Future Proof and the Extended Now

Work for somebody? Think twice before voting for McCain

I'd like to add some personal color to my previous post on the McCain vs. Obama choice.  It's a well-worn saw that the tone of a company's culture is set by the CEO.  Watching Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and currently National Co-Chair for the McCain presidential campaign, cheer madly at the Republican National Convention highlighted contrasts for me that I think, if you work for someone, you'll find well worth your attention.

First, let me say that despite having had to deal with Meg's eBay, I went on to build about 40% of the interactive features of this very website, which won Best Web 2.0 Innovation for 2007.  During that time I also graduated with a 3.7  GPA from Carnegie Mellon University's Master of Science in Software Engineering.  And then I went on to be Senior Staff Software Engineer at a major financial firm, where I am currently after about two years, and where I've been privileged to write some of the greatest code I've had the opportunity to create.

Back in mid-2004, I was hired by eBay on a three-month contract-to-hire basis as a software engineer.  I gave two week's notice at my current job.  One working day before I was to start at eBay, eBay canceled the contract, with neither recompense nor apology.  I know that they did this to several people at that time, from information I had from the good people at the staffing firm I worked with.  Luckily, I worked for some of the best people ever, and I got my old job back, if barely as they were about to hire my replacement.  That was a very close, very scary call back in the job market at that time in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Then eBay called me six months later, and I was hired again for the same job and on the same terms.  Wanting get back into full-time software development, I went ahead with it.  Then a graduate student (in software engineering at Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast campus), I was told three months into the contract that the contract would be renewed for three months and that I would not be hired while I was still a student. 

Huh, why didn't they mention that up front?  Anybody see a pattern here?  But that's just the beginning.

At the end of that contract, it was renewed for only two weeks.  I was told that because of an upcoming re-organization of the department I was in, my contract could only be renewed for two weeks as staffing plans were not absolutely sure yet.  I promptly found a much better job, dutifully gave and honored my two week's notice, and did a decent job on the knowledge transfer/hand-offs of my current projects.  Five days before my last day, my manager came to my desk and asked me if I was sure I wanted to leave. 

Can you guess my answer?  Well, of course it was "yes"!  In the years since then, I have heard from countless others about their, or their friends', similar stories about eBay.   While eBay certainly has many very skilled and creative employees, it must be much more difficult for them to hire in the "Silicon Valley" than it is for almost any other company.

Regardless of where you stand on the legal rights of employees, would you really want live in a country with a politics any more heavily-influenced by the people who were behind this way of doing business than it already is?

The Presidential Race: Will It Be Magna cum Laude . . . or Summa cum Dumma?

McCain's candidacy seems to be coasting on the odd perception that the Iraq misadventure is somehow a "victory".  We see him neck-and-neck with Obama in the polls despite the recently-revealed fact that he doesn't seem to even know how many houses he owns.  Against this backdrop, I find myself realizing that I just don't know how Dubba (who maintained "a gentlemanly "C" average at Yale" -- and how do you get into HBS with a low "C" average?) or McCain (who had at Annapolis a "a low class rank (894 of 899) which he did not aim to improve") made it through their higher education.  It's possible that thinking hurts too much for them to do much of it.  

A favorite angle of attack from these dummies seems to be accusing Barack Obama of not having much of a resume.  As a job for two college summers, I worked full-time for Acorn and INFACT (now called Corporate Accountability International), grassroots community organizing groups.  This was difficult work.  Sometimes, it was dangerous, as I learned when a co-worker came back with a smashed up ear after having ventured a few blocks from where I was working, into gang territory.  

Before entering politics, Obama had an impressive career as a grassroots community organizer.  Unlike our Presidential and would-be Presidential dummy friends on the right, he "graduated with a Juris Doctor (J.D.) magna cum laude from Harvard".  He also risked his entire political career on the totally red-herring (at the time) stance of opposing the Iraq war before it was started.  That is certainly an impressive resume.   

McCain's speech at the Republican convention focused on reasons that we should fight for our country, presumably in places such as Iraq.  When we are frustrated, our first impulse is to fight.  Blindly carrying through with that impulse is truly the opposite of wisdom, and also of "the art of war".  The reality of the Iraq war is a giant, bloody subsidy for oil and the contractors involved in the war.

