Negroponte J. Rabit

posting this via phone browser because my isp, who shall remain nameless, is having technical problems with the tower that provides my net access. The net starts working for few minutes to half an hour then is back down for the rest of the day. Otherwise, lack of infinite net distractions makes me a bit more productive on my nvscene entry. So, yay!

A seriously great animated tribute to the greatest computer ever made, by who else but Eric Schwartz.

This is just too awesome for someone of Bugliosi's stature saying it, I had to transcribe it so I could keep a permanent copy in my blog. Video of Bugliosi speaking it is here.

The third group of people responding to my book is the nation's right-wing, and they of course have contempt for me and my book. But whatever contempt they have for me, I can assure them and I can assure you, I have much, much, much more contempt for them. *audience cheers*

There are no more repugnant, hypocritical and un-American - that's the word I want to emphasis - un-American people of society today, than the right-wing. I'll give you one example, I could give you many more. When it was their time to fight for America, and the Vietnam War, virtually all of them - I'm talking Cheney, Rove, that endlessly reprehensible Rush Limbaugh. What did they do? I'll tell you what they did. They ran like hell in the opposite direction.

But today, they have no hesitancy at all, no hesitancy at all, in waving the flag - they don't want to fight for it - waving the flag and shedding the blood of other people's children, than in the Iraq War. *audience cheers*

As far as Bush's monumental crime in this case is concerned, I'm going to give you a fact - it's not an opinion, it's a fact - because I know these people - as far as his monumental crime in this case is concerned, since Bush is a conservative republican and so are they, anything he does, anything at all including murder, is just fine with them. God, these are despicable human beings. I have nothing but contempt for them.

But you know, although I have, perhaps, been a tough prosecutor. I was always very, very, very fair. And there is one thing I should probably say, in partial defense of these people, that goes in mitigation. Arguably reduces their moral culpability. And what I'm talking about, is many of these people are incredibly stupid. *audience laughs* And they make up for their stupidity by being extremely ignorant. And when you combine stupidity with ignorance, that's a toxic combination. But I do want to be fair to these people.

Vincent Bugliosi's name is synonymous with integrity, being the world-famous District Attorney who prosecuted Charles Manson, and who's legendary career as a prosecutor includes losing only one out of all 106 felony cases he's tried, including winning every murder case, has just written a book titled:



I would believe Bugliosi knows what he's talking about. His understanding of criminal psychology is beyond question and he has recently written a compelling, disturbing article that Bush is a psycopath, not only unable to feel any human emotions like compassion toward other people, but in fact derives a sick sense of self-importance and pleasure in American soldiers dying. "I am a War President, I have War on the mind" I've had this suspicion for years and have written about it many times (many, many, many, many times), as have several others, and Cindy Sheehan sensed this upon meeting Bush after her son was killed in Iraq and became an anti-War activist because of it, and Democrat Representative Pete Stark controversially said last year:

"Republicans sure don't care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where are you going to get that money? Are you going to tell us lies like you're telling us today? Is that how you're going to fund the war? You don't have money to fund the war or children. But you're going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President's amusement."

To understand how a REAL human being in the White House should react to matters of war and inhumanity, go out and rent or buy the exceptional HBO docudrama Path To War, about Lyndon B. Johnson. To Bush (and most republicans, apparently), war and death is as real as someone playing a video game.

Anyhow, here's a talk Vincent Bugliosi gave regarding his new book. Click the video to see part 2.

My new toys... ^^



A couple of Mercury Computer Cell Accelerator Boards. These are self-contained Linux machines sitting on a standard PCI-Express card, running the same PowerPC G5-based Cell processor that powers the Playstation3, except with all 8 Synergistic Processing Units functioning and 5 gigabytes of system RAM (about 20 times the PS3).

Also, Toshiba has just released a new Qosmio Q55 model that runs a highly scaled down (1/5 the performance, roughly estimated) version of the Cell CPU that they call the Spurs Engine, which will still be able to offload and perform many processor-intensive tasks like video processing up to 10 times faster than it's dual-core Intel CPU is capable of.

David Fox talks about the early years working at LucasArts. LucasArts first few games like Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus on the Atari 8-bit systems were technically amazing. Rescue on Fractulus (aka. Behind Jaggi Lines) used fractals to generate 3D mountains.

