I love America. This is such a great idea. Firefighter Brand Products are products like soda and chips. However, 25% of the profits go to support firefighters. Besides, no HCFS:

HAZ-MAT FREE

All Firefighter Brand Products are made from superior quality ingredients for great taste. "Haz-Mat Free" is the brand's response to the growing concerns regarding health and obesity in America. The company's better-for-you beverage products contain 25% less sugar versus other leading brands of soda, and they do not contain high fructose corn syrup, which has been tied to the obesity crisis in America. Likewise, the company's better-for-you chips do not contain trans fats or hydrogenated oils, which have been shown to raise harmful LDL cholesterol levels.

In two press releases here and here the corn refiners are sounding like the tobacco industry. First they are sponsoring a breakfast to tout that HFCS ( High Fructose Corn Syrup) is not the only thing making people fat. Second, they are trying to force the people in the Dominican Republic to keep HFCS as cheap as possible. Maybe the people in the Dominican Republic are not fat enough yet.

Once, when I was but a wee lad, I went door to door around the neighborhood during the Jerry Lewis telethon to collect money for Jerry's kids. Being the adorable little angel I was, I amassed quite a wad of cash for those afflicted with muscular dystrophy. Then to my suprise, a police car pulled up beside me and a very tall, very scary policeman got out and asked me what I was doing. I showed him my money and told him what it was for. He took me home and I had to get a Jerry Lewis Telethon flyer taped to my money bucket so people would not thing I was stealing the money. Apparently, one of my generous neighbors had called the cops on me.

It was fun to go later and drop off all the money.

TOASTMASTER'S THEME: Write your own romantic tip or idea. Of all the relationships in life, our romantic relationships are the most important, most enduring and can bring the greatest pleasure or the worst pain of our lives. So for this week, share with the group a romantic idea. Maybe its something you have experienced or maybe its something you would like to share. Please note: Keep them in the PG realm please.

For example:

1 - Give you sweetheart a dozen real roses and one silk rose with a note that says "I will love you until the last flower fades".

2 - Buy several small candies, the one's she really likes, and hide them in various places so she will find them over the course of a week.

Along with the rest of the world, I always seem to have side projects going. One of these is called topoged and it lives at http://www.topoged.com/ with a blog at http://topoged.sf.net/.

What is topoged?

I like doing genealogy,http://m0smith.freeshell.org/JosephAnthonyThomas/ and have over 10,000 names between my wife's family and my family. The problem is that genealogy programs only let you see a few people at a time and its hard to truly understand the data.

On the other hand, a topographical map presents a lot of data in a very concise way. There are lines and colors and icons all presented in a clear, easy to understand format.

Topoged is then to generate a 3D image of the genealogical data so that it can be understood better. Right now I don't know what they looks like but I have a few vague notions.

What about phpGedView?

This is an open source project, http://phpgedview.sf.net/ that manages and displays genealogical data online. I have integrated it into the topoged site and will build the 3d images based on what phpGedView provides.

I found myself with 7 gmail invites for 7 of my cloeset friends. Are you my friend?

Yahoo! News - Sugary Soft Drinks Raise Risk of Diabetes -Study

Rates of diabetes are skyrocketing. At the same time, over the last couple of decades, consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages has increased," said Meir Stampfer of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, one of the authors of a study examining the link.

A few months ago it was corn syrup.

The end of summer

The end of summer means:
* Cramming in those last few Bar B Qs with family and friends.
* One last camping trip
* Doing all the little things we planned on doing but never got around
to.
* Getting the kids used to going to bed and getting up so they can go
to school.
* Preparing for the beginning of fall.

HR0627 LRB093 16247 KEF 41881 r

1
HOUSE RESOLUTION

2 WHEREAS, 138 years ago Brigham Young and more than 20,000
3 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were
4 expelled from the State of Illinois after the Illinois General
5 Assembly withdrew its charter for the city of Nauvoo, Illinois
6 in Hancock County in 1844; and

7 WHEREAS, During a period of seven years of Illinois
8 history, from 1839 to 1846, Latter-day Saints built and
9 developed the city of Nauvoo into the largest city in the State
10 of Illinois and the tenth largest city in the nation; and

11 WHEREAS, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
12 was established by Joseph Smith in Fayette, New York on April
13 6, 1830; and

