Presidental Approval Over The Decades

There is an interesting article over at The Best Article Every Day that plots the approval ratings for US Presidents from Truman to Bush Jr. I wanted to comment on some interesting trends I noticed.

• From Truman to Reagan, every President ends with a much lower rating than they begin, and their replacements always come into office with a higher rating than who they replaced.
• Clinton is the only one to leave office with a higher rating than he entered with.
• Somehow, Clinton's rating climbed when the Lewinski allegations were made and yet dropped when he was cleared of charges. Do we actually want a dirty President?
• Bush is the only one to enter office with a lower approval rating than who he replaced.
  
  

Upgrade Your Democracy

Seth Godin is a bright guy. I thought so yesterday and I think so more today. Having your views paralleled and expressed when you haven't found how or where to do so is great. Few other experiences are as refreshing as unannounced, welcome company.



Read is post on why our outdated politics need to adapt, which a far truer thing than most of us realize: Seth's Blog: 1840s democracy



My favorite two points involve the outdated geographical systems of our districts and candidate ranking versus voting.



To quote Seth, "Our issues aren't farm-based any more." I agree on more issues with people in entirely different locations than I ever will with people next door or even in the same town. New communications make connecting those people all the more easy, and yet we need to struggle, all of us, to gain ground mixed in with so many people in our locale. Popular opinion does not walk or run, but it does fly right over your neighbor's head and to you.



Saying anything about how bad our bipartisan system is won't do any good and won't include anything original, but candidate ranking replacing candidate voting would only improve the situation. How many of us either throw out vote away on a minor-party candidate or refuse to give them any help at all out of fear of throwing away that vote? Ranking solves the issue, because even if the Greene Party has far too few votes to get an official elected, they can still get their second choice into power. Bush would not have happened with a ranking electoral process. Period.



Definitely some things to think about.





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First Sketch in Probably a Year

I honestly can't remember having sketched anything in at least a year, much less completed any artwork for quite some time. I grabbed some paper and a pencil and just did this because I had to. Hopefully I can start to pry open the gates of my artistic well again.

The Collector of Junk

I am the Wonderful Collector of Junk You Never Wanted. Being a bit of a packrat was handed down to me by my father, who has a garage and a large, two-story shed full of "junk", and that's when keeping it at bay with near-daily yardsales through spring and summer every single year. Obviously, I've got some strong habits to break this Cycle so that Caelan doesn't have to. We're trying to get things shaped up and ready so we can deal better when he is born.

I have a very large collection of movies, and its been the subject of "discussion" several times in the marriage, if you know what I mean by "discussion". Needing to get things organized and prepared for the baby, and my wife spending 90% of her TV time watching TLC's Clean House, has brought this subject back into the light. Of course, I rejected any thoughts of getting rid of my wonderous collection. Why, I have movies in there you could never find. I have both editions the classics Hercules and Hercules Unchained. I have Barbarella and Forbidden Planet. I even have movies so obscure, that I don't even want to watch them! Yeah, maybe I got a problem.

The thing is, I really like having the movies. Not the individual titles, and not to be able to watch them, which I admit I rarely do, but to have the collection as a whole, is a very nice thing, which I enjoy, for some reason. Rationality ate at my unnecessary ties to the collection and I may or may not have gotten overly mad at the idea of getting rid of them. I may or may not have thrown the first VHS I decided I never watched and never wanted to and never will watch into the box. Twice...

Packrats out there, we got a problem. Do what I did, and what I need to keep doing. Go through one group of things at a time, and really consider if you need each individual one. Try and cut it down by at least half, and later you can even cut that half down another 50%. Progress is the keyword here, and eventually that progress will lead you to something you never knew you needed: spacious tranquility.

I feel better looking at the shelf without two layers of tapes of DVDs on it and more stacked ontop of each row and on top of the whole shelf unit. Yick.

Cringley doesn't think Google is doing TV right

In a conviniently timed article, Cringley talks about how the server-client methodologies will not hold if internet distribution of video is to reach any ammount that would impress the media producers. Since I was just posting about Google TV, I thought I'd put up some related thoughts.

There are a lot of things to agree with and to disargee with. On the one hand, I can see that the current methods wont last if the userbase grows large enough to care about. On the other hand, I know those execs are afraid of the term "P2P" so lets keep away from it, or it just won't happen.

The majority of the content is pre-recorded, so we aren't talking about live streams; this is stuff that can be downloaded ahead of time and watched from your local cache, so that's in our favor. Also remember that current broadband can bring in a lot video faster than you can watch it, so the servers aren't even supporting the users for the entire duration of their entertainment time. This, at best, can double the number of viewers a data center can support.

So the current ways might live for a little longer than Cringley thinks, but in the long run he is probably right. Of course, this kind of thing won't be available easily and universally until its built in at a lower level. What we need is something like HTTP can operate very easily, be implemented quickly, and adopted by everyone. Most importantly, it needs to be transparent to everyone but the network admins and browser/player developers.

Grid Networks looks cool. When I get my new Windows box, I'll try out the demo and see what kind of content they have available.

