O (b LOG N)

Plug-in Hybrids

Where’s mine? I would gladly buy one. I saw one of these last year in Minnesota. The Li-Ion batteries they use have a many year warranty. If I recall correctly it was like a five year warranty. The engines last considerably longer because they run so much cleaner. It’s simply common sense.

• RechargeIt.org
• Google.org

Poster Child

Cross Post

I promised previously to highlight a developer a month. This month I'm highlighting Pete Erickson. I guess this makes Pete our developer of the month. Roy told me he was unwilling to peaceably relinquish his crown. Too bad Roy. It's Pete's turn to shine because he's a superstar and you're old news.

First a little background on Pete. Pete was born and grew up in a teeny tiny village in way northern Minnesota called Roseau.. He attended college at Bethel and then NDSU. He was hired by Great Plains software after school. Pete tells the story of his first week at work. He was informed the company was purchased by Microsoft. He was sufficiently pissed he considered quitting. He didn't though and he continued to work with Microsoft for a couple of years in and out of Redmond, WA. PeteE (as I call him) is passionate about open source and open standards. He enjoys participating in triathlons, biking, hiking, camping, and long walks on the beach with pina coladas. Ok, the last two items I manufactured, but the rest is true.

 Open Source Developer Poster Child

Pete manages most of our infrastructure stuff. He's probably the best Linux guy we have other than Geoff. He codes mostly in C# although he's recently become adept in PHP. He manages the NOC, all our software packaging, install guides, and upgrade scripts. Mostly recently he's done a lot of work in Hayes on Lucene with search indexing, he wrote the RSS API, and he even wrote a Drupal authentication service for DekiWiki.

Pete was actually the first engineer hired by MindTouch. He was a contractor even before Roy came on as a full time employee. He was introduced to me by his now girlfriend Marianne who was doing some business administration work for MindTouch. Pete literally worked with me out of my windowless basement for a couple of months off and on. Unfortunately Pete still lives in MN. Hopefully his recent surfing expedition in Pacific Beach with Max will entice him to move to San Diego very soon.

Pete blogs on rare occasions too. He's done a nice write-up about the upcoming Hayes Beta2 release. Specifically he highlights:

• Hayes has a web installer! No @#!t! And PeteE wrote it too.
• New parser
• Live data services
• External Authentication services
• Extensible storage provider model
• New indexing service
• Nicer UI, but I think he means improved presentation layer

Pete's post is a useful read for all you interested Gardeners. Enjoy! Oh, and be sure to click on the photos in this post so you can see the witty Flickr notes I placed on the photos.

California’s Open-Document Bill: AB 1668

Groklaw

I have an email apparently originating from Microsoft asking people to support their opposition to California A.B. 1668 - Open Document Format, Open Source. by writing to the California Assemblymen involved in this bill. This email has contact information for the Assemblymen involved, and a lot of information about their position regarding ODF.

Is this for real? A little background first. The bill in question, AB 1668, says this (in part):

Great. This bill is common sense. This will be in the best interest of any organization, any industry, and technology in general. Massachusetts has already passed a similar bill. The great state of Minnesota attempted a similar bill previously. Now Minnesota is trying again and Texas plans to attempt a similar open standards bill. No one in their right mind would object to any of these bills. Allow me a moment to explain why this is common sense.

Interoperability. This is about content/data being reusable by any application. Your content should be able to be consumed and understood by a variety of systems and applications. This insists that content created and used by the state of California be stored in a format that other systems can understand. This is important for automating things and making content search-able, discover-able, and reusable. Imagine writing an essay in a language only you and five of your college buddies could understand. This is great if it’s some type of secret document. Perhaps the by-laws to your secret society. But this is useless if your essay is content intended to be communicated or collaborated on. This bill asks that our tax dollars not be trapped in a format only a minority of applications can read and operate on.

Royalty free. Why should you pay a royalty on the content you create? You own it. In this case, why should the government be forced to make annual payments to access and edit their data? It makes no sense. Imagine, again, writing an essay. This is the equivalent of you being forced to pay money every time you wanted to read your essay. Also, any time you wished another person to read your essay they too would have to pay to read it. Always, forever. You’re not getting the money. It’s your essay. Where’s the money going? To the company that made the paper and pen you used to write the essay. Absurd, I know. If you have a proprietary format, let’s say Microsoft Word (.doc), you are required to own that application to create, edit, or view content in that format. It is well known in software that users pay, on average, an annual 20% maintenance fee. You don’t just buy Microsoft Office once. In 1989 Microsoft Word 1.0 was released on Microsoft Windows 3.0 and sold for $500. Can you read the files you created using that software? It’s not likely you’re running a Windows 3.0 computer anymore. It’s unlikely you could use Word 1.0 if you wanted to. In order to read the files you created you would have had to have purchased additional versions of Microsoft Word. You are paying royalties on your content right now! It’s absurd. You’re not even paying for support. You’re just paying a royalty to access and edit your content. And so is everyone you share your content with.

