Thoughts about Bookkeeping

What'll be fun is when some of the smart cookie NGO charities get their books projected in real time.

Make a donation, watch the money go to work. Track every penny if you like.

A "no secrets here" open books policy often makes for good fund raising, plus gives donors bragging rights they might not otherwise have.

However, these same practices might work for a mom & pop coffee shop just as well. Buy a bagel, watch the debits and credits ripple through the system on a wall-mounted flatscreen.

Is the profit margin scandalous? No.

Do loyal customers like seeing a special fund build, so that staff might get some much deserved R&R? Yes.

Per my limited Free Geek experience, I'd say top quality free and open source generic bookkeeping software is still in short supply.

For the NGOs at least, it'd make sense for Foundations to band together and to give them a boost. Pioneer some new designs that take advantage of hindsight, why not?

"Want our millions? Then document your expenses using X" might be a stipulation.

Of course that might get out of hand, if each funder tried to micro-manage which open source bookkeeping application got selected, as a condition for funding.

A more realistic goal is to design and implement systems capable of generating the kinds of feedback requested by each funder. That might include a growing archive of videos, with donors getting special access rights.

Don't be afraid to tell it like it is, only to see some backers drop away, even as others freshly join and/or step up their involvement.

Not every relationship is meant to last as long as every other. A given funder might relish the one night stand as it were. "Get in and get out, make a difference" is the preferred M.O. (the "pinch hitter" design pattern).

One hallmark of a friendly system is it's good about dumping its data, doesn't interfere with migration to competing systems.

Unfriendly systems count on using the captured data as leverage: "Want out? It'll cost ya."

Dissing Quakes

I spent some of my day, between day job activities, mocking Quakers for being such dweebs around technology. Here we are in a futuristic Open Source Capital, with a new cable car and everything, and we don't even have a Mapparium yet (unless Google Earth counts).

So where's the Portland Geoscope gonna be? Or should we have more than one?

The details: our business Optoma is on loan for legitimate business purposes and I'm snarlingly protective, like Sarah on steroids, when so-called Friends come along begging, confiding they don't actually take care of their own young (by investing in said equipment), but instead rely on hand-outs and charity.

Query: how can a religion have claws if it outsources the care and feeding of its own young? Many will say Quakers shouldn't have claws, being all "Peaceable Kingdomy" and like that, to which I retort: don't lions have claws?

On another front, I'm unable to find a power supply for the Toshiba Satellite A60, my WinXP laptop. I've been taking Ubuntu to work a lot more. But if we've decided to go with Visual FoxPro again (my staple for some years now), then it'd behoove me to get that asset back in the game. I'll order a new power supply if I have to [update: I had to].

Enjoyed gabbing with Wanderers today, Bill and I side by side, with our Ubuntu Dells, except he's booting Win98 off a memory stick and home growing an assembly language piano, which worked flawlessly in the demo.

Liz popped up in a chat window, next-gen type that she is, with more cyber skills than even most boomers. Sometimes having Wanderers join in cyberspace is the best one might do, and really it's not half bad that way (though I prefer meeting for coffee at least sometimes).

Related blog post: Quaker Informatics (May 17, 2007)

BarCamp Alpha

:: Charlamagne Tower room,
Olympic Club Hotel and Theater,
Centralia, Washington ::

"Alpha" has a couple of established meanings in geekdom. "Alpha geek" borrows from "alpha dog" or "alpha chimp" i.e. is a zoological term referring to some species of king or queen of the hill, a bossy mammal (can snakes be alpha?).

But the "alpha" in BarCamp Alpha traces to the other meaning, of "first draft" or "prototype" with lots of built in permission to get it wrong, to make mistakes.

After alpha, comes beta, still expected to contain bugs, not yet a production release ready for prime time.

In this case, our mistake might be the venue, which is somewhat spartan, what with bathrooms down the hall and train sounds at night.

On the other hand, for young professionals it's reminiscent of college, plus some BarCamps are actual camps, more like at Burning Man (an art event) or in the field, like in a tent city for refugees, ala One Laptop per Child, so by those standards these digs are relatively posh.

Portland's CubeSpace is closer to ideal, as an actual meeting space, but Centralia is closer to half way if attracting campers from both the Portland and Seattle areas (hence the name).

There's wifi, there's alcohol.

Personally, I think it's a fine venue, but then I'm already a McMenamins fan.

The theme of this particular BarCamp is: open source in the health care sector, especially when it comes to facilitating outcomes research.

The idea may at first seem oxymoronic, given the inherent confidentiality of patient records, but one of our goals is developing open source pools of accurate case histories, scrubbed clean of real patient identities, yet useful for research purposes.

Besides actual data, research and teaching hospitals might also share, and collaboratively develop, clinical table schemas (registries) plus interfaces for populating them (front ends) plus share techniques for reliably gathering data at the point of care, and in ways that don't interfere with a hospital's primary care giving responsibilities.

The funds raised for these projects should pay for design and implementation skills, not so much for basic development tools, as the latter (Linux, MySQL, Python... Mozilla) have already been paid for and contributed to the global ecosystem as shared assets, under the various open source license agreements.

Relevant presentation: What is Open Source? (PDF)

Another Cube

Executive Toys

No cube or corner office is complete without an assortment of executive toys.

Some of these disassemble into a surprising number of parts, disconcerting for the job interviewee perhaps, if fiddling absently, but there's information to be gleaned from such events.

In the foreground, CubeIt! from Huntar disassociates into 24 magnetic Mites, though only a few insider cognoscenti have any idea what that means (so why not flaunt your knowledge, if you're a high powered exec?).