We need someone who can think enough to avoid wasting our nation's future on reasons to  subsidize Halliburton/KBR and the like.  The cost of the Iraq war, approx. $25 billion per month, thus far works out to about $2500 of the $30K of federal debt so far accrued for every individual in the U.S.   Median income per household member (working and non-working) is about $27K per year.  

We need leadership that can avoid this kind of nation-ruining expense where the end result is even less security.  Not to mention, jeopardizing our safety by draining our last-ditch defense, the National Guard, killing about half a million people in Iraq, and ruining much of Iraq's infrastructure in the process.    Vote for magna cum laude, not summa cum dumma.

Ubuntu in the Sky with Diamonds, Part II: ATI + Linux Woes? Vesa Driver Works for Me

Solution technical details are posted.

Earlier, I detailed some travails with getting decent screen resolution on an external (workstation-style) monitor to my laptop running Ubuntu Linux.  Initially, the proprietary ATI driver provided some relief, albeit at the cost of taking 'sleep' mode away from the operating system.   A few months ago, tempted by the latest ATI proprietary driver, I upgraded.  But after some torture it was all only to end up having to fall back to the low-res xorg-ati driver.  Worse, the whole thing forced me to flee to my old Mac Mini!

So I am very happy to report that I've now got the best of both worlds -- good resolution and operating system 'sleep' mode.  Very surprisingly, the humble vesa driver does the trick!

Possibly it was always so, but in days of yore for yours truly at least, good screen resolution on a 19" monitor and operating system 'sleep' mode were mutually exclusive!  Linux forums are so loaded with people doing loops over problems related to ATI graphics cards that I would bet that it is one of the top obstacles to wider Linux adoption.

Maybe that's a chapter that can finally be closed.

Wildflower Long Course 2008!

1.2 mile swim, 56 mile bike, 13.1 mile run.  Mile 50, bike course: Ugh, feel kind of sick, like I have the flu.  Mile 7, run course: Wow, feel better!  

Problem: "*Bummer*" something like the flu I had a couple weeks before, or a remnant of it, got to me after a couple hours out on the cool morning windy flats of wild eastern Monterey county, out by Fort Higget.  Or maybe it was that bleachable stuff on the inside of my hydration system that I thought was on the outside!  

Whatever it was, camping and cheering and having a decent swim, first chunk of the bike and last piece of the run made it all very worthwhile.  A classic that has been going since eons before I had even heard of the sport, Wildflower is actually three triathlons over two days at an absolutely huge lake in Monterey County, Lake San Antonio.  With upwards of 8,000 athletes and a few tens of thousands more fans all located about 50 miles from the nearest gas station, this is a unique event.

As a very amateurish "triathlete" it was a fun learning experience to train for and do the event with Team Sheeper.  What a lucky privilege it is to participate with such a bunch of fine athletes.

Our camp:

Our Camp

Team Breakfast

A Neck of Lake San Antonio

Getting Food Ready, Camp

Lone Sheep in the Morning

The Country by Lake San Antonio, Monterey, CA

Transition Area

The massive Wildflower transition area, where the change from swim to bike and from bike to to run is made.

More Transition Area

Teammate in the blue-and-red jersey middle right, behind the orange water bottles.

Transition Area and Part of Product Exhibition

Me, All Set Up and Stoked for the Event

This is my little piece of paradise in the transition area.  You'll notice the markings on participant's legs and arms.  Everyone has to get their oldest-that-year-age (yes, tri culture is brutal) and number marked on them.  The orange band on everyone's left leg is the timing chip device.

Just Out of the Water

Feeling good here after a successful swim.  No heels or elbows in the face!

Beginning Swim to Bike Transition

Whoof, I'm out of breath.  Swinging my arms to get up some momentum here, and taking a big breath to get more oxygen in and co2 out.  I had kind of sprinted into the swim finish.