It is in 12 parts but you can watch it as a YouTube playlist here.

They are doing everything possible thing they can to block investigations into the crimes connected to the Iraq war and Bush administration, even going so far as one republican representative named Darrell Issa publically making a death threat against Democrat Henry Waxman, who has been leading investigations into military contractors, such as a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney's company Halliburton received $3,000,000 to fix a water pumping system that electrocuted one soldier as he was taking a shower. And there have been 11 other similar deaths.

They have always operated like a crime syndicate, somehow attracting the most ambitious and least ethical people. Like President Bush and Vice President Cheney, Darrell Issa also has an arrest record, except it was for car theft and illegal weapons, many times.

I read a lot of political, general news and tech blogs. By a-lot, I mean approximately 742 currently. Actually, by read, I mostly skim for subjects that interest me. I do like to keep a permanent copy of every posting so I can go back later if it's a subject I might want to do more research on. Google is handy, sure, but do a search on any political subject and you're going to end up with some bad information from insidious right-wing sites designed to appear as legitimate, reasonable news sources (see for yourself). It would be nice if Google had a filter:bullshit search term, but alas.

A solution is to use an RSS aggregator tool that keeps a permanent copy of every blog but most of them become unusable after about 50,000 articles. Years ago, I made a simple one that worked pretty well that was nothing more than a Perl script that fetches articles into MySQL and a web front-end that utilizes MySQL's full-text search. It worked fine but I wanted a more graphical front-end and didn't want to spend time writing something elaborate that only I would use. I used the Gnome aggregator Liferea for a while but it quickly became overburdened by tens of thousands of archived articles.

I found KDE's Akkregator to be the only RSS reader that can handle massive amounts of archived articles. I've been running it now for 8 months with an archive of 210,000 articles (700 megabytes) and despite taking 30 seconds to start up, and several minutes to perform searches now, it hasn't slowed down at all for general browsing of archived postings. That has to do with the fact that Akkregator uses the very efficient but simple metakit4 database engine to store each archived blog in it's own separate database file. Unfortunately, metakit is a very basic database engine that doesn't provide fulltext search (as MySQL and now SQLite3 provides) and is not supplied through Ubuntu's package manager as a shared library but it's available here to download and compile and here's a Python interface.

Since sqlite3 is far more universal and a cross-platform file format, every copy of Firefox now includes an embedded sqlite3 engine, I thought it'd be handy to convert Akkregator's content from metakit to sqlite3. Here's a script I wrote that does just that. The schema is self-explanatory. The only things to point out are that the article contents are gzip-compressed and stored as blobs, and indexed by an md5 hash to make storage a bit more efficient (articles with duplicated content point to the same blob). This reduces the size of the data from 700mb to 150mb which also makes it a nice way to put all these hundreds of thousands of articles on a hand-held device to read on the go. There's a port of Python to Windows Mobile devices, Garmin GPS, Apple iPod, and many others and Sqlite3 is included. If the device has a built-in web browser, a simple Python script running as a local webserver makes a really flashy front-end for carrying all this content with you. It works well on my Samsung Blackjack.

( Source Code )

An extremely cool visualization of a popular open-source project put to visuals and music, generated using the actual commit logs of the Python language going back to 1991. Names represent programmers ("Guido" being Guideo Van Rossum, the inventor of Python) and the dots surrounding names representing files that programmer is working on. It shows 9 years of very gradual growth with a handful of programmers popping in and out, then a massive explosion in activity 2000, and an even bigger one in 2005.

Now you can clearly see why open-source looks like the andromeda strain to some tech CEOs.

A poll from National Journal of Democrat and republican Congressmen:



Mathew Iglesias writes:

The cool kids of the conservative movement have long since moved on to much more complicated rationalizations for why coal and oil companies should continue destroying the planet unabated, but National Journal's poll of members of congress (respondents are anonymized except for their party affiliation) reminds us that for most conservatives lying and ignorance are still the key to the politics of global warming. Note this staggering remark from one GOP stalwart: "If there's one thing poll after poll indicates, it's that the science is not settled on this issue."

Because when I want to understand whether or not science is settled, I leap straight for a public opinion poll! Are ghosts real? The science is unsettled!

Perhaps the only thing really unsettled is which of these republican denialists gets to be Chinese peasant-food first.

