Gesthemane: The Video

For the Easter holiday, I wrote the song blogged earlier. I made the video over the weekend. You can download it here: (approx 6mb).

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/video/Gesthemane.wmv

Windows Movie Maker proves to be a good utility for this kind of work. Now that many churches have big audio-visual systems, there is a ready venue for it, so between the video-enabled iPods, the web in general, and the big systems, this is fun stuff to do.

Messages of Mutual Exclusion

For Staff:

Everyone is counting on you.
Good attitudes make good teams.
Teams make sacrifices.
When the team wins, we all win.
Keep up the good work.

For Executives:

Hire proven performers.
Eliminate doubt.
Fresh blood makes fresh ideas.
When stockholders win, options vest.
Keep up the good work.

I'm not disgruntled. I like to think of myself as the last of the original class of "nattering nabobs of negativism".

Gethesemane: A Song

Anyone who knows me or downloads my songs knows I write pop and not for the sanctuary. I was asked to do a solo for Good Friday by our choir mistress. This is the piece.

Gethesemane

The image of Christ praying in the garden is compelling to me because I believe this is when He is the most human. Confronting the hours of betrayal, humiliation, torture and execution, Jesus knows the real nature of original sin: to love life more than Heaven. So he prays to be released, and in this, he understands why He came: to pray for forgiveness for all humanity, Himself included.

Some songs come so easily, it feels as it they are breathed into me and all I did was write them down. This is one of those. If you enjoy it, credit the source and not the emanuensis.

Office Affairs

Office affairs are always among parties where at least one is married and not to another party to the affair. Otherwise, they would be office romances and while those can lead to problems or a better life, they don't break covenants so don't fall into all of the problems of the office affair.

The dynamics of office romances or affairs are such that in the beginning, the male is at the greatest risk because he typically initiates and until the female says yes, the male can always be gotten rid of with harassment charges. At the point at which the female says yes and the affair is consummated, the female assumes almost all of the risks. While both may have risks associated with their spouses, those are outcomes outside the office.

The unfair part of the office affair is that when concluded by consent or command, the most severe consequences usually are to the female. The worst that happens to males in the majority of cases is they are reassigned, warned, or can lose a security clearance, but little else economically or socially within the workplace unless the female is pregnant, and then the pregnancy is politely ascribed to the marriage. If all parties remain polite, life goes on.

When exposed, and the majority of office affairs are because these are transparent to colleagues, the female can lose her career and possibly her marriage. The male may lose the marriage but seldom if ever the career. There is something Western here, but it seems the modern opinion is that it is the female who is most at fault for accepting and loses the most trust among her colleagues and that is what devastates the career.

Men who are politically compromised may suffer a setback in upward career momentum, but it is typically short-lived if other skills are valued.

For a female to recover, she typically moves to another company and away from any social connections to the former company, often to a new town to ensure this. If there are spousal objections, the problem becomes much more complicated and often, the deceit, much deeper and difficult to manage. So the risks grow exponentially unless she and her spouse can cope with the infidelity openly or at least in private.

The male may have similar issues but they aren't as severe.

It is not uncommon for the male, having seen that the consequences are few, to engage in multiple office affairs serially or even in parallel. While the risks of parallel affairs are great, the risks for serial affairs are little as long as he can maintain the social arrangements of the marriage. In some networks and cultures, affairs by men are tolerated without approval, with little consequence to the marriage which is viewed socially as an economic and parenting arrangement. The primary mistake the male can make is to subject the spouse to social humiliation by publicly flaunting his other liaisons; so in these cultures, keeping the mistress or office girl at a distance from his social world is considered polite even if having her close at the office is not considered impolite but risky. Because a male gains status from risk taking and managing risk, the office affair can be a plus to his advancement.

This is never true for females.

None of this is fair. Fairness and justice are concepts of legitimacy and there is no framework in which the office affair is considered legitimate. They are part of the fabric of desire that drives the humans at the emotional and sometimes economic levels. That they are unbalanced as to consequences appears to be a cultural problem of perceptions, not a problem of right or morality. If they were right or moral, people wouldn't hide them, make up stories when confronted, or otherwise be 'keeping it on the side'. It is what it is: risky behavior.

How risk is managed and rewarded is the crux. Caveat emptor.

Gethesemane

Father, take this cup from me
Swap it for a cooling rain
For a dream we share
By the river there
Cover your face from my shame.

Oh Father, take this cup from me
Take back this drink of despair
For the feelings that harden
So far from the garden
Gethesemane here ensnared.

I came to love them, Father
Share their joyfulness and pain
When our deaths were so far away
But now I share their hunger
For the breath of inspiration
Breathed into me, Father, Life!
It ends today.

Father take this cup from me.
Human, have you made me and frail.
Though your face I see,
Will I still be me
Remembering all beyond the pale?

Oh Father, forgive me, this sin I bare
For the love that you have for your child
From the garden of Eden
To the ending of the world
For forgiveness, merciful mild.

Oh Father, forgive.

len bullard 03/13/06

Pirates and Innovation

It's been calculated that money spent on R&D is not correlated to innovation. Believe it or not. If you don't spend any money on R&D, you lose, but if you spend too much, the stockholders lose. Since most management plans are couched in terms of shareholder value, one can pretty much forget pleading for R&D money without a solid short term turnaround return on investment.

So you still need an innovative staff, you still have to manage to get them across technology chasms requiring lots of homework, and you want them to be happy about that?

Children won't learn arithmetic writing numbers on a board. They will count the numbers of toy pirates they have and how many they lost in a sea battle with a friend. Occasionally, they will fill a ship model with firecrackers and gas and blow it up just to watch together and tell their chums.

Keeping the little buggers entertained is 80% of teaching hard lessons. There is no agenda on a playground but the one in a child's heart just before recess.

We can't spend money, but we can have fun.

ARRGGG! MATEY!!

... and they wonder why the development staff is so silly.

XML Was Invented By The Losers: Part II

Point is, XML was a coup, Mike, over fish and bigger fish. ... and it was the right thing to do, implicature and inference. I don't want to reel off the names because that is an assessment based on the sales I saw at the time and who they were selling too. SGML systems were very expensive.

The bigger fish don't always win. It doesn't mean they are evil. Some are being eaten/herded by even bigger fish. But put enough losers on the street and they figure out how to beat the winning fish to the bigger fish. No legacy. Nothing to lose. Everything to win and software requires no more than household costs to develop to prototypes.

Were I The Evil Coyote at the Evil Empire:

Cut the loss leaders off into open source. Spread the risk and cost of development out. As the hardware costs come down, software is a bundled component and it is shipped that way. To reduce costs, reduce non-standard bundling of software and hardware. See Macintosh 1986.

A standard bundling of hardware/software collapses the licensing costs, sales costs and dilutes the threats of patents and patent trolls without removing the competitive edge of quality.

Solve the problems of versioning and identity management. The problems of the second are social in that they are the history of systems like those based on SSN beating against the new web based systems that are quick to grant rights and slow to revoke them.

The application of identity tokens such as Social Security numbers, that is, tokens which are printed and therefore easily lost are insufficient for a digital society. Because the rate of interconnection, relations, and types in the system have increased, the speed and size of damage is fast and hard to undo with current mixed human/machine schedules (eg, what user can contract with the server and what a human has to review/approve). Not relaxing the constraints on registration of transaction where the business logic is adequate to approve a transaction is costly and paranoid.

Portals must integrate notification services based on legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy.

Identity theft is discovered only when the first collection agency calls. That is too late.

Services to stop all transactions on the lost id are closed on weekends. That is too slow.

Services can be insensitive. That is rude.

This lack of orchestration/choreography/event systems for building implicature and inference from events over data increases costs and reduces reliability. BI systems ARE the next hot emergence zone.

Reliability is a problem of undercertified systems. Undercertified systems require tests and tests must be transparent. Mapping specifications to open testing is still the best means to certify.

This requires all the big fish to put down their guns and see the desktop market equilibrium for what it can be: a cost cutting system that doesn't sacrifice the quality of the product to increase the rate of sales. Make sure this piece is a rock-solid indisputably patent neutral system.

Any time a component rises to commodity status, buy the rights and put it in the standard system. Buy the patents and put them in the public domain. Innovate and standardize by providing profits to the owner from the profits made of selling the system to public domain. Let the market economy do the rest.

Pretty much what The Losers do. Lose the least profitable risks by sharing the costs of the most profitable ones. In that way, economic gains are sustained by social benefits.

Then it's norms and affordances, or culture and rights. With these come national interests. We speak of society as if it were homogenous and that is observably not so. But given the power of nations, culture is where our standard systems and marketplaces interlock, where social benefits and economic gains are made uncertain by the unreliability of those relationships in the human context. Cultural interfaces mean system filters. System filters mean autonomy.

The conflict is here between human and virtual systems.That is the hard problem of the emerging generation of digital systems designers and strategists: to couple social benefits to economic needs through the dimensions of legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy of the virtual systems with respect to the norms and affordances of the human systems. Where we cannot, we risk the nationalist agenda oscillating against our global conversations. But the rule of autonomy says that we cannot continue simply by system fiat: we must desire this. That is the crucible sensitivity over autonomy in the rights of the human over the virtual, and the virtual over the human, and by representation, human over human.

