The world of international politics, trade, human rights, police actions, war, and policy is a thorny topic. Most people have opinions, but have they really studied the way the nations work, what the UN is supposed to be, or how the international legal system cooperates with each other? How can you judge without learning about what you're judging? Such uneducated judgment is just the imposition of another form of dogma than the one you disagree with, not an evolution of society.

I don't ever want to be in government. Politicians have to mince their words to avoid offending people in hopes that they'll still vote for them if they're not blatantly against those people.

While I use the rule of law to make my judgements of political actions, I do sympathize with anyone who feels restricted by the existing political system when they want to do what they feel is right for the country. But your wishes for a better world have to be curtailed by a respect for the laws and procedures of the nation you choose to lead, otherwise you don't have democracy, you have a dictatorship.

The rules of a nation take precedence over international agreements and treaties. A treaty which violates the Constitution or Charter of Rights is an illegal contract. Illegal contracts have no force of law in national courts nor in the international counsels that arbitrate treaty violations. It may have taken decades for the system to realize a treaty is in violation of the Charter or Constitution, but they're still illegal and can't be upheld when found in violation.

Some people like to paint the use of economic and trade sanctions as a suppression of the freedom of foreign nations. I disagree. The world has to have a means of letting abusive governments know that the world disagrees with the way they're treating their people or threatening global stability without resorting to invasions and war. If not sanctions, then what? Diplomatic dialog only works if someone is willing to listen and learn; the stubborn ones need to be beaten with the stick of international sanctions to teach them a lesson and force them to change their ways, the same as any other willful child needs to be punished and taught the error of their ways.

Lately I've been seeing apologists, including Ron Paul, saying we shouldn't have international sanctions against Iran, that Iran has the right to rule their own people as they see fit. What I see is a leader who periodically dives off the deep end and makes wild conspiracy theory accusations with no proof. It makes me question whether power has made him psychotically paranoid, and whether the pressure is making him lose his sanity. I have the same concerns about some of Chavez' comments, even though I see nothing in Chavez' policy to warrant sanctions of any kind.

Where sanctions fail is when their mission is lost and they're upheld against a nation without any clear definition of what that nation has to do to have the sanctions lifted. The Americans have persecuted Cuba for over 50 years. It's leader has retired, the USSR that was behind the Cuban Missile Crisis is no more, and it's people suffer in poverty for the crime of being "communists" and "socialists." US policy has no goal, no conditions for ending the sanctions, and no purpose except a vindictive revenge on an entire nation for the mistakes made by their leaders THREE GENERATIONS AGO.

Neither the Harper government in Canada nor the Obama administration in the US want to abide by the restrictions on their policies imposed by the Charter of Rights and the US Constitution, respectively. They want to implement policy that violates those seminal documents, even going so far as to publicly justify their illegal legislation because it won't be applied to "citizens." Well, those documents talk about fundamental HUMAN rights that apply to EVERYONE who lives in our nations, not just those who have citizenship.

The NDAA and SOPA are particularly odious.

NDAA denies the accused their right to be charged, arrested, processed, and to defend themselves in a fair and speedy trial. Instead, it seeks to "detain" people without charges, a hearing, or even an approval from a judge as you'd need for a wiretap. Does America want to bring back the Japanese internment camps? Weren't they embarassing enough the first time?

SOPA seeks to allow the US and it's media companies to not just arbitrarily censor the internet, but to completely remove the DNS entries for any site they disagree with. Yet this is the same nation that spends so much time decrying the Chinese censorship of the internet. There are existing international and regional laws for dealing with violations of copyright and patents; SOPA is wrong headed, immoral, and probably illegal.

This isn't about piracy, people. It's about whether those accused of piracy are allowed to defend themselves at all, or whether they're going to be subject to the arbitrary dictatorship of a country and it's enforcement departments without any notice, charges, legal recourse, or respect for the proceedings of national or international law.

I have no interest in carrying a cell phone and being leashed to harassment by customers and employers 24x7. Leave a message on my landline or send an email -- I'll get back to you when I have time, not cater to your impatient demands for instant service impinging on my personal life.

Seeing as I don't want to carry around a phone all the time, what I want is a tablet device that will let me use a stylus to scribble notes and diagrams, a true replacement for pen and paper.

I want the option of having those scribblings analyzed for text content, graphical components, and an interface to clean up those scribblings and turn them into a proper document on my home/main system when I get back from collecting notes at a client site.

It might be nice to have 4G and phone connectivity from the tablet device, maybe even skype video conferencing support, but I'd rather just clip a bluetooth headset to my ear and have it talk to the tablet than deal with an actual cell phone.

If you want to get fancy, let me use the bluetooth headset to "command" the tablet through a voice interface. I don't mean being able to say "Select File. Select Save As. ..." type dialogs, but Siri Part II: Siri Meets Watson. With an actual tablet, the device has enough power to do the voice analysis and grammar parsing without resorting to a central server like Siri has to because of the low CPU power and memory of a cell phone.