Multiple vendors. Buyers will always pay more when they have available only a single supplier for a given product. Users will always be subjected to an inferior product when there exists only a single supplier. This is a kind of innovation tax. It exists because the supplier has no incentive to improve the product beyond incremental improvements to justify a release in order to be able to sell an upgrade. Case in point, Firefox, an open source Internet browser, forced Microsoft to improve Internet Explorer. If it weren’t for Firefox who knows how long we would have had to wait for multi-tab browsing. Without Firefox, Microsoft would have no incentive to improve their product. If there exists multiple vendors the rate of innovation will be superior and thereby the products. Also, the competition will drive down prices.

Open standards. This makes all of the above possible.

Is Microsoft seriously attempting a campaign to kill AB 1668? This would be outrageous! Not only would it be counter to common sense, but the bill doesn’t preclude the use of Microsoft applications anyway. It would just mean that Microsoft would have to use a file format that meets some common sense requirements. Microsoft is currently lobbying for acceptance of its Office Open XML (OOXML) format. ECMA approved this and it’s now before ISO/IEC. The OOXML spec is an unprecedented 6000 pages and is ridiculously contradictory to openness and standards as is evidenced (in part) by:

OOXML does not conform to ISO 8601:2004 "Representation of Dates and Times."  Instead, OOXML section 3.17.4.1, "Date Representation," on page 3305, requires that implementations replicate a Microsoft bug that dictates that 1900 is a leap year, which in fact it isn’t.  Similarly, in order to comply with OOXML, your product would be required to use the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function, and therefore assign incorrect dates to some days of the week, and also miscalculate the number of days between certain dates.

Similarly, 6.2.3.17 "Embedded Object Alternate Image Requests Types (page 5679) and section 6.4.3.1 "Clipboard Format Types" (page 5738) refer back to Windows Metafiles or Enhanced Metafiles – each of which are proprietary formats that have hard-coded dependencies on the Windows operating system itself.  OOXML should instead have referenced ISO/IEC 8632 "Computer Graphics Metafile" – a platform neutral standard.

Taking the external reference issue further, I’m told that parts of OOXML can’t be implemented by your typical programmer at all without technical assistance from Microsoft, as they refer not only to proprietary Microsoft products, but to undocumented parts of them as well – which violates the General Principles of ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2. 

- Standards Blog

Is this a joke? Why would anyone other than Microsoft want OOXML anyway when we have ODF? I don’t know.

Call to Action:

Contact your state representatives and demand AB 1668 be passed. If you are not a resident of California, Minnesota, or Texas, contact your state representative and demand a similar bill be adopted. Stop this needless waste of our tax dollars. If you live in California, you can use this site to determine your representative by zip code. Every state has a similar website.

Act now! Hearing on AB 1668 in the Assembly Committee on Jobs, Economic Development and the Economy is set for April 17th, presumably in Sacramento.

I sent an email to my two reps and congressman in matter of minutes. For zip 92101, these were:

Senators

Member                 District Number and Office        Capitol Office

Kehoe, Christine       39  2445 Fifth Avenue             State Capitol
                           Suite 200                     Room 4040
                           San Diego, CA 92101           Sacramento, CA 95814
                           (619) 645-3133                (916) 651-4039 

Assembly Members

Member                     District Number and Office     Capitol Office

Salas, Mary            79  678 Third Avenue               State Capitol
                           Suite 105                      Room 2137
                           Chula Vista, CA 91910          Sacramento, Ca
                           (619) 409-7979                 94249-0079
                                                          (916) 319-2079

Saldana, Lori          76  1557 Columbia Street            State Capitol
                           San Diego, CA 92101            Room 5150
                           (619) 645-3090                 Sacramento, Ca
                                                          94249-0076
                                                          (916) 319-2076

I’ll surely post any responses I get here.

External Resources:

• California AB 1668
• California State Assembly Member Mark Leno website
  • He’s also interested in introducing a Net Neutrality bill
  • He’s a supporter of the Sunshine Initiative
• A brief analysis of the
• "Why OOXML will ultimately fail"
• "Openness in Microsoft’s OOXML"
• C|Net: "California may adopt OpenDocument"

Blog Tag

There’s this game of blog-tagging that’s been going around for some time now. I was just tagged by my old neighbor in Minnesota. The very lovely and talented JJ Killins who has been such a good friend to my wife and daughter. In fact, her daughter was Ashby’s first friend. This meme (see Unusual #2 below for why I’ve not used that word for two years) has evolved some it seems from the original five things that most people don’t know about me to 6 things that make me unusual and 6 things that make me happy. Here it goes:

Things that make me unusual (Tara helped):