I have hope.

Last week I received an email from a fan who shares my music with his friends in China. My wife warns me people in China have a thriving business duplicating western music and selling it and might steal mine. I told her, "I hope so."

A bit of memory from my generation: the music of Motown made for peace in an integrating racist Southern America. If there is to be peace, it is to be found in our shared languages, and of these, music speaks to the heart. When we hear this, we listen. Then no one loses.

"Leave gentle fingerprints on the Soul of another for the Angels to read"..- Proverb

What Do You Do Here?

What do you do here?

Pick any two.

2. Resume Version: Senior Technical Consultant. The duties are to make sure Process Requests get answered promptly..

2. Email Signature Version:

Wyle E Coyote Society : Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow.

2. Blog Version:

I herd fish for the other predators.

A day without scaring a senior manager is a day without perspiration.

Being bad is easy; being evil takes practice, study, and planning.

2. Podcast Version:

"Speak of the Devil!"
"It's not my turn to be the Devil."
"Oh right.... it's my turn, but I've studied."

2. Zen version:

They ask you to move a mountain but will not buy you equipment or explosives. You notice a stream runs past the base of the mountain, buy a small house, and spend your mornings picking up sand off the bottom of the stream and dropping it back in the water to watch it flow toward the mountain. You grow old but you attain your goal and the water does all the heavy lifting.

XML Was Invented By Losers

Here's something to ponder. Winners may write histories but evolution is determined by the losers.

How many of the XML designers and primary supporters had, owned or worked for companies that were losers in the SGML market or standards fights? Most of them (the exception being James Clark but he was independently wealthy and has his own reasons). XML wasn't the Revenge of the Forty-somethings as it was once described, but the victory of the SGML losers over the SGML winners.

The trick here is pragmatic (as in linguistic pragmatics): the sentence may be true and the implicature false. Implication is in the utterance, not the sentence.

Can you think of cases where the sentence is true? In possibly more cases than we like to admit, losers determine the direction of the next generation. Why? Motivated to change. That's why BigCos are seldom the place to look for progress. The cost of ditching legacy is not something short-term profit project managers want to account for. It's cheaper to offshore the old, delay the new, and melt down the competence capital of the engineering departments. Then you sell the company to your wealthier competitors or even to the offshore companies you have been sending work to. After that, losers take the next steps.

Happy Mind Melting.

What happens as the cost of computer hardware continues to fall? Traditionally, it has been cheaper to replace or upgrade software because hardware changes were orders of magnitude more expensive given a system of some size? If both costs are falling, isn't there a point at which it is cheaper to FexEx the entire system? Is it true that the only future profits for information technologies will be in local customization?

I don't believe any of that, but the implications are fun. Those buying those companies, for example, may win by acquisition and lose by possession of the obligations because the losers in the last round of competition are waiting and weren't loafing while all of the buying and selling was paralyzing the engineers like deers caught in the headlights.

And now that they have lost, they have nothing else to do but work on winning.

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Kris Kristofferson

Fishbrains

Ever go to a meeting and while you are trying to work out terms and conditions, your customer or the consultant are regaling you with a story about a neat new box that let's them provide themselves and five strangers within two hundred feet Internet Access over their cellphone?

Has your next door neighbor who has yet to buy a life insurance policy for himself to cover his seven children from his first and second marriage and his new girlfriend's three shown you his 1975 Rolex that he bought at the flea market?

Did your brother in law have a yard sale that included a first edition copy of "Are You Experienced?" while keeping a copy of his Morris Albert album that includes the megahit "Feelings" because that was his song when he was dating you know who before she left him for you don't care?

More often than not, you are dealing with FishBrains. Fish don't stop to think when they swim toward bright and shiny objects in the water that the object may have a hook inside. Fish only care that something is bright and shiny and they'll swallow it.

It is always interesting at any social event to figure out who the FishBrains are and who are sharks pretending to be fish. The clue is that predators steer prey and if they hunt in groups, they steer them toward the other predators by distraction. Remember: bright and shiny. While your lawyer is showing your wife his new Jag, his wife is showing you her new tits. And you're listening? Right.....

I don't know why but in America, more women are eager to demonstrate their Fishbrains. It may be that American men are equally inclined to live in the space between their opposing eyes, but American women are faster. It may be that American men are just slow in general. A Fishbrain prefers Britney Spears to Lisa Loeb and maybe that is why fish survive long winters in cold water frozen to the bottom of lakes. They don't rise to ugly bait. Remember, bright and shiny aren't the same as smart and whiny.

Fishbrains still believe conversion to the metric system is inevitable in America. Why? The French say so. Fishbrains believe the Arabs are causing all of the world's woes because we get so much oil from them. Of course anyone who reads Wired or watches West Wing knows we get most of our oil from Canada. If we dig deep enough, we'll find out Canadian Fishbrains blew up the Iraqui mosque. Cui bono? And it was bright and shiny... "like a Rhinestone Cowboy".
Fishbrains still have their Mood Rings and keep them next to their favorite Pet Rock. They euthanized their last Pet Rock because it pissed on the couch and they know the cat is too smart to do that.

Fishbrains tie yellow ribbons to trees to welcome home veterans in honor of a song about a guy coming home from prison... on a bus.

Fishbrains think the Chronicles of Narnia is a serious philosophical movie, applaud Sean Hannity for his deep grasp of the truth, and laugh when told that NASA surpressed evidence of global warning because they know the Rapture is coming soon so consume.

When George W. Bush says Osama Bin Laden helped him get elected by issuing threats, wiley Fishbrains nod in agreement knowing it was a ruse to get them to vote for Kerry because Bush is bad for Bin Ladin and the terrorists' cause.

Fishbrains tell you that the next generation of the Web is here because they can interact with their best friends who live down the street over the wire by typing messages into a telephone keyboard with a pen.

Fish aren't all bad. Fish make great bait. Fish can be used to hunt other fish. Fish are brain food. In one of the weird results of life seeking higher intelligence, lower lifeforms trying with all their mighty might are just filled with GottaEvolveAnxiety and yes, that is the life force. You can eat that and become smarter. In world of eat or be eaten, timing and position matter.

Fishbrains rule. Why? The more eggs you lay the better the chances of accidental fertilization.

To mix metaphors, as I said to Kurt Cagle, the difference between a bag of helium and a bag of gold is the bag of helium will float away, but if you let go of the string, either will disappear just as fast.

Searching for Signal: Part II

Last night I turned the comments on. It only took a few minutes before the first spam message appeared in my inbox from the blog. Gad. The web predators certainly are evolving fast. One wonders. We want to have these participative conversations but as soon as we open up, the opportunists begin to piss in the soup.

I had a long conversation with the owner of a popular 3D chat room. She related an interesting bit. 3D rooms that don't have multi-user chat don't last. She said, "They're lonely places." That implies that many of the experiments in 3D enabling interactive but non-multi-user 3D apps don't have a promising shelf life. When I think of all the failed experiments in search engines, shopping malls and visualization that tried the sex of 3D and flopped, or the 3D cartoons that while fun to watch were really linear 3D and therefore could just as well have been 2D Flash or machinima, evidence builds that what we've always said is more true than ever: the killer apps are always presence apps where people can make contact with each other. Social worlds do better. Not exactly news but once again, we are reminded the users are mammals and mammals are social critters constantly searching for signal. The smart money develops apps to hook them up.

Searching for signal: it's a meme I guess.

Next week, we'll look into combative pragmatics. Being a contrarian, if the pundits and heros are going to proseletyze for Web 2.0 being pragmatically enabled for negotiation, I'll take the other side and discuss how to use pragmatics in combat with the other chimps on the hunt for bangmates and domination of the monkey tree.

Searching For Signal

Queens follow kings. Kings follow danger
Seeking advice from a beckoning stranger.
Truth isn't easily found in your dreams.
It's nothing from nothing whatever it seems.

You crawl to the top. Ambition is calling.
The moment you stand, you're already falling.
Love's not a prize for a victory won.
Love's how you feel when the loving is done.

What taste do you think is more bitter than this:
The lie on your lips or her passionless kiss?
A gift without knowing the reason for giving
Is rotten as flesh when it's no longer living.

Heartless and void, merciless cold
You humbled yourself as the cameras rolled.
Now that its over while sycophants sigh,
You're searching for signal from an ebony sky,

len - 2/21/06

Red Neck Valentine

My wife told me not to buy her candy for Valentines Day. So I bought her a two inch thick steak in the shape of a heart for her Valentine. For mine, she will cook it. It must be a good idea. Last time I saw her she was pounding on it with a wooden mallet and repeating my name.

Connecting The Right Dots: The Legal Use of Surveillance

President Bush claims that had the NSA surveillance of American citizens been in place prior to 9/11, the terrorists could have been intercepted. He says we have to be able to 'connect the dots'. He is possibly right.

On the other hand, had a perfectly legal message switch connected the police records systems of South Florida, the same result would have occurred because Mohammed Atta in a perfectly legal traffic stop was subject to a perfectly legal name query that would have returned information sufficient to detain him.

It isn't that we need to connect the dots. That is too simplistic. We need to connect the right dots legally, then I believe we would have all the connections we need.

