who have a far better understanding of what I need than the program managers and marketeers in Microsoft Developer Relations. This, surely, is a motivation that anyone can understand.

Glass then goes on to natter about the “...critical importance of the economic model to the open source movement”. Critical to who? Not to the Open Source developers themselves. The “economic model” was invented by the VCs and execs who wanted to exploit the Open Source phenomenon, not by OS developers and users. Linus Torvalds isn't going to stop working on Linux 2.6 if all the companies selling Linux go under.

Glass makes a more interesting point when he compares OS to SHARE, one of the user organizations that thrived in the late `50's and early `60's before the Justice Department ordered IBM to unbundle software from hardware sales. He states that “for those of us who lived through the era of software that was free and open because there were no alternatives, a return to the notion of free and open software feels like a huge regressive step”. Perhaps it does. But having begun my career in a proprietary marketplace in which the most basic tools - like a C compiler - cost hundreds to thousands of dollars, the availability of thousands of tools, libraries, components, and code snippets is a kind of Utopia. And having to go back to proprietary toolkits is unthinkable.

Weekly News Roundup, with your anchor George Orwell

<G.O., speaking directly to camera #1:>
President Bush, appearing on Meet The Press with host Tim Russert:

<roll tape>
Russert: How? why, as a fiscal conservative as you like to call yourself, would you allow a $500 billion deficit and this kind of deficit disaster?

President Bush: Sure. The budget I just proposed to the Congress cuts the deficit in half in five years.

Now, I don't know what the assumptions are in the GAO report, but I do know that if Congress is wise with the people's money, we can cut the deficit in half. And at that point in time, as a percentage of GDP, the deficit will be relatively low.

<jump cut>
Russert: But your base conservatives and listen to Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, they're all saying you are the biggest spender in American history.

President Bush: Well, they're wrong.*

<G.O. does quarter turn in his anchor chair to face camera #2 and intones:>
In other news, the American Bar Association announced that a top lawyer at Microsoft has been named to chair the Antitrust Committee for the ABA.**

<Cut to commercials -

#1 How Walmart helps communities,
#2 shows an oil company helping to preserve the environment,
#3 is a lite beer commercial with a flatulent horse.

Return to G.O. facing directly to camera #1>
In tonight's final story, Diebold, makers of new high-tech touch screen voting systems announced last week that “Maryland Security Study Validates Diebold Election Systems Equipment for March Primary”.***

<Cue music, cut audio, pull back to wide shot and then go to commercial>


*“There's the overstatement of the current deficit in order to make plausible the claim that they will cut it in half in three years.”

** No links needed. Welcome to the post-ironic age.

***"We were genuinely surprised at the basic level of the exploits that allowed tampering". Just for fun, search Google for "Diebold, Maryland, Raba" and look at how the mainstream media outlets reported this story.

SCO Follies continue
I never liked Ayn Rand's writing and I was never able to finish Atlas Shrugged. But it occurs to me that Darl McBride is exactly the kind of pseudo-capitalist that Rand railed against. She had a word that she lumped people like Darl under:

Looter

It's hard to say what Rand would have made of Open Source software. But if you think carefully about it, you'll come to the conclusion that Open Source is an engine of creativity and innovation that adds considerable value to many - and perhaps eventually most or all - of our industries and enterprises. Just ask IBM. They're even willing to pay for Super Bowl ads to promote it.

You might even draw the conclusion that Linus Torvalds has a little in common with John Galt.

The other conclusion you might draw is that IBM doesn't seem very worried about being sued by SCO.

Update: I originally wrote this on 1/26, but hadn't gotten around to publishing it. But SCO's latest bit of nonsense led me to finish it. The best source of what's going on with the SCO-IBM case is, as always, Groklaw.

Finally
Brad DeLong points to this Washington Post article that reports we're one step closer to bringing Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling to justice. Andrew Fastow is going to jail and is reportedly cooperating with investigators seeking evidence against former Enron Chief Accounting Officer Richard A. Causey. The next link in the chain after Causey? His boss, Jeffrey Skilling.

It's about time.

A Comment on Era Transitions vs. Transformations

My friend T lends us his thoughts about the state of the era we're in. He also has some thoughts on hosting a good story.

“Writing about the rapid change of the era in which we are now has become almost trite these days. It was 1970 (the year of this author's birth) when Alvin Toffler put his finger on the idea that people are more behind the times than ahead of them in his book Future Shock. That was 34 years ago, and the pace of change that he was writing about is nothing compared to what has been happening since then. We all know the times are in rapid change. Fine.

A more interesting thought, is that not are we merely in the throes of all this change, but the true era change many talk about is only just approaching mankind. I would contend that what we are going through right now is merely the staging time for the era change that is about to rock the world in the next 15 to 25 years.

The reason that I write this is that we are in a time when we are starting to complete the technologies (or at least evolve them to such a level as necessary for the revolution) that enable the era change that is to come. With the abilities that we have been developing over the last 150 years, with the revolutions in metallurgy, biomedicine, communications and computational power, we are setting the stage for such things as the bio-technical and nanotech revolutions. Not only have we evolved the technology to support the coming massive leap, we are developing the mental/psychological necessities to do so.

It's been a long road. From developing a system of government, economics, security, mass production, distribution, transportation, communications, information management we can support the kinds of research that will bring sweeping revolution. We have moved beyond a time where we can only know what our god given senses limit us to. Now that we can measure the unseen, we are able to think far beyond our human condition.

The changes that we have seen to get us to this point will be, upon future reflection, small compared to how the human condition will change after the nanorevolution. The radical changes to human life will go far, far beyond the changes that we have recently seen. When achievements start rolling in from such fringe fields as biotechnology and nanotechnology, life will be almost so different as to be unrecongnizable from today. Hold on! We're just getting started!”