The five "flippy balls" are even more obscure. Spin them in thin air, and they flip to the other color, a kind of jitterbug action (more esoterica).

That sculpture in the background is no way a toy. That's Barrel Tower, a Kenneth Snelson original and gift from the artist.

I'm bullish about my cube.

More Curriculum Writing re MVC

(click pic for larger view)

The innovation here is putting an end user in the picture, both "for real" and as a figment in the model, i.e. as the "modelled end user" (or users as the case may well be).

Modeling its users is part of what a model should be doing, as a part of its job of persisting state. And no, I'm not just talking about delegate avatars per Second Life and Active Worlds. A user model might be quite primitive, as low level as "logged in" versus not.

By this way of thinking, a user-controlled change in view needn't involve the view subscribing to the controller directly, as the model itself is made aware of some end user's change in preference (through the controller), so that next time the viewer polls, or otherwise gets notified of state changes, the view is refreshed accordingly.

Adding the end user, in other words, turns this MVC picture into a classic feedback loop of cybernetics fame.

The end user steers and fine tunes the model in response to what the model is showing (or maybe how it smells? -- this user has a big nose and the viewer looks like a funnel).

Of course this diagram makes no judgment as to the suitability of the model for the task at hand, i.e. some closed loops like this become dead ends -- which is why it's important to get your head out of your model from time to time (which is your freedom, as a human being).

Catching Up

I'm running behind in my study of TurboGears on Safari, using the impending switch to Pylons for undergirding as an excuse to tred water.

CherryPy is certainly worth learning, along with the Kid templater. Per the Kusasa discipline, I'm not one to shy away from mastering these kinds of tools (some of the heavier metal sort, I do shy away from -- working on it, getting pro help).

Tracking those orbiting lunar probes (Japan's project), wondering what they'll discover.

Fine Grind has updated its lighting to sweet effect.

I sat next to "rodeo girl" Gayle today after Meeting, jawing with Ron about a topic Ron knows the most about: motorcycles. Gayle has this feminist angle, whereas I'm the proud rider of TinkerBell.

Dough Stories

The goal of teaching fiscal responsibility, by giving my daughter the use of a debit card, proved expensive when the card hit bottom, but without overdraft support. Doh!

The bank reversed some of those penalties, plus extended more credit, in the form of a new DWA credit card in my name. It pays to know your small business banker.

I'll redesign the overdraft picture, probably by offering it in-house, like she needs to keep a $200 minimum (a cushion, like an air reserve on a scuba tank (they still have those right?)).

It's not like Tara did anything wrong, just that I didn't feel like sharing keys to the control panel (I'm kinda proprietary in that way), and so she had no easy/quick access to a transaction history (yes, there's keeping a check book, and yes, there's banking on-line).

A friend and I bought new prayer flags today, for the back yard. The older ones, blown down recently, are enqueued for ritual burning.

A paycheck came in today, which is good as we were running beneath the surface.

September PPUG

We had a far out convergence of Pythoneers this evening @ CubeSpace, Portland. Our four lightning talks, two of them mine, were most illuminating: tux droid; my EuroPython experience; PyFlakes; PIL.

Ruby folks are holding a dojo in the same space, with their own screen and projector facing the other way. About 16 of us, 4 of them, lots of friendly banter.

Jeff is moderating, inventing process as he goes (resourceful guy).

The Intel guy's PIL work is about a robot detecting orange traffic cones. He projected some source code for smoothing and separating the R, G & B channels, with some simple arithmetic to detect orange.

Earlier today: just a light gym workout, mostly on the elliptical. I had 10 flatscreens within view, 9 illuminated, running 7 distinct programs.

Summarizing a Thread (Synergeo #35613)

I think the underlying problem here is people imagine a 4 CCP ball tetrahedron then zoom in on the K-points, where the balls touch, and make that a "dividing point" (which is why Frank keeps saying "solid").

That divider then takes us in our minds' eyes to imagining 2 frequency, which needn't mean any doubling in size if we're simply multiplying by subdividing.

On the other hand, it might also mean doubling in size.

The problem here is you can always subdivide and picture something else inside of what you've got. Brawley makes this process come to an end with his pionts [a neologism] in Tverse. We require no such dodge. Draw a complete Magic Kingdom inside any A module, complete with castle and flying tinkerbell. Continuing to subdivide ad infinitum is your sovereign right as a thinker.

But don't let your pride and/or fascination with continuing to subdivide keep you from appreciating the austere beauty of a simple design, one in which we've rationalized our ratios as best we can, and our best really is better than what some earlier ages managed. Why surprised? Humans have been on a learning curve and it shows. So?

Anyway, somewhere along the way, Zubek started using the 2F tetrahedron for reference, thinking 4 CCP balls must make one of those. Did Steve feed him this corrupting thought? I have no idea.

But as 2*P*F*F+2 makes clear, where F=1, and P=5, the number of balls in a cuboctahedron is 12 in the first layer (same with icosa).

That "12-around-1" is the true starting point (similar to the start of Tverse), and the volume is 20, with Frequency unity. So the 8 sub-tets of the VE are now each set at unity, with six half-octas of volume 2. 8 + 12 = 20.

Notice, now, that each of those 8 reg tet components of the volume 20 cubocta, in turn made from 12-around-1, is in turn defined by four (count 'em) CCP spheres.

This is the IVM then. All edges are CCP diameter in length, go from ball center to ball center. These edges define two shapes: tetrahedron and octahedron, of volume ratio 1:4 and population ratio 2:1.

The rhombic dodecahedra that encase each of the IVM/CCP balls, as voronoi cells, are what're volume 6, made of six Couplers each of volume 1.

