Dragons and Elegance

May Day/Beltane/Birthday -- Late Spring celebration!

OK, here's the deal: For the last few birthdays, I haven't felt much like celebrating. Blame it on the Bush years, the fact that I felt my age catching up with me, or whatever.

But this year we have a new president. Sure, he's not everything we might want him to be, but he's a decided improvement. And he's sane.

In the spirit of solidarity that I have expressed in several posts in this blog, I would like to celebrate Labour Day as workers around the world celebrate it. We may not throw a parade, but we will sit around the table, eat well, tell each other tales of struggle and of victory, keep each other company and lift each other's spirits. And for many religions, the beginning of May is the start of a sacred season of celebration and feasting, love and fellowship.

Mara's birthday is in late April; mine's in early May. We both have far too many friends we don't see enough of. What more reason do we need to throw a party?

So, the details:

If you can see this post, you're invited. If you want to come and don't have my address, follow this link for more information and directions to the house. Also, please leave a comment here or drop a note to (mayday at gigdrag dot net) to let us know how many of you are coming.

The main body of the party will be on Saturday the 2nd of May, 2009, from about 3pm until we don't want to party any more.

I invite people of a leftist and/or labour-friendly bent to come to the house the previous night, Friday the 1st, and tell stories and share their experiences with Labour Day in other countries, if they have them. Anybody who wants to stay over on Friday night is welcome to do so, provided they are willing to help the housemates and me set up for the Saturday party. I expect the Friday night gathering will be smallish (10-12 people at most), but am willing to be surprised.

On Saturday people are encouraged to show up any time after noon if they are willing to help set up; there will be general milling around and conversation. Folks who don't want to help set up should arrive after 3pm; we'll keep going as long as people want to stay, but Cindy will go to bed around midnight and we should probably keep the noise down after then.

On Sunday, of course, there is a BayCon meeting. Those of you on BayCon staff are welcome to carpool with us to the meeting; we can whomp up breakfast to fortify us for the ordeal. Those who want to stay behind and help the housemates clean up will be forever blessed and your names will be honoured in the House of the Holy Donut.

Presents are emphatically not required; I'm at the age where more stuff is a nuisance rather than a pleasure. Bring me a good story or a heartfelt hug.

Go now, bring your friends who are also our friends (and even a few new folks you think we'd like), and be excellent to one another.

The Wake-Up Call

The euphoria at feeling like we've finally gotten out from under the oppression of the last eight years of being ashamed of ourselves and our country. The outrage in the midst of that victory, that so-called 'Christians' could spend millions of dollars to 'protect' their institutions by denying recognition to a whole segment of society. My first physical exam in over a decade, and the growing realisation that not only am I not immortal, I have entered into middle age.

This has been what I used to euphemistically call 'an experientially-dense week.'

I have kept my head down for the past year and change for many reasons -- my creative energy has been at a low ebb, I have been wary of speaking out politically in a society that seems obsessed with wiretapping and privacy invasion, and I have felt that I didn't have much to add to a world in which every dingbat with an opinion has a blog. I'm also wrestling with the question of how much of my writing/data to keep on other people's servers (my mail has lived on Google's servers for over a year now, and I'm still not sure how I feel about that), and how much time I have to devote to my own personal computing infrastructure. Being my own sysadmin used to be fun; now it feels entirely too much like work.

There's also some perfectionism involved -- I didn't want to clutter my livejournal with memes and LOLcats and 'trivia,' but I'm beginning to realise that writing for livejournal is a very, very different thing from writing for publication, even when it's self-publication. It seemed obvious to me at one time that there are some things I write that should be hosted on my own hardware, and some that belonged out where my friends could see it easily, and I think I had some vain hope that RSS/Atom aggregation was going to save the day. But re-inventing infrastructure is so very 1990. And perhaps most important of all, it doesn't matter what you're using to publish if there isn't any content.

So I am punting the infrastructure question by the simple expedient of copy-and-paste, and folks who read me on LJ can comment there, and folks who have subscribed to Dragons and Elegance can comment there, and we'll take it as it comes. Because, after all, if I'm the only one reading this stuff, it makes no difference whatsoever. But if you have an opinion, please, share it and be welcome.

Every period of writing activity starts with a single post. This one may not be polished, or even particularly coherent, but it means I showed up to the page. Or at least to the Emacs buffer.

Be excellent and loving to one another, my friends. We've got a lot of work in front of us, but we don't have to do it alone.

Why I don't code Java, a splendid example

Posted without comment (or rather, the comment is in the comment):

         String hp = isa.getHostName() + ":" + isa.getPort();
         String s = "service:jmx:rim://" + hp + "/jndi/rmi://" + hp + "/jmxrmi";
         JMXServiceURL url = new JMXServiceURL(s);
         String login = getJMXUsername(isa);
         String password = getJMXPassword(isa);
         Map env = new HashMap(1);
         String[] creds = new String[] { login, password };
         env.put(JMXConnector.CREDENTIALS, creds);
         JMXConnector jmxc = JMXConnectorFactory.connect(url, env);

         // jmxc = new RMIJMXConnector(host, port, login, password); /* sigh */

Urgent necessity

Where is the love that will save us, now?
Be still and listen, for it beats within you.
Find a Muslim, a Jew, a young Christian and an old sceptic,
Take them by the hands and look deeply into their eyes.
Say the words:  "You are my sister, my uncle, my grandma, my beloved.
You wear the face of the angels, of all that is good in the world."
And dare in your heart to make it true.
"What is love?" you ask me, and I have but one answer:
"The only hope we have, and the gift we must not forget."