14 WHEREAS, The Mormon Prophet, Joseph Smith, led the
15 community of Latter-day Saints from Fayette, New York to
16 Kirtland, Ohio in 1831; and from Ohio to Independence,
17 Missouri, in 1837; and

18 WHEREAS, Joseph Smith, a strong anti-slavery advocate, led
19 his community of some 15,000 Latter-day Saints to the
20 Mississippi River town of Nauvoo, in Illinois, following their
21 expulsion from the slave State of Missouri in 1839; and

22 WHEREAS, Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints exercised
23 enormous industry and effort in the development and growth of
24 the town of Nauvoo, succeeding in creating a prosperous
25 community in which they drained the local swamp lands and
26 transformed them into productive agricultural and residential
27 environments; and

28 WHEREAS, Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints were given
29 an extraordinary charter for the powers of home-rule by the

                HR0627 - 2 - LRB093 16247 KEF 41881 r

1 Illinois General Assembly to create and preside over their own
2 court system and also to maintain their own military force,
3 second in size only to the United States Army; and

4 WHEREAS, Joseph Smith and the community of Latter-day
5 Saints exercised extensive missionary activities which drew
6 new Mormon settlers to the city Nauvoo, reaching a population
7 of some 20,000 citizens by 1844; and

8 WHEREAS, The prevailing economic conditions of the nation
9 in general, and Illinois in particular, faced a downturn in the
10 early 1840s, with the result that the rapidly growing
11 population of Nauvoo faced drastic levels of unemployment
12 without success in attracting needed industry; and

13 WHEREAS, During the period of their residency in Nauvoo,
14 Joseph Smith and his community of Latter-day Saints began as
15 political Democrats, transferring their political allegiance
16 to the Whig Party in both the elections of 1838 and 1840,
17 before once again transferring their affiliations back to the
18 Democratic Party in the election of 1842, until the
19 establishment of the Reform Party by Smith in time for the
20 election of 1844, when he began to seriously campaign for the
21 office of President of the United States; and

22 WHEREAS, The expression of political authority and power
23 within the community of Latter-day Saints was seen by many
24 citizens in Illinois as reasons for caution and concern, seeing
25 the control of local courts by Joseph Smith as autocratic, and
26 interpreting the leverage and influence of the Mormon
27 community's voting strength as an over influential forceful and
28 voting bloc; and

29 WHEREAS, Local religious customs among the Latter-day
30 Saints began to be viewed with suspicion, bias and
31 misunderstanding; and

                HR0627 - 3 - LRB093 16247 KEF 41881 r

1 WHEREAS, Following the destruction of a local anti-Mormon
2 newspaper known as the Expositor, violence against the
3 Latter-day Saint community increased; and

4 WHEREAS, The Governor of the State of Illinois, Thomas
5 Ford, called out the Illinois Militia to keep order; and

6 WHEREAS, Governor Ford had the Prophet Joseph Smith and his
7 brother, Hiram Smith, jailed, on suspicion of complicity in the
8 destruction of the Expositor, in the nearby town jail of
9 Carthage, Illinois; and

10 WHEREAS, A violent mob stormed the Carthage jail on June
11 27, 1844, causing the deaths of Joseph and Hiram Smith; and

12 WHEREAS, Between 1844 and 1845, violent acts against the
13 community of Latter-day Saints increased in volume and
14 intensity, demonstrated in such acts as the burning of crops,
15 the destruction of homes and the threaten extermination of the
16 entire Mormon population; and

17 WHEREAS, Faced with the extremism against the community of
18 Latter-day Saints, Brigham Young, the new leader of the Nauvoo
19 community made plans to take his people out of Illinois; and

20 WHEREAS, Beginning on February 4, 1846, Brigham Young began
21 sending the community of Latter-day Saints out of their
22 homeland of Nauvoo, Illinois across the frozen waters of the
23 Mississippi River, in the largest forced migration in American
24 history; and

25 WHEREAS, Brigham Young made an exodus from the State of
26 Illinois, leading tens of thousands of men, women and children,
27 together with livestock and wagons that stretched across the
28 expansive winter horizon for miles; and

                HR0627 - 4 - LRB093 16247 KEF 41881 r

1 WHEREAS, In this Mormon exodus, Brigham Young and the
2 community of Latter-day Saints left behind their life in
3 Illinois and the shining city that they had fashioned from both
4 their faith and the hard work of their hands; and