Google Video needs to be Google TV

With Google Video, the G People are already building a humble video distribution chain, but they have some steps to take before it is ready for prime time. Here is just what I think would make Google Video worthy of being called Google TV:

• At least a Mac OS X player, if not a Linux player, too.
• Ad-supported viewing of for-pay content for one-time-view only. In other words, watch an advertisement before a set of music videos you want to see.
• Channels. Although "On Demand" video services are a wonderful thing, sometimes I just don't want to decide and I want to watch "whatevers on".
• Original Programming that isn't just a collection of internet clips. We need to see the formation of a Google Studios, that would produce news clips, documentaries, a sitcom, a drama, a cartoon, and a soap opera, to start with.
• The ever-predicted Google TV Box for my grandmother.

Pandora, Personal Media, and Integration

I have two wonderful sources of music while I'm on the computer and working: Pandora and my personal MP3 collection. Now, often when I am listening to Pandora, I think to myself "I'm in the mood for a few songs from Tangible (of 8bit People)" and sometimes, when listening to my MP3s of Harvey Danger's latest release, I get in the mood for some songs from my personal Ventures radio station on Pandora. Makes me really wish there was someway I could keep a list of Media Resources registered on my computer, with a player that can be set to randomly request tracks from each of them, randomly. Request a random track to be played from Pandora, then one from my own collection, then play a song from one of my favorite Shoutcast stations, a few from Pandora and my harddrive again, then maybe something from my computer's Radio Tuner. Anything like this around? Does anyone know where to look into this sort of thing, existing or in some form that could evolve to this?

Less signs, less accidents

Less signs, less accidents: "Roads Gone Wild is a piece in Wired from December 2004 that a reader just brought to my attention. I love it. Here’s why:

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn’t done his job. “The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman says. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.” "

Signal vs. Noise is a great blog about well thought design, and although it is the blog of 37 Signals, a software company, they appriciate design in all of its forms. For some reason, I really liked this piece, talking about the designers of roads. Who ever really thought of traffic as a medium of art? Well, when you read this, you can see how one would think that way. I enjoy finding something that I don't normally find interesting turned on a new corner to suddenly become interesting from a context I can grok and appriciate.

Blog Splitting

I've started a second blog for programming related posts over at (http://ironfroggy-code.blogspot.com/). Start reading there. This blog will remain for social commentary, political outbursts, and personal reflection.

Where Have I Been?

Mostly sitting right here. Things have been going on. I now know that my child will be a boy, and his name will be Caelan Mathew Spealman. I got my self my first contract programming job, developing a site called MMOUpdate.com, which is basically like Allakazahm or tthotbot. Anyway, I'm gonna try to get back to my blogging more. Hopefully if this contract work goes well I can do that full time soon. If I get a good contract for at least three months of work before this current job is finished, I may take the plunge. It may be a risk, but the freedom is worth that.

Mono-compliant Development Platform

There is a growing and unseen need for a Mono-compliant development platform. This would be something like Eclipse, but much lighter in base. This would allow people to extend it very easily in pretty much any language and a lot of different targets could be found. Extensability needs to go very far, too. Syntax highlighting and code-folding rules is not enough. If I want to define that all lists and tuples be displayed an element-a-line and no more than 5 lines used (with an embedded scrollbar to go through it) then let me do that. If I want dictionary literals to be displayed as tables, then so be that. If I want to very the if and else blocks side-by-side in color-coded boxes, then let me do that, too.

Just a thought.

No, this should not use Gtk+, because that isn't productive (.Net has a GUI API, already!).

My Name is not Scott

Some may know and now all will, that my name is Calvin. Over the years of working in various positions that require me to deal with lots of people over the phone (fielding calls from customers managing the furniture store, dealing with vendors and carriers for K-Mart, now) I have noticed a very odd and very consistent trend.

I tell them my name, "Calvin", and they persist to call me "Scott". How on Earth does anyone mistake the two? Now, many people (just ask my wife) will tell you that I speak softly and sometimes am misunderstood. But "Scott" for "Calvin" just doesn't make any sense, especially for the pure consistency of the occurrence! What is going on here?

People of Earth: My name is Calvin. Not Scott. It is Calvin.

Paint.Net on Mono

I technically admire the .Net platform, although I don't use it much myself, except following the tutorials on MSDN for C#, which I compile and run with Mono. Part of this is subscribing to the feed from the MS blogs, just to see if there is anything interesting going on. Through this I found Paint.Net, a nice little project that started small and seems to be growing nicely. I looked into running it on Mono, and was very discouraged to find the developers don't care and don't seem to want it to run on anything but the official .Net implementation on Windows. They act like Mono is a nothing to the side to whisk away like dust on the floor.

Now, am I wrong in expecting anything more? I don't think they should all install Fedora and start using Linux, but as long as they are developing a .Net project, couldn't they at least open the door a little? Their installer even refuses to install with Mono, so I can't even test the damn thing.

That's too bad, because I'm disliking GIMP more and more every day.