The Executive Branch of the government is attempting to persuade us that in times of war, laws don't matter. When laws don't matter, we are a government of men, not laws. While I have no evidence that the information gathered by the NSA is or has been used for some purpose other than those claimed, the fact of law is that it is illegal to have done so. If the only reason for breaking the law is 'wouldacoulda', then one that is speculation, and two that is not the only 'woulda coulda' so it is loose speculation. The second coulda is also legal.

Law is sometimes imprecise and in need of rewriting to meet the changing technology and times, but it is not speculative. We are now confronted with evidence both of outing a covert officer and of using the covert systems to commit possible high crimes from the same Executive Branch. The Executive Branch must be held to account for the commission of acts that may on inspection provide evidence of high crimes, If we are to remain a nation of laws, not men, then this evidence must be discovered and deliberated to determine grounds for prosecution if indeed these grounds are supported by the evidence.

... even if the acts were mostly just stupid.

Cosmic Evolution

Open source is both politic and software model applied to the business model.

Is it a business model? No. I agree with Tim Bray. It isn't.

IMHO, it is shared values. Not ideology, but values.

I won't enumerate those but for one by example:

Many turtle graphic systems have been developed, but
<canvas/> works because there is one language we all speak:

HTML.

HTML's ubiquity is not based on a business model but on a model of how software should evolve for the betterment of those who use it: by always being there. That was the choice of those that built it. Read their books, read their blogs, read their lists, love their flames, style, mendacity, eagerness to challenge and eagerness to learn and eagerness to explore.

... but most importantly, to share.

For that reason, HTML is the language we all speak.

That did not come of business, it came because of what we wished for and worked for for each other: to communicate across the boundaries, to seek each other out, to want to know the differences, and to discover in all of that those things by which we are the same embracing those we choose as we choose. Freedom to know ourselves and each other isn't a business model. It is yearning for each other.

It is the mammal in you. The human.

The older I get the more I find I only really believe in two things: music and love for these reliably bring us together in yearning. The web is that desire made very large. While governments watch nervously, we have opened up the world to each other.

Cosmic evolution is choosing the means to find each other. That's all. That's enough. But if in all of that you feel an even higher power, know that it is not an uncommon feeling among the humans. If the wisdom of crowds is usually reliable, then it is wise to yearn for each other for it is something we all want to do. And if we feel in that or life in numbers there is a greater power of yearning that touches all, it is possibly true.

Self-directed evolution is cosmic evolution. You choose and become.

As ye olde Hippie bands sang, "Who Do You Love?"

Roll The Dice On Likable Choices: A Left Wing Lunatic Set of Amoral and Completely Unworkable Ideas Because No One Likes Me

Extremist Jihad Osama Bin Ladin Allah Muslim MightLikeNakedWomen... is that enough keywords to get the attention of the attention-obsessed with their hands on the dials?

You know who you are. And now, so does the rest of the world.

Now that I have your attention:

Re-elect Jimmy Carter for President

He is experienced, above moral reproach, hard working, well-educated, fiscally conservative, well-liked internationally and ... eligible. He can't be bribed because at his age, he doesn't need anything. He is an evangelical but not a neo-con. He is the perfect spoiler and has good hair. He can pronounce 'nuclear'. He is on a first name basis with most of the world's leaders and as far as we know, no one wants to assassinate him. With a solid staff and an eminent but trustworthy VP, he can do this. It would be fun to watch the attack dogs set on him because he could turn and say, "Now, there you go again." Priceless.

We elected him last time because we were tired of crooks and meanies. Anyone really happy about the current choices? Let's roll the dice on a person we all like.

Make Open Source Code Development Tax Deductible

Fess up to reality. The illusion of a frictionless community of zero cost code is made of models of the code itself, not models of the cost of owning the code. To improve that, reduce the amount of it you need, increase the quality of what you use and don't waste all of your time trying to measure that and control it. It is a ecosystem of cooperators who share costs for code evolution. Just stimulate it. It already knows how to do the rest.

I realize it's not in the nature of sales to espouse a commissionless system, but it may not be their choice. Software ecosystems don't require sales. They require non-negotiable price lists.

Services, of course, are negotiated. However...

Understand The Middle

If the top and bottom of the stack are free to use, all the IP and non-open source software is in the middle. That's a cosmic d'oh in the software development community, but I'm not quite sure the businessHeads get this. To control costs, you either

Accept a business model where the middle is commoditized (translation: no legacy interfaces, all standard business documents and forms, single roots for the ontologies, standard contracting and licensing, in short, very few negotiated options in the software costs, or

You measure and cut and name and send out an RFP with the best wishlist the organization or your consultant can produce. RFP authors take note: you have champagne tastes, you pay champage prices. If you can party on beer, prices are better.

Model one is cheaper. It means change for the organization but the mammals are quite adaptible. Be aware that the perceived value of local code is better costed as frequency of use/cost of use across some organizational boundary. The second term provides for the fact that low frequency cost hits even at higher costs are unavoidable because of the value proposition of the service. Software costs are not the source of the highest costs: the cost of use is.

Make Internet Legal Services A Tax Deductible Purchase

The problem of the middle is local variations on common processes. Accelerate the purchase of XBRL and other standard contracting systems. Gains here scale all the way through the economic model of in both government and business operations. Provide grants for government systems that provably conform to the open standards.

Real In Alabama

When Dr. Martin Luther King said,

I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

my generation was embroiled in the painful integration of the schools. We were the guineas, the living material of a Petri dish of social change. For all said on both sides, it was our daily routines, our social interests that had to adapt to the strangers put among us by law and not always out of choice. For all the praises now of that time, it was a hard slog to get past stereotypes and baiting, but most hard to get past the fear bred into us. Fear was our inheritance, a legacy of separate worlds, separate cultures and separate destinies. With every riot in the halls, every protest, every fight behind the gym, every kid held up to a wall for money, or threatened with bricks, or threatened with worse, we thought it a terrible time and a wonderful time, so great were our differences. It would take generations to make Dr. King's dream real. So we thought.

When my daughter asked me last weekend what she should write for her school assignment for the holiday my generation had celebrated as Robert E. Lee Day, I told her that she should remember her black friends and that part of Dr. King's speech. She should understand that some dreams are realized, if imperfectly, if late, if only in part, but that part realized is to be celebrated. Here in 2006, almost 40 years and most of my life later, it isn't a dream. It is real. My son and my daughter are that dream.

For justice' sake, for the sake of our children, for the sake of all children, be hopeful, be patient, be determined. What is dreamed can become real. Fear may live on, but a generation of praiseworthy parents can choose not to will it to their children.

As Dr. King said rightly, "Thank God almighty."

Famous On the Internet

I see some are comparing the haves and have-nots of Wikipedia. Last time it was Google numbers. Yes, friends, the vanity of the web's super heroes is showing. Of course, being mammals and web geeks, we their fans, turn that into hierarchy:

"You aren't listed in WikiPedia? How CAN I be related to YOU???"

Tough life for sidekicks, too.

"Well, yeah, you sorta came up with the idea, but I WROTE THE CODE!!!"

There are two distinct forms of fame on the internet:

o Wikipedia famous: has a distinct wikipedia entry containing approved facts about the person of note. This is bounded fame. It's value proposition is location. In this sense, the fame is bounded within an ambient: typically, professional contributions establishing authority.

o Google famous: has no Wikipedia entries but many entries in various sites such that the person is often referenced in conversations. This fame confers no authority yet is unlimited. The fame cannot be bounded within an ambient as this form of fame has no operational boundary. This is folk fame, aka, legend.

Examples of either form of fame are easy to find. Since folk fame could become WikiPedia fame, the Wikipedia entry is a star on the walk of fame, not the restaurant at the end of the walk.

Writing On the Stone

I picked this up at CNN:

Tonino Tola is a 75-year-old farmer from Sardinia, Italy. He starts his day at dawn with a little coffee, some cheese and one or two glasses of wine from his small vineyard. By midmorning he has milked his cows and walked miles to reach his pastures.

"If you don't drink to avoid dying, if you don't eat to avoid dying, if you don't smoke to avoid dying, and if you see a beautiful woman and you don't go after her... then you may as well be buried alive!"

Zorba lives.

In these days of overocculated existence, relentless pursuit of digital perfection, and the elitist bad habits of the boomer generation that strangle the careers of our younger compadres while we try to hang on to that title as the Magic Bus Generation, it's nice to know some folks still get it. Living is live, it is messy, it is fun and it breaks your heart but without that, you can't know how good it is to have one.

Rock on, Tonino.

We watch too much TV, too many DVDs, and too many web sites with airbrushed perfect professionally posed pop tarts. To keep our attention, the images get brassier, the colors more colored, the music too loud and the emotions too cruel to contemplate. Working on the Dickens reading and giving it away as digital Christmas cards, I am being reminded of the joy of listening... just listening, as if the ear for so long the servant of 5.1 HDTV, becomes glad to be the main sense, to let the mind make up images in accordance with the dictates of the sound, the reading, the voice actors, the sound effects and Ludvig.

God bless Ludvig where ever he is. And thank you.