Now, we both think we're in an era transition. But we have a subtle disagreement on what really constitutes the era transition. T thinks it happens when a host of revolutionary technologies come on-line. I think it really happens before then, and the revolutionary technologies are the effect, not the cause, of the era transition.

Now, if I'm right, the era transition may have already happened and this is a moment of stasis before an explosive (and probably very difficult) period of near-chaotic change - as surely as Reformation followed Renaissance. Note that this period of stasis may be measured in decades (or may not, if we're especially unlucky), and the changes to follow will be spread out over many more decades. This, admittedly, is a pessimist's viewpoint.

T, on the other hand, is more of an optimist. He's talking about the cool stuff - the stuff that lets us be something more than we our today. And he believes that we're developing the mental and psychological facilities that will allow us to move beyond the flesh-and-blood limits of our current condition. And, in his view, that's the real transition - to what amounts to a posthuman age.

Some other very smart folks - like Vernor Vinge and Bill Joy - believe the same thing but interpret it in a way that makes me sound like a pollyanna. Vinge pulls no punches:

“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”

The implication is that we ordinary humans get replaced - very swiftly - with some super-intelligent post-human. I can't buy that. I think an era transition will be messy, dangerous, and difficult. But no more so than the original Reformation. And it'll probably be even be less hazardous than, say, the Black Plague of the mid-14th century (which harmed China and Islam even more than Europe). I think we'll transition into post-humanism in stages, and we'll bring most everyone who survives the wars/plagues/pogroms/riots (which will be a large majority) along.

I like what Bruce Sterling writes about a post-human future:

Posthumans aren't content with human achievements. They're better at posthumanity than we are...[But] The posthuman condition is banal. It is astounding, and eschatological, and ontological, but only by human standards. Oh, sure, we may become as gods, but the thrill fades fast...By the new, post-Singularity standards, posthumans are just as bored and frustrated as humans ever were. They are not magic, they are still quotidian entities in a gritty, rules-based physical universe. They will find themselves swiftly and bruisingly brought up against the limits of their own conditions, whatever those limits and conditions may be.

A condition that sounds so...human.

The Fiscal State and Our State
Peter Drucker:

“The two world wars of this (previous) century transformed the nation-state into a 'fiscal state'...They (nation-states) have all come to believe that there are no economic limits to what government can tax and borrow, and, therefore, no economic limits to what government can spend. Under the new dispensation, which assumes that there are no economic limits to the revenues it can obtain, government becomes the master of civil society. The sole result of the fiscal state has been the opposite of what it aims at...In every single developed country, governments have reached the limits of their ability to tax and their ability to borrow. The fiscal state has spent itself into impotence.

Worst of all, the fiscal state has become a 'pork-barrel' state...government spending becomes the means for politicians to buy votes...In the fiscal state, the looting [of the public treasury] is done by politicians to ensure their own election...Democratic government rests on the belief that the first job of elected representatives is to defend their constituents against rapacious government. The pork-barrel state thus increasingly undermines the foundations of a free society.

Joseph Schumpeter warned in 1918 that the fiscal state would in the end undermine government's ability to govern. Fifteen years later, Keynes hailed the fiscal state as the great liberator; no longer limited by restraints on spending, government in the fiscal state could govern effectively, Keynes maintained. We now know that Schumpeter was right.”

Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, quotes from pages 125-135

You can see this in the small - if the phrase "the fiscal state has spent itself into impotence" doesn't apply to California, I don't know what does - and in the large, as the federal deficit zooms out of control. Just look at the new Medicaid bill, which manages to spew pork in all directions while providing little to no actual benefits to ordinary citizens.

What got me on this track was reading about our Governor's new budget. As some wag pointed out, it's probably almost identical to the budget Gray Davis would have produced. The most salient points to me were the reliance on a $14 billion bond issue and the transfer of an extra $1.3 billion in property tax revenues from cities and counties to the state. There's very little that sounds like trimming the fat off the pork, unless you consider education and health services wasteful and unnecessary. I find it impossible to believe that there aren't billions of dollars in truly wasteful corporate and special interest welfare that can't be cut.

What would real reform look like? Well, it might start by dealing effectively with the problems described here. And it might end with a significant transfer of both funds and responsibilities out of Sacramento and back into local governments. It would be the end of the fiscal state.

And that end will come. It's just a question of whether it will be a difficult transition (the best case) or a painful, revolutionary upheaval.

I don't believe that our new Governor will lead us into that transition. For all the talk of a revolution in California politics, I think that Arnold's election is an end, not a beginning. It's an end because the only way one group of entrenched power interests in this state (the Pete Wilson Republicans) could get elected was to use a popular cultural icon as their frontman. But what happens if the frontman's administration is as ineffective and unpopular as the previous administrations?

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”
The Who, Won't Get Fooled Again

Is it just me, or does Instapundit seem to be getting a little meaner, a little more ideological, a little more self-righteous, and a little more poorly written as the months go by? It's all very predictable and tiresome. I read blogs to learn something new and/or to get exposed to different points of view, not to be beat over the head with someone else's ideology and agenda.

Nevertheless, it's fascinating to observe what Oliver Willis calls the "Instapundit crowd". To their opposites on the ideological divide, they're yet another right-wing conspiracy. But they're not. They're a damn good example of how a social network works. And their mass and influence should tell us all something.

Today, they're jumping all over Paul O'Neill (with a few swipes at liberal scum Molly Ivins and Wallace Shawn*). Meme Of The Day: He (O'Neill) gave out transcripts of a secret NSA meeting! That's as bad as outing an undercover CIA agent! No, it's worse!