Linux Packaging and Autopackage

I got a comment on my previous little quip about the problems with Linux-based operating systems. It was just a link to the Autopackage website. I find it odd, as I had just got wind of Kyle Brooks response to some of the negative commentary about Autopackage. So, basically I agree with everything Kyle said and I know things like Autopackage exist. But, the user still needs to know how to run the .package, which is more difficult on some systems than others. Of course, a quick google of autopackage will tell them, but how will they know to google for autopackage? Now, some distros might be able to configure KDE or GNOME to look at the first line of the file and see its actually a shell script, but I believe most would not. Of course, doing so might open up some security holes, but if the user is running as the root user, they're screwed anyway.

Now, why do we even need things like Autopackage and why is there such controversy over it. (Yes, there is controversy) Quoting mike from the Autopackage forums:

As you may have realized, many Linux developers are very conservative. Some feel autopackage is bad, others just feel that software installation is not their problem.

The culture of "my responsibility ends once I upload a tarball" is very deeply ingrained in the open source landscape I'm afraid - over a decade of distros controlling everything has made any true innovation in this field nearly impossible.

In the beginning there was source code in a tarball and it wasn't good. Programmers would release a tarball, and maybe some compiling tips, and others would acquire the code from an FTP server at 150 baud or mail-order a copy of the code on magnetic tape storage. Systems were varied and different and often a user would work hard to build the program for his (or her) particular setup. Some did this so much, that they developed little scripts and tools and practices to make the whole thing a little easier, and organizations and businesses that adopted this software would follow the same lines. These evolved into the idea of distributions, which made it easier to do all this work.

Free Software/Open Source operating system distributions can be traced back to the three major BSD derivatives: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. These used the Ports system to control the compiling of software for the system. Guidelines about library locations and configuration files were created and software intended for a particular distribution would follow those guidelines. However, due to the days before real distributions, the developers were not directly targeting these distributions. As many distributions came to be, their volunteers and employees would port useful software, making just enough changes to get it to work on their distribution. Sometimes this would make it to the main source, but usually it would be bundled in some way, such as a tarball, along with installation scripts for their distribution, like Ports for the BSDs. These were called packages. The users were happy because they had good software, the distros were happy because they had users, and the developers were happy because they didn't have to do the work to make the software run on all those different distros.

Fast forward twenty years or so and we haven't come far. Developers find it hard to package for so many targets and many refuse to do so, even believing they have no such responsibility. And, why should they? Most are working for free, anyway. Reducing the number of targets is an option, but anyone is free to make more and that is a large portion of the value of free software.

Through these years, those standards and guidelines have converged in many ways. Something like autopackage was finally possible and perhaps we need it.

Let me tell you what bugs the crap out of me. I hate finding a good program on-line and then having to open up a terminal and typing "emerge search foobar" to find this app. I hate having to tell my roommate, who uses an extra computer of mine, how he has to go through Mandriva's software management app to find out if that game has a package available or not.

I welcome Autopackage, but we need cooperation from the community and the distributions to make it work. Perhaps work like Autopackage can converge the much repeated work of packaging all this software and we can reduce distributions to installation auxiliary scripts.

All I know is I am tired of waiting for a package after the tarball is released.

What's wrong with Linux

I love Linux and the community it spawned and so much about it. However, overall, I've grown increasingly distressed. Things only seem to go downhill, and everyone just keeps on cheering.

Binary support is in desperate need and barely cared about. Packaging is a complete joke. The distributions are a mess.

I shall elaborate.

Pat 0.5.0 for this Weekend

This weekend I'll release Pat 0.5.0 with the following features (and more?):

• Selection from multiple tables with a From(table1, table2).select(table1.colA) type syntax
• Column instansiations to pass to insert and update operations, such as table1.colA("foo")
• Streamlined and cleaned up unittests
• More complete unittests
• Deletion of rows

And, possibly some other things. This should be good enough that I'll return my focus to Involgo, which is also about to shape up into a nice prototype of what I'm trying to accomplish. Hopefully, by the end of 2005, I'll be able to show what I've been trying to acheive, and maybe I can actively search for some VC to put my work to better potential.

Pat 0.5 Not Released on Time!

I was going to release Pat 0.5.0 tonight, with full support for multiple table queries with From(tbl1, tbl2).select() syntax, but its getting late. I've gotten selection working fine. I need to centralize all query generation and keep things cleaner, and that also includes migration of the update query generation to the new From class, which will control all CRUD, now. Internally, single table operations will just create a From with themselves to handle the request. This should all be operation by tomorrow and I'll release then.

I may have broken my release-a-day spree with Pat, but at least I did make progress tonight, and that's the important part.

Pat 0.4.1 Released

Twenty minutes ago, I realized I forgot to update Pat today. So, I fixed a small bug, and released a minor update that allows column-column comparison clauses. I added unittests, made sure it all worked right. It does. Another day, another release. At least until Pat reaches maturity for my purposes, I'll keep this up.

Pat 0.4 Released

Following my "at least one release a day" pattern with Pat, I've released yet another version. Version 0.4, which supports multiple chained select calls, easier selecting by passing multiple Clause and Column objects in any order, and more, is now available at the cheeseshop.