Giggle: a synthesis of Blosxom-philosophy and Tcl simplicity

Giggle is a small blogging application in Tcl, inspired by Blosxom. It's a fairly straight-forward translation of early Blosxom from Perl to Tcl. It doesn't have plugins, because the code is simple enough to hack on directly.

I'm greatly indebted to Steve Cassidy for making his code available; Dragons and Elegance owes a great deal to the modularity and readability of his efforts.

Ruminations on language choice

Someday I may give in to the buzzwords: Java, Python, XML, Object Oriented Programming, XP as in Microsoft Windows, XP as in Extreme Programming. I may see the light and shout hallelujah. I've tried Python, but I've never really cared for bondage-and-discipline languages, as a friend calls them. And sometimes whitespace is just whitespace. I prefer my loops and blocks clearly delineated -- it's one way I keep them short. Any loop body that's over fifteen lines is probably doing too much. Also, Tcl's three sets of delimiters are enough for me to keep track of: {} for hard quoting and script bodies, [] for command substitution, and "" for 'soft' quoting with variable and command interpolation. It's possible that if Lisp had used [] instead of () for its delimiters, I wouldn't have been so bothered, simply because [] are unshifted on most North American keyboards. I will admit that having the delimiters for proc bodies be different from the delimiters for called procs is useful -- or maybe that's just my biases showing.

One of the reasons I find Tcl so useful as an SGML-templating language is that you really only need to quote one character, [. Variable substitution is a useful subset of command substitution, and I go back and forth about whether John Ousterhout's original idea to forgo the $-syntax entirely was a good one. It looks like a Perl-ism now, though it was probably intended as a loan from Unix shells. Again, my Forth background is undoubtedly speaking here: If I find that a problem needs syntax to solve it, I'll add my own.

It's sometimes hard for me to believe that my Tcl style is still developing after ten years of use as my primary language. But I've come to appreciate the notion that the source code is written for one human to express his conception of the problem to another; the computer doesn't care if you have any style at all.

Simple tools for simple problems. Maybe it's all just about making the language your own. Forth will always remain my first love for many reasons. Tcl is not considered quite the dinosaur that Forth is, but it's definitely no longer anywhere close to new and hip. Java should have lost its shine by now: it's almost as old as Tcl, but it had a multi-billion dollar marketing push behind it. Among the scripting languages, Python seems to be switching places with Perl for general-purpose scripting, while PHP hacks out a niche for itself in Web services and HTML-templating. Having more choices is always good, we tell ourselves in this consumerist society. Pick the tool that most closely matches the way you think.

"I think I've figured out why there are ten times as many Java jobs as Tcl jobs out there. It's because it takes ten Java programmers to do what I can do with Tcl." -- Jeff Hobbs being modest on the Wiki. Tcl does a very good job of matching how Jeff thinks. Or maybe it's the other way around.

A little bit of personal hacker's history

A friend of mine commented on his journal/blog recently that he likes the Microsoft Windows interface, and that he expected me to be upset with him for this. I replied that the Windows interface wasn't a good fit for me (I'm a command-line junkie), but that I believed that people should use what's comfortable for them, and most of all, what gives them the least urge to pitch the machine out the nearest window. (I suppose the marketing-and-usability experts would label this the 'most positive user experience.')

I'm comfortable with small tools. The first programming language I truly felt I understood was Forth. (I don't count BASIC because I didn't learn how a BASIC interpreter works until much later.) Forth is an astonishingly simple language. Data goes on the data stack, addresses go on the return stack, exit means pop an address off the return stack, set the instruction pointer, and away you go. Compared to Forth, even C looked complicated, with its stack frames and auto variables.

The first language covered in my university education was Pascal (which dates me pretty firmly), but it was taught as a black box: code in, results out, what happens in-between is a mystery. Something about compiling to p-code and then interpreting the result. I didn't mind Pascal so much; structured programming was new to me, but the notion that a subroutine should have one entry point and one exit point didn't seem too radical. The tendency of my fellow-students to write two-hundred-line procedures, however, baffled me utterly. "How can you wrap your head around that?" I asked, bewildered, "How can you know what's going in and what's coming out?" The inevitable reply was, "Well, the program runs." I couldn't manage more than a screenful for a procedure; otherwise things got lost. I longed for the simplicity of typing words on a screen and seeing results on the stack. When I discovered that dbx, the VAX debugger, would actually let me run one procedure at a time, inspecting the results as I went, I spent so much time in the debugger that my TAs must have thought I wrote the buggiest code on the planet. It wasn't Forth, but it was nearly instant gratification. And that was that: I was hooked on the interaction. My father wrote thousands of lines of FORTRAN on punched cards submitted in batches; sometimes he'd wait days for output of a single run. His father sold and repaired Marchant Pony mechanical calculating machines, doing laborious debugging by hand. I'm immensely grateful that I have the tools I do; I'm not sure I would have had the patience they did.