Starting Bike

More Bike

Yet More Bike

Finally Feeling Better

The first hour of the run was just savage for me, unfortunately, due to the factors I mentioned above.  As far as I get it, this sport is about feeling good out there!  However, here I am finally feeling a bit better.  That first hour slowed me way down, but here I am just glad to be through that period.

Kick!

Even a little left over for the finish and feeling good.

Yay!

Glad to be done with this one, given that first segment of the run.

Ooof!

Recovering from that fun kick at the end.

Despite that first hour of the run it was a great event, and will have to bleach out my bike water tube and fully shake off any flus next time!

No matter how one fares in the actual event, camping out at Wildflower and cheering for friends in the other two triathlons that weekend always makes it fun.

California Cities Adopt Grassy Swales to Filter Run-off Water

The grassy swale: Consider this wonderful pursuit, perfectly combining function and design.  A drier version of the marsh wastewater treatment plants such as that used by the City of Arcata, CA, they give us the option to do something good for the environment and, by extension, ourselves.  Not to mention, they also provide some welcome landscaping.

Grassy Swale for Runoff- RWC Post Office

Grassy Swale Public Info, RWC, California

Grassy Swale for Runoff #1, Menlo Park Office Park

Grassy Swale for Runoff #1, Menlo Park

Looks like it's catching on!  It reminds me of my last doctor's visit, when whole wheat bread was recommended.  Yet another innovation popularized by that group oft reviled as "hippies"! 

What will we see next -- a Scientific American cover story about how solar energy can supply the bulk of U.S. energy needs?  Compare that to the traditional response -- trillions for massively destructive warfare and strategic blunders in oil-rich areas such as Iraq.  Well, looking at it from the perspective of a couple of the chief decision makers, why think when it hurts and you can get others to do the fighting you avoided when it was your turn, all to increase your influence?

West Alpine Road, Santa Clara County, California: January

Mirkwood

Branches Like Hair in the Wind

January Brush

QotD: My 10 Things

What are 10 things you've done that other people probably haven't? 
Submitted by Janette.   

Petted a butterfly for a long time as it sucked flower nectar

Painfully ran into the random-number generator bug in the Basic computer language on the Apple II+ (I know of one other soul who did as well!)

Grew the first commercial quantities of organic lettuce seed

Did Towers of Hanoi iteratively at at 11

Popped wheelies on a tractor

Saw a natural playground in Liberia ruined by bush tourists

Chased a large black bear off in a truck -- they really do run 40mph

Did a Long Course Triathlon including a very chilly ocean swim

Took a shower with the hydraulic oil in a D8 Caterpillar bulldozer

Floated down the Seine on a river barge, making excellent crayfish salads.

Cycle Tour "Little Appalachia" in Silicon Valley

Just a stone's throw into the hills from the bustling "Silicon Valley" of Santa Clara County, California lies a microregion seemly untouched by the tides of change below.  Cycling along Stevens Creek Canyon road, which tracks Stevens Creek for about four miles, yields some juicy atmosphere.  Conjuring images of Appalachia, it's a welcome break from the plastic wealth on display in the valley below.

The arboreal junkyards of rusting machinery by the road, with the dark dampness. give kind of a Halloween feel to the place.  Truly, one enters a strangely isolated zone as one travels upstream.  Throughout the area, tall trees (often redwoods) shroud everything in a seemingly permanent shade.

One time I took a buddy up there.  A native inhabitant rolled by in his roaring 70s-era 4wd pickup.  Both of us must have looked like skinny (well, by comparison to the local population) little colorful bug-guys in our colorful cycling gear with biking glasses that really make us look entomological: Bugs flying in from another world.  So, taking advantage of the extra lookee-see time of the road curve we were on, he let out an unforgettable "hoooodllee".