A lot of this info is encoded in the form of QuickTime movies from the mid 1990s, by Richard Hawkins. His art is still on the web to this day, thanks to strong freedom of speech traditions.

Plus of course it's all in Synergetics, complete with color posters. Nothing new.

If you lived in Korea, your kid'd probably have learned all this from the back of a cereal box by now (or from the free DVD inside).

Kirby

Wanderers 2007.8.29

We met for unprogrammed sharing this morning.

Much of the chatter was astronomical in nature: the shepherd moons in Saturn's rings, the fact of our Moon's inching away from our Earth year by year -- but then aren't both getting heavier?

Jim Buxton, our solar eclipse resident fanatic, hadn't much use for the lunar eclipse we'd just experienced.

Don mentioned Katie Couric's plans to anchor from Baghdad next week.

David Tver talked about goats and their environmental impact.

New fitness goal: gym once a day, even if just a short visit, any day I'm in town, through the end of September.

[ posting via a free access point in the Lloyd Center, while Tara does some shopping for school clothes ]

Which Hollywood Star for President?

Hindu cultures have done much to mix celebs with politicos with minor dieties, and that may be catching on here, what with President Reagan & Cronies being such a smash hit at the box office with many voters.

Who would we consider drafting today, of the Hollywood variety?

I'd propose Whoopi Goldberg, though I'm quite aware of the hilarity and fast times we'd enjoy under the current Governor of California.

I just like her Calypso energy whereas so many of the guys are so slimy and retarded (no offense guys, been there done that).

It's all about balance. We could revert to a John Wayne down the road, when all the shrill testiness has died down a bit. Whaddya say voters?

Back to reality:

I like having camps champion constituencies, no question. You don't have to be a huge party to be impressive.

Take the Pirate Party in Scandanavia for example: very exclusive, but walks a good talk, has clout. Voters give it just enough credence to stay in the game, like adding hot sauce (them Veekings ain't cowards).

In the USA, we're mostly supposed to declare Red or Blue to even get chips on the table. Then at higher levels (e.g. intelligence community) it's like we're completely forbidden to play either Red or Blue cuz that's just "too political."

Go figure. A nation of turkeys if you ask me or Ben Franklin (smile).

for bbq

Liberal Islam

One of the cool aspects of American Islam is it hasn't inherited all the legacy battles of the Mesopotamian region.

Sure, there're tensions, even gangs, but high level teachers have their roots in the civil rights movement, post USA Civil War.

Even if not devout followers of MLK, they understood the nonviolence stratagem, and see it strongly enacted in the person of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, an Afghani.

So you'll find no shortage of patriotic Muslim Americans ready to defend against the likes of Bin Laden, no love lost.

It's not about being "pro" 911 (not about being a twisted psycho). But nor is it about being "pro" attacking Iraq (for what again?).

Liberal Islam also has no silly restrictions against using comics (e.g. cartoons, manga) when treating of serious subjects, including the religiously themed.


Related readings @ Math Forum: [1][2]

Re: Spherical Trig

[ in response to Lou Talman @ Math Forum, re "spherical geometry" becoming important, in tandem with geography and graph theory, typos fixed, hyperlinks, local color added ]

I don't think that spherical *geometry* (or any other non-Euclidean geometry) was ever particularly important as a high school topic. If you meant spherical *trigonometry*, that's a horse of another color.

Geometry, trigonometry whatever. The fine points of your "non-Euclidean" are of some interest though. I take it up in more detail in geometry-pre-college.

And your suggestion that it was displaced by Newtonian calculus is arguable, at the very least.

Joe Clinton showed me the spherical trig books that used to get air time pre the big push to gateway everyone through Calc (moooo!). Fast Food Nation indeed.

Spherical trig may just have died on the vine when it was no longer expected that high school graduates could become surveyors and/or navigators with no further formal education.

Yeah, a presumptuous class thing. As we're learning in South Africa, it makes perfect sense to get young boys on the water, sailing, before they get recruited into landlubber gangs, and a lot of distracting politics (Lara did an excellent story about this awhile back on CBS -- she's chief foreign correspondent and an RSA native).

Navigation arts make a big come back in my scenario. We don't *let* it "die on the vine" the way they did in the dark ages 1900s (but then they didn't have the GIS/GPS tech we now take for granted, poor slobs).

In education, such deaths are usually quite protracted, and that explains the "recent memory" part.

- --Lou Talman

I'm glad you too feel secure in your model. Nice isn't it?

Kirby

IEEE Picnic

:: the fantasy ::

Our tour guide with the Army Corps of Engineers professed ignorance of our IEEE guild, at least with respect to our geographic origins, and so queried us before his talk, a kind of namespace check, to see if he'd need to decode the likes of BPA (Bonneville Power Administration) and/or WPA (Work Projects Administration).

As it turned out, we were mostly local yokels with or without family members. I was there with Carol (my mom) and Tara (my teen). We also visited the Fish Hatchery and saw some really big sturgeon, enjoyed coffee from the gift shop (chocolates by Ghirardelli).

Mom hadn't been here since her trans-America trip with my dad as a newly-wed (car trouble in Montana, genius mechanic).

Someone (not me) asked where he, our tour guide, was from. "Indiana, Pennsylvania" as it turned out, which was cool. I have family there too, where we both knew Irelands.

:: the reality ::

Anyway, Powerhouse One is a WPA project dating back to the original design of Bonneville Dam and Lock.

Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned in the area on the promise of starting this project, which had huge momentum behind it.