I learned C more or less at the same time as Pascal, and FORTRAN shortly after. I spent some fascinated time reading the output of an early version of f2c; it really brought home to me the fact that C, Pascal, and FORTRAN are very closely related -- one can be transformed into another with a fairly simple computer program. Lisp was something new; I hadn't run into the code-as-data paradigm yet, and it didn't stick immediately. The syntax of Lisp also put me off quite a bit -- I had trouble seeing the code for the parentheses. I'm told they become almost transparent to veteran Lispers; I haven't had that experience yet.

(More tomorrow -- I've got to get going.)

Thinking Small

There are things I'm passionate about, and things that I'm good at, and they don't always coincide, but there's a pretty good correlation. I will never be a hotshot software developer -- I think too small. Small languages, small tools, Unix philosophy (see below). But I can solve problems, I can get data from point A to point Z, and I have a nose for bugs. I'm also a strange breed of speaker-to-machines: I have the need for solitude and the deep concentration or 'zone' of higher productivity/enlightenment/touching-the-face-of-the-algorithm, but I lack the disdain for ordinary politeness in everyday affairs. I can be as oblivious as any stereotypical absent-minded professor, but I connect just as deeply with my online friends when we finally meet in the flesh. Too much human contact makes me withdraw, overstimulated and ruffled, but I'm told that I'm a fantastic listener, that I would make a good counsellor or social worker. Love is more important to me than mathematics, but the euphoria of having solved a difficult problem is not to be denied.

It all comes down to thinking small. My mind is not advanced enough to ponder the movements of whole civilizations or whole countries or even whole political movements. I'm not much of an abtract thinker when it comes to human beings. I know my own feelings, and I can hazard a guess at the feelings of those closest to me. And if you put me in a room with one other person with whom I disagree, after a while I can try to put myself in her shoes and understand where she's coming from. But it doesn't generalize well, for me. Just because this person thinks in a particular way does not imply that everyone who lives within a certain distance of her thinks the same way.

Software is the same way for me. The Unix philosphy of 'do one thing, and do it well' appeals to me in a fundamental way. The notions of 'in the end, it's all text in a file' and 'generate your output in a way that's easy to parse' also make a sort of visceral sense to me. The abstraction of 'pipes,' where one program's output becomes another program's input, and so forth, seems to me to be a natural outgrowth of these three tenets taken together.

This is why ambitious projects to 'revolutionize' some computing-related activity always seem to leave me cold. The idea of a 'killer app' is pretty foreign to me, as well. For instance, grassroots non-profits need a freely-available way to keep track of their donors, their clients, their volunteers, and their money. Non-grassroots non-profits don't need these things; they have multi-million dollar budgets with which to buy software and hire technical help. So what's the traditional method for 'delivering enterprise software solutions' to tiny non-profits? There are several:

Buy a shrink-wrapped software package and try to adapt it to your needs, by yourself, with no technical assistance: You may even be able to get a non-profit discount on the software. But this is a sure-fire way to distract you from their primary mission and mire you in detail after detail of how to make the damned machine work. You didn't get into humanitarian work to be a computer technician; otherwise you'd be working at a tech service provider.
Take a flat-fee seminar or community college course on the package, in hopes that it will teach you enough to do #1. This somewhat improves your odds, but only if the package is well-known and the course is well-taught.
Buy a shrink-wrapped software package and then hire a consultant to set it up for you and train you on it: The consultant is then motivated to bleed you dry, and you can't really make any accurate assessments of progress until you're halfway through, at which point firing this consultant and hiring another one is prohibitive.
Buy a 'software and technical assistance package' from a 'technology provider' or TSO ('technology service organization'): This has the advantage that it may get you a deeper discount on the software; TSOs are generally able to aggregate their purchases, and the software vendors will often offer them deep discounts for their PR value (see last article). But since the TSO is also collecting fees for service, some of the same problems with consultants apply.
Open source the wrong way: Download a freely-available package and expect the 'accidental techie' to install it, learn how to use it, and then train everyone else. Don't laugh, this has happened at non-profits I've worked with.
Open source consultants: See #3. Just because a consultant specializes in open source products does not mean that he won't charge you 150% of your budget for the project. All cautions when dealing with consultants apply.
Download an open-source application and then hook up with a socially-minded kid at the local Linux Users' Group: This is actually a better idea than you might think. He may not be the most socially adept volunteer you've ever had, but the experience will look awfully good on his resume. And if you can pay him a little, so much the better. He won't have a family to support, so he's less likely to need full-time work or benefits. Downsides include the need for someone to train your staff in using the machine; training's a tricky skill to pick up.
Pool your resources with other area non-profits and hire a consultant to share (the 'Circuit Rider' approach): This has been used with some success in the past; a major advantage is that it frequently becomes a long-term relationship where the Circuit Rider gets to know your needs very well. The major downside is that Circuit Riders are often very poorly paid, so they have to pack in lots of clients, and so are frequently very pressed for time. Frequently they do have families, but cannot afford health insurance or other benefits. This can lead to budget overruns simply to help keep the Circuit Rider afloat.

