Thanks to whoever burned five.

Wow, you get so many mod points, you feel the need to blast all 10 at me? I'm no longer the most prolific poster on slashdot, why do you bother?

Limited to 25 posts/day? When did that happen. Lame.

It seems that slashdot is learning from the users. If ever there was a Troll Tuesday for the front page, it is today. Let's see, we've got a story taking advantage of gender divides, a story taking advantage of Middle East division, several Apple stories, climate change/evolution, and a game console story. Still a few hours to go, so perhaps there is still time for a coding language story, a text editor story, and a distro/desktop story.

Michael Kristopeit vs. apk.

Do we still need to add crap at the bottom to prevent it from disappearing?

I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.

Hey! I am a finalist in the National Science Foundation's Visualization Challenge: Check it out and vote: Metabolomic Retina The full list of entries is here.

Every generation needs an intellectual hero... Ours was Steven P. Jobs

Hey everyone,

It this time the herd might have really moved on?

I've tried to scavenge as many email addresses as I could from my friends list and added them to my google+ /. circle. I'm going to send out a message on it to see how many of those addresses still work.

But in the mean time, feel free to add me if I couldn't find you. You can find me on Google+ with my email address, noble.oblige at gmail.

That means you chacham, superyooser, etc...

So I've been looking back on my career. It is amazing to me the technologies that I was innovating with before their day.

I've been working on Linux since it was a toddler (pre 1.0). I've been doing automated image installation since before Ghost and Kickstart; windows and Linux unified directory services with LDAP+Kerberos before Centrify; and unified network on a scalable hardware platform before HP, Dell, Oracle, Microsoft and the like.

I was never the lone pioneer. There were others working on each technology at the time. Some were open with their ideas and I gained a lot from them. Others, like Amazon and Google's work on scalable infrastructure, kept them as proprietary secrets of strategic advantage.

I never found these technologies in an effort to build my career or be on the leading edge. I've spent some time playing with different technologies at home, and to be honest none of them seemed to go anywhere.

But these career choices seem to be remarkable in that they occured purely when focusing on enabling researchers or simplifying systems management.

For Linux, the need was given to me to explore, the Computer Lab needed to have a mature/complex environment to enforce security and be open enough for education. They found Linux, and simply found me a willing person to develop it for them.

For the imaging system, it was a need to administer 100+ workstations for a call center on my own, while the other corporate call centers had a ration of one FTE per 10 workstations. Automation was the only way to accomplish that. The need to make my job easier was also behind the LDAP+Kerberos.

But it wasn't until I found my way into large companies that I found an entirely different kind of need. A purely business created need -- the need for simply scaling architecture. The PMO process is, inalterably by its very nature, a waterfall approach to change. While large companies can benefit from economies of scale, the PMO processes seem to work on an economy of inflation -- the bigger the change more the inflation of resources needed to enact the change.

Hence the need for scalable architecture arose from the need to change and grow with as little imprint in the PMO as possible.

Now, PMO oversight is a business justified expense. I am in no wise critical of what value project management brings a large organization. But it is, and will continue, to be an inflationary environment which continues to drive evolution towards architectures which minimize its footprint in the PMO.

Right now I'm working on just what that means -- how do you minimize the PMO footprint of your architecture? What principles are developing that show what exactly is best to simplify, and where is the flexibility that needs to be pushed to soft-tooling rather than hard-tooling?

What are your thoughts? No place to find venerable IT workers fighting against the machine than Slashdot, no?

A nation cannot be free where its citizens are bonded in debt or reliant on welfare.

If the Lottery is a tax on people bad at math, then financial crisis such as the one we are going through are a tax on people who fail to fully account for value.

The Medici family, one of the richest in all of Europe, practically funded the movement we call the Renaissance. Much of that was on the good accounting practice of double-ledger accounting. But even with that stringent accounting, eventually their search for business went bankrupt. The powerful family was left with nothing left but a little political currency they could use to set one of themselves up as Pope. And what did they do when they obtained the Papacy? They spent the Catholic Church, itself rich enough to fund the largest building projects in Europe at the time, into the ground.

Here's something to think about. Lets say I need or want money, where do I get it? In an economic standpoint I see three basic transactions which get me money...

I can earn it.
I can sell for it.
I can take out a loan for it.

Each of those have their pluses and minuses.

Earning requires work, and establishing value for someone else who exchanges part of that value with you.

Selling means giving up something that could be useful to me.

And a loan requires me to take an obligation to somehow make the money later, by the two means above.