Myopic easterners expressed skepticism that our Pacific Rim economy, rather recently contacted by Lewis & Clark, would ever make use of the six planned-for generators, let alone the 21 we're now using (that's counting the smallish two fish ladder engines on the Washington side, plus the one in Powerhouse One for local use): "the Dam of Doubt" they called it.

Transformers bedeck the topside of Powerhouse One and put stronger pressure behind the high voltage distribution networks, while lowering amperage. This works pretty well to counter unwanted power loss over the long haul.

He anticipated questions about pricier superconducting solutions such as are found in some parts of the Russian system, but doubted we'd be needing such services down here any time soon, so far south, and the very last in the sequence of Columbia River megawatt dams, which start up in Canada.

The big local news is the ongoing remodel of the generators themselves, which still contain parts dating back to the 1940s and before. Engineers are gradually switching in some new parts, including new blade assemblies, designed to be more fish-friendly plus less oily/leaky to own/operate.

:: a newer blade assembly ::

PPUG

:: Jeff sharing about Python 3000 ::

I'm not sure if PPUG is what we're really calling ourselves (Portland Python User Group). We used to be PORPIG (Portland Python Interest Group). Have we morphed from pig to dog?

I got here late so didn't manage to propose anything for the agenda. I came prepared to give two lightning talks (5 minutes each): my Vilnius-OSCON talk, and the tux droid talk (with Crunchy kindly lent to me by Tara).

I did manage to catch the concluding minutes of Kirk McDonald's talk, about using his Pyd library to write Python extensions in the still-obscure D language.

Jeff talked about Python 3000, using Guido's OSCON slides, prompting some interesting discussion, in which I participated, defending Guido's decision to change the behavior of the division operator, plus mentioning his intent to standardize on Latin-1 in the Standard Library, except for strings like author name. Third party modules are welcome to go wild however, as long as keywords remain keywords.

Mark reviewed David Goodger's OSCON tutorial: How to Program Like a Pythonista while Jeff flipped through David's slides.

I volunteered my lightning talks for next time, plus enjoyed the more informal chat that came afterward -- an important aspect of any Python meetup.

We opted for the IEEE picnic this Saturday. With so few weekends left in the Summer of 2007, I want to maximize time with my family.

Esozone

:: Paul Laffoley delivering his keynote ::

I inadvertently woke Trevor to come to this, originally hyped by him as worth catching, and we were both glad we attended.

This artist, Paul Laffoley, was able to enthrall for four hours, working off some bottled water and a defibrillator. His visuals were simply stunning -- deeply alchemical, occult, weird. That's what his audience is into, and that's what he delivers. His speech, on the other hand, is first person "been there, done that" with improvised science fiction.

He's argued for eight hours with Bucky about the Mobius Strip, had that mind-blowing phone call with Kenneth Snelson, did Claude Bragdon's 4D house, a basis for Heinlein's crooked one, as if Bragdon had had the time, builds space elevator time machines in his head and paints them... Gurdjieff, Ouspensky.

A walking compendium of some of the 20th Century's best circus magic, with intimations of what's coming in the 21st. An earnest student of utopia. Shades of Hieronymus Bosch. Many allusions to Dante.

Complete with self-interruptions over others' voices, coke bottle shadows, stories of assistants he'd driven insane. Oh, and a Gaudi version of the World Trade Center, post-911. Wants to live in a Klein Bottle house, grown from some philosophical vegetable matter.

Got my 50 dollars' worth, that's for sure.

OK, time for Bridge Pedal.

:: trevor's comics @ backspace ::

Rippling DNS

I repointed my 4dsolutions.net to some new domain name servers, making them the veridical authorities regarding the hostname and IP number of the hosted archive.

In sum: I jumped free of jumpline.com, landing on some Dual Xeon at a datacenter in Houston, Texas. The move took under 24 hours.

My .py files @ Oregon Curriculum Network are once again popping source code, thanks to a documented AddHandler in the appropriate .htaccess file. I even got the geoquiz working again (uses MySQLdb in the context of Pythonic cgi scripts).

A Fuller Schooler: Trevor Blake

Darfur

As a local Darfurian, my goal might be to simply escape the region, visit later. This is how many people have historically improved their lives: by moving. North Americans are especially familiar with this strategy.

The global NGO community shouldn't buy the fiction that only "political prisoners" deserve something called "asylum" (relief from suffering). Rather, once you're born a human being on Planet Earth, freedom of movement is your birthright, a freedom perhaps curtailed as you grow older and break others' rules, but why does simply being born in Darfur merit a life sentence to that region?

This is your planet, as much as the next guy's.

I think Darfur represents an ideal set of challenges for OLPC and P4E people to walk their various talks.

Add wireless using satellite, hand out some laptops (not just to kids). They're designed to be self-teaching i.e. this is not a "literacy first, then computers" model, but a "literacy through computers" model, combined with peer teaching ala the South African design.

Portable movie theaters, for showing documentaries about the great outer world outside of Darfur (plus the occasional blockbuster) would also be a part of this program, though individual XO screens pretty much serve this same purpose (like that little screen on the seat back in front of you, on a fully equipped Airbus).

The Simpsons (movie review)

[Some kind of "spy kid" review, excerpted from elsewhere]

Common knowledge that Simpsons, like Google, is heavily infiltrated, in the former case through Korea, as direct infiltration of domestics is forbidden (Google through China).

Hence the cleared-for-public-view insider shots of an NSA listening center, where Lisa's worst paranoias are confirmed. Those calls to the boyfriend next door might be monitored. Emails too.

More subtle was the allusion to Marvel comix superhero Spiderman, mixed with capitalist pig iconography and long associated with selfishness (Homer) and product fetishes (as in Wired Magazine -- Bart himself a manikin sex toy in some catalogs Flanders never sees (though his boys maybe do)).