A "reporter" from Bill O'Reilly's bug-infested TV show attempts an ambush confrontation with Bill Moyers at National Conference for Media Reform 2008 and probably cried himself to sleep that night.

Al Franken, 2008 Democratic contender for the Senate

A Republican attack ad against Saturday Night Live alumni Al Franken. It almost could have been a prank made by Franken himself, if it were more cleverly done. Al Franken is good enough, smart enough, and doggone it, everyone likes him, which is a nightmare to a party who's trying to get their own torture-supporter/candidate Norm Coleman re-elected. Franken has been a celebrity since joining Saturday Night Live in the mid-70's, so republicans really could have been more creative with all the material out there, instead of repeating the same clip over and over of him saying a four-letter word. So, what was torture-supporter Norm Coleman doing in the 70's?

"these conservative kids don't fuck or get high like we do (purity, you know)" - Torture-supporter republican Norm Coleman, early 1970's

Does he kinda looks like that guy from Silence of The Lambs?

Update: Here is a more recent picture republican Norm Coleman, a supporter of water-boarding:



A simple Google Images search on Norm Coleman reveals countless pictures of him with that exact identical grin, and even more amazing, that photo was taken while he was asleep.

It appears that Obama has won the Democratic nomination. I really hoped Hillary would win. In fact it almost seemed to me like destiny considering years of despicable treatment she has received by the very same lousy people who backed George Bush II: The Terrible. Hillary is the best proof that no matter how hard you try as a politician to be a force for good, in fact BECAUSE of trying, you will be vilified mercilessly and repeatedly until even the people who should know better believe it.

David Neiwert explains how the right-wing craps in the water of national discourse by making people stupid:

I was talking to one of my oldest friends, a smart and politically involved woman who makes her living as a jewelrymaker in Missoula, Montana, back in early February, shortly after the Washington State caucuses, when I had largely been won over to the Obama camp. She was already ardently pro-Obama, but when the subject of Hillary came up, I was a bit taken aback by how viscerally she disliked the woman: she was cold, calculating, unsympathetic, too ambitious ... a bitch.

I'm sure she was as taken aback by the forcefulness of my reply: She sounded, I told her, like the women I used to meet when I went to militia meetings, the ones who sold books like Big Sister Is Watching You (all about the secret coven of witches operating out of the White House then); or for that matter, like the average Rush Limbaugh listener. The women who absorbed and internalized all that right-misogyny rampant in those worlds. And they all used the same kind of visceral I-can't-explain-it-I-just-hate-her rationale.

That's how right-wing crap works. It's not meant to advance or even partake of discourse; it's meant to end it. One can argue the worth of Hillary's policies or her voting record or her position on the war till the cows come home; but when she's reduced to being a bitch, that pretty much ends the discussion. And when it's as pervasive as it's become in the past decade, its effects are paralyzingly toxic.

Yeah, Hillary has a history of controversial remarks (reads: naively more direct and honest than a politician is apparently allowed to be), and her attempts to appear more "First-Lady"-like tends to be kind of tone-deaf. But the fact is that Hillary Clinton has been involved in politics literally her entire life, graduated at the very top of her class at one of very top colleges in the country, served on the committee that led to Nixon's impeachment in the early 70's, was one of the countries most prominent lawyers before her husband became president, and raised a daughter who is already well into a successful career. Those facts stand on their own and anyone who calls Hillary Clinton a "bitch" really are only displaying their own misogynistic ignorance about how a "first lady" should behave. Hillary shouldn't waste her beautiful mind on the high standard that republican First Ladys have set. </snark> Counting how brutally vicious republicans have been on her, her husband, and even their daughter, she has been remarkably restrained.