Seeming quite out of place in my cycling gear, I made sure not too tarry to long while I took these photos:

California "Fixer-Upper"

Big Rock in Stevens Creek

Ancient Truck in Native Habitat

Junk Pile in the Woods

Rough Livin'

Deep Woods Junkyard

House in the Woods with Junk Cars

Weird Fortress

Old Moss-covered Foundation

Cool Waterfall Tributary to Stevens Creek

Stevens Creek in Full Rush

A Fresh "Keep Out" Sign

Flag over Old Bridge

Bike Frame Gate

End of the Road

Talking Points on JavaScript for Software Engineering

Perspective

• Widespread agreement that object technology is effective
• Less agreement that the kind of strict object development environment supported by, for example, Java or Eiffel is desirable
• Systems containing large amounts of JavaScript code are now shipping on the Web
  
• IMHO, JavaScript is less than ideal for software engineering
• Not statically checkable (either in terms of state-space or concurrency)
  
• Object-based vs. Object-oriented
• Most obstacles to object-oriented can be overcome
• Still, significant limitations:
• Encapsulation
• "Classless" objects cannot be completely prohibited
  
• Randomly adding/removing properties to objects
  
• Polymorphism
• Method overriding cannot cleanly be done with separate methods
• Poses a problem for Javadoc-like documentation generators
• Data types
• The loose typing makes the code hard to read, even when type prefixing is used and data types are respected.
• Impossible to enforce strict typing
  
• Interfaces
• Can be done, but only "enforced" through a slow run-time process. 
  
• The enforcement routines could be removed for non-development-time situations.
• Events:  Cannot prohibit spaghetti-like "callbacks"
• Packaging:  Does not mirror the file system, and no enforcable naming convention
  
• Aspect-oriented programming
• Can be done, but significant run-time and code-clarity issues since JavaScript was not designed for this.
• http://aspectes.tigris.org/
  
• It could be much worse -- remember some thought that on the Web it would be VBScript!
  

Origins
 

•    How do Self and C-- add up?  JavaScript!
• A hard-to-meet deadline for Brendan at Netscape in the 1990's
• The language's market: Not necessarily software engineers
  
• Paradox Supreme: The rarified, research facility life of Self, compared to the ubiquity of JavaScript!
  
• In a paper on Self, its creators wondered if true class inheritance, as distinguished from Self's prototype inheritance, would predominate in software engineering in the future.
• Self and the SmallTalk Community: Killed by Java?
• StrongTalk: The built-in event-basis of SmallTalk with the structured object development provided by Java?
• http://www.strongtalk.org/
• http://www.strongtalk.org/history.html
• Where did that source code come from?
• In early versions of Netscape (version 4, circa 1998, and less), the 'select' html element was implemented as a first-class window object.
• That meant that it could not be hidden by other html elements on the screen.
• Clearly a bug, this was fixed in Netscape 6 around 2000.
• Was present in the early IE browsers that took Netscape's market share.
  
• Still exists in IE 6
  

JavaScript Considered

• High power-to-weight ratio!
• As with Self, "The Power of Simplicity".
• Fast start time
• Ability to self-modify the language
• Allows us to do object-oriented software engineering in JavaScript, and implement concepts from other languages, such as binding objects through an event system.
• Property value lookup very slow at high memory load
• Closure overhead
  
• Machine capabilities now growing -- so is the low weight of JavaScript really such a big advantage anymore?

JavaScript's Future

• EcmaScript 4 Proposal: Adding Structure
• 'strict' option not yet in reference implementation
  
• Tamarin JIT and Adobe
• A tools strategy by that company, not a platform play with Flash as it may appear?
  
• Interesting post by Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript, on Microsoft opposing EcmaScript 4, the proposed new version of JavaScript:

   http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/11/es4_news_and_opinion.html#more

• The compatibility issue: A corporate "we can't" (make a reliable, interoperable implementation of ES4) from MS?
• MS management's considerations: A competitor to Silverlight and C#?
• Is there a Neutral Ground Solution: A language such as StrongTalk?  In reality, it might be Python:
• http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/07/new_projects.html
• My guess: It depends on Google and Apple.  If they apply their full weight, Microsoft will implement ES4.

Star Wars Over the Years

The "Star Wars" science fiction movie series is so iconic that it is no barometer of culture, but rather an interacting component of  living society.  The saying, "as California goes, so goes the nation", would apply equally, if perhaps not more so, to director Lucas' Marin County, California creations.  Spanning some thirty years, the complete series provides a unique opportunity for cultural reflection.