Some may see the evil hand of Moscow in all this (environ- mentalism leverages such as Greenpeace against NATO), but that paranoia's maybe too old school for most tastes ("old school" as in "during recess -- monkey bar talk").

On a more positive note American Dad continues to boost recruiting volume through at least the first few hoops, among women especially (per long term equalization goals -- gotta bring guys up to speed).

Myself: recently returned from Lithuania, toured "KGB museum" disguised as an overweight American tourist (very persuasive, even to me).

Greetings from Richmond

Some folks around here, merchants included, have taken to calling this the "Hawthorne District," but our neighborhood newsletter is still about Richmond. Hawthorne Boulevard is actually our northern border, with Sunnyside neighborhood across the way. Powell, otherwise known as Highway 26, limits us to the south.

In cyberspace, I'm waiting for a level three engineer to do something in Apache that'll make Python source files pop up on screen, like before. The takeover of digitalspace.net by jumpline.com hasn't been entirely without glitches.

I'm in a coffee shop with Derek, thinking about what to have next. A rooiboos latte, honey infused, might be good.

I'm expecting to have dinner with Dave, missing Wanderers this time. Martin Zwick is presenting on his paper Systems Metaphysics: A Bridge from Science to Religion. I made some comments in the egroup about it, which I'll now dump to a world readable text for public linking purposes.

We were hoping Larry might join us at dinner this evening, but he's tackling his basement, trying to diagnose a problem. Derek may be otherwise occupied as well.

Tara phoned from a mountain wilderness area covered by Verizon, saying she's having a great time hiking with Larry's Chris, Jane, June and Luci.

The call came while I was in said basement, enjoying slides of Amanda's wedding (Chris & Larry's youngest -- their eldest, Greg, is by now back in Moscow).

MetroFi continues to expand its coverage of Portland neighborhoods, per this browser mashup. [update: that link goes nowhere now, as MetroFi later quit the scene, might never have had a clear storyboard in the first place, hard to know].

Metrofi access points
in and around Richmond Neighborhood
July 31, 2007

Programming for Everybody (P4E)

I'm in this very high ceilinged venue, the Oregon Convention Center, listening to Guido outline his plan for transitioning to Python 3.0 via Python 2.6, a bridge version. I like that he offers a strategy, not just the changes themselves. He gives himself a responsible role, not too heavy, not too light.

In that vein, I don't want to saddle him with a lot of Python in Education content he never signed his name to. CP4E was his original abbreviation, used to secure some funding for IDLE. Although I want to acknowledge the heritage, the influence, I'm not wanting to get him in trouble if I take a dead end path. So I've doctored the slides to say P4E more frequently, dropping the C. Plus I have HP4E to play with (these days, everyone thinks "HP" means "Harry Potter").

That may not sound like much of a difference, but legalistic types don't need much of a difference, to see the difference, so I'm feeling good about this change.

So I'm up next. I published some notes just a couple hours ago, to edu-sig, to help focus my mind, keep me on track.

Technical note: digitalspace.net, the ISP behind 4dsolutions.net, was acquired by some new company. The process of website conversion has apparently partly broken access to my site. I've opened a trouble ticket. If you can't access "the slides" (above), please be patient and try again soon. Embarrassing to develop this glitch right when I'm making my work more public.

I stayed late to hear Larry Wall's State of the Onion, right after a great auction (Perl people are so cute).

He confirmed my impression that Ruby really owes more to Perl than Python.

Most of his talk was about the different dimensions along which scripting languages vary, netting a big phase space. And let's own "scripting" was his advice (Perl has no hope of shaking the label). Don't fight it, just change its meaning if that's what you need to do.

Geospatial and Open Source

I'm attending a talk on the effect of open source on geospatial. The database and CAD packages are being geospatially enabled. New views, giving fire fighters a real time simulation of the insides of buildings, of what's under the street, are becoming commoditized.

"Think of SimCity but with real data" said Geoff Zeiss of Autodesk.

Geospatially-enabled IT plus Web 2.0 means General IT is absorbing GIS, resulting in a convergence of hitherto separate cultures. GIS is also converging with CAD.

We're also seeing new open geospatial standards, such as SFS, GML, web mapping service (WMS) and web feature service (WFS). ISO's SQL/MM includes geospatial extensions. OSGeo has matured.

Given the field forces have lots of retirement age personnel, there's a big need to update telco and utility records so that coming generations know where stuff is. Historically, central data repositories are significantly out of date vis-a-vis what's true on the ground.

Ajax Tutorial

Our forum leader is top notch, a true master of his field, able to spin up an OS + Browser in almost any permutation, in order to better empathize with his users, and kill their bugs. His name is Alex Russell, an author of Dojo Toolkit, count me a fan.

For those of you who don't know, Ajax is a foundational technology of Web 2.0, a second wave of browser bling, courtesy of a Renaissance in browser technology. Microsoft actually gets a lot of credit, for introducing an ActiveX control for interacting with a host over the wire in the background, with no click sound in user space.

The basis for dynamically changing a web page, without a reload, without an audible click, was born. Other browsers quickly followed suit, obviating reams of workarounds and hacks that had made this stuff too esoteric for 99% of developers.

I wasn't so aware of JSON before: a non-XML solution, quickly handled by eval() on the client side to create a data-rich Javascript object. I also finally installed Firebug for which Alex had plenty of high praise.

Idiomatic Python

I parked Razz near Hollywood and took the Max to the Portland Convention Center. Two geek circuses are already in full swing, so I'm walking around with two badges, two bags with bling.