Never mind that the document in question was released to the public 6 months ago. It's all about spreading the meme. And unlike Ivins, they never apologize for their gaffes or bad jokes.

Now compare that to what Josh Marshall writes:

“So now the White House has pilloried Paul O’Neill as a sorry doofus and, by all appearances, launched a punitive investigation against him.

How about denying any of his claims or those in Suskind’s book?

Just a thought ...”

An appeal to objectivity and facts? What, no slams of straw men or idiots? No simple-minded sound bites to stick in peoples' heads? This is why the left is losing.

*(And, yes, I think Shawn is an idiot. Ivins, on the other hand, is a terrific writer and journalist who occasionally sticks her foot in her mouth, an old and honorable Texas tradition. Her gaffes shouldn't obscure that fact that 95% of the time she's funny as hell.)

LOTR, Pt. III
I finally saw the Return of the King. I didn't like it quite as much as the first two - it departs from the book more than I liked - but it's still marvelous entertainment. Some people have complained about the multiple endings, but I liked them (except for the absence of Saruman's scouring of the Shire and its rebirth).

It's been raining a lot and when I left the theater I expected to walk out into a downpour. Instead, the sky was clearing after a fresh rain. I walked through Bookshop Santa Cruz and saw a rainbow to the south as I came out the back, the clouds low and gold in the west in the setting sun.

Transformation vs. Era Transitions

I've been thinking a lot about what I want to write about, and there's something I'd really like to explore over the next few years. I've been strongly influenced by two books - W.R. Clement's Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide to the New Renaissance and Peter Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society. I've written a little about Clement's book here before, but just to sum up, his basic thesis is that we are currently in the midst of an era transition brought about by a rise in the level of abstraction. That rise in the level of abstraction sets in motion a cascading wave of ideas and events that sweep away the existing status quo and create a new world-view. The only comparable event to this in our experience was the original Renaissance, in which the discovery of perspective "brought on a vigorous and profitable series of invention cycles through applications of the new science" and largely created the world we live in today.

Drucker's thesis isn't as radical as Clement's; the changes he sees are the kind of transformation in Western society that happens every few hundred years, and he gives the examples of the re-emergence of the city in 13th Century Europe, the period from the invention of the Printing Press to Luther posting of his 95 theses (1455-1517, the peak of the early Renaissance), and the events of 1776 (not just the American Revolution, but also James Watt's Steam Engine and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations). 40-60 years after the beginning of one of these transformations, "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".

It's almost a cliche to say that we're living in a time of rapid change; most people seem to have accepted this as the norm. But I don't think they expect (much less want) really profound change. Someone (I can't remember who) once said that it wasn't that a few people were ahead of their time so much as it was that most people were behind theirs. And I think that's the case here; profound changes are coming, will occur in my lifetime (in fact, have already begun), and will reshape society, polity, and, most of all, our worldview and our epistomology (how we know what we know).

So the question in my mind is: Is this a transformation - a regular occurrence to be expected every 200-300 years or so - or an era transition? An era transition is a much rarer and more profound event. Human nature being what it is, I prefer the more dramatic interpretation of events - it's more exciting to believe you're living in one of those epochal eras of history. But it seems to me that if we can carefully examine what's going on in the world and somehow manage to shed some of our cultural baggage in order to think more clearly and dispassionately, we can at least glimpse the outlines of what's happening and what the magnitude of change really is.

The idea of an era transition seems exciting but Clements points out that, based on previous experience, era transitions are dangerous and difficult times. It's no accident that his book's subtitle includes the words "survival guide". One way we can detect whether or not we're in a real era transition is the level of danger and difficulty.

DSL's Back
And it only took SBC/Pac Bell 27 days (after I moved a mile and kept the same phone number) to get my DSL turned on. A co-worker just returned from a trip home to India and informed me that Reliance, the big Indian telecom conglomerate, now offers wireless (home) telephone service that they can turn on in 4-5 hours after you order it. Granted, wireless is simpler than DSL. But wouldn't you expect better service here in the NorCal Riviera, just over the hill from Silicon Valley, compaed to a land still notable for its crushing poverty and widespread corruption. (Sorry, apologies to my Aryan/Hindu/Punjabi/Tamil brothers and sisters. The corruption is just as widespread here. But it's better integrated into the system. No tacky direct bribes for us, just routine corporation transactions).

Part of the problem, I'm sure, is that I order DSL through Cruzio, the local ISP, who then buys the service from the local monopoly. I'm guessing that SBC/PacBell puts those orders in the back of the queue and services direct orders first. But I prefer being shielded from SBC/PB's billing system - you know, the one where they lose your payment and then threaten to cancel your phone service as well as your DSL unless you pay a estimated year's rates in advance. I'm pretty that particular class action suit is still ongoing.

Bam, Iran
The recent earthquake in Iran is a sobering reminder of how the rest of the world lives. What's only of passing interest here - a 6.5 earthquake 200 miles away that makes your office building sway for 10 seconds - is an unbelievably deadly killer half a world away when it hits a city of 100,000 whose buildings are made out of dried mud and bricks.

6.5, baby
OK, it took an earthquake to get me blogging again. It lasted about 15 seconds or so; I heard something that sounded like some heavy equipment was getting rolled on the floor above ours, then a sound like flakes of plaster falling. I didn't realize what it was until Les, whose cube faces mine, said "earthquake". We all stood up and you could feel the building swaying. I called S. in Santa Cruz, who was standing in line at the Post Office. She said she didn't feel a thing. Mike H.'s wife in Fremont didn't either. But Les' wife did in San Mateo and so did someone in the 23rd floor of an SF office building.