That said, I think Obama has proven himself to be more than capable as a campaigner and a leader. All of the Democrats were exceptionally strong (unlike the comedy of horrors that the Republicans gave us) and for someone relatively obscure like Obama to pull ahead of all of them, especially Clinton, and without generally resorting to republican-style campaign game, requires exceptional preparedness, clear-sightedness, and mental agility - qualities that I think Obama has a slight advantage over Clinton. However, are these enough for Obama to win in the general campaign, if the Rove-advised (errr, chit-chatted) McCain campaign resorted to the same Rove-type dirty tricks that sunk two extremely smart, principled but also slightly tone-deaf Democrats, Al Gore and John Kerry. Joseph Wilson has been pretty consistently a Hillary Clinton supporter and makes some very solid points on why experience matters and one slam dunk:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is one of the few who fully understood the stakes in that battle. Time and again, she reached out to my wife -- outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson -- and me to remind us that as painful as the attacks were, we simply could not allow ourselves to be driven from the public square by bullying. To do so would validate the radical right's thesis that the way to win debates is to demonize opponents, taking full advantage of the natural desire to avoid confrontation, even if it means yielding on substantive issues. Hillary knew this from experience, having spent the better part of the past 20 years fighting the Republican attack machine. She is a fighter.

But will Mr. Obama fight? His brief time on the national scene gives little comfort. Consider a February 2006 exchange of letters with Mr. McCain on the subject of ethics reform. The wrathful Mr. McCain accused Mr. Obama of being "disingenuous," to which Mr. Obama meekly replied, "The fact that you have now questioned my sincerity and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you." Then one of McCain's aides said of Obama, "Obama wouldn't know the difference between an RPG and a bong."

Mr. McCain was insultingly dismissive but successful in intimidating his inexperienced colleague. Thus, in his one face-to-face encounter with Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama failed to stand his ground.

,,,

Contrary to the myth of his campaign, 2008 is not the year for transcendental transformation. The task for the next administration will be to repair the damage done by eight years of radical rule. And the choice for Americans is clear: four more years of corrupt Republican rule, senseless wars, evisceration of the Constitution, emptying of the national treasury -- or rebuilding our government and our national reputation, piece by piece. Obama's overtures to Republicans, or "Obamacans" as the Senator calls them, is a substitute for true national unity based on a substantive program. His marginal appeals have marginally helped him in caucuses in Republican states that Democrats won't win in the general election. But his vapid rhetoric will not withstand the winds of November. His efforts will be correctly seen by the Republican leadership as a sign of weakness to be exploited. While disaffected Democrats may long for comity in our politics after years of being harangued and belittled by the right wing echo chamber, the Rovians currently promoting Obama are looking to destroy him should he become the nominee. Obama's claim to float uniquely above the fray and avoid polarization will be short-lived. He is no less mortal than any other Democrat -- Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry -- all untouched at the beginning of their campaigns and all mauled by the end. We should never forget recent history.

Although, Wilson apparently isn't aware of McCain's "YouTube problem" - notably the June 3rd speech in Lousiana that was so unnervingly creepy, McCain aides are trying to get it removed from YouTube. Paraphrasing someone I heard on NPR a few days ago, the Democrats could probably nominate a can of soup and it'd win.

Andrew Sullivan posted about this website that, for a $40 annual subscription, will let you send pre-stored e-mails to family members after the "rapture" occurs. This would trigger, they claim, when "3 of our 5 team members scattered around the U.S[sic] fail to log in over a 3 day period." Accounting, of course, that two of those five are unrepentant sinners who'll hang around to make sure the servers are kept running to send out those post-rapture e-mails, as fire descends from the heavens turning Earth into a giant fireball of death.

Already came and went. Did anyone notice?

American Idol's creator Nigel Lythgoe didn't want President Bush to appear on the show's charity episode but relented under White House pressure, and his appearance ended up being one of the lowest-watched.

Considering this is American Idol, I think I can speak for most people when I say:

BRING HIM ON!!!

Jeremy Ruston's TiddlyWiki [Introduction to TiddlyWiki, quick reference] is the coolest, most powerful, and most useful pieces of software ever invented that sits inside a single self-modifying HTML document on your hard drive. Actually, it's the only piece of software ever invented that sits inside a single self-modifying HTML document on your hard drive, but it's still one of the coolest and most useful pieces of software ever invented. I've written about TiddlyWiki once or twice before. It's a wiki tool with an elegant underlying programming model that allows it to be extended to do anything you'd ever want.

One neat aspect of TiddlyWiki is that you can begin with an empty, barebones TiddlyWiki (just right-click and save this link) and import just the addons that you need from other people's TiddlyWiki sites using a tool very similar to a Linux package manager (even supported automatic updates). It also is really handy as a web designers scratchpad and for playing with new browser features, and you can import some Javascript libraries and use their widgets and graphics rendering features within your tiddlers. For instance,