People say emotions are bad for business. Possibly. Do I really want to be in a business where that is true? I don't. Modern life in TechnoLand is too much like London in winter, and maybe that was Dickens' point. The relentless pursuit of any perfect moment, color, sound, love or just a cup of mocha is too much like sanding off my skin with coarse grain because I think beneath the blemishes of real life there is a better one. I don't think there is. There is this one. The difference is how much pain I create trying to perfect a world that already endures so much pain it has to paint it digitally and remake it into surround sound to escape. It is as Scrooge's fiance says to him as she irrevocably releases him, "You fear the world too much." and in her tears for what he once was, his heart dies.

So as the merchants go about taking Merry Christmas off the signs, making sure the ads are neutered of all special emotions and replaced with politically correct ones, while the hard Christian right has to face the facts that using Christ's name in the pursuit of power over others, to defend the unforgivable, that in doing that they caused the very pushback they say they are afraid of, that in their fears they found their demons and embraced them, I say listen to Dickens.

See the writing on the stone. It is a name.

SOA: Like Ludwig Did It

What are the qualities one wants from federated aka, 'mashup' pages built over services?

• Seamlessness: no big glaring boo boos in format or behavior.


• Reliability: no piece mysteriously failing and causing the other pieces to look bad


• Composability: pieces can be assembled together quickly and intuitively

Web components should fit together as neatly as Ludvig Von Beethoven's music and assemble as easily as Adobe Audition. Music tools are always about a decade ahead of the rest of the software industry; so if like other aphoristic models of technical development (see Moore's Law), I should get this eventually.

For my Christmas card this year, I recorded Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" doing all of the characters (except the Cratchits: my wife and kids took those parts), narration, sound effects, etc. I used Adobe Audition to do that in case that is interesting. Audition is good easy to use multitrack recording and mastering software with plenty of clean effects and an intuitive interface. But the real serendipity was choosing to use Ludvig Von's music over composing my own.

Why?

Beethoven and Dickens are close in era, so in timing, tone and theme, they are quite composable and reliable, but the delight is that Beethoven's works are seamless. I avoided the 'hits' (say Fur Elise, Moonlight Sonata, opening of the Fifth, etc.) and grabbed bits of lesser known pieces and inner pieces of the symphonies. Some of these were composed years, even decades apart and recorded by different performers in different periods. Using various recordings both vinyl and CD, I had to do some serious click and pop removal but, that is what Audition does well.

They fit together seamlessly. The effect is as my wife says, 'enchanting'.

Web Services Should Work Like Beethoven's Music: you can slice it and dice it and it just works. The level of knowledge of keys, transitions, melodic development, chordal progressions, dynamics and orchestration required are enormous yet almost all of his works are memorable, hummable and accessible. When he applied technical virtuosity, it was in service of the dynamic perceived by the user as emotional anticipation, fulfillment and release, not the performer's angst about playing fast and accurately on the device of the day. It's a high standard for musicians and I wonder if there are similar prodigies in the world of software services.

That is the challenge for the mashup component builder. When someone puts the services together, they have to just work. I can get that fromBeethoven.

The question would be, what would be the experience if I tried that with Beethoven and Mozart and Bach and Schumann. The challenge of today's software behemoths is exactly that: what happens if I take your components and mash them together? Will they just work? Will certain melodies stand out garishly in bad taste where taste matters? Or is it a matter of taste where taste is knowing what to choose or to stick to one company just as I stuck to Beethoven even with that Mozart CD staring at me like Marley on the knocker?

If we are to pick common formats, we should choose based on the ability of the web service builder to compose, mashup, and serve up without seams, without glaring bugs, and with the ease of putting together slices in sequencing/recording systems that are to web pages what Adobe Audition is to audio production. If Enterprise Engineering is to come to the Service Oriented Architecture, that's what we need for productivity.

Having discovered the joy of working with dead collaborators who don't object to me remixing their work, I plan to work with more famous decomposers in the future.

The Meaning Of Life and What We Can Do About It

Life has meaning. As soon as the intellectual property issues are settled, the Americans will license it to the English so they can sell books about it not being worth discussing, the French will claim the meaning is really different or at least not what the Americans are selling, the Russians will implement it faster, the Japanese will improve it, the Germans will write precise algorithms for identifying it on sight, the Indians will sell services for it and the Australians will live it.

If there is someone I managed not to offend with that, I apologize in advance.

Kate Bush: Aerial

There it sits on the desk in front of me, opened but unplayed. It was twelve years in the making. The last time I had a new Kate Bush album, I weighed a lot less and had a lot more hair. I lived in a different neighborhood, worked for a different company, drove a different car, had different friends, still had my band, well.... lots of things were different.

What hasn't changed: my utter fascination, admiration and adoration of the music of Kate Bush. I won't explain that. It's like explaining a nicotine addiction to people who have never smoked cigarettes. You won't understand and I don't care. She simply is the one real genius of modern pop for the last fifty years. Every disposable tart act out there stands in her shadow, and so do most of the modern songwriters. It isn't that she is perfect. Kate takes some getting used to if you were as I was raised in the American South on country and blues and whatever the radio served up in the Sixties. On the other hand if like my son, you never are too far from your Pink Floyd mp3s and have a slightly cynical attitude toward whatever the machine is serving up this week, well then you might understand. I dunno. If you understood, you'd have this CD.

And maybe like me, it would be sitting there open and unplayed. You see, when I get a new Kate Bush CD, my mind goes away for awhile. It's like getting a sugar straw full of liquid LSD. It makes me doubt my talent, my skills, my music, my romances, my life, my job.... it makes me weak kneed and slobbery. For you readers who think this is a sex thing, well... you are right about that. She is 47 and I am 51 and so the f**k what.... she is Kate Bush. No one does it better; no one ever has.

I've simply too much to do to risk losing it to this sultry delicious maddening woman. I may have to stare at that soundwave profile of a bird call for another month until I've completed mixing my own album and finishing this production of Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". If I listen to that album, I'll stop working, start analysing and comparing, and dammit, another silly season will be done before I've the guts to get back to my own work.

.... it's just too risky.... it's like... well... you know what it's like.... but i just gotta... too weak... too overcome by.... KateLust.

Bye bye focus... hello Kate.

The Secret Poobahs

I saw this earlier at Kurt Cagle's blog and that is a nice compliment. I'm not an important person in the world of XML nor was I ever important in the world of SGML. And I am not an expert in 3D. Just a hacker. Think of me as a fair witness, but not a contributor, and like Marley, I will fade backward out a window that opens magically into a world of nothing.

So I'm not a hero but I've seen some. Like Jim Mason and Lynne Price, they take care of young people, they see to it things connect, and even in anonymity, wield incredible power over world events by working for those who share their values.

I've seen a lot of office politics, proven performers, up and comers and all the rest. They don't impress me. If you pick a target and shoot often, you hit something. Who cares? That is the question. Shared values are the keys to the suite of the secret poobahs who change the world.

So I ask you, what are your values and who do you share those with?

No matter what games you learn to play, your ultimate impact on the world will be determined by those values and who shares them. Some people want to run the place, and they can get what they want. Some people actually want to change the world and the rules for doing that are quite a bit different.

Winning is not owning.

You discover the closer you get to the top, the less real power you really have because you are too closely watched and the system is too sensitive to your every mood. When that happens, you have to spend so much time controlling yourself, you can control very little else. That isn't much of a victory, I'd say.

So you must always ask, qui bono? Who benefits? If it is just you, that is a very small kingdom. True power is knowing where the system is sensitive and thumping it just a little even at risk to your own career because if the values are right, the results will be right and in the long term, you will win.

Dare to do but do that for those who share your values. That is all you need to know.

For those of you who celebrate it, have a Happy Thanksgiving. For those of you who don't, have a Happy Thanksgiving.

All The Gold In California

Dave Pawson sends the URI for Paul Graham's blog about what Web 2.0. is. I know what it is. My question: qui bono? Who benefits?

iTunes is Web 2.0ish in this sense. Finally you can buy individual songs instead of having to buy whole albums. The recording industry hated the idea and resisted itas long as possible. But it was obvious what users wanted, so Apple flew under the labels. [4] Though really it might be better to describe iTunes as Web 1.5. Web 2.0 applied to music would probably mean individual bands giving away DRMless songs for free.

Paul Graham

Notice that this is one big monolithic corporation taking over the turf of other big corporations. In the old days, it would be iTommyGuns.

If you are on the production side of music instead of the consuming side, you notice that the last sentence is right precisely and only because iTunes will sell you individual songs, BUT they don't accept songs from individual artists.

Good for you. However, those hoping for freeing the artists from groveling to the record labels take note: now they grovel to Apple or one of Apple's designated MiddleGuys.

That's right. If you are an independent artist who wants to get a few shekels for your work and you see iPods as the new transistor radio, take note of Apple's policies: artists deal with middleGuys who deal with Apple. The middleGuys only deal with artists who make CDs (no submission of individual tunes) and have representation in the form of a label that represents many artists and they do this for tadaaaa: a percentage. Now I ask you, as iTunes proves, why should we be making CDs when they are selling individual songs?

Qui bono? The guys in the middle taking the bite are also selling CDs. And taking a bite. The artists, ahem, the labels still have to produce CDs and kids, that ain't cheap.