Update: The epicenter was apparently about 11 km NE of San Simeon. The USGS is now reporting a 4.7 aftershock in the same area. Go here for more details. Apparently they felt it in LA, too.

Update: The official count is now 11 aftershocks of magnitude 3.9-4.7. I wonder what's it like to watch Hearst Castle sway?

Local Hero
Santa Cruz librarian Anne M. Turner wins Jane Magazine's Bad-Ass Loudmouth (scroll down about halfway) award for “reinforcing her citywide policy to shred library records every day in protest of the privacy-invading PATRIOT Act, which gives the government the right to find out which books people check out and anything else they're curious about”.

Another new blog
Terry Teachout's About Last Night, a journal on art in that Big City On The Other Coast. Courtesy of Asymmetrical Information.

Apparently, I too would be the The GashlyCrumb Tinies if I were an Edward Gorey Book. "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who wasted away. D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh..."

New Blog
Here's a really interesting new blog I just discovered, courtesy of Halley Suitt's weblog. Read this and then this.

More John Adams
The thing I don't admire about Adams was his support, however reluctant, for the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Collectively, they were the Patriot Act of their day. Adams let himself be persuaded into signing the bills by the High Federalists (led by Hamilton), his wife Abigail (whose usual good sense was trumped by her anger at the scurrilous criticism of her husband in Republican papers like the Aurora), and Adams' own vanity. While he proved mostly unwilling to use the provisions of the acts to either expel aliens or suppress dissent, his support for them ultimately hurt him. The Sedition Act was used to justify the arrests of 25 men who were either editors or associated with Republican newspapers. The men were jailed and their papers shut down. This resulted in a public outcry against the acts and contributed to the victory of Jefferson and the Republicans in the election of 1800.

There was little doubt then, and none now, that the Acts were designed to destroy opposition to the Federalist party and its agenda. Adams was not complicit in this; but he let himself be used. Fortunately, the effort backfired. But the passage of the Acts set a precedent that has, at least implicitly, been used to bulwark similar efforts of questionable constitutionality.

Japes, ribald
Sweet Fancy Moses is back, just when I'd given it up for dead. OK, it came back 3 weeks ago, and I'm as out of it as ever. But you might find this amusing.

Now, if only Suck would come back.

Desktop Linux
David Weinberger echoes my misgivings about Linux as an OS for non-geeks, this time from the point of view of a regular user.

The Archetypal Patriot
I've been listening to an abridged recording of David McCullough's biography of John Adams as part of my continuing reading about the Founding Brothers (as John Joseph Ellis called them). Adams is a fascinating character whose greatness I'd never fully appreciated. While I think that the author is a little too much in love with his subject, and I'd like to have heard the sections about Adams' diplomatic missions immediately before and after the peace of 1783, I greatly enjoyed it and want to read the entire book someday. But first, I'd like to read Cappon's The Adams-Jefferson Letters.

For me, the most admirable thing about Adams was his integrity. Two incidents in his career illustrate that integrity. The first was his successful defense of the British captain and the British soldiers (in two separate trials) who were accused of murder in the Boston Massacre in 1770. Thirty years later, his efforts as President led to a treaty with France that preserved peace, in spite of the opposition of much of his own Federalist party led by Alexander Hamilton. He was criticized, even attacked, by many for his actions in both of these events - a difficult thing for someone as sensitive and vain as Adams. But he stuck to his principles regardless of the outcome. And while the outcome of the first ultimately enhanced his reputation, the second probably cost him a second term as president.

Catching Up
It's been a while since I've had time to blog. I actually wrote this over a week ago but never published it; but I wanted to contrast it with the post above about John Adams...something about how deeds matter more than words, and how real patriotism isn't a fashion that the self-righteous get to wear.

There's something about the prose in this essay that really irritates me, even though I agree with many of the points the writer is trying to make. It's the hectoring arrogance of the tone, I think - the ways the author seeks to cut off possible arguments an imaginary reader might make instead of just making his point, as if he's worried his argument won't stand up on its own.

I also like being lectured about patriotism by someone who I suspect never actually served their country about as much as I like being lectured on morality by, say, William Bennett. Self-righteousness always strikes me as a particularly unattractive character trait. Patriotism isn't about what you say. Displaying the flag doesn't make you a patriot any more than attending church on Sunday makes you a true Christian. Serving your country - in any of the myriad of ways that you can render service - makes you a patriot. Deeds, not words, not acts done strictly for show, are the real measure of patriotism.

A Home in Paradise
Oh, and the other thing that's been keeping me busy is that we just bought a house. This picture doesn't do it justice - it's lovely - so I'll try to post a better one tomorrow




Here's the Bougainvilla on the side:

Too Busy To Blog
I've spent most of the weekend reinstalling the Brick (my aging, 4.5kg Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop) because I'd bought a 802.11b wireless card (Netgear MA401) for it and figured I'd finally get around to upgrading to SuSE Linux 8.1 (esp. since 9.0 is about to come out).

It's been painful, especially compared to the ease of getting my iMac up and going. Like having to rebuild the kernel in order to run Oracle. And downloading the Yast2-nis-client -2.6.14-120.noarch.rpm because the shipped version (2.6.14-58) errors out during install. And changing "bind prism2_cs" to "bind orinoco_cs" in /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.conf because the MA401 uses the Orinoco chipset, not the Prism chipset. But you knew that, right? I'll leave out the rest, but there's a lot more.