All of these methods have advantages and disadvantages. Please comment on this post and tell me if you can think of more.

Next time, I'll see if we can improve on current practice, with emphasis on thinking small.

The Life of a Humanitarian Techie, Part 2 -- Obstacles

First of all, to take advantage of something, you have to have heard of it in the first place. Some of your younger or more plugged-in friends may have heard of Linux, the poster-penguin for copyleft and free software. They may even have heard of Richard Stallman and the GNU Project. But if you ask a typical non-techie "What's GNU?" be prepared to have him ask if you've got something stuck in your throat. So the first major obstacle to adoption of free software is lack of awareness that it exists.

Once they are informed about free software, the first reaction I typically see is skepticism. Non-profits, especially small non-profits, have been burned by technology an awful lot in the past twenty-five years. What started out as the promise of labor-saving, cost-cutting, mission-enhancing tools has all too often turned into more hoops to jump through, incompatible data formats, training and re-training with exhortations to 'think like a business,' endless re-typing and re-entry of data, and a distraction from their mission. My friends working at non-profits have learned to dread the words 'Oh, we're building a new system to deal with that. It'll be great!' So the second major obstacle to widespread adoption is technology burnout.

Related to this is the difficulty that most small non-profits don't have a dedicated techie. At best, they have an 'accidental techie,' a person working on the core mission who has some interest in technology, who thereafter gets drafted to deal with new technological issues and systems. Every non-profit has someone in the office who you go to when the copier's broken, before you make the expensive call to the repair guy. These 'accidental techies' are frequently overloaded as more and more technology comes in to the office, and they frequently feel tremendous pressure to continue volunteering for the tech work even long after it's ceased to be rewarding or fun, simply because of the knowledge that no one else in the organization can or will do it. So they start to resist new technologies, as well, knowing that a new project or system is just going to wind up being more work for them, possibly jeopardizing their work on the actual mission of the organization. So the third major obstacle to widespread adoption is lack of dedicated staff and adequate division of labor.

I mentioned Microsoft's 'philanthropy' in my last article. There are many software houses out there developing software for non-profit use; Microsoft is just the biggest. Have a look at this list of software providers to nonprofit organizations. Do you see a single open source project on that list? Of course not. And that's not even including the nonprofit-serving ASPs (Kintera, GetActive, GuideStar, Convio). With the introduction of just one truly usable, friendly, and well-supported open source project in non-profit funding and development, all of these companies have two choices: either transform themselves into a service organization selling support services, or watch their customer base erode over time. Their clients may be non-profits, but they certainly are not. It is in their business interests to keep open source and free software out of those markets for as long as they possibly can. How do they (including, emphatically, Microsoft) do this? With money, of course. It's their one big advantage, so they use it like a club. Take a look at the websites of three self-described "providers of technology assistance to non-profits": NPower, the Non-Profit Technology Enterprise Network, and CompuMentor. Notice anything interesting? Each one of those organizations has a prominent link to Microsoft or its products on the front page, usually with mentions of discounts. And none of those front pages mention so much as a peep about Mozilla, Firefox, Linux, GNU, or any other open source or free software project. Since most small non-profits have no technical staff of their own, they are essentially at the mercy of the technology providers for advice and consulting. How long would Microsoft maintain a deep-discount relationship with a technology provider who openly advocated using free software? How many of these technology providers' budgets are being underwritten by people who see non-profits as an essentially captive market? This helps to explain the lack of widespread adoption of open source and free software among non-profit and non-governmental organizations in a simple and classically capitalist fashion: The money's on the other side.

Later in the week, I'll look at ways that grassroots non-profit organizations and socially-minded techies can help each other overcome these obstacles.

The Life of a Humanitarian Techie, Part 1

Up to this point, most of my living has been made with computers. It seems a natural fit with my skills, and when times are good it pays the bills pretty well. But all too often it's just business. People with money making more money. Too often I feel reduced to a cog in the machine, enhancing nothing but the company's bottom line. In contrast, the last really good gig I had was making software that helped engineers determine how much steel was necessary to reinforce a building during a sizable earthquake; buildings designed with our system survived the Northridge quake in 1994 and very likely saved hundreds of lives. Yes, of course I want to make enough money that my family is comfortable. Of course I'd like to be able to afford a home, and to educate any children I might have. But I don't need to be rich; let me support my family and have a positive effect on people's lives, and I'm a happy man.