5 WHEREAS, Brigham Young and the community of Latter-day
6 Saints set off in the midst of winter for Utah, some 1300 miles
7 to the west; and

8 WHEREAS, The severity of the winter placed on Brigham Young
9 and the community of Latter-day Saints extreme hardships,
10 trudging across the Iowa Plains to the far side of that state
11 where they made a winter camp; and

12 WHEREAS, In the Spring of 1847, Brigham Young and the
13 community of Latter-day Saints began again their journey to
14 Utah, beyond the Rocky Mountain Range, to the valley of the
15 Great Salt Lake; and

16 WHEREAS, On July 24, 1847, Brigham Young and the community
17 of Latter-day Saints arrived in that valley following a trek of
18 more than five months, journeying across the heart of the
19 American continent, from the heartbreak of events in Nauvoo,
20 Illinois to a place of far-western refuge; and

21 WHEREAS, Within 50 years of their arrival in the territory
22 of Utah, the community of Latter-day Saint became the 45th
23 state in the Union on January 4, 1896; and

24 WHEREAS, The community of Latter-day Saints grew from a
25 population of 250,000 at the end of the 19th century to a
26 population of more than 10 million people in our present day;
27 and

28 WHEREAS, The goodness, patriotism, high moral conduct, and

                HR0627 - 5 - LRB093 16247 KEF 41881 r

1 generosity of the community of Latter-day Saints has enriched
2 the landscape of the United States and the world; and

3 WHEREAS, The biases and prejudices of a less enlightened
4 age in the history of the State of Illinois caused untolled
5 hardship and trauma for the community of Latter-day Saints by
6 the distrust, violence, and inhospitable actions of a dark time
7 in our past; therefore, be it

8 RESOLVED, BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE
9 NINETY-THIRD GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that we
10 acknowledge the disparity of those past actions and suspicions,
11 regretting the expulsion of the community of Latter-day Saints,
12 a people of faith and hard work; and be it further

13 RESOLVED, That we asks the pardon and forgiveness of the
14 community of Latter-day Saints for the misguided efforts of our
15 citizens, Chief Executive and the General Assembly in the
16 expulsion of their Mormon ancestors from the gleaming city of
17 Nauvoo and the State of Illinois.

The Star Wars Trilogy on DVD is on sale at Amazon for $41.99. Availability: This item will be released on September 21, 2004. You may order it now and it will shipped it to you when it arrives.

This looks like a good price, $14 a movie.

From the review

Years later, George Lucas transformed his films into "special editions" by adding new scenes and special effects, which were greeted mostly by shrugs from fans. They were perfectly happy with the films they had grown up with (who cares if Greedo shot first?), and thus disappointed by Lucas's decision to make the special editions the only versions available on DVD. Still, the Star Wars trilogy was one of the last remaining DVD Holy Grails, and only the most stubborn critics won't welcome its release. --David Horiuchi

Cartographer http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/how_to/tricks_of_the_trade.php

Mapmakers will often use "copyright traps," bits of information in their maps that are purposefully wrong. They might label a body of water "Lake Strongbad," for instance, and then examine the next editions of competitors' maps to see if the incorrect information makes an appearance.

The simple act of gardening contains within it many of the greatest lessons of life. For example, the law of the harvest simply stated as "for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap". Can there be anything simpler or easier to understand? When carrot seeds are planted, the harvest will be carrots. That is the way it works and it always works that way. Would a person really plant carrots and expect corn in the harvest?

This same law applies everywhere. Each decision is a seed planted. Sooner or later these seeds sprout and bear fruit. Just as the harvest is predetermined when the seeds are planted, so the consequences can be foretold when the decision is made.

As quoted in a Utah Department Of Transportation press release, the cost of the Legacy
Parkway was originally bid at $475,500,000.00. Of course, with the
delays, court battles, and such, it is going to cost a lot more than
that. However, lets just start with that number for argument's sake.
In other words, that is the amount of money the state is using to make
sure that those people who live in northern Davis county and need to get
to the west side of the Salt Lake valley can do so without being unduly
delayed by the huge mass of people heading downtown. Current estimates
are there are about 130 such people.

When I was in San Francisco, I noticed that for $30.00 you could get a
helicopter sight seeing tour lasting 30 minutes. It wouldn't take 30
minutes for a helicopter to take people to work in the morning and back
home again in the evening. Keep in mind that the helicopter operators
are making money at this rate.