I love Linux. But it still has a really long way to go. When I can install a distribution error-free and then get Mozilla, Oracle, Java, Netbeans, Apache, MoveableType, MySQL, TCL/TK, etc., installed (I want the latest versions, not the shipped ones), configured, tweaked to suit my preferences, and ready for business within 8 hours - without hair-tearing and endless Google searches - I'll be happy, and I'll believe Linux is ready for prime time. But until then, the "Geeks Only" sign needs to stay up.

On the plus side, I actually like Gnome now that they've added Nautilus and some of the other Eazel stuff. And I still really hate the loathsome monstrosity that is KDE, absolutely the worst, ugliest GUI this side of Windows 2.0 (yes, I'm old enough to have seen and scorned both 1.0 and 2.0 when they came out). KDE looks and feels like some brain-damaged script kiddie's idea of a UI - which, I assume, is the core constituency for its user base.

I'll probably end up going back to WindowMaker since all I do is use Netbeans, Mozilla, and shell windows - plus I like the minimalism - but it's nice to see that some real progress is being made here.

But it still all needs a lot more polish before normal folks (as opposed to geeks like me) can use it.

Headlines
“Schwarzenegger Elected First Horseman Of The Apocalypse”
“Lieberman Pledges To Gloss Over The Boring Issues”
“Ashcroft Chases Down, Loses CIA Leak Suspect In Alley Behind White House”
“OutKast Universally Accepted”

You just gotta love the Onion

Another Iceberg Sighting
Dan Gillmor, from his perch up in the crow's nest, sees it too:

It's called the European Technology Rountable Exhibition, but a significant portion of the discussion here has been about the awakened giant to the east. Again and again, the conversation has turned to the opportunities -- and, to many, the threats -- China represents for the technology community.

I'm not feeling threatened, mind you. But I think this is a very interesting phenomena that bears watching. Communism won't ever succeed, anywhere. But who says China has to remain Communist?

Self-Absorbed Stupidity
Ok, I'm reading Instapundit - always a mix of the interesting and the ideological - and I come across this bit:

INSTAPUNDIT SHUT DOWN BY AL QAEDA? That's the report -- actually saying that the DoS attack that shut me down, along with some others, last night was aimed at someone else, but came from Al Qaeda-affiliated websites.

This was quickly debunked by someone from HostingMatters, the affected hosting service. The "report" mentioned in the quote comes from a site called Little Green Footballs, one of more moronic ideo-blogues I've come across. (and no, I can't be bothered to link to it).

Sheesh. Can you get any more self-absorbed than that? Of course, these are the guys who are always railing about loony liberal conspiracy theories. Now, it is possible that Internet Haganah, the site in question - which apparently specializes in identifying and working to shut down sites that support Islamic extremism - may be undergoing a DoS attack because of its mission. And it's possible that the attack is sponsored by Islamic extremists, because, let's face it, any idiot of any stripe can be a script kiddie. Or it could actually be a bored script kiddie in Illinois. Or Finland. Or China. Or someone else entirely.

But the real story - the one that's actually worth talking about - is that this particular site appears to be under attack. Not "Al Quaeda is going after all us God-fearing, patriotic right-wing sites because we're so important and so dangerous to their cause". This is just another example of the bloated self-congratulation/triumphalism that's become an increasingly annoying meme in the blogging subculture in the past year or so. It's awfully similar to a similar meme running around just a few years back - you know, the one where the VC's/entrepreneurs/techies/visionaries were running around congratulating themselves on inventing the "new economy".

Yes, blogging is interesting and important. But it's still a relatively small phenomenom in a very large and diverse culture. So get over yourselves. And please try to say something interesting (hint: more navel-gazing about blogging does not fall into the "interesting" category. Nor does describing positions or policies you don't agree with as "near-treasonous". Going all Ann Coulter tends to preclude intelligent discussion on just about any topic).

But, of course, they won't get over themselves. Clay Shirky was right when he wrote that “The Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”.

*

Globalization - Another tip of the iceberg
China Puts Man Into Space (via Instapundit).

Now, I don't believe any Communist government will ever succeed over the long term, and China has lots of problems, not the least of which is circa-1964 Brezhnev-style government corruption. But what if the Chinese someday decide that the Mandate of Heaven demands some form of representative democracy?

What if India during this same time got its own problems with corruption under control, deep-sixed the caste system, reduced poverty, and starting educating most or all of its people?

And what if we decided to avoid dealing with the corruption of our own political system, stifle innovation, pursue economic policies that result in economic inequality, and spend our money maintaining the legions at the edges of the empire?

AppleMania
My new 20GB iPod just arrived, so my order from Apple (iMac, Airport base station, and iPod) is complete. I've gotten pretty blase about computer hardware over the years. But I haven't been this excited about a piece of hardware since I got my first 10-MB hard drive in 1986. More later.

CalPolitics
There's a voice in my head that's suggesting that a different result on the recall - one that ended up keeping Gray Davis in office - would have been a mandate to continue the corrupt business-as-usual nature of California state politics, at least until things got so bad that they couldn't be ignored. While I still think that the recall mechanism is a dangerous tool that has no legitimate place in representative democracy (certainly the Founders didn't think it desirable or necessary), I find it impossible to dismiss this line of thought.

And that thought process further suggests that one of two things could happen. One, Schwarzenegger's administration succeeds in bringing about real reform and turns around California governance; or, two, Schwarzenegger's adminstration fails miserably and triggers an even more impassioned revolt by the electorate - eventually leading to real reform and a turnaround in the quality of governance. I'd prefer the former to the latter, of course. A failing administration probably means lots of Californians suffer, economically and otherwise. So here's hoping for the best.