In short, I'm still waiting for someone to follow through and bring Alan Kay's ideas to market instead of trying to tell me that being able to play "Angry Birds" is more innovative and useful than being able to take notes.

Investors like to know about your customer base and your projected value in the future before they'll make you a fair offer. I find it rather insulting that they under-value sweat equity.

I've spent at least 20 hours per week, 52 weeks a year, for 15 years doing the research, development, testing, and enhancements to this system. That's a low-ball estimate of 15,600 hours of programming.

At $75/hour (a very reasonable rate for a senior consultant), that's an investment of $1,170,000. The truth is I've probably put in double that number of hours, and had I remained in the US and Greater Toronto Area, that billing rate would be more on the order of $125-150/hour, plus expenses.

There's no way in I'm taking the typical "angel investor" terms with that much as my opening stake in the business. No one in their right mind would table a fair offer to invest in a business that doesn't even exist yet, and which has no customers.

If you want to try out the technology that will be driving Singularity One, you can check out the GPLv3 licensed research and development project at http://msscodefactory.sourceforge.net/ That's right -- you can try out a multi-million dollar tool and even use it for free if you can stomach the licensing terms of the GPL (some businesses can't or won't, and for their attitude I'm thankful -- they're the ones I hope to service and partner with.)

Before you even think about coming to the negotiation table with potential investors, you have to know what you've invested so far, what the realistic revenue potential is, and show a plan for getting to those goals.

You have to admit it's one heck of a retirement savings plan! Tax free, too, until I actually earn revenue from the investment.

I can fight for what I believe in without fear of arrest as an enemy of the state, a terrorist, or just being shot by a military government that doesn't like me.

I'm lucky to be a citizen instead of a politician. I don't have to worry about getting elected, I don't have to compromise my values to win your trust and your vote, and I don't have to mince words to avoid a media firestorm.

I'm an educated, opinionated, debate-loving bastard, and I actually love to get someone pissed off and fired up enough to argue with me about some point I've made. It means I got their attention and made them think.

I really appreciate it when people correct me by proving me wrong about something. You can't win the war if you're not willing to learn by losing a few battles along the way.

I've finished changing the look of the MSS Code Factory project website, a shift to black on light grey from the neon blue on navy I had been using. Much to my chagrin, I tried printing out a few pages of the site just before leaving for Christmas vacation, and found that unless you fiddle with the Firefox settings, the text comes out as a very light, unreadable grey with the neon blue foreground colours.

I always intended that the reference material for the project be easily printable for offline use.

Aside from the Beatles, I have never heard anything positive about Liverpool without searching for it. In fact, I would like to point out the rampant racism that exists in Europe and the UK against Scousers, people from Liverpool. Example the first: I mentioned to a friend online that I would like to visit Liverpool to see a football (soccer) game and asked what I should see while there. She said I should keep an eye on my wallet. Example the second: There was a terrible crush at Hillsborough. 96 Liverpool supporters (fans) were killed. The Sun newspaper reported despicable lies about the Liverpool supporters. Example the third: Some Italian soccer supporters were killed when a stadium wall fell on them. The Europeans blamed the Liverpool supporters and banned Liverpool from European competition for years, despite very strong evidence showing that the Italian supporters attacked Liverpool supporters, causing a crush. Example the fourth: Urban Dictionary. EDIT - Example the fifth: http://www.sickipedia.org/subcategory/view/1317.

The issue is either bigotry against class or bigotry against cultural origin. In this case, I find that cultural origin in the source of the bigotry. Basically, there is a strong bigotry against people from Liverpool, otherwise known as Scousers or Liverpudlians.

Merry Christmas!
Happy Hanukkah!
Joyous Kwanzaa!
(And a little late) Peaceful Ramadan!

Everyone knows and shares the sentiments of the Christmas season, no matter which holiday they grew up celebrating. It's a time for family, friends, and food.

Everyone has wishes around Christmas Time. Here are mine:

• That my new business do well enough to feed me and provide a comfortable retirement in 5 years
• That everyone who is ill experiences a miraculous remission of their ailments
• That you may find yourself surrounded by friends, family, and too much food at this time of year
• That Harper and his cohorts experience an epiphany and realize that in order to lead instead of dictate, they have to consider the restrictions of the Charter of Rights BEFORE enacting legislation or policy, otherwise they're just hurting citizens, wasting the courts time, wasting their time, and acting like traitors to the very national ideals of our country of Canada.
• That Apple has a miraculous epiphany and submits their patented gestures and behaviours as part of a tablet UI standard in memory of the CUA.

Notice invoking copyright protection over terms to be registered for the operation of a new corporation registered in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada in early 2012.