Where do you go when you care about saving lives but don't care much about money? Non-profit work, of course. Non-profit technology workers are in as short supply as teachers in this county, and that's saying something. There are wonderful people working in both fields, but they have an incredibly difficult job to do, with very few resources. Ever notice how Microsoft routinely donates software 'valued at' huge amounts of dollars as evidence of Mr. Gates's philanthropy? Quick quiz: If I donate 2,000 copies of Microsoft Windows and Office to your kids' school system or the humanitarian organization where you work, and the programs retail for $495 a seat, but cost me $5 each to make (the research and development costs being already sunk and budgeted for my multi-billion dollar business), did I really just make a donation valued at the equivalent of $1 million, as will surely be reported in the papers, or did I simply guarantee myself a revenue stream of four hundred thousand dollars (that's money from you to me, of course, and now it's money that you can't use to buy books for the kids, feed the hungry or protect battered women) when the software 'needs to be upgraded' in two years for $200/seat? (What a deal you're getting, that's more than half off the retail price!) Not bad for a $10K investment.

And where do you go if you care about making useful software but don't care much about money? Perhaps you've heard of a little fad called open source. (If you know and love a socially-minded techie, you may have also heard the term free software, usually accompanied by an explanation of the form "free as in speech, not free as in beer.") A bunch of freaky-idealist, not-terribly-socially-brainwashed geeks decided that computer programs were meant to be shared and studied, like literature or traditional scientific inquiry. So they invented something called copyleft, which basically says: I share my work with you, you share any improvements you make on my work with whoever asks you for them, and you get them to agree to do the same with their improvement on your work. Copyleft is not, as might be assumed, the opposite of copyright. It is rather a use of copyright to ensure that future generations are able to study the work, build on it, and pass on their improvements to it.

You'd think this would be a natural fit with people who want to save lives but don't have a lot of money to spend, wouldn't you? After all, a homeless shelter in Detroit needs e-mail, fax, and web access for its clients so they can apply for jobs and public services online in the same way as a homeless shelter in San Francisco does. A food bank in Dallas needs to track and manage which restaurants and grocery stores can do donations on which days just the same way a food bank in Portland does. A human rights organization in Jordan needs the same kind of secure, distributed, portable method of reporting on human rights abuses as one in Kosovo.

The software doesn't even need to be developed, in these cases. It's already out there, at the end of those links, ready to be downloaded and installed, free of charge. So what's the problem? Tomorrow I'll write about some of the obstacles in the way of wide use of copylefted software by non-profits.

What Karl wants to do when he grows up

OK, folks, bear with me here. I've had less sleep than usual, and so this is going to be a bit more stream-of-consciousness (or perhaps stream-of-conscience) than my average entry. But I promise you it'll give you some insight into the dark recesses of my brain.

Last time I talked about television and information overload. One of the patterns in my life that really disturbs me is that I tend to use the Internet as substitute for television, and abuse it in some of the same ways that television gets abused. There's such an incredible wealth of information out there, and I can browse until my eyes are square on any given subject. But in the end, all of that information doesn't make knowledge, it doesn't mean anything unless it is turned into tangible action. All of the political blogs I've watched over this past US election season, all of the outrage and passion for democracy that I've seen -- it's no better than television if it doesn't move me, if I don't decide to get up off my bottom and do something.

The same is true of the Free Software-related activities I've been part of for lo these many years. I've been using UNIX-derived systems since 1986, and running my own since I've had hardware powerful enough to do so. My opinion of the notion that I should have to pay someone to lease a program that I can't change, copy, or even examine closely without violating some sort of "End Users' Agreement" is very much like my friend Elena's reaction to the thought that she should actually pay directly to see a doctor -- it's nothing short of obscene. In her case, it's a matter of "isn't that what we pay our government to provide?" whereas in mine it's much more like "isn't this what programmers and scientists do -- build on each other's successes, learn from each other's mistakes, and pass the results on to the next generation?"

I have benefitted from the contributions of thousands of writers, programmers, scientists, and hooligan-nerds who came before me -- their work has enabled me to earn a living, to communicate with people far-flung across the earth, to share joy and sadness and exquisite mathematics with a group of friends who care about computers and communication and ethics and love poetry and yes, even the occasional television show.

So what can I do, to carry on this fine tradition of putting words and expression and computer programs in the hands of people who will change them, copy them, and even examine them closely?

On my business card, there is a motto: making the magical world of computers and software gentler to human beings. That's my manifesto. Whether by coding, by writing, by giving lectures and seminars and workshops, or by methods I've yet to discover (and perhaps, if I am very lucky, some methods that you suggest to me), that is what I want to do with my life: Use these slabs of silicon and waves of electrons to increase the power of love in the world.

How's that for a pipe dream? Or a life's work?

TWS - Tiny Web Server

TWS is a webserver, an SQL database engine, and a persistent Tcl interpreter all wrapped together into a stand-alone executable.

Take a look at that statement for a moment. Take a few thousand lines of C, about a thousand lines of Tcl, add a zip-file full of configuration content, wrap it all up in an executable file, and make it under a megabyte and a half. OK, two megs with a modern Tcl library.

My hat is definitely off to these folks.

(Update: After months of complaining, I took two hours and corrected the two flaws keeping me from using TWS for general work -- the URL-hacking security hole, and the lack of any logging. I'm very, very pleased.)

My difficulties with television ...