I was glad to see that Arnold got a significant percentage of the votes, in effect getting more than Davis did. This at least legitimizes the election; if he'd gotten more votes than anyone else, but fewer votes than voted No on the recall it would have something less than a mandate. But it is a real mandate, and it will be interesting to see what he does with it.

The local papers are full of news about the transition team. Much is being made of the bi-partisan composition of the team, which is supposed to find the "best and brightest" for the new administration. Best quote from the link above: "It's part symbolic, and it's part genuine outreach,'' said Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College. But Pitney, paraphrasing James Madison, said, ``the larger the group, the smaller the number that will decide the proceedings.''

The most interesting bit to me is the decision to bring in an auditor to assess the real state of the deficit. I've written before about how Ann Richards saved the Texas state government $6 billion by instituting a vigorous auditing program. Is it possible that significant savings can be achieved here as well?

Unfortunately another, more cynical, voice in my head suggests that the Schwarzenegger administration will neither scale the heights nor fall into the abyss. Instead, they'll muddle through, enacting some reforms, doling out political favors to their most important constituents, and putting significant time and energy towards helping GWB's reelection campaign in 2004. Here's one quote supporting this thesis: “...his (Arnold's) vast personal wealth did not stop him from accepting roughly $9.2 million in contributions from some of state government's most well-established insiders despite a pledge not to take contributions from "special interests." The largest portion...came from businesses, executives and their families in the real estate, financial services and transportation industries. ”

Dittoed
I despise everything Rush Limbaugh stands for, but I've got nothing against him personally and I hope he's able to recover from his current problems. On the other hand, I'm glad to see ESPN/Disney/ABC with egg on their faces after their cynical attempt to create controversy and boost ratings by giving him a forum.

After all, idiots like Limbaugh are easily identified and dismissed by thinking adults. But the cynical manipulations, pandering, and biases of the major media are much more subtle and much easier to take for granted, so it's always good to see their machinations fail miserably and publicly.

CalPolitics
So one of Arnie's first acts is to go on the Tonight show.

Ahhh, democracy...

Enron
And speaking of energy company fraud, are we ever going to see indictments of Lay and Skilling? There is something happening on that front. And here's one more possible way for it to happen.

CalPolitics
Here's some alternative speculation on what drove the recall. Take it with a grain of salt, pending collaboration from other sources. Believe it if the lawsuits initiated by the Lieutenant Governer against the energy companies are settled for pennies on the dollar after Arnold becomes Governor.

Too bad the media is too busy investigating whether or not Arnold can keep his hands to himself to look into this story.

Globalization
This is really interesting:
More and more international patients are travelling to India to seek quality health care at a fraction of the cost back home

I think this is just the very small tip of a very large iceberg.

CalPolitics
Well, there's just two days to go until the recall election, and it's looking like Arnold is going to win. I've been waffling on how I'd vote for the past few weeks, but I've finally decided to vote "no" on the recall. I have no idea who'll I'll choose for Governor should the recall pass. I'm sort of leaning towards a protest vote for the ButtMonkey Beer guy because of this quote (from the Doonesbury site):

A system that allows for two guys promoting a beer brand to be on the official ballot to run the fifth-largest economy in the world. Angry doesn't begin to cover it. Don't get me started.
CA recall candidate Scott A. Mednick, co-owner of ButtMonkey beer, when asked
"What makes you angry?"

I won't, but I'm finding it dificult to make an informed and reasonable choice. Despite my earlier comments, I was actually hoping Schwarzenegger would show me something, anything, that would give me a good reason to vote for him. But I've read and heard nothing. Not only do we have no real idea what he'll try to do if he gets elected, we also don't know what he really thinks about any important issue. Oh, you can check the boxes on the hot-button issues - Women's right to choose, gun control, immigration, education, etc.. What we don't really know is what his real political philosophy is or if he even has one.

I'm cynical enough to suspect the latter. Comparisons have been made to Ronald Reagan, but I (and others) don't think they're apt. There's plenty of well-documented evidence to show that Reagan was interested in politics 20 years before he ran for office, and he traveled for years making stump speeches for GE and others on conservative issues. Reagan wasn't a policy wonk by any stretch of the imagination, but he did bring some depth and experience in politics to the job when he became Governor of California. Comparisons to Jesse Ventura might be more fitting. Ventura got elected largely byattracting previously disaffected voters tired of politics as usual. The same thing seems to be happening here, according to this article in the San Francisco Chronicle. But Ventura had some previous political experience and also had demonstrated a real interest in politics and governing.

If Schwarzenegger has, I've seen no compelling evidence of it. Unless I do, I have to conclude that his primary motivation is simply egomania and that he's little more than a frontman for the mainstream Republicans who were part of Pete Wilson's administration. I think that the real underlying motivation for the recall is to capture California for the Republican party as a prelude to the 2004 presidential elections. Capturing California's electoral votes (difficult, but certainly less difficult with a popular Republican Governor) would virtually guarantee GWB's re-election. I don't know if the Republican backroom leadership championed Darrel Issa's efforts to recall Davis, or simply took advantage once it gained traction (and then conveniently dumped Issa); either way, they've exploited this opportunity brilliantly.

So what can we expect from a Schwarzenegger/Wilson administration after the Gray Davis interregnum? Well, the first step will be to repeal the tripling of the car tax - a move that's sure to be popular - in order to start off on a positive (if pandering) note. Special sessions will be called, audits will be initiated, any other unpopular new measures (e.g., SB 60) will be repealed, and there'll be a flurry of activity that will hopefully serve as a smokescreen while the new administration gets its house in order. It will also serve as a smokescreen for certain hot-button conservatives issues, like Worker's Comp reform and renegotiating state employee contracts.