1. I’m blunt. I mean really really blunt. I speak my mind like no one I know. Want to know what I think? You may not even need to ask me. You may have to ask me not to tell though.
2. I don’t like things that are trendy or particularly popular. Whether it’s a band, a restaurant, fashion whatever. If something becomes popular I’ve been known to drop it. If it’s already popular when I’m introduced to it I’ll likely avoid it like the plague. I’m making an exception for blog-tag I suppose, which is surely very trendy right now. This aversion for the popular or trendy has, on some occasions, proven to be counter-productive professionally because there can be wisdom in crowds. Some examples: I stopped blogging when it became really popular and abandoned a thriving and growing community of readers for a couple years. I refused for over a year to use any application with tagging. I avoided anything Web 2.0 (confs, groups, etc) for over almost two years. Anyway, the wisdom of crowds does not often manifest itself in pop culture.
3. I never leave home without my knife and my camera.
4. I enjoy reading, but mostly I consume my books in audio format on my iPod. The only novel (fiction) I’ve read in the last ten years (I think it’s been ten years) I read on my Treo600. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always reading something, but I don’t read fiction often. The reading a novel on my Treo (smart phone) is what Tara suggested was an item that makes me unusual.
5. I like documentaries lots. I watch a few a week. This tends to irritate friends, family, and my wife who are all not as fond as I am of documentaries. Tara likes documentaries, but she doesn’t want to watch one every night. As I write this I’m watching “Jesus Camp“. Craaaa-zy–Duude, Ted Haggert has a cameo appearance, you know him. He was the evangelical preacher who was snorting crank, banging a gay prostitute, and advising George W. Bush every Monday of the week. At home right now I have: “Grizzly Man” (Steve recommended it a long time ago), “Terror Storm” (apparently you can watch it free here), and “Who Killed the Electric Car“.
6. Tara says I dress like an old man. Particularly my socks, shoes and hats. I almost only wear Birkenstock’s and I like hats. I don’t know what’s wrong with my socks…

Things that make me happy:

1. My daughter Ashby makes me happy in ways I never thought possible. All I have to do is look at the girl and regardless of my state of mind I’m filled with happiness.
2. Sex. And my wife in general. Tara is so funny. See Unusual #1.
3. Making the world a better place. Diminishing poverty. Helping under-served people and communities to improve their quality of life. Facilitating education. I love helping people learn. Knowledge is everything man.
4. Camping. I try to make at least one solo camping trip a year. When I had fewer responsibilities I spent a lot of time in the Boundary Waters.
5. Sharing. Sharing knowledge, ideas, emotions. Sharing is good (most of the time). This may account for Unusual #1 and Happy #3.
6. Diversity. In everything, but particularly in culture and ideas. It’s hard not to love California when you love diversity.

Now it’s my turn to tag two people. Definitely PeteE who, because he’s so much cooler than me, has probably already been tagged. And Paul Jones who I barely know, but admire greatly.

I’m Cold, I’m Going Home

Everything is packed. The house is cleaned and ready for our renter. I made the mistake of touching up some paint, which resulted in me having to paint a couple very large walls, one of which was 15 feet high. That sucked. I also had to repaint part of the kitchen because a handyman I hired to help get some things done around the house to get it ready for us to leave the state had used the wrong paint, cream not white. That sucked too. Home Depot is like a black hole. Why is it that if I have to make one trip to Home Depot I end up making at least three? I hate that! I can never seem to get what I need in a single trip. I suppose it’s best that the house have fresh coats paint now. It will surely save us money later. It still sucked.

In preparation for the trip I’ve got my podcasts stacked up on my iPod and some new audio books to tide me over during the 30 hour, 2000 mile drive. I have the route planned. If you like, you can review it. If I had more time I would take a route through Wyoming our mover was telling me about that’s mostly 2 lane highways and not much longer. However, I have to be in San Diego Wednesday for a conference on Thursday and with Ashby an all…we’re going to get the drive done quickly. We’ll be sleeping in or near Omaha, Nebraska tomorrow night. I’ve taken this route before. Tara hasn’t. Hell I think I’ve taken darn near every reasonable route one can take from MN to CA. I considered going south to Oklahama City and cutting across to avoid any potentially bad weather. I took this route last time though to California and stopped off to visit Paul Yellowhorse (an old buddy I’ve known since I was about eight) and I’ve trafficked that souther route from east to west most often recently; so, this time I figured I would take the route through Colorado, which I haven’t done for many years nor has Tara ever seen.

I can’t wait to get on the road. It definitely feels like I’m going home. I’ve also been freezing my ass off today. It’s bitterly cold here in Minnesota. Bitterly cold. I mean really freaking cold. Also, my gloves were packed. I think I lost two fingers today.

I just finished reading Cobra II. Well, I say reading, but I use this loosely. I actually listened to the audio book over the last few days as I packed and cleaned the house. Wow, what a book! I suspected Rumsfeld was an incompent and stubborn Secretary, turns out I was right. Great book. Must read.

Mostly packed, ready to go…

We’re mostly packed now. The movers load the majority of the Minnesota office tomorrow beginning at around 8 AM CST. After that they’ll load the house. Our route to San Diego is completely planned, but I know we’ll be going through Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada before we reach California. The car is loaded. I would have never had enough room if it weren’t for the new (used) 21″ Yakima Skybox I bought off Craigslist for a less than half price. I’ll try to post as we travel. My BlackBerry acts as a modem to my laptop so connectivity won’t be much of a problem. I’ll be glad when we’re on the road this Sunday.