I mentioned yesterday that I hated television with a blinding passion. It's probably worth it to go into some of the whys and wherefores of that statement, and to explain some patterns in my life about which I have some ambivalence.

First of all, bashing television has gone in and out of style over the last three decades, at least -- Harlan Ellison's Sucking the Glass Teat wasn't that long ago, was it? And what about the TV shows that have brought some of my dearest friends together, like Buffy or Firefly or, saints add preservatives to us, due South? No, my complaint is not so much the programming, although that, like anything else, obeys Sturgeon's Law with a vengeance. I mean, I don't want to burn all the bookstores down just because Ann Coulter's got a new bestseller out. My problems with television lie primarily in two areas -- one, the glorification of the short-attention-span culture, which I find both frightening and inevitable, and two, the commodification of the audience into receptive consumers for the benefit of the advertisers. Media consolidation and the stifling of political dissent enter into my misgivings as well, of course, but I see them as consequences of the two major objections above.

The television tells us, again and again, that being part of the modern world means constantly being bombarded with new information, and that speed is of the essence when dealing with this new information, because it is all vital. It encourages us to 'process' information as if we were machines designed for that purpose. But I don't feel any attraction, as a human being, to 'processing' information, any more than I have any attraction to 'processing' food. The same society that keeps us too tired to cook joyfully, to share the gathering of the daily bread with our nearest and dearest, is the one that is constantly screaming at us that we need more information, and we need the information that only the advertisers have. It isn't true, and even though we learn the cynical lesson that television programs are really there to sell us the products advertised during the commercials, we still accept the practice with no more than a passing reflection on the ways it shapes our actions and reactions.

The humanist paradox of what I call the here-and-now (roughly speaking, North America since 1945) is that although we've shown ourselves to be very good at inventing 'labour-saving' devices and exhibited a huge appetite for boundless growth, we're not any happier than we were in 1945. We produce enough food to feed the whole world, but somehow the whole world doesn't get fed. The United States is one of the wealthiest nations on the globe, and yet we can't seem to get all of our people fed, much less make a serious dent in feeding the rest of the world. But the amount of attention-grabbing material generated on behalf of huge commercial interests in the same timeframe is ... well, you can read a television schedule, right? How much of what is in that schedule is commercials? How much of it has anything to do with anything but keeping the money in the hands of the people who put on the programming? You want my primary objection to television? That's about the best face I can put on it.

A little reflection to start the new year ...

This year is going to be all about devoting time to what's important to me. But I can't do that until I determine what's wheat and what's chaff. So I expect to spend a significant amount of the winter in contemplation and meditation, asking the questions "What is really important to me?", "How does this help me live the life I want?", and all of those other horribly philosophical quandaries that sound alternately like I'm a navel-gazing yuppie or a neo-Classicist wannabe.

The thing is, the yuppie lifestyle just doesn't appeal to me. I'm terrible at being a materialist, I despise television with a passion that almost frightens me, and I don't believe in the power of unfettered capitalism to solve the world's problems. Hell, at this point, I'm not sure the world's problems can be solved.

So why all the introspection? Mainly because I'm tired of being depressed -- I've been in what feels like a hibernation-state since active development on my last real project stopped in March of 2003. The economic struggle has sapped my will in so many ways, and I'm tired of giving it that kind of power over me. So I want to rediscover my passion for things, for ideas, for people. Because I'm not going to get to do this again, at least not in this body and with these opportunities.

I expect that my contemplation will follow these general guidelines:

1. People are never chaff. Certain people may not be ideal to be entangled with, but people are never objects to be gotten rid of. I know it sounds simplistic, but it's a moral value, if you will.

2. Wealth and security are not synonymous. I'm not sure security really exists here and now, although compared to River in Baghdad, we're all pretty damned secure. I had an opportunity to work hard and neglect my family and brown-nose my way up once, and I didn't like the feel of it. Wealth in this country feels too much like keeping the boot of progress on the necks of those less fortunate.

3. Love is the most important force in my life. This has many ramifications; it also puts me seriously at odds with what seems to be the prevailing spirit of the here-and-now. Learning to say "I will not hate you, but I will not participate in this activity that I see as destructive to others and incompatible with loving my neighbour" may be the single hardest lesson of my life. Jean Chr�tien's "We will not participate" may in fact be the most moral thing I've seen a politician do in the past decade. I expect I will be returning to this topic many times over the coming year. It raises all sorts of questions, mostly having to do with how many steps of the causal chain do I need to feel personally responsible for, and how can I make ethical choices in the midst of a society that endorses such practices as factory-farming and near-slave labour simply by its economic structure? How much of that can I bite off at once?

4. Technology has widely unacknowledged second- and third-order effects. While the widespread use of computers and the Internet has made possible at least part of Bertrand Russel's dream of unfettered communication between ordinary citizens around the world, those same computers are being used by oligarchies and economic powers to maintain their hold on the levers of power. As a technologist and a humanist, I feel I have a responsibility to benefit the little guy more than I benefit the big guys -- the big guy can get along just fine without me, but the little guy needs all the help he can get.