And when that's all done, they'll still have to figure out what to do about the state's deficit and its existing debt levels. Wilson made himself very unpopular in the early/mid 90's by raising taxes in order to cover deficits, and gained little credit for lowering them afterwards. You can bet his advisors haven't forgotten that, and I'm willing to bet that no significant measures to address the deficit besides politically popular (but not necessarily effective) budget cuts will be proposed until after the 2004 elections.

The wild card in all this is Schwarzenegger himself. He has demonstrated that he's very strong willed and decisive and has the acumen to be a successful businessman. It's not unlikely that he could decide to bust out of the box his handlers want to keep him in and go his own way once he's elected. Real leadership is badly needed to address California's problems. But you have to wonder what a political neophyte with an apparently shallow understanding of the issues and no real idea of how to make effective policy would do.

Then again, it may not matter. California made have been made ungovernable by anyone due to a long series of poor policy choices stretching back to Prop. 13. Once again, I'd love to proven wrong. I'd love to see an effective Schwarzenegger administration making good policy and solving California's problems. But I'd be really surprised if that happened.

Life
Well, it turns out I have to order a Mac direct from Apple in order to get a 160-GB hard drive on an iMac, so it'll be 1-3 days before it arrives. So in the meantime, I'm consoling myself by reading all the stuff on their developers page. Here's what I got:

1.25 GHz iMac w/17" TFT (It's the one with the flat screen that comes out of the pod base)
1 GB memory
160 GB disk
Airport Extreme Base Station and Card
iPod w/20 GB

Eventually, I'll put a wireless card in the Brick (my 10-lb Dell Inspiron 7500), so that I can tote it around the house and take it to all the wi-fi enabled places around town. The added benefit of toting the brick is that it strengthens the back and builds up the biceps.

I didn't get a Powerbook, because there's a good chance my Dell notebook at work will get replaced with a Powerbook (Woo-Hoo!).
I didn't get a G5, because of the cost and because I'm figuring that I won't really care about 64-bit processing for a couple more years.

And the iMac should work great for S. All I have to do is buy a JetDirect Card for our HP printer and she'll be all set. Once she's switched over, I can convert the Tower (Dell Dimension 4100) to be a Linux Server.

And if I do get a Powerbook at work, I won't have to put up with WinDoze any more. Woo-Hoo!

Simple Minds
Stay, I'm burning slow,
with me in the rain,
walking in the soft rain,
calling out my name,
see me burning slow...

Brilliant days
Wake up on brilliant days
Shadows of brilliant ways
Will change for all time

Simple Minds, “Someone Somewhere In Summertime”

Life
It's my birthday, and I get to buy a Mac. I can't wait...

Society
Roger L. Simon on pathological politics: “Possibly the primary reason I am no longer an adherent of traditional party politics is that both the Democratic and Republican Parties are dominated by a hatred of the other that seems pathological to me”. Link courtesy of Heretical Ideas.

On a related note, I've been listening to the Books on Tape version of Joseph J. Ellis' Founding Brothers. One of things the book focuses on is the bitter (Ellis calls them "scatalogical") partisan politics of the 1790s, when the two-party system first emerged. Both sides commonly referred to the other as "traitors" to the legacy of the revolution. It's worth noting that getting down and dirty did very little for the participants' reputations; Alexander Hamilton, in particular, lost a good deal of his influence and prestige (as well as seriously damaging the Federalist party) after a vicious attack on John Adams in the election of 1800. Adams had already been suffering from the Republican opposition led by Jefferson, who just happened to also be his Vice President. Yet Adams was the only one of the revolutionary participants able to rise above partisan bickering by concluding an unpopular treaty with France that effectively ended an undeclared state of war in 1799. It doomed his chances of being re-elected in 1800; but it was a brilliant piece of policy-making that allowed the nascent republic to gain a breathing space of a few more years in which to solidify its institutions before engaging a foreign power.

Would any of our leading politicians today sacrifice their careers in order to pass an unpopular but necessary measure?

I've read a number of comments in the last few days that the 2004 campaign will be dirtiest in recent history. The recent sniping at Wesley Clark seems to be a harbinger of things to come. While it may not be as vicious as the 1796 and 1800 elections, the caliber of those engaged can hardly be said to equal the real “Greatest Generation”.

Life - Snowballs in Paradise
Summer is almost officially over, but it was over 80 today in beautiful Santa Cruz. I think it's just the continuation of a strange weather pattern this year, but it's a little odd. The Amaryllis are still blooming weeks after they're usually gone, and there still seems to be a pretty good number of tourists 3 weekends after Labor Day. The only real sign I've seen of fall is that the surf seems to have gotten heavier in the past 2 weeks, although it was a little milder today. Both dogs have gotten knocked over by big waves the last two weekends, which is a little scary; Greyhounds aren't exactly built for battling the waves.

Life has a mildly hallucinogenic quality here under any circumstances, but the heat seems to make everything even slower and dreamier. I'm driving down Soquel Avenue yesterday, just past the Harley Davidson dealership/museum on the corner of Seabright, with a guy on a Harley in front of me. I look across the street and see a 9 or 10 year-old kid taking aim at the motorcyclist. With a snowball. He throws it well behind the Harley - the rider doesn't even notice - and runs away. There's a flea market going on the next corner down and people are walking down the street on my side, but nobody else seems to see this but me.

Now, where do you get a snowball on a hot day in Santa Cruz? Come to think of it, where do you get a snowball on any day in Santa Cruz?