Singularity One prototype website and notice of copyright.

I've been thinking about some philosophical issues around taxation in Canada that might apply to other jurisdictions as well. In Canada, we have a national GST/HST program. GST is is the Goods and Services tax; HST are provincial agreements for Harmonized Sales Tax where the same collection system is used for a combined federal/provincial GST-like tax base.

I understand the desire to tax manufactured goods, so the "Goods" part of the name makes sense, as do the Revenue Canada regulations for how to offset GST/HST collected vs. GST/HST paid out during normal business operations.

Collecting a tax on human services is also reasonable, as there is obvious value to what gets done by everyone from your hairdresser/barber to your plumber or computer services technician. The government would miss out on a huge revenue stream if they were to settle for the payroll employment taxes they already collect from anyone who earns their income by providing the service of working for a living!

Danged greedy double-dipping bastards have alway had me collecting GST when I worked in Canada for my software development services. But I digress....

Note that I said "human services". Computer provisioned software-as-a-service or what are more commonly thought of as "cloud providers" are a different beast. They're a leasing and licensing oriented business, providing neither physical nor intellectual goods, but only a lease for the storage space required by the customer's data that they've created themselves.

So I guess I need to find out how GST/PST regulations apply to computer service leases.

I have no idea whatsoever how license and royalty revenue fit into the picture in Canada, never mind any other jurisdictions.

In a nutshell, unless there are explicit clauses saying otherwise, I don't believe GST/PST would apply to the leasing aspects of my business. I'm not selling a product or a good, I'm providing data storage management and transformations.

There won't be any human service providers (well, not none, but most of them won't be techies) with my business model, except for training and customization consultants who might choose to work through my business instead of their own or some other competitor. Those services are something I need to provide, not something I want to do. I'd much rather farm them out through partnerships.

I'm digressing again. I had a lot of time to think about these questions while working on my buddy's machine over the past few days.

Tax law and how it applies to:

• Physical goods
• Intellectual goods
• Human-provided services
• Storage and compute leasing
• License royalties

Cleaning up my buddy's badly infected XP box became a battle of wills today, me vs. the computer.

It was an XPSP1 box, originally deployed by HP to the consumer in 2003. Therefore it had some seriously obsolete software. Early in it's life, it was infected by a virus that shut down Norton 2003 at the registration stage. So for all these years, they thought they had Norton and no problems, because there was a Norton icon on the desktop.

Avast cleaned up 47 viruses last night with a normal scan.

I installed SP3, but couldn't install anything else, including Microsoft updates.

So I had Avast schedule a boot-scan. Within 10 minutes of the scan, it had found the first culprit: a nasty ole' root kit. It found 2 more infections before I left for the day.

The challenge is now to get this box cleaned up and updated without resorting to a system re-image.

This is my masochistic side coming out -- cleaning viruses is very frustrating, but that just makes victory so much sweeter in the end!

I'm looking for a few good tools to deal with the mess -- I'm sure there is plenty of registry damage and probably a few infections that could get past Avast; no one AV solution is perfect. The rules are simple:

• It has to be free for individual or home use
• It cannot be nagware
• Annual registration updates are ok; it's only fair to let the provider know who's using their software
• It has to be freely downloadable from the internet, either via FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, or Torrent download.
• It has to pass a scan by Avast before I'm willing to try running it.

So pull out your arsenal -- how do we salvage this currently steaming pile of infection?

Is it wrong for a startup to approach everyone they know directly or indirectly to get going? I don't know, but as long as I'm not broadcasting it to a mailing list of people I don't actually know, it's not spam. And seeing as Slashdot doesn't use a mailing list approach, I think I'm in the clear with this, even if it does annoy some people...

I realize I won't be working with my former employer as a PostgreSQL beta site as I'd originally hoped and planned, but I thought all of you might find this an interesting read and an interesting proposal, and I was hoping that you might be willing to forward this directly to people in the tech industry you know that might be interested in participating in the beta, including the planned beta support for the current generation of Oracle's venerable RDBMS.

Before I get into the beta projects, I'd like to direct you to the MSS Code Factory project R&D website. I've finally finished with a few weeks of editing to provide a much cleaner and more informative documentation site about the project, including release notes, GEL syntax, a description of the XML models used to drive the MSS Code Factory tools, and comparisons to competitor's products in the code generation arena. At this point I can't think of any additional documentation sections that will be required, so all I plan on doing to the site between now and the business launch is to keep reviewing for spelling and grammar errors and updating the release notes and announcements as applicable.

When I start the new business, it's my intent to collect the Welcome, Defining a 1.9 BAM, The Manufactured Object Model, and Generic Expansion Language documentation into a whitepaper to be published by the new business as a technology announcement, and send that off to as many places as I can think of for distribution.