Now I'm in Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python by David Goodger, who works in the financial sector, which explains all these (portfolio, equity, position) examples, in addition to the more typical Monty Python based ones, as in:

>>> given = ['John','Eric','Terry','Michael']
>>> family = ['Cleese','Idle','Gilliam','Palin'].
>>> pythons = dict(zip(given, family))

Although the content is very basic, I'm finding it of excellent quality. Safe to say: some of these idioms won't survive into Python 3, but mostly he's encouraging good habits. For example, given the 'in' operator works on so many collections, use 'key in dict' not dict.has_key(). Be less idiosyncratic, i.e. when possible use the more common pattern versus the too special case.

Hey, collections.defaultdict is a pretty cool tool. maybe using int as a factory function, though note you won't get any "no key" errors (it'll just create a new one).

I surprised myself this morning, what with all the switching among laptops and cases: not until I got to the conference room did I realize I was lugging the Toshiba, not the Dell, meaning I'm in Windows, not Ubuntu at the moment.

Good chat with Lars Lohn, now contracting with OSDL on the OLPC project. I hope he introduces me to Justin, a project leader and student, also speaking next session. Lars and I remembered each other from our conversations two years ago. I also met up with my old Plone friend "fifer" (Richard Amerman), plus encountered Kevin Turner (FreeGeek) in the Ubuntu Zone, where I am now.

Maybe I'll finally hook up with Don this evening? S'been a tad hectic since getting back from Lithuania. Tara is still count down for lift off. Hey Nick, leave voice mail if you want me to get back to you. I'm unresponsive to simple vibrations.

Transformers (movie review)

The future of humanity is at stake and it's all up to this boy and his cube, with help from the muscle car, and in hopes of winning the heart of this girl. Not a new storyline, we all realize (OK well, maybe the cube part's a little different -- kinda Borgy -- but not the robots, although these ones are quite expert at disguising themselves by curling up).

The Pentagon was happy to show off its best toys, in this wash of eye candy. A broad cross section of kids, some adults, get a character with which to identify, plus many will see the car they want to drive, or truck, one of the many airplane options. Flatscreens galore. Department store bling. Lots of shopping ideas.

Was the whole point of that little dog to embed a link to Taco Bell? Lots of amped up brand name iconography, blended with other governmental, patriarchal, patriotic razzmatazz and symbols of authority (scenes of national security goons bossing USA homelanders were a focus in The Last Mimzy as well).

The autobots themselves might be cast as advertising something more abstract. How about the ability of capitalism -- the cult of imaginatively using one's head -- to morph endlessly, if sometimes only one-dimensionally.

Transformers is a loud nerve-jangling ride with lots of bovine growth hormone or testosterone or whatever that is. Amusement park stuff, cram packed with clichés. Enlist today. Serve your country.

Wanderers 2007.7.18

Dr. Moira Gunn is our guest at Wanderers this morning. She's chatting away about Philosophy Talk (she's a fan), the possible two channel solution to the need for more tech talk on the public air waves.

But mostly she's talking about her new biotech book (martini glass on the cover).

Speaking of that martini glass, why do hardened journalists carry hard liquor around (a stereotype perpetuated by many movies)? You can disinfect a cut with it, brush teeth with it, bribe with or give it as a gift, plus have fun with it. Even journalists who don't drink have been known to lug some liquor. And why scotch and not vodka? Easier to see if it's been diluted, plus how much you have left.

Now she's talking patents and big pharma in the context of a world economy, analogies to the music industry, trends in the price points, Brook Shields' tatoos. Obviously I'm in the presence of a true teacher, not "just" a journalist.

Earlier, we went around the circle introducing ourselves, giving thumbnails. Terry did his "I'm a contrarian" speech, some threw in deep questions (Don: "what hope do we have?"), while I pulled off a fifteen second version of my stump speech, this time with the added spin of having just returned from Vilnius, with lots of Wanderers happy to see me, me them. Hi Nancy!

The other aspect of my morning is I'm needed on stage for Day Two of this Saturday Academy class on Pythonic Math, a strategic Silicon Forest pilot.

I'll treasure this brief partial overlap with Moira as the sweet encounter it was for me.

OK, back to Razzmatazz, my trusty Subaru, waiting outside.

Sunday in Vilnius

I enjoyed a quiet Sunday in Vilnius with young Geoffrey French, author of gSculpt and gSim, plus a professional graphics designer using 3ds Max in the UK.

We ascended Castle Hill, a thousand-year-old site, then had lunch in Old Town, comparing notes on such topics as soccer hooliganism, South Park, Ali G, and Ricky Gervais in Extras and The Office (also meta-classes in Python).

We also visited an amber museum. Fossilized tree sap, oft times with "inclusions" (insects especially), dating back 40 or 50 million years (or more) is an important extract in the local ecosystem.

Baltic amber is typically mined off shore, or from a patch of "blue earth" in Russia. Tons of the stuff are recovered every year.

I bought some tiny dolls-in-within-dolls for Tara.

Python in the Control Room

I started my second day at EuroPython learning about how ConocoPhillips is using Python to improve integrated operations of North Sea oil platforms in onshore control rooms.

Coin3D wrapped in Pivy on top of a database, serving out through Qt, gives operators real time views of the drilling platforms and surrounding vessels. We zoomed in on the Ekofisk field, checking out weather conditions, logistic features (e.g. vessel trip planning, viewing cargo manifests).

The demonstrated application implements collision and speeding detection, sea bed visualization. Applying a dynamic language such as Python was a big experiment and considered a success. Our speaker was Roly Seehaus of Kongsberg.