There, that's a good place to start. Comments welcome; I hope to refine my thoughts out here in this semi-public forum, and thoughtful criticism is always a help.

A flashback ...

5am, Monday 30 May 1988, Sheremetyevo Aiport, 20 km outside Moscow, USSR.

The grueling 16-hour flight from new York was finally over; my butt was still vibrating. My 79-year-old grandmother had made it through with surprising aplomb and energy, but she was still exhausted. We disembarked from the Aeroflot 747 and emerged into an eerie silence; the plane was the first one to land that morning, and the airport was very nearly deserted. An empty airport is a very different thing acoustically from a full one, to hear the echoes of your footsteps in an airport is deeply wrong in a way I am not sure I can explain. We descended a long, dim corridor towards the ominous-sounding Passport Control. No one spoke, and I wondered why, thinking perhaps they were too tired, too drained from the long journey. And then I saw them -- a line of about a dozen fresh-faced Soviet youth, standing at some approximation of parade rest, not looking particularly hostile or particlarly welcoming, with that blank expression that speaks volumes to those who have seen it, as some of my companions had, on a thousand borders all over the world. And each youth was holding an automatic rifle in an easy two-handed grip, very carefully not pointing it at anyone. It wasn't until after I had the thought, "Dear God, they could kill us all from that position; no one in the corridor would survive," that I realised they were in uniform. That was the moment when I realised how lucky I was, how safe my world had been to have never seen this before.

3pm, Friday 5 November 2004, 12th Street BART Station, Oakland, California, USA.

The group of policemen were gossiping loudly, in that hail-fellow-well-met sort of way that tells you that they've never been told to keep their voices down in their lives. They were standing to one side of the entrance to the station; there were six of them. Two armed in the way one is used to seeing transit cops -- flashlight on one belt hook, automatic pistol on the other side. The other four -- how can I describe them? I don't know guns well enough to tell you a maker or model, but I know these were fully-automatic rifles, the next thing to a personal machine gun. One of them adjusted his rifle on its strap, and though the muzzle never pointed at me, I found myself abruptly imagining what it would feel like to look down the barrel of it. I had seen the individual men in fatigues carrying these things at airports since 9/11, of course. But they tended to travel singly, or in pairs at most. Seeing four of them together, with their weapons casually slung, as if it were nothing that they could simply pull a little piece of metal and hold it down and everyone in this bustling plaza would either take a bullet or run screaming for their lives. And I knew in my head that I should be grateful that these were familiar American good-ol'-boys rather than silent, unreadable, unmistakably Slavic young men. But that didn't stop my heart from breaking.

Jeremiad

America, who was most beloved of nations! See how she is cast down, and rends her garments at the faithlessness of her usurpers!

Boys in uniform, her precious children, sent to kill and die in lands far from home; who will teach them the way, show them the reflection in the stranger's eye, instruct them in the language of Brotherhood? Where is her mercy, her love? Twisted, perverted, made to serve that hideous beast, Mammon.

Children perish in her streets, starving, orphaned, alone -- where is her bounty, her endless love and generosity? Plundered, attacked, destroyed by the usurper and his minions.

Death have they sown, and death shall they reap; see how she weeps at their abuse of her companions, so that none dare come to her aid.

Electrodes and boxes, forever denying their kinship with the Other; she weeps as her flesh is stained by this, her depraved guardian's barbarity.

Faithless pretender! Hypocrite! Mouthing his prayers as he mocks the Law, serving none but himself and that great Beast, the Deceiver and False Prophet!

Greatness is in her soul, her eyes still a shining beacon to the nations. Her fidelity is of legend; her friendship a glorious gift. But she is despised by those most sworn to protect her, and is undone.

Heaven knows the hearts of those who transgress; nor shall they escape punishment. Things unseen will be seen; deeds done in the darkness shall be revealed in the light.

Israel, O Israel! Hearken to the words of the Lord your God: "THOU SHALT NOT KILL!" The Law is the Law, and God is God!

Jerusalem, your children are suffering! Put away your swords; no more children made motherless, fatherless, lifeless! Listen to their cries and hear the voice of God!

Killing in the name of God is not righteousness; it is blasphemy! She hears the lamentations of the widows, the orphans, the maimed, the dying, and the sound will not leave her ears.

Love shines in her eyes; but he has forgotten her love, and goes to make the war plans. She weeps to be broken and abused so, abandoned, rebuffed.

None dare to resist the transgressions of wicked men, even as they take more tribute, and fill their coffers with the blood of children. None dare assist her, alone, her virtue vanquished and her skirts torn. Where are her friends now?

O friends of America! Arise, resist! Deliver her from the clutches of this Beast and his ministers! Show her your love, your fidelity, your steadfastness! Bring her children home and care for them. Obey the Law of the Lord your God!

Peace is denied her; her armies are broken, one by one, and her children lament. Strife and murder mark her days; her nights are filled with sorrow.

Quick is the poison he feeds her; he takes her blood and her treasure and feeds her on his lies. She looks in vain for aid; her faithful companions have deserted her, and she is surrounded by enemies.