Given the amount of money (half a billion dollars is the optimistic
estimate) and the cost of a helicopter ride ($30.00 for half an hour)
and the low number of people that would use the new highway (130), I
propose an alternative: heliopooling.

Its really simple. You arrange with 4 or 5 people for a place for the
helicopter to land, a heliopark. It picks you up and wisks you off to
work. Then in the evening, it picks you up at work and drops you off at
the "heliopool parking lot " or heliopark. A single helicopter could
take many groups of people from Davis county to Salt Lake county each
morning and back again each evening. Just as wireless networking is
better that wired, this is roadless commuting.

Who is going to pay for it? The state of course. They are already
bound and determined to spend $450,000,000 on getting those people to
work. If they put that money in escrow at 10% interest, they would have
money to fly every one to and from work on the interest alone. Plus,
there is no need to have all the lawsuits, environmental impact studies,
and other costly things. That money could be added to the escrow to
allow for more people in the futute.

Also, there would be ways to reduce costs. With a long term contract, a
heliopooling company could make money on less than $30.00 a day per
person. Maybe the military could use the big helicopters to haul a bus
load of people and call it practice rescueing civilians in an urban
area. Then the military could use the $30.00 to buy supplament the
military budget, reducing the need for federal tax increases.

Additionaly, this would spawn new companies that hire people and improve
the economy. There will be companies that sell golden parachutes for
executives to wear. Imagine small snack shops and java huts at the
heliopark for people as they are waiting for the helicopter. Designer
earmuffs and stylish straps for the ladies skirts so they don't blow up
over their heads as the board and depart the helicopter. A whole new
service industry will be created.

There would be less pollution. Buses are uncool and riding one makes
one uncool. Carpools are only slightly less uncool than buses.
Helicopters are cool and riding one to work would be something to brag
about. So, since coolness is what really motiviates people, the
helicopters would be popular enough to cause people to leave their
gas-guzzling, air-polluting cars at home. Since the helicopter only
take 10 minutes or so to get to work, it will be polluting less than a
car travelling 40 minutes or more. Plus, it will be taking several
people who would each have driven their car, additionally saving on gas
and creating less pollution.

Just as its easier to add a computer to a wireless network, so it would
be easiear to add people to the roadless commuter pool than to build and
maintain more roads for them. Because its a money making business for
the helicopter opertaors, they would be willing to transport more
people. Because it will greatly reduce the amount spent on roads each
year, that tax money that would have been spent creating and maintaining
roads could now be spent doing the real work: transporting people.

This is my proposal and I think it should be given all due
consideration. It will reduce pollution, save money, create jobs and
add to the overall coolness of Utah, a pretty great state.

REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer

FrontPage - RESTwiki

REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer. The basic idea is to simplify rather than add complexity. The reason for the success of HTTP is its simplicity. There are a few well-understood and simple commands that a web-server supports. Any other program can access the data on the web server. There is nothing tying either the server or the client to a specific platform.

UNIX pipes are similar. A very simply interface that allow for powerful systems to be build without undue complexity. Wouldn't it be great if the GUIs of the world allowed programs to be "piped" like command line programs.

In the shell, you "create" a pipeline by entering the command like:

ls -s | sort -n > /tmp/sortedlist

What this does is to start two programs, sort and ls. The output from the first is read by the second. The output from the second is written to the named filed. The pipes don't need to exist on a single computer but can be run over a network.

So why does this work?

1. The is a shell that allows for the creation of a pipeline of programs
2. There are a set of programs that accept input from STDIN or output to STDOUT or both
3. There is a way to order the execution of the programs such that the output of one program is read by the input of another
4. There is a way to terminate the pipe so that the output of the final program is written either to a terminal or to a file. Actually terminals and files look the same.
5. The programs produce the data in a well understood way. The format of the output of ls -s is always the same.

So what would it take to have "pipelined" GUI elements? First off, just as in the command line version, you wouldn't need to see the data as it flowed through the GUI pipe. So the data would flow in a non-GUI way.

Ok, to create a pipeline. First, the GUI would need a pipeline tool like the shell. It could be a gui based tool or support a command line like bash. With a GUI tool, you could have a pallet of programs that you place on a pipe looking background. At each point in the pipe, a sample output of the program could be shown.