Fabio Pliger from the University of Verona also cast his talk as a success story regarding Python's ability to perform in real time, generating critical feedback, this time within the pharmaceutical industry.

His shop is still Windows-based, but Python plays well with others.

I next learned about the somewhat experimental PyConsole.py running atop Python's win32console module. This gives users a Windows compatible command line, atop which another Python interpreter might be loaded.

By use of callbacks, one might use multiple consoles to leverage the operating system's multi-processing capabilities (e.g. instead of Python-level threading).

The speaker, Michael Graz, also demonstrated using AJAX to invoke a server-based Python command line from within a client's web browser.

The Pygame guy unfortunately had no sense of time. Though obviously a genius, we barely got to the core substance of his discussion (tmap, RenderUpdatesThreaded).

Jonathan Fine of The Open University in the UK demonstrated the public MathTran server (mathtran.org) designed to put mathematics on web pages. The service takes math formulas written in Tex and sends back an image for web page embedding. Python glues it all together. Let's give it a try. Sending \sum_{k=1}^\infty \frac{1}{k}, receiving back the following png:

.

OK, cool.

On the agenda: two way translations between TeX and MathML.

Johnny Stovall, a wild man Texan expat from Indonesia belted out his Data Driven Parsing for the Real World. The guy's been on a 36 year mission to develop a utility he's been told is impossible (he's been nicknamed "the impossible man").

But what is a data driven parser and what is it for? It doesn't depend on an exhaustive rule-based description of a knowledge domain or human language.

Mostly he talked about how computers complement humans by accomplishing tasks that humans cannot (but I think we knew that).

I believe until what he's looking for -- some kind of very generic pattern recognizer -- is better defined, the kind of non-computable problems he imagines tackling will be handled on the human side of the fence, though with the aid of computers. I don't think we're quite ready to do Python sprints to solve the perennial problem of creating an Artificial Intelligence.

Connecting the Dots

The talk went OK I thought, in Zeta (all the rooms have Greek letter names).

The gist:

Students like to be clued in regarding technology, especially when it represents the promise of better living standards. Calculators shouldn't artificially delimit what we mean by "technology in the classroom."

Understanding of computers, how they're programmed, gives a deeper appreciation for "how things work" in many walks of life e.g. data bases are prevalent.

Mathematics and computer programming need to be better integrated from an early age. The object oriented paradigm (OOP) brings some unifying heuristics to basic mathematics, as we're able to cast polynomials, vectors, polyhedra, rational numbers and so on as "math objects."

Working backward from a vision of the future in which many more people are much more computer literate, we need to ask ourselves: how did we get here (a more enlightened world) from there (the dark ages past)?

P4E succeeded not because everyone had to learn Python or had to choose computer science or programming for their profession. Rather, we converged problem solving skills with coding skills, code being another kind of mathematical notation (the machine executable kind).

Our integrated approach also involved connecting the lexical to the graphical, keeping the so-called left and right hemispheres of the brain integrated.

For eye candy I had my hypertoon projecting as people took their seats. During the talk I rotated the Beryl desktop cube a few times, switching to various websites.

For example, I demonstrated looking up 1, 12, 42, 92... in Sloane's On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. We might use such sequences to motivate writing a few Python generators.

I didn't actually have time to run any of my source code, nor even explore it in much detail.

I only got two questions, one about whether I get any income from my teaching (yeah, some) and one about H.S.M. Coxeter and his possible influence on my curriculum writing (he's one of my heroes, helped give focus to polyhedral numbers).

There were some microphone problems and page up/down weren't working in OpenOffice so I kept resorting to the mouse wheel, which was awkward.

P4E: slides, paper, 4dsolutions, edu-sig, CP4E, OEIS, Kusasa, PyMath, Mathematics for a Digital Age, math-teach HP4E: Hexa-wuh?, EuroPython 2005, Hexapent Turtle Shell

Lithuanian Control Panel

Blogger control panel in Lithuanian
(click for larger view)

Ratatouille (movie review)

The food critic, mirroring a film critic, delivers the moral of this film: anyone might be a cook (film director, great actor... food critic). What that means is: not everyone is born to do just anything, but anyone you meet might be a genius in ways that surprise you.

How this movie teaches its lesson is by setting up a lot of interspecies bigotry (not hard, as it's real, at least on the human side), with the crossover being quality food, in which members of both species are true believers, but this one rat in particular: he has the right stuff.

Although a kids' cartoon, I found ways to piggyback my adult reveries, about kings and queens and their inner circles 'n stuff. The word "democracy" is still echoing from Michael Moore's latest (a certain UKer was most eloquent about it), and the Quaker idea of "that of God in each and every" -- easily mappable, as a maxim, to "the genius light within" or St. Augustine's "inner teacher."

The rats inhabit a kind of Hades, a netherworld. Remy overcomes his misanthropy enough to actually become one of "them" (joined in his loneliness by his idol, one recently departed) if, that is, you think looking out a man's hat, puppeting his limbs, might just be a metaphor about the mind-body relationship ("naw, Disney? Philosophical?" chuckle). Think "rat = homunculus" in this case an ego dealing with class and personality complexes (shades of Flushed Away).

This was a family outing, with Tara to my immediate right, then Julie and Carol. Later we split up a bit, me heading to Men's Warehouse (redeem a coupon, shirts for Vilnius), Tara to American Eagle, Carol and Julie wandering an old haunt. We rendezvoused at the ice cream stand just outside Macy's, Carol's treat, and drove home.

My thanks to Tara for filling my iPod with a lot of good music. Tonight's listening: Blue October: Into the Ocean, Hate Me (Tara and I agree there's a lot of talent here).