During the startup phase of my new business, it will probably be necessary for me to do the actual business application modeling based on an ERD, database dump, or design meetings performed either on-site or via email.

My American friends, your potential projects will have to be done remotely if we proceed -- it wouldn't be feasible for me to get down to the States in the near future as I'd need to spend time and money getting a new Passport before I'd be allowed in to the US.

While I'm in the Can-Sask program itself, I have to stay in Regina because the sessions are mandatory, so any of you who needs on-site modeling services will have to work within that schedule.

What I was thinking is to do the modeling for an hourly rate plus expenses, with the client providing travel, housing, and food expenses up front or having them billed directly to them. I would only be able to commit to 20-30 hours per week while on site due to the migraines, though.

Once the business application model for the project is done, I'd take the model back to Regina and add it to my test build queue, the set of applications that I remanufacture on a regular basis as test data. Unlike those test data projects, I'd be doing full test builds and packaging, which could then be either SFTP'd to a server at your offices, or checked in directly to subversion if you have a public-facing https subversion server available.

Some time this year I hope to write a GUI that would make it much easier for others to work with the business application models. In the meantime, I could help train some of your senior analysts to use the command line tools and manual XML editing to create new business models for any other projects they might like to bring on board in the future. In the meantime, I've provided documentation about working with the XML business model application specifications.

PostgreSQL testing should be complete by mid January, after which I'll be working on the Oracle interface, seeing as everyone I've talked to so far really wants Oracle support over any other vendor. I would expect to have the Oracle updates ready for beta testing by mid-late February.

How productive am I with the tool? I think productive enough to give me an edge over any other software consulting service:

On 2011.12.17, I spent 3 hours working on the S1Bam20 model. The manufactured code for that model now weighs in at 1,225,478 lines, an increase of 69,909 lines of code in about 3 hours. That's 23,303 lines of code per hour, 388 lines of code per minute, or 6 lines of code per second for my effort.

Now here's an interesting way to look at that six lines per second:

If I hold down the return key on my keyboard, it will generate new lines in a text editor at a BIOS-coded rate of about 5 per second.

So I can:

• Use vi to edit the XML business application model for S1Bam20Repeatedly run MSS Code Factory to validate the model and eventually manufacture the updated code
• Fire up an existing Eclipse project, do a refresh, a clean-all, and a build-all
• Check the clean-compiling code in to SubVersion with a 60Kbyte/sec upload
• And I can do all that work faster than my keyboard could produce blank lines in a text editor in the same amount of time!

A new section titled "Defining a 1.9 Business Application Model" has been added to the main MSS Code Factory project website.

The document provides the descriptions of the attributes and structure of a business application model as it will be implemented before 1.9 is released. The 1.8 model is currently being used, which appends "Def" to many of the modeled object names in the XML.

Here is a deep link to the document page in question.

In addition to my usual build releases through FreeCode, I've started doing "stable" release announcements through the Google+ and Facebook at the "MSS Code Factory Project" pages and groups. More detailed information about development and internal releases will continue to be posted to the project website for MSS Code Factory.

The truly curious can see what kind of code is manufactured for both a "regular" application (The SME project in subversion) and for a custom expert system (the main 1.9 project and the 2.0 S1Bam project, using MSSBamMssCF for 1.x series code, and MSSBamS1CF for 2.0.)

The GEL syntax and grammar used by the customized expert systems have been documented at the main project website, and there are years worth of examples in the cartridge-1.8 and cartridge-1.9 configuration rule bases found in the main 1.8 and 1.9 builds to help you learn by example.

I will, however, spam you one more time when I have the new corporate website set up. :p

1,008,243 lines of code on the wall, a million lines of code!

2.0 just passed the million line mark, and that's without the bloat of web form prototypes, just the core database scripting and Java 6 code.

The Ruby fans haven't mentioned how long it takes to add new types and objects to the language. I've used my 1.9 development release to produce 2.0, with over 400,000 lines of new code in under 3 days.

I've added some conceptual objects to the 2.0 model, stubbed out an abstract GUI widget hierarchy, and modeled the majority of the objects needed to model the parse structure of a generic language that can be easily mapped to Java, C#, or C++.

MSS Code Factory 1.8.2745 just accomplished something new and rather amazing: it became a true artificial intelligence capable of learning about a generic business application model and able to adapt an implementation of itself to being able to learn how to work with that application implementation.

I know that's hard to understand, but it's a key feature: the engine now manufactures a binding of the generic application model to the engine core algorithms, which allows you to use the engine's core rule syntax to specify expansion rules for a navigation of your application's model.

While this qualifies as an artificial intelligence, it still doesn't implement automatic learning of how to work with the generic application model; it just understands how it can _learn_ about that generic model.

If you want a biology analogy, the generic business application model now defines the genetics of a new implementation of the factory itself.

MSS Code Factory website