Month: November 2004

Action Alert — Need Your Help

I know that even those people who kindly read my blog depsite disagreeing with me vehemently on most left-right political issues tend to agree with me on intellectual property issues.

There is yet another in a series of “gigantic expansion of industry intellectual property rights at the expense of the individual citizen consumer” bills being pushed through Congress right now.

PLEASE go to this page and read the text of the “please oppose this” letter and send it to your Senators if you agree with it.

There’s a war on our intellectual property rights, as consumers, going on in the legislature, and the huge media conglomerates have just fired another salvo and are hoping to catch us napping.

Squeak Ambivalence

I’ve been dinking with Squeak again lately.

The thing with Squeak is that there are numerous levels to it.

There’s the classic Smalltalk level.

There’s the new Morphic environment, which was borrowed from the Self programming environment. Morphic was originally (in Self) designed as the visual environment for prototype-based programming par excellance, but of course Squeak is Smalltalk, which is class-based, not prototype-based, so there’s less than a 100% perfect fit there.

There’s the eToys programming environment, which is a visual programming environment built within and on top of Morphic. eToys is prototype-based, and this is accomplished, as best I understand it, through a hack on the Smalltalk environment in which every new object in the eToys environment generates a new singleton class. eToys is an entirely visual programming environment; you literally write code by dragging and dropping tiles into code templates. It’s suprising how much cool stuff you can accomplish there.

I’ve been infatuated with Squeak for several years, but it’s a very stormy relationship. There is so much to Squeak — there is so incredibly much in there — and it’s been developed nonstop very rapidly for years — and the documentation is abysmal, and gets very rapidly out of date. If you look at the Squeak mailing list (populated by elder gods of programming like Douglas Englebart and Alan Kay!) you will find a constant stream of newbies fascinated by Squeak, trying to accomplish something, and baffled by the overwhelming uberty of the Squeakiverse.

I have this dream of using Squeak to make neat little toy programs that my kids would enjoy. Like, I want to make something where you have these little blocks with different colors and they play different notes. And you can put them in a row in a container and play the whole container to make a tune.

That seems perfect for Morphic/eToys. So I tried it. First I tried to just do it in eToys. It was a hoot playing with eToys’s visual interface, and the neat tricks you could make things do, but I found out there seemed to be no connection between eToys and the internal Midi music system in Squeak. Whoops! Environment shear! So I had to go into the Morphic world and make a Morph that could do what I wanted. I succeeded with some effort, but never did quite figure out 100% how to give it a menu that would let you choose the note that the thing played. (I did set it up so that the morph was a different color based on what note it was, and that was wayyy slick how that worked. I was jazzed about Squeak when programming that part.)

I thought, “I should make this morph work in the eToys environment. If I could program it with tiles, I could do the rest of what I want easily.”

No luck there. I couldn’t find doco anywhere on how to give a custom morph its own special set of tiles, and I couldn’t figure it out by reading the code in existing morph classes before frustration and anger at wasted time overtook me.

This is always how it happens. I have a neat idea, I figure out how to do it 40, 60, 80%, and then the rest of it just kills me.

I need to swear off the Squeak. It’s so cool and powerful that it tempts me, it sucks me in, and then it bites me on the ass every time with its lack of documentation and overwhelming complexity.

I think I need to learn Flash or someting. People are always doing in Flash the general sorts of things I would like to do in Squeak. I wonder how much it costs.

Gotta get me away from that Squeak. It sucks all my free time and gives me temporary delight and ultimate disappointment.

NYT on Vote Fraud

Let me say once again, I would be thrilled to have it proved that no fraud occurred in the 2004 presidential election.

By “proved” I mean recounts and audits such as are being ordered in Ohio, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, on the basis of serious concerns raised by troubling statistical anomalies all over the place.

By “proved” I do not mean supercilious pooh-poohing by the New York Times about Those Wacky Bloggers and their conspiracy theories.

To read that NYT piece you’d think that a dozen bloggers had cooked up these crazy ideas of election fraud based on disappointment over a Kerry loss.

There’s no mention of the fact that this kind of fraud was warned about and predicted years in advance, and that the particular signs which in every other country in the world are taken as an obvious warning of fraud occurred. There’s no mention of the fact that the three most important non-major-party candidates in the 2004 election — who obviously, by running against Kerry themselves, could hardly be dismissed as disappointed Kerry fanatics — are all financing recounts in key states.

There’s no mention of really any facts whatsoever.

I guess I’d summarize the article as “Move along. Nothing to see here. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Those wacky Liberal Media, huh?

UPDATE: Similar pooh-poohing from Wired. Again, the point is missed that what people are calling for is the facts and that the facts are, and will be, unavailable to us without a recount.

If the facts support the Bush victory, well, I don’t know about anyone else who’s making noise about it but I will personally be thrilled. I really would rather believe in an electorate that supported Bush than in an RNC which was able and willing to sell out the democratic system completely on a national scale.

But dismissal of anyone who is demanding the facts as a crazy “Internet pundit” doesn’t make me feel particularly confident.

Both links via Steve Dekorte.

God Bless America

Hardees comes through for us. No damn liberal hippy indie filmmaker is gonna squelch their vision.

HARDEE’S® INTRODUCES NEW MONSTER THICKBURGER™
The New 2/3 lb. Thickburger Takes Decadence to a New Level

ST. LOUIS, Mo. – November 15, 2004 – First there were burgers. Then there were Thickburgers. Now Hardee’s is introducing the mother of all burgers – the Monster Thickburger™. Weighing in at two-thirds of a pound, this 100 percent Angus beef burger is a monument to decadence, yet is still a throwback, as it features lots of meat, cheese and bacon on a bun. Available at all Hardee’s restaurants starting today, the Monster Thickburger is certain to crush the hunger pangs of even the most famished burger lovers.

(I’m not actually going to be partaking of these, because it sounds like a bit much even for me, it’s mondo expensive, and there are no Hardee’s in the area. But I will sleep better at night knowing that if I need one there’s a Monster Thickburger out there waiting for me.)