Next, we need a set of pipeline-able gui tools. The source tools already exist: ls, wget, etc. What we need are some sinks. A couple of useful sinks would be:

• A progress bar. It would read from STDIN and write to STDOUT and show a window that counted the number of bytes that had gone through it as well as having a percent complete, if known.
• A GUI less program that would allow the user to page through the output. It could understand columns.
• A multi-pipe sink that would show several pipelines. This could also be a passthough allowing the user to watch data.

Then we need a way to keep track of a pipeline and to be able to reuse it, like a bash script. The gui pipe building tool could support this. It should also be able to be in a pipeline itself, allowing the user to create a pipeline from the output of another pipeline.

The GUI should also allow for adding of sinks to a running program. For instance, if you have a pipe running, you could insert a tee into it while it was running. The tee could then be connected to a progress bar allowing you to see how much data was flowing without interupting the pipe.

Also, it would mean a need to move to open, simplier structures for data. The same document can be stored in XML as in some propietary Microsoft format.

So how to create a complex document with imbedded graphics, spreadsheets, whatever? Use the multipipe displayer and create a pipe for each element to be displayed. One pipe could simply be a file, treated as an image. Another could be text. Yet another could be a complex pipe that pulls data from a speadsheet application. The multipipe displayer is capable of applying filters to regions. So it doesn't need to know how to resize an image, but is does know how to apply a filter to the image source pipe that does know how to resize it. Same with fonts, and everything else. The displayer will then output the entire things so that is can be saved as a single document or as a the set of input pipes. For output, there could be an HTML filter or an XML filter or a Postscript filter or a PDF filter.

By using small and simple tools, any arbitrarily complex system could be created, using only the resources required. Contrast this with the current bloat mentality of put everything in that could possibly be used, even if only 1% of the population would ever use it.

Benjamin Franklin | PBS

At Toastmaster's today I was the Table Topics master. The meeting topic was "Ways to Improve the Club". So, I decided to follow the old adage and steal from the best: Ben Franklin. He had started a club for mutual improvement called the Junto. They had 24 standing questions. At each weekly meeting, a person should come prepared to dicuss at least one.

1. Have you met with any thing in the author you last read, remarkable, or suitable to be communicated to the Junto? particularly in history, morality, poetry, physics, travels, mechanic arts, or other parts of knowledge?
2. What new story have you lately heard agreeable for telling in conversation?
3. Hath any citizen in your knowledge failed in his business lately, and what have you heard of the cause?
4. Have you lately heard of any citizen's thriving well, and by what means?
5. Have you lately heard how any present rich man, here or elsewhere, got his estate?
6. Do you know of any fellow citizen, who has lately done a worthy action, deserving praise and imitation? or who has committed an error proper for us to be warned against and avoid?
7. What unhappy effects of intemperance have you lately observed or heard? of imprudence? of passion? or of any other vice or folly?
8. What happy effects of temperance? of prudence? of moderation? or of any other virtue?
9. Have you or any of your acquaintance been lately sick or wounded? If so, what remedies were used, and what were their effects?
10. Who do you know that are shortly going [on] voyages or journies, if one should have occasion to send by them?
11. Do you think of any thing at present, in which the Junto may be serviceable to mankind? to their country, to their friends, or to themselves?
12. Hath any deserving stranger arrived in town since last meeting, that you heard of? and what have you heard or observed of his character or merits? and whether think you, it lies in the power of the Junto to oblige him, or encourage him as he deserves?
13. Do you know of any deserving young beginner lately set up, whom it lies in the power of the Junto any way to encourage?
14. Have you lately observed any defect in the laws of your country, of which it would be proper to move the legislature an amendment? Or do you know of any beneficial law that is wanting?
15. Have you lately observed any encroachment on the just liberties of the people?
16. Hath any body attacked your reputation lately? and what can the Junto do towards securing it?
17. Is there any man whose friendship you want, and which the Junto, or any of them, can procure for you?
18. Have you lately heard any member's character attacked, and how have you defended it?
19. Hath any man injured you, from whom it is in the power of the Junto to procure redress?
20. In what manner can the Junto, or any of them, assist you in any of your honourable designs?
21. Have you any weighty affair in hand, in which you think the advice of the Junto may be of service?
22. What benefits have you lately received from any man not present?
23. Is there any difficulty in matters of opinion, of justice, and injustice, which you would gladly have discussed at this time?
24. Do you see any thing amiss in the present customs or proceedings of the Junto, which might be amended?