Communality pervades the 70s and early 80s episodes.  Witness the the Jawa with their giant mobile techno-rust-caravan of the desert, the perfectly-balanced cloud city in "The Empire Strikes Back", "Return of the Jedi"'s space convoys, and its Ewoks, with their Rainbow Familyesque situation in the old-growth redwood forest and primitive drumming.  The episodes treat us to visions of encapsulated, usually acephalous community existing in seemingly perfect balance with the surrounding environment. 

The early episodes feature long, meditative periods, as if to conjure themes in Eastern religions.  As part of this conjuration, the audience gets a lesson in how appearances can be deceiving with the first appearance of Yoda in the swamp of Dagoba.  Yoda comes first as a silly little green swamp creature.  Later, the opposite is revealed.

In the very first episode, Luke has a psychedelic trip-like experience in the swamp of Dagoba as part of his Jedi training.  There Yoda says, "Know fear you will."  Going back to the raw 70s Marin County original, without the major motion picture filtering, the wording is, "Know bad trips you will."

These cultural alternatives to mainline Western culture are, at best, subdued in the episodes from the 2000s.   We see the Jawa, where Annakin gets tips from them about the location of a group of desert inhabitants.  But nothing of their interactions amongst themselves is presented. The film shows only smoothly-operating Jawa caravans at night with their lights shining brightly.

That scene makes a marked contrast to the funky rustiness of the caravans and the Jawa society that was on display in the first-released episode.  Overall, the closest thing we see to communality in the later-released episodes is its nightmare: the clone army. The film shows a perfect inversion of the former visions in this vast replication of the ultra rugged-individualist, bounty hunter Jango Fett. 

Along with the cultural alternatives presented in the early episodes goes their delight in technology.  Gone are the long droid soliloqueys and duoliloqueys of the early episodes.  Whereas in the early episodes, technology offered liberation for many, in the later episodes that role is limited to the child Anakin's winning the pod racer contest.  While in the early episodes we saw much promising fix-it wrenching and welding, such activity is limited in the later ones. 

In the later episodes, an equally interesting angle replaces the early themes, however.  Corporate society envelopes almost everything in a suffocating embrace.  And the technology of the 2000s episodes reinforces the current world, instead of transforming it.  The spaceships land with perfect grace, often turning slightly upon landing or performing other graceful, smooth, last-second maneuvers to perfect a landing.  They do this as if to say that their essential technical function, space transport, is beyond much significance, and the only remaining excitement is in their style. 

Happily, the 2000s episodes support not only science fiction content but in-depth love stories.  While the primacy of the individual seems lost amidst a suffocating corporate galaxy, exemplified in the city-planet where the galaxy finds its capitol seat, the personal dramas stand out clearly.  As in Balzac, the interest lies in the individual dramas, highlighted against the intentionally boring backdrop. 

With this highlighting of the individual comes an emphasis on physical fitness.  The light saber duels that formerly focused exclusively on the philosophical schools of the combatants, representing the intensity of the clash of will in the humming of the clashing light sabers, now feature pervasive gymnastics.  70s acid trips are out; physical fitness is in.  Pointed politics is also in, especially when Anakin (as the newly-minted Lord Vader), tells Obi Wan Kenobi, "If you're not with me, you're my enemy", echoing a recent statement by the President of the United States.

Kenobi responds, "Only the Sith deal in absolutes."  And the exquisite portrayal of Anakin's turning to the Dark Side stands head and shoulders above the melodrama in the earlier episodes.  Anakin's straightfoward mind is bent and twisted to Senator Palpatine's ends.  In this end of the beginning of the series, the democratic Galactic Republic turns into the totalitarian Empire. 

From the outset, the film introduces us to Anakin's thinking early on and its progression makes the evolution into Lord Vader seem understandable.   For any film, the level of sophistication is impressive.  For an American film, it is shocking.

As large corporations dominate American society today, it is fitting that the Star Wars series should find its zenith in depicting good turned to evil in a misguided struggle for corporate power.  Perhaps the great American novel is, in fact, this movie series.