So that's Web 2.0 for the artist: the bad old business model reconstituting itself on the web and Apple making sure that happens. Volitionally. Good guys? Think again. These are business people with a market to conquer. Apple and their "contributors" take lots of little bites making one big bite into the product with no value added but to say 'yes'.

Umm... excuse me but that is exactly what we were doing before the web, during the web, and now Web 2.0 comes along to tell us no 'natch for the content makers without representation. Wow. Some victory....

So for you dweebs out there dwelling on how good it all is, Web 2.0 is good for programmers, venture capitalists, and people who believe the cost of software should be an item on their phone bill. Big artists are still a product of marketing. Street musicians and garage bands are still street musicians and garage bands. The only real improvement is they can pick the corner. The cost of recording is time and a few thousand bucks for gear. So sure, the good artists can record cheaper but that is about it. They are still on the street, on their own, out of luck and out of the money.

So if you pass one of them, toss a few coins in the hat and they'll toss back a few DRMless mp3s which by fact of having given them away, reduced their economic value to zero.

So artists are what they always were: meat. Smart ones build their own Web 2.0 web sites and have Paypal or its ilk anyway. The rest of us do it for boo.

What does Web 2.0 mean? It means exactly what the market always means: the same people get to make money again for the same software except this time it will be cheaper, come in smaller boxes, and do less than it did last time which means you will buy/download/subscribe to more to get the same. But this time, when it gets obsoleted, you will change like it or not. You may not notice, and you won't have to hunt through your old CDs for the backups but if you lose your credit card number, it won't matter anyway because they don't know your name, just your credit card number.

The Web 2.0 is the next version of progress for the same reasons for the same people: items based on scarcity may not be interesting to investors, but scarce capital is everyone's problem. The ownership society never acknowledges that and that is Graham's social network.

"All the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills in somebody else's name..." The Gatlin Brothers.

XML 2005: Document Formats

As chair of this session, it seems appropriate I provide personal notes. First, let me compliment all attendees on the tremendous and evident respect they brought to the discussion and each other. You are clearly leaders and deservedly so. While none, I think, believed decisions could be made in the town hall, your seeking common understanding in respectful debate was a marvel to experience. Thank you.

The following are questions that were in my opinion, pivotal in the discussion with my personal opinions about the issues arising from them.

1. What is open?

A clear consensus for this question did not emerge. All sides have valid arguments for the technologies they sell, specify and standardize. Questions of the open and closed market models resolve to company choice.

Opinion: The participation agreements of the consortia make adoption and participation separable. While there is an emerging consensus on the qualities of openness, their is no policy or means of enforcement without a clear means of identification. It may be sufficient to say that open is best defined in accordance with the policies of the publishing authority such as OASIS or the W3C given an ontology of concepts for that term and the provability of assertions of duty in the records of authority for the obligated parties. It will be well for the market if such ontologies are sharable among consortia and government alike. This is a significant challenge.

NOTE: Tim Bray made the valid point that the participants in the discussion are not legal experts. IANAL.

Opinion: It is clear that all sides have market ambitions. Mutual interests are likely to converge around costs of sustaining loss leader technologies. A specification represents opportunity; a standard represents market reality as costs to producer and consumer. The advantage of a standard to the vendor is that development costs can be shared and components are interoperable. The advantage to the consumer is that costs can be controlled. A clear shared interest is cost control.

2. What is open enough?

Given item one, there is no consensus here. However, this is where the most progress is being made. XML provides the opportunity to create a common markup for word processing document types and much technology is being provided for systems to share formats. At issue is sharing semantics such that the rendering and behavioral qualities are predictable and reliable for the end user as far as possible.

Opinion: The concern expressed by Microsoft was early adoption of standards such as XSD are costly and if not well liked, contribute to premature obsolescence. In my opinion, this is a risk all early adopters take. The vendor is expected to evaluate a specification and the process of its development. Thus, this is not simple a question of open enough, but also, good enough. In the market, I expect consumers to understand the relative development maturity of software and to choose wisely. It works for cars and other consumer goods. All sides assume this risk.

The concern expressed by open software advocates has both practice and egalitarian appeals. They assert that open specifications developed by all of the market vendors provide the best software, a position sometimes known as, the wisdom of crowds. However, XSD. It is a workable technology, but is it the best or good enough? So in fairness, this wisdom does not always work as advertised. If the best advice is to create as few languages as possible, parties must create very good ones or this strategy saddles the market with mediocrity.

Again, this is a risk of early adopters. RelaxNG is a viable alternative. The problem of the market is sales cycle. A vendor does not see a customer again for some time. The question of standardization can vary by application. The strategy of specification over standardization is to give the market time to decide. Given this, for specification of new products, it is prudent to standardize as little as possible to enable decisions to be made more granularly and timely.

The winning strategy is found in reducing the complexity of the application itself, such that the end user is receiving only those components clearly needed by role and task or preference. This is where the question for egalitarian positions is: given the disadvantage accrues to the vendor with the most legacy, how does the vendor adopt an open specification if the immediate results break fiduciary duty to the company ownership?

But is this question that cut and dry?

Metaphorically, legacy is to market what mass is to momentum and distance traveled over time. If one suddenly cuts the mass, the distance over time can beat the speed of light. An example as Matt Fuchs pointed out over breakfast is XML itself. The task of refactoring SGML for web applications cut mass. Then the market achieved momentum and distance.

So, if the answer to what is open enough is, the market chooses and what the market chooses becomes the standard, then a specification must achieve enough mass in terms of users to achieve momentum. The conundrum is the vendor of a product with sufficient legacy releases a large number of customers as well as software support when legacy is terminated. So the vendor will wait until the software components and the language achieve a point of inflection.

Analysis of Outcome: The open document community must keep up the pressure. Microsoft will implement openDoc as part of a strategy to move their customers from their loss leaders to lower cost software that enables a switch to service systems. The question is timing and the complaint is that this is not an open market. This is not as open a market as some need or think more provident to more companies, but it is an opportunity to do this better than the current marjority market leader.

Because a standard becomes a game model where the evolutionary stable strategy is a Nash equilibrium, it is best to defer standardization until need is clear to all parties. Disruption isn't always good, but winning need not be defined as owning.

Offtopic Lessons Learned at XML 2005

Bloggers with technical training and technical assignments are blogging the important lessons of XML 2005. I am neither. I've never contributed a single topic or technical item of any importance to XML or the web in general. I am a pundit, an observer of the mammals, and really, just a poet/songwriter. Life among the mammals fascinates me and I do pay attention to that. In a technical world of technical assignments, that is offtopic. Let those who care to read, read, and otherwise, must-ignore applies here.

Lessons learned:

Once a greased pig is let loose, no man or woman is its master. There may be a profound lesson about XML and/or the web there.

To keep coyotes away, kill one and nail its corpse to the fencepost. Texans have known this for years. That explains the career of the Dixie Chicks.

In the American South, addressing a woman as "mad'm" is a gesture of respect. In other parts of the world, it's a putdown. Tolerance is best.

Science often gives evidence for things best ignored in polite conversation. Let the world work out the consequences for that which it cannot admit.

Snakes fear their handlers. Understanding that is the key to keeping them as pets.

At every markup conference I've attended, there is a group of contractors and civil servants telling the audience that the lack of interoperability among Tri-service (think DoD) systems nearly caused the last war to be lost. This problem either has no solution or the lack of a solution is profitable. Since the web is an existence proof that whole continents of festering souls have achieved communications over systems that interoperate, it may be time to look at that second possibility squarely and meanly.

On the other hand, in a world where keeping secrets and only giving information within a legal framework designed to protect human rights and freedom, it is very hard to interpret the law and apply the technology while still doing those jobs. Future-proof seldom is.

I am told that at the last three markup conferences I've attended, I've 'chatted up' at least one brilliant beautiful woman. Guilty as charged. No remorse. Brilliant beautiful woman are not only fun, they can be the best friends a po'boy ever has. It's not about one-nighters; it's about life long friendship with someone I wish to care about because they are capable of caring even if they don't. As the song says, "I can't make you love me if you don't.", but I can get to know you in that short time granted. That is treasure enough and a good reason for what others might consider, bad behavior. As a friend said to me, "You can never know what goes between two people". It is possibly less than you think and more important than you can know.

It isn't always best to sit at the front table. The informative conversations are often with people who's acquaintence was a random accident. I crabwalked my way into my career and that is a design pattern.

The music industry is corrupt because of its origins in the nightclubs and speakeasys of the early part of the 20th century. The book industry is not corrupt because of its origins in the patronage of nobles some centuries earlier. The people managing the room make the difference. The reason for the success of the web and XML is because of the values of the very small groups of scientists, technicians and humanists who created these. That they cohere and persist are the driving and shaping forces. As these people fade from the scene, the only guarantor of future success, that this *stuff* does as little harm as possible, is the persistence of those values. For that reason, even though there may be no technical contributions, it is important that stories be told, examples made, and that these people be both honored and remembered. I was most glad to see Jim Mason honored and to converse with some of the other SGML cognoscenti. They took care of me when I was younger and just as dumb as I am today. It is about the people, not the stuff. If you really intend to "do no evil", remember that while you are building these marvelous toys.