Politics - The Administration's Spin Cycle Never Stops
So the National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defense, and now the President have all gone on record acknowledging that there was no link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and 9/11, apparently in an effort to spin some earlier comments made by the Vice President about ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune asks: “So why do seven in 10 Americans believe there is a link? Is it just their wild imaginings? Nope: It's because the White House planted the idea and has cultivated it assiduously for months”. Read the whole editorial here.

But they never actually came out and said it. They may have implied it in every way possible, and there seems to have been no shortage of off-the-record suggestions that Saddam and Al Qaeda were intimately involved. But the right level of plausable deniability was maintained.

Robert Scheer writes: “The pattern is clear: Say what you want people to believe for the front page and on TV, then whisper a halfhearted correction or apology that slips under the radar. It is really quite ingenious in its cynical effectiveness”. I don't agree with the rest of Scheer's article, but he gets this point exactly right.

This doesn't just apply to Iraq. Take tax cuts, for instance. Spinsanity debunks the latest spin on this topic. Take WMD's. Oh, but we're still looking for those.

So the question I have is this: When does a pattern of constant manipulation and dissembling in the media come to be regarded as fundamentally dishonest? Where's the dividing line between doctoring the spin and lying?

Software
The Pragmatic Programmer, by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas, is one of my favorite books about the of programming. They distill their advice down to about 70 tips, but three really stand out for me, and I've made them part of my philosophy about my trade.

• Don't Live with Broken Windows
  Don't leave broken windows (bad designs, wrong decisions, or poor code) unrepaired...Don't let entropy win.


• DRY - Don't Repeat Yourself
  Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.


• It's All Writing
  Treat English as just another programming language.

The combination of the last two is particularly powerful. For years, I've struggled with how to write effective documentation that's both concise and complete, and can be maintained along with the code. Putting those two ideas together helps a lot. So I try to let the code say what it says (this is how it's done), let the UML diagrams and other pictures say what they say (this is what the pieces are, how they're structured, and how they relate), and glue it all together with just enough prose (this is why it is what it is). A crucial tactic in this is to make the software as self-describing as possible - by putting as much application-specific detail as possible in metadata and making the code as simple and clear as I can.

A lot of developers I know believe that all you need is the code, and all you have to do is read it in order to understand the application or system. I disagree; I think that only indicates how immature the discipline of software development really is. I think we need to think of ourselves as writers, not coders, and understand the whole process as a continuum of authorship. And what we produce is writing. And we correct it, enhance it, refactor it, reuse it, and recast it for the whole of its useful life. And we should take pride in making it as easy to understand as possible. The macho attitude of "just read the code" is the attitude of intellectual adolescents.

Critical documentation that is out of date is, of course, another form of broken windows. Don't let entropy win.

Other good books on the craft:

The Practice of Programming, Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike
Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, Robert Glass
Refactoring, Martin Fowler
Peopleware, Tim Lister and Tom DeMarco

and the all-time classic:
The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks - I recommend re-reading “No Silver Bullets” at least once a year.

I should read Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls, too, but I just haven't gotten to it yet.

Honesty compels me to admit that Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming trilogy is still a little over my head. I've set myself a goal of reading (and understanding) it all by the end of the decade. I have no doubt that it will still be relevant.

Good blogging
Spinsanity has two good pieces - one on debunking some of Al Franken's more inflammatory rhetoric disguised as humour (while acknowledging how well Franken dismantles Ann Coulter's Slander and Sean Hannity's Let Freedom Ring) and the other on GWB's misrepresentation of the effect of his tax cuts on both the deficit and on the economy.

I love the tone and approach. Eminently reasonable, logical, clear, well-argued prose with little or no trace of ideological bias. James Madison would be proud of these guys.

Nema, at Iranian Truth, meditates on the questions she gets about what it means to be Iranian and asks “How do you answer a question you spend your life answering?”. I think she's doing a wonderful job in the series of posts that follow.

101-365, on the delay of the recall: “...at least Davis now knows who that chubby Mexican guy down the hall is”. And scroll down and check out the Full Barley Moon and Mars with the Moon Behind a Tree.

My friend T., in his own inimitable style, has a series of posts on mortality and the afterlife. In between, he's discovered flashmobs, the new baby boom, and how Chinatown one-ups McDonalds.. He also says that because he's drinking less, he's changed the title of his blog back to Crazy, Drunk, and Unemployed. What's up with that, T?

War and Peace
Molly Ivins, after receiving the usual* hate-mail from the wingnuts on the right after this article:

“Well, I ain't gonna take it anymore. I am not shutting up for Bill O'Reilly or anyone else.

I opposed our unprovoked, unnecessary invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it would be a short, easy war followed by the peace from hell. I predicted that every terrorist in the Middle East would be drawn to Iraq like a magnet.

I was right, and I'm not going to apologize for it.”

You go, girl. Then she adds this:

“I also realize that the future in Iraq is a lot more important than any petty "I was right" vindication...I am trying hard to be a responsible citizen here; I don't think the choice is between "staying the course" or "cut and run." I think we need to change course and be honest enough to admit it to ourselves and everybody else.”

That, unfortunately, is the space (you know, the one between a rock and a hard place) that we find ourselves in. We can't abandon Iraq (or Afghanistan, for that matter) to chaos. Doing so would result in a defeat worse than any military setback we could possibly suffer. But we need to change course and find an effective grand strategy - one that rebuilds and stabilizes Iraq and Afghanistan and that refocuses our efforts on actually fighting the war against terrorism without turning it into a war on Islam.

*(It requires absolutely no imagination at all to figure out what kinds of things were said. That's because your basic right wingnut doesn't have any imagination; all he or she can do is crudely parrot the same tired lines. Your basic left wingnut, on the other hand, suffers from an excess of imagination, which is why they come up with such a wide variety of truly ridiculous notions.)