Remember the widow, the orphan, the stranger: these you are commanded to protect. Hear the shouts and cries of the prisoners; their warnings are for you.

She calls out to the nations: "Help me! Deliver me before I am driven mad by sorrow!" But their hearts are hardened; they see his actions and call them hers. And thus he defeats her a little more each day, the poison doing its deadly, corrosive work.

The usurper dares speak the name of the the Lord your God, but he knows nothing, obeys nothing, believes nothing. He dismisses the Law, sends this holy land's sons to do senseless murder, and is deaf to their cries upon their return, beaten and battered and maimed.

Unite, and obey the Lord your God! Be not deceived by these hypocrites, charlatans, deceivers! Obey the Law, love one another, care for the old, the infirm, the stranger, the lost. Show your reverence to the Lord your God in how you treat all souls.

Vision is given to him who will see; the Lord delights not in cruelty, in mayhem, in destruction. Build your groves, care for your flocks, look to each other and to your Lord for help and comfort. Save this precious land from division and destruction; embrace your neighbour as one of your own kin.

Weep for the children, of all the tribes, a thousand lives betrayed for false piety and pride. Return, America, away from endless war. Your children need you; they are crying and hungry.

Xenos, the stranger. Remember the Law: protect the stranger. He is far from home and helpless; the Lord your God entrusts his safety to you.

You are indeed His beloved children; return to the fold now, and care for your holy land, for she is bleeding, wounded by the usurper's poisoned dagger. The time for playing with toy swords is past. Leave vengeance to Him who has claimed it; keep the fields and tend to the dying.

Zealotry in obedience is full of wonders: the stranger is your brother. You are, as Cain was, your brother's keeper. The Lord your God has commanded you: Thou shalt not kill.

Bitter wisdom

America is a country that needs war to sustain its economy and hate to nourish its pride. -- Ed Turner, the only black faculty member at UC Davis, April 5, 1968.

Less than three months after George W. Bush was inaugurated in 2001, I lost my job and the only hope I ever had of achieveing the so-called American Dream. The past three and a half years have been hard-scrabble, punctuated by periods where I couldn't afford to go to the doctor because I was uninsured, where I have abandoned physical therapy because it I couldn't afford it, leading to what may well be a lifelong impairment, where savings that was intended to go for the down payment on a house was instead committed to keeping my family fed and housed, and the one windfall from the Clinton years swallowed up by the very same tax code that gave billons of dollars in tax cuts to people far wealthier than I. Not only am I not better off now than I was four years ago, I very much doubt that I will ever be able to make up the difference. I have gone from being able to support my family of four single-handedly and comfortably to watching all of the adults in my household take $10-or-less jobs in an effort to keep the house over our heads.

I fully expect another four years of this treatment to defeat me utterly -- I quite literally do not expect to survive it. This is not to say that I will not fight, with all of my heart and soul. For my family, my friends, my loved ones, I must do that much -- but I am breaking inside, and I can feel it. I can no longer afford to be ill, but I am pushing my body to the point where it is clearly communicating to me that it will ot take much more.

That sound you hear is yet another formerly-middle-class American falling through the cracks. There will be more of me, as the social safety net frays and disintegrates, and sooner or later, long before you expect it, one of them will be you.

This is what happens when you elect people with no conscience, no empathy, no ability to put themselves in another's shoes. You get imperialism and hubris and policies made up of flights of fantasy with no conception of their human costs.

America will remain at war in Iraq to sustain its economy, to enrich the defence contractors and the ruling cabal's cronies. And oh, the pride. Down with the queers! Down with the Muslims! Down with those filthy peace activists! America for Americans! And we will tell you who the real Americans are. And you will hate who we tell you to hate. And you will be proud to hate them.

Ed Turner died in the early 1970's, after a long and tortured struggle with the culture of which he never quite managed to be a part. I do not intend to follow the same path. But I feel, tonight, more than I have ever felt in my life, the truth of the words he spoke on the day after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

The Chant Has Begun

the spirit of the people
the spirit of the people
the spirit of the people
the rhythm has begun ...

old men with their protocol
lead us off to war
sometimes we don't even know
what we're fighting for
marching to the beat of their drum

leaders we no longer trust
told too many lies
the promises they made to us
were never realised
hear me now the chant has begun

nowhere left to turn
no-one left to turn to
voices raised in anger
they don't have the answer
our whole world's in danger

oil slicks on the ebbing tide
progress out of hand
blind men choke on swallowed pride
heads down in the sand
don't wanna see the damage they've done

trees destroyed by acid rain
falling from the skies
when our children place the blame
who will tell them why
hear me now the chant has begun

why is love so rare
all this talk of warfare
voices raised in anger
they don't have an answer
pass the word along
we can wait no longer
too much blind destruction
follow love's instructions
now the chant has begun

(chant)

make your choice there's no escape
add your voice, the chant has begun

-- Level 42, The Chant Has Begun, 1986.

Blosxom

One you get past the odd-looking name, blosxom is a very sweet, elegant piece of software. About 450 lines of Perl, a screenful of configuration in the top of the script, put it in the right place, and it just works.

Now to enable writebacks!