If the room staff accidentally breaks your $50 Norelco, it is good luck that it happen in an expensive hotel that replaces it out of the overpriced gift shop with a $100 Remington. ;-)

Kids always like the t-shirts you bring home. Dad's live for the hugs.

The Goblet of Fire

After a long drive, a nap and a cup of coffee, I went to see Harry Potter: The Goblet of Fire with Dana, Buddha and the Boo. It is excellent. The makers really got this right. It is not for younger children but for anyone else that likes this kind of thing, this is that kind of thing. The special effects are purposeful and stunning. The action is fast and the plot is not belabored as it is in the book with foreshadowing details.

Because the main characters are well-established at this point, they play no more time on the screen than necessary to keep the plot moving. Yet, the movie does take all the time needed to put the values the author says are so important to the stories front and center: loyalty, courage, tenacity, inventiveness, friendship, love and learning. When Hermione chews Ron after the dance, we see that magic or not, the struggle to grow up is what establishes those values, and at the end, change will come; so we best value what we value, fight for it and understand life is not without loss no matter how strong we are, how magical, how clever, or how well loved.

Well done. Go see. Enjoy.

XML 2005: Y'all Come

Off to Atlanta this week for XML 2005. I am looking forward to spending the time with friends and being tutored on the latest developments in XML and the Web. These are exciting times. Many years of work have blossomed and the world wide open communications we dreamed about years ago have come into being. Many of the people who made that happen will be there.

This is fun. This is real. And it makes a difference. Since this year XML 2005 is being held in a great Southern city, as we say here in the South, Y'all come.

Sam (For Liz): Video

For giggles and an experiment, I made this video of pix and music. It's a lovely thing at full size but that is around 22mb, so this reduced version is on the web.

Sam (for Liz)

The music has been up at my web site for awhile. The pix are gathered off of download sites. Many thanks to the people who provided those.

I miss her too.

The Sociopaths in The White House

The paper cited below is about the sociobiology of sociopaths and their social strategies. The media talks about culture wars. This isn't that. My theory is this: the Republican leadership at this time is made up of sociopaths, and given their prominence, they created an environment that made it attractive to the sociopath in each of us.

http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/OldArchive/bbs.mealy.html

A sociopath is typically created by early childhood experiences plus genetic disposition in the case of primary sociopathy. The emergence of that personality feature is frequency dependent particularly in secondary sociopaths.

As Linda Mealy puts it, the sociopath becomes "apparent at a time when immediate environmental circumstances make an antisocial strategy more profitable than a prosocial one." and that is exactly what the strategies of the Republican and evangelical right have done: made cheating advantageous. Karl Rove is the exemplar.

What is fascinating about the sociopaths in charge at this time is how much emphasis they place on morality while pursuing immoral ends. That is almost the clinical definition of sociopathy at the extremes. America saw this once before during the administration of Nixon and Agnew.

I've been explaining this to my son who wants to know why things are as dark as they are and why we are seeing a sudden upsurge in student violence here in the South where the solid base of support for the Republican agenda is. I am noting smaller examples of it in behavior of some who now confronted with the evidence of the sociopathy of the administration are in deep denial and actively hostile toward anyone who was not historically supporting the hard line conservative position.

But the damage and concern are much greater and more insidious than what we do to ourselves. In effect, unless the moderates of both parties pull toward the center, we are poisoning our children for at least a decade much as we were poisoned in the late Sixties and early Seventies. The impact on our lives varied by environment (parents and other social advantages/disadvantages) but they are there.

We've seen this movie before. It is long, fatiguing and ends with the sound of children screaming followed by a terrible silence.

XML: When We Wuz Fab

Innovation is when someone folds the universe, taking two distant points and connects them. Otherwise, it is incrementalism. The vision for innovation is most always outward seeking. That means someone knows just enough about something to try or say something they won't if they know too much. I'm writing a course on XML this week and had to get XML for Idiots to do it. It isn't that I don't know enough; it's that I know too much. Even then, I keep looking up pointsto be sure I'm right. So the chances that I will ever innovate on XML are pretty slim.

That's Ok. XML is mostly done and the undone parts are undone to keep us honest. Otherwise, we'd cheat and take LISP and a Volkswagen repair manual and come up with something really cool and totally obsolete. But reallllly efficient.

And that would die. Why? Too hard to innovate on that... and the heater wouldn't work. You have to leave something undone for the next guy. Otherwise, he won't take possession and get passionate about innovation. When something becomes plumbing, everyone thinks they can do it, and where's the fun in that?

When XML was SGML and not well-liked by the programming community, the documentation and hypertext communities that did like it conceived of many extraordinary uses for it. When SGML became XML and was well-liked by the programming community, most of those extraordinary uses dwindled as the programming community was as it always is, absorbed in the minutiae of tools and syntaxes, content to treat it as bits on the wire, not as a fertile ground for extraordinary uses. Thus to the world at large, XML became plumbing, a dull subject and mostly one that is well understood.

I cannot conceive of a commercial like the one for faucets where an attractive venture capitalist is shown a software firm. She places a chunk of XML down on the table in front of a CTO and asks, "Can you design a business around this?"

But I think perhaps someone will. I want to work for that guy or live with that girl.

The Rules of Sex For Men

So many serious subjects; so little bloggin' time.

Tonight, the rules of sex for men.

Not wanting to blog about topics I have no expertise in, these are the rules for Hetero-mutual sex for men. Women may have rules but they don't tell. That may be a rule. Men need help.

Not the how; there are no rules for how. That is a topic for scrupulous study and experimentation, so take it to the lab and make careful observations. Watch some films. Or do both at the same time. It's all ok as long as it's mutual. Oh... and ask questions when in doubt... laughter is not no. No is no.

Anyway, the rules:

Rule #1: Everybody gets their cookie. Otherwise, it ain't mutual.

Rule #2: Women come first. Otherwise, given nature's machinery, men break rule #1.

There may be other rules, but those will get ya by until she tells you what they are. She can break the rules. Men... don't. Rule number one is there to make sure you get enough chances to master rule number two in case you break it.

That's all. That's enough rules for a lifetime for men. We are simple creatures and too many rules will make us forget rule number one.

Take It To The People

If you are keeping up with the Massachusetts decision to require OpenDoc, you possibly know that a bill has been filed to require any such technical standard to be approved by a four member panel appointed by the Commonwealth Senate to contravene this decision. The politics of special interests over the interests of the people of the Commonwealth are clear.

The decision to adopt OpenDoc was based on thorough research into open formats by people who are experts in this field: The State IT staff.

I am extremely impressed that IT professionals are stepping up to the challenge. The profound possibilities and dangers of the World Wide Web aren't fully understood, and because they evolve with the technology, we will never have such assured understanding. IT professionals get this. Others only see business potential and as a result, the Web continues to be fielded witlessly by some, greedily by others, wisely by a few.

The best minds I know in the business all agree that regardless of what transpires in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the future for large interoperable and cross-referenced systems is open formats just as the past has been for HTML, SVG, X3D and the SGML application languages that preceded XML. Markup professionals for the most part understand why: cost control and preserving the rights of individual expression. This is not a trivial issue nor one that can be neglected by the States and even the Federal government.

To the Patriots in Massachusetts: take it to the people. Make sure the Senators who are sponsoring the bill in question are fully engaged by the press, both in the Commonwealth and world wide. Be there to answer and be there to explain to the people what they are losing when such bills become law.

And point to the Senators.

Power corrupts. The only cure is consequences. Take it to the people. One lesson learned on the Internet is that crowds are not always right, but they are often wise.

Patriots

Rewritten for parsability. Thanks Norm.

len

Issues of legal expression surround the relationship of vested authority to a namespace. Ownership rights obtain to the authority over changes to the definition of the namespace and the semantics by which it is enabled.

XML moves the data but XML is a syntax for formats. The legal rights of expectation obtain to compliance to the XML 1.0 and 1.1 specifications but not semantics. Format rights are negotiable, but experience says closing these limits their growth if closing them means

1. Syntax changes of labeled values and structures can only be made by the owner

2. Extensions by relationship to semantic definitions cannot be made by the user of the format.

The ecosystem favors open formats. Open formats that evolve in collaboration with the environment faithfully track the requirements of the environment. That closed formats exist in the ecosystem is undeniable and is also the right of the owner, but that systems which support public work do not support open formats, the closed format acts to remove rights of ownership from the public. Authorities who close formats obtain not just the rights of the syntax, but of the expression because they own all rights to the implementation that enables it, that is, the semantics.

The decision in Massachusetts to impose open formats asserts the right of the owners of expression, the content, in the case, the people of the Commonwealth. The decision is an assertion of State sovereignty over the means and manner of fulfilling the obligation of the State under law to best fulfill the sacred contract between those who have such authority and those whom they serve, in whose authority rights through governance obtain, to provide the most ownership, therefore, the most freedom to the people.

Massachusetts is to be saluted for once again, showing the leadership born in the Boston streets, demonstrating by example that most essential American trait, Yankee ingenuity and just a touch of revolution. They drink sassafrass and dump the King's tea in the river rather than pay a Stamp Tax.

We call them Patriots.

"SALUTE! THANK YOU!"