River Views

Personal Workspace

A control room may be as humble and spare as one laptop and one child (the controller), which is close to where I am, except I'm a grownup. My one laptop (the other one's in the closet) is now the wildly popular Dell Inspiron E1505, a duo-core jobber, running Ubuntu, in my case with Beryl 0.4.2 (a release candidate).

CubeSpace, which hosted the wildly successful Portland BarCamp a few weeks ago, is premised on this model: find your cube and fit in. Doesn't have to be the same cube every time. Join a counter- part cube farm in Tokyo. Flit about, a wandering cube farmer. Except I've always envisioned my PWS as a tetrahedron in GST, but that's just my Fuller Schooler aesthetics shining through the covers.

So O'Reilly's Safari Unleashed or whatever they're calling it, proved its weight in gold just now. After fighting the problem for hours, as to how to get my 1280 x 800 desktop to share out to my 1024 x 768 Optoma or some like-minded projector, preferably on both screens simultaneously.

Answer (as I found by browsing Safari): use the Ctrl-Alt-Fn-minus to lower the resolution, which'll make that 1280 x 800 surface (one side of a cube of two caps and four desktops) into a virtual desktop not quite fitting in its little brother window. I can live with this outcome.

What's amazing about this nVidia card is it'll then play a DVD movie through both displays simultaneously, though I don't ask for "full screen" as that'd mean "partly off screen" in my space. My Toshiba, the one in the closet, hasn't mastered that trick yet.

Deja Vu (movie review)

I'm just focusing on one particular scene here, wherein Doug Carlin, played by Denzel Washington, throws a kind of tantrum in a control room, breaking a monitor.

Why does he do this?

He's being let in, as an insider, to the core counterterrorism center, the better to do his job. The monitors show events four days in the past, which the experts claim is based on satellite feed and some post processing.

Carlin does some empirical testing of his own and confirms his suspicion that he's being lied to, which is when he throws his fit. How can he really do his job most effectively if he doesn't have a realistic grasp on what his degrees of freedom really might be? Is he actually able to retroject himself into the past? He really needs to know this, and he tries to hammer that point home.

I found this scene effective in that I wasn't buying the satellite feed model either, as I kept telling Tara. Besides, we both knew from the previews that time travel was somehow involved. My impatience found cathartic expression in Carlin's throwing a fit. He's just trying to do his job, so why all the BS?

Carlin and the other controllers have witnessed a horror and will do pretty much anything to prevent it from happening again -- or might they really undo the past itself, even at the cost of erasing the present? Yes, apparently.

Within the domain of timeloop science fiction (12 Monkeys being another of that genre), this one resolves nicely, like a clever slip knot.

Summer Retreat

Wanderers gathered at Joe's place in Oregon wine country, to learn about his long term experiments in horticulture and forestry, and to compare notes on practically any subject under the sun.

Given the Willamette Valley's almost Mediterranean ecosystem, with drenching cold winters and hot dry summers, a relatively small set of plants and animals are good to go here.

Although redwoods and great sequoias grow in largely separate bioregions of northern California (along the coast and in the Sierra Nevada respectively), Joe hopes his experiment of interleaving the two species will work well on this property. Once these trees are big enough, they tend to create their own self-sustaining micro-climate.

At one point I felt we were becoming too cult like, with the sun beaming down between rains, listening to ourselves chatter in the well lit, finished barn (more of a workshop). When people prefer the sound of their own philosophies to unedited Mother Nature, that's a warning sign.

I left the group and hiked up to the old oak, taking in the view, coming down from the mountain with a message for my peers: "you're all crazy" (I got a few nods of assent). But the group was transitioning to the outdoors at that point. Joe cleared a main trail with his Kuboda tractor and before long we were all guzzling Nature's Own kool aid, taking in the forest.

And besides, we are an interesting group, chat wise.

Listening to Gus and Bob blab about who they know in common in the Mars Society, what experiments they've been up to, what telescopes made, articles read and/or published, is all very entertaining and enlightening to boot. Too bad I'll miss Gus's upcoming talk on time lapse photography, which I expect will be excellent.

Terry was busy spinning thermodynamics, channeling Greek philosophers. Gloria led a discussion of family design patterns in relation to ethnicity. Phil, the book store owner, suggested I read up on those tough guy Teutonic Knights given I'm heading to Lithuania soon.

Another Control Panel Fragment

ProQuest search panel
(with special thanks to Trevor Blake)

As a card carrying Multnomah County Library user, I have access to the New York Times historical database, which includes ads as well as articles. I've been using the above control panel to scan for relevant projectable citables to help my audiences get a grip on some recent history.

Here's an ad citing Bucky's infamous "nature is not using pi" meme, which in 1980 sounded fresh enough to serve as a recruiting tool. This company is looking to hire some new crew members.

NYT ad: Apr 27, 1980 pg. F33

So that's Shirley Sharky on the left (below). I got to meet her in Ed's Georgetown apartment during that big shindig in 2004 he cohosted with his daughter Ashton, with foci of her own.

I got to share lasagna with Thomas Zung and Shoji Sadao as well. Dick Fischbeck was in the little kitchenette where Ed kept the gin.

Anyway, I tend to get a little giddy when I'm around so many beautiful people all packed into a single meetup like that.

NYT article: School of Tutors Uses World as Campus,
by Sharon Johnshon, Sep 7, 1980
(Janet Bergman with glasses)

Now it's time to watch the evening news with Katie Couric. Tonight's closing story: Lake Superior is at an 81 year low. How low will she go? Container ships are especially affected.