It is our country, and in my corner and yours, a value shared as Americans is our patriotism. Patriots know when the people are the most free, they are the happiest, the most fruitful, and the most tolerant. Thereby, they obtain the most love, for the duty of patriotism is not love of country, but of making a country safe for love of country.

Outing the White House Spinmeisters

Watching the Tim Russert round table on NBC this morning, one would conclude that the only wrong done was failing to keep good notes of conversations.

Raise your hands: how many of you know that Valerie Plame was a covert CIA agent?

All of you. Enuff said.

March of the Intelligently Designed Penguins

The conservatives are touting March of the Penguins as an ode to monogamy. It confirms what I've always thought: it's for the birds. They also say it confirms intelligent design. So an intelligent creator dresses you in a tuxedo and makes you walk hundreds of miles to find a mate, then after sex, you have to stand around rolling an egg between your toes while she goes fishing.

Ok, I get that last bit. I live in Alabama. But I don't fish in a tux. It scares the bait.

VRML and The Numbers

The deal for authors of content on open source software should be that the content is open. Trust works better than technology.

If the programmers accept this deal, I don't see why the content authors believe they have to get a better deal.

But it keeps VRML from being adopted by the $ content paid for by employers that pay the salaries of engineers for 3D content. CAD. So far, no one has invested the $ into a VRML project that it takes to assemble and maintain a team to create a very compelling VRML-based game for online or single-download play.

Worlds, yes.

Look at the price difference though: say $35 to $40 to belong to a chat site, vs $35 to $40 to download a single copy of a game. Downloading worlds is having the band come to play for you instead of buying their records except they come for pennies a gig and someone else has to own the club. So while online worlds are where much of the best VRML content is, cost per gig has to increase to pay the band and the bar.

Or the teams that build both have to sell both. Gigs and games. This takes serious chops and serious chops earn serious money.

If someone with serious shekels to bet wants to make a bet, funding a team to build an open format online game with all of the secondary add-in sales is even money tonight. Maybe better. VRML has numbers and technology. By the way, when I say VRML, I mean X3D too. The differences are mostly in the minds of the browser makers. They are for the most part, the same thing.

Except X3D has encryption and some other baubles, but encryption stands out.

Lack of encryption denies some vendors access to markets that can buy far more copies of software and services. While computer scientists know that anything you can compile, I can decompile, it is nonetheless believed it constrains theft to only those smart enough to pull it off.

Sorta true. It gets rid of the bleachers.

When I saw the first diskcracker in the 80s that started with "Ho Ho Ho! A pirate's life for me..." I gave up on encryption. If it's cool, they'll get it. If it's not, who cares. If they get busted for stealing the Bewitched movie, they are dorks-for-bucks anyway.

Who cares?

If they are stealing to learn, that is a different story. That is a compliment. Encryption slows those who can be slowed, but the players hungry for it get it anyway. Might as well smile and accept the compliment.

It comes down to the variables you believe you can trade-on with your partners. I want to make money from content, but I will make content anyway. Copyright is good enough. My songs are in mpgs and wavs. Anyone with a speaker wire can copy that; so tell me what good those are except to stop another musician from learning my licks and he can do that by listening? Or buy my midis, but all that is saving you is typing time. If you want them, we can talk.

How exactly does encryption help me? Nada. Copyright is good enough.

So it comes down to how you pick the variables you trade on.

This blog is a part of an email response to a Google survey Viveka Wiley did. It showed that VRML use is growing. Other entries to the 3D market such as Adobe's new PDF 3D are entering the market, but VRML by dint of history and community has grown fourfold in the last year. 3D interest is increasing. Why? It's generational. Dominance isn't the issue. PDF coexists with HTML. it is an issue of who gets good numbers, not who is the last browser standing.

I believe VRML gets good numbers because of the variables selected as it emerged. They shape it. They are deep parts of the networks of selected variables now. In the genes.

1. PDF with 3D is a done deal. What you use it for and who chooses to use it remain to be seen. I note only that so far, the success of 3D has not been a function of its format but of the difficulty of authoring in the medium and imaginative use of it for one-off downloads. PDF is still a slow loader for anything complex or deep. Hardware happens, but it floats all boats. It comes down to content and reach just as it did for Flash.

2. VRML's numbers such as they are are increasing because VRML has been adopted by research universities who understand the rationale of the choice to keep VRML open:

Students can afford it.

Students are still young enough and loose enough to want openness in their relationships. What loves them, they love. Mathematics departments get it. Archaeology departments get it. Navy scientists get it. As long as the code is open, people are learning it. As long as people are learning it, it is alive. Life is learning; VRML's choice of variables chooses education.

Don't need no stinkin' badges.

3. A tipping point in 3D on the Web is approaching. The frequency of new entries into 3D plus the history of VRML in creating 3D presence on the web are coupling to the entry of younger 3D-proficient users onto the web. The first generation of native 3D users has begun to arrive in increasing numbers.

Pick up your prize. If you pick up mine, send me an email. If you pick up something I was paid to do, it will be encrypted and that makes it the problem of it's owner. Not mine.

Call Ray: The Recording

Most songs I release are produced. That means I spend a lot of time in my home studio working on an arrangement, writing out the midi, recording tracks, fixing bad notes, etc. etc. onward to the slickness that technology affords.

For Call Ray, I sat in front of a mic and sang it one time with my guitar. No retakes, no overdubs, no synths, no technical magic; just the song and the emotion.

So warts and all, this is as honest as it gets. Why? This one needs to be honest.

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/CallRay.mp3

Someone else might produce it and give it slick but I'm not of a mind to do that. Of all the people I've known, things I've done, honors good, bad or ugly, the honor closest to my heart has been to be a member of the tribe of musicians that play rock, blues, folk, country, and classical in bars for people who came to hang their blues on the tab, leave a tip, and be with other people just like themselves. It has always been a privilege. So for all of you who spent time with me particularly in the very early days before I had anything but long hair and a guitar, just my songs, here is an honest song.

We miss ya, Ray. Happy trails, Man.

Katrina and Public Safety

While I am glad to see the individuals pulling the online resources together in response to Katrina, I reiterate Rex Brooks' post that getting more professional and informed resources into the specification processes for the public safety and justice systems is a very positive response.

Had CAP and EDXL been online, the response effort could have been better. Among the systems that gather name information, we have location and address, phone numbers, classes of registered vehicles, and named relationships among these. Between your Utility and other public safety agencies, there is sufficient information to warn you and organize the recovery.

It comes down to cost. What doesn't?

Sign up lists for notification are optional and through the receiver of your choice as long as it conforms to the specifications for the system and the standards for the data.

Interoperable asset cataloging and management is needed.

Interoperable dispatch systems integrated with wide area and broadcast communications are now possible and being implemented.

Standards are lacking but emerging.

While large scale sensor systems are vital to homeland security, we are seeing in Katrina the results of overfocusing on one source of hazards to the neglect of more probable ones.

"Fear is the mindkiller." Frank Herbert.

We have to face this squarely. This stops. From 9/11 forward we have been operating in a climate of fear and distraction, somewhat normal given the enormity of that event, but ever since being played as a card in the game of political distraction.

Officials using the destruction of the Gulf Coast by Katrina as the means to push agendas for left or right political causes are not doing their jobs to serve the people. Turn them off for now and remember them later at the ballot box.

The media is not excused either but frankly, they were in fast and providing real time data.

We all failed. Too many people are dead, dieing, homeless or grieving to believe otherwise.

Beware the blame game. It doesn't helo people off roofs.

From my desk, it is clear that the call list systems were inadequate. Call lists are part of the major incident response protocols that enable resources to be brought on line quickly and efficiently.

It is likely that inadequate provisions were made for rapid mandatory evacuations, and just as obvious that some people don't heed warnings even when the evidence is in and time is short. It is obvious that some people even with adequate warning do not have the resources to evacuate. That is a very tough problem to solve logistically. When the danger is coming fast, there are no magic helicopters or fleets of ships. It comes down to school buses, flat beds, tractor-trailers, Wal-Marts and Lowes.

Remember that.

Think hard about what is on their shelves and which parts you want on the street the morning after. Pass laws.

A top-down response is always combined with a bottom-up response. There are plenty of lessons to learn for everyone involved. It is obvious that we must step up the pressure to implement a well-thought through and fearless National Response Plan. It is obvious that State and Local protocols must be improved NOW to cope with the need to interoperate at a national level.

For you XML geeks, it's just the message set, D'oh!

While local and State control of resources remain standard procedure, requests from these officials are not required to mobilize national assets under the NRP.

Old habits can be bad habits. New habits save lives.
Old habits can be good habits. New habits can kill.

What do you know about your location and what is near you?

Do you have a plan to find family members fast if your cellphone callist is unavailable?

Do you know your neighbor's name? Do you know their children's names?

Do you have an evacuation plan that all of these people know?

Are there large chemical plants or nuclear reactors near your home? Do you know about plumes and prevailing winds?

Do you have alternatives?

Act.

If you see a Cat 2 or 3 enter the Gulf in August, you don't need much analysis to know time is wasting. The engine of a hurricane is hot water.

As a member of the public safety industry watching my company stock climb even as I know public safety systems are inadequate in the face of a Cat 4/5 hurricane, I have that same sick feeling I had on 9/11: making money on misery. On the other hand, I know these systems save lives. And more can be saved.

Public safety is an industry where ego-driven competition kills people. It is the industry that in the face of this disaster, must come to the standards table.

The amount of senseless local deviation in your dispatch and records management systems to keep your local response officials nice-to-your-mayor or unions will get you killed. Kick their heads until they implement GJXML, NIMS, CAP, EDXL and other document protocols that work Just-In-Time.

Regionalize. Immediately.

Train your cops and firemen on computers. There is NO excuse for a computer illiterate in a cruiser or any other first responder vehicle.

There is NO excuse for software that is so hard to operate that a college degree is required.

Know what the real problems are and don't let your public safety systems become political footballs. In my experience, it means you cutover slower and often pay the same money multiple times for bad procurements.

Coverage and technology are not the same thing. Choose wisely particularly with respect to scale. LANs rule; WANs fuse.

Networks don't fight floods, fires, or CBRNE but they can place a lot of the right calls to the right people at the right time. At the very least, fix the callLists by event type and support subscription-based notification on any eligible receiver.

Buy wisely. Pay attention. Act.

len (speaking only for myself and not my employer)

Civil War Thinking

From: Mike Bullard [mailto:mikeb43@charter.net]

Received this from a friend and the father hits the nail on the head. During the 40s she would have been run out of the US and the threat now is greater than then. We won that one because we stood united. When the politicians are through with her she will be left to die on the vine by herself and they won't be mentioned.

"An Open Letter to Cindy Sheehan From the Proud Father of a U.S. Marine
By Brantley Smith
Posted On August 17, 2005"

NOTE: Mr Smith's letter is not presented here because of copyrights and permission. Please find his letter and read it.

I wish it did. It doesn't. Like Ms. Sheehan, it hits to one side of the nail. It is two people with very opposite positions about the way of American foreign policy and the cost of not correcting mistakes quickly before losses mount higher. Brother, I do read a lot and not just the Bible or the Constitution, but history, philosophy, religion, analyses from foreign policy experts and so on. They may know more than me or you, or maybe not. So this is just another whack at the American nail.

Our fight is not with the Muslims; it is with sects. These are the people who attack us; not the world of Islam. Unless we wish for this. If we do, it will come true.

Here's the deal with the Muslims: Islam is a religion of peace. The law of Sharia about occupiers on their land is the man who owns it must fight, if he cannot his neighbor must, and if not he, his neighbor to the extent of the whole of the Muslim faith.

That means eventually, we will have to fight them all if we do not leave the lands of the Middle East when asked by the people of those lands. Who we fight about over that will depend on who welcomes us and who does not. Oil doesn't matter; religion does. We invaded and like VietNam, we will face an insurgency that will only grow stronger. When we leave, a Civil War will occur whether we provide cover or not if this is the will of the people of Iraq. Today, they fight us because we are there. Whatever we think we are achieving, we are not stopping the insurgency. We are prolonging it just as we prolonged the Civil War in VietNam by taking a side after the French failed to hold their colonies in SouthEast Asia.

Whether Cindy Sheehan is right to protest the loss of her son in a war we should not have started, or whether this man truly believes the sacrifice of his daughter will somehow make him safer, Iraq did not start a war with the United States. We did.

We violated the one tenet most Americans share: we would not strike first. We say we did this out of fear of Weapons of Mass Destruction when America possesses the
greatest stock of such in history. If it really is our intention to liberate, then we have done that. If it really is our intent to turn Iraq into the war where all terrorists come to learn how to fight us, we have done that too. If it is our intent to leave in peace and enable the people of the region to choose as freely their lives as we do here, then we must leave.

If our intent is other than that, then we must ask ourselves if we do as Americans share such cause. If all that sends us there is fear, then we are a dishonored nation before the world for we of all peoples have learned by history and experience the costs of stocks in the village square, or sending our children into harms way to satisfy the craft of craven leaders.

Bodies. Ours. Theirs.

At the end of this when we do withdraw as we eventually will, those costs are not unnoticed or dishonored. The children and men who go to die as professional soldiers
will have as they always have when called, fight selflessly for each other and for whatever else they value.

It is Their fight. Not mine. Not yours. Not Cindy's. Not Mr. Smith's.

When they come home, they will tell us if it was worth it, but they will come home, to say or be buried. That is war.

Intelligent Design

After going into full flame mode on XML-Dev about intelligent design, I should apologize.

But I won't.

You see, every time anyone in America apologizes to the evangelicals, their extreme members use it to push their agendas harder. This is the only group I know of this side of the Moonies that have summer camps for preparing children to debate their agendas. I don't want that taught to my children. There are lots of parts of their agenda I oppose, but most of them can be debated without pulling the rest of the world into the debate.

Intelligent design is not science. It is religion. Science does not admit universal first cause. Why? Because this premise is not testable or verifiable. Once introduced, logical investigation stops. Competent well-trained scientists know this. Those who mix their faith into their technique of investigation, and science is technique, know this.

My position on the existence of God can be found all over my writings. My beliefs are as strong as they need to be. My relationship with God is not for anyone else to judge.

But I do not and cannot accept this thesis that attempts to beggar that relationship because some believe they can strengthen their own position with it. It adds nothing to my faith, and it detracts from the body of science.

In the past, when faced with the political agenda to create a unified faith in this country, the result was to build stocks on the village square. From that experience and others, we learned to separate our religion from our State, but this is not why intelligent design cannot be a subject for a science class. The thesis has no tests for proof and no proof offered adds knowledge that strengthens faith.

It isn't science. Teach it in the temple and I will be there with you. Teach it in a science class, and I will remove my children from your class. Make it a State-enforced requirement, and I will remove my family from the State. No negotiation.

The world today is filled with extremism. We are pumping these emotion-stirring positions into a system that amplifies them and gives them power over otherwise reasonable men and women. We do this at our peril. Any fool, whether foolish about religion, science, or their own relationship to God can see that. Fools that we are, if we wish to harm ourselves, this will achieve a fool's end.

Let the worshipper be known by that to which they live assimilate.

Getting Fed

Tim Bray is right, as usual.

If blogs, vlogs, mlogs, in other words, subscription systems are to grow faster, subscribing should be a one-click operation. On the other hand, the web is full of one-click nasties and if the XML icon is to be used for that operation, it should be safe. It seems to me, getting people to learn and trust the operation because they are fairly certain they can is the challenge.

Otherwise, yes: drive learning through the common interface convention. That is what hypertext has done best for decades.

Gas and The Suburban Warrior

My son turned 16 and I bought him a six cylinder car. Gas prices rise. My plan to keep him close to home is working.

Next year, you will see very poor people driving very nice previously owned SUVs. You will see very rich people driving very nice restored VW Beetles. There is a rough justice in that.

The men in my neighborhood are organizing group expeditions to Wal Mart and Home Depot on the weekends. Our wives are organizing whose lawn will be mowed on alternative weeks.

The beneficiaries of the gas prices are local TV stations. We can't afford to drive to the movie store, and we gave up on the movie industry last year anyway. Come to think of it, Hollywood is the one place in the nation that is truly low on gas.

I could take this seriously, but first I have to help repair my neighbor's push golf cart. In return, he is sharpening my wooden handle hedge clippers and swingblade. That's ok. The fellow across the street is blowing his leaves off his driveway.

The knee pads help.

To The Canadians

When my country needed its friends, Peter Jenning's friendship was a great gift. For boys my age, he was a truthteller, the greatest gift that friendship gives. I grieve with you. We will remember our friend, for his goodness, his charm, and his wit but most importantly, his truth.

God, give Peter a job.

len

Doing Business in The Jungle

The fastest gazelle rises early to outrun the slowest gazelle.

The fastest lion rises early to chase the slowest gazelle.

The lazy hunter rises at noon, loads a gun, and shoots the fastest lion before shooting the slowest gazelle.

The slowest lion waits in the bush for the hunter to reload.

The crafty vulture patiently waits to feed on the slowest gazelle, the fastest lion, or the lazy hunter.

Be the middle gazelle.

Call Ray

In memory of
Ray Brand
"master bluesman, saint, husband, father, friend, legend"
1946 - 2005

Look around this room at all these beautiful people
Holding on to what they've got and memories
All the times they came to play
All the loves they took away
All the fights they had when the night was bad
And the room was dead and the Man was short
Weren't we lucky?

And the Man that's laying there, He was a friend of ours
He could play the sweetest song you ever heard
He could make you cry or laugh
Set you on a better path
Teach you to play, show you his way
If you needed a friend you could talk to, you'd

Call Ray
Call Ray

He played your song and talked to you at the table
Never forgot the band or the till or the take
No matter who came his way
He had a cheerful thing to say
Not a word for dues just a powerful blues
And believe in the thing that you're doing,
Aren't you lucky?

So all of you saints and sinners and friends and lovers
Do one last gig for the man who cleared the way
As long as you play, you will always hear Ray
In your hands, in your hearts,
In the notes of the songs that you're bending

Call Ray
Call Ray

When the storm above your head's
Too warm to let it rain
When the face you see's too sad
To keep away the pain
There's a sound you want to hear
There's a hunger in your ear
There's an aching in your heart
That just won't go away
Call Ray

Len Bullard - Aug 03, 2005