What if I could have the best of all those options. How about if instead of taking a debt for money, I get you to get into debt to pay me some money. In your new found abundance, each dollar is less valuable. Call it easy come, easy go, or perhaps your own personal inflation dilemma. It is burning a hole in your pocket and you are ready to spend it for something less valuable, less needed, then you were before. What if I sold you that something that was less valuable for more of that easy to come by money. Then, I'm richer, and you are in trouble.

I'm not saying that is in and of itself an evil process. In fact, at its worst it may be considered an unfairly churlish way of looking at how economies expand. The more money there is, the more that can promote the circulation of real value, and the more real value we all have the more prosperous we are and able to gain more money.

In essence, the only problem with that transaction is in the discrepancy between the money given and the value received. The personal inflation problem caused more of a bubble then sustained economic growth. And the only person to blame, caveat emptor, is the buyer. When the person's ability to account for their own money, and prioritize to get the most value from that money. Or in other words, they devalued their own money by the triviality of their purchase. Or in even fewer words, they showed poor business sense.

Perhaps we can simply say that good business sense boils down to the fact that the more people account for their own money and needs, the more they will demand respect for their money. I'd certainly like to say that is good business sense, but when I walked away with that persons money, I'd be patted on the back by investors with more money -- given I can show that I can reliably do that for the foreseeable future. So lets say that good moral business sense boils down to good accounting as well as understanding of yours and others needs.

The distinction of the two is so difficult to see. Especially when the money circulation is such that one can siphon off that value with a large supply of takers for a seemingly infinite length of time. With that kind of seemingly endless money supply, what is the difference between that and the truly moral sense of economic growth? Such is the problem the S.E.C. has in enforcing regulations on corporate accounting.

But I don't understand accounting like they do. But I can learn a lot of the principles of true value and wealth from my own accounting practice -- the one in my own home.

And one thing I've learned in my family budget is that it can't be built in a day. But that doesn't mean it is hard to do. Like building a kit car, a budget is the last step of turning the key on an economic engine built for your home. It depends on some very simple practices that need to be taken one at a time. Each step is much easier then building a car, and just like when you got your first car the result of taking on the extra maintenance is much greater freedom.

I've been working on my own financial budget, out of necessity, for many years now. For myself, I've settled on Ledger-CLI for my accounting, I hire financial advisers each year and talk with them regularly. I've even found that instead of riding roughshod over my bank statements each month, it is easier to spend a little time each few days to go receipts. The closer I can get to the actual transaction, the easier it gets to account for my finances as a whole. But your mileage may vary, your engine is your own to build and drive. the most important value you can gain is not the money as much as the process.

Many years ago I was offered stock by RedHat during their now legendary IPO. I think it had something to do with my paying a consultant a large sum of my own money to help fix NFS in the Linux Kernel to be more compatible with AIX for my job. But at the time I had re-entered college and on a very strict budget. I had $2000 I had budgeted to use for the rest of the school year, in fact I only needed $1600 of it. That also happened to be about the exact minimum lot purchase price.

And I walked away, much to the chagrin of people around me who were begging to be in the Redhat IPO. Why? Because at the time the stability of knowing I could pay for the rest of my college was more important to me then anything I could get with any more money. I'm not adverse to risk, recently I plunged a lot of money I'll probably never see again into a start-up with a few friends. But that taught me the line, where my needs were more important, and nothing could be sold for it.

The principle, more than the money is what ultimately saved me from divorce, bankruptcy, depression, etc... I'll take the principle I learned over the $2000 or maybe even $20,000 I would have made. That money, even if used wisely at the time, wasn't enough to generate any sustained wealth that would have been invulnerable to poorly managed risk later. But knowing the real value of what I had helped me save everything that I hold most valuable with far less money.

And, even more importantly, the more they will have the fiscal sure-footedness to scrap with their representatives when it comes to keeping them honest -- yet wise -- with how they use that money.

Why is this so important to me now? Its all about the Balanced Budget Amendment that so many people are talking about.

You see, as someone who values fiscal responsibility I'm a great fan of the tea party and their call for a balanced budget. I can even say I was ready to march with them. But that was until someone asked me the same thing I'm asking everyone around me -- how can I make a balanced budget compact for my own home that would allow me to respond to emergencies? I've made some attempts but haven't found one that I feel comfortable with.

And that is because in a decade effort I've learned that a budget, let alone a balanced budget, is only the culmination of many steps of financial security. Now granted, the federal government has the accounting practice already in place that I had to learn. But the devil is in even finer details for the bean counters to keep tabs on.

A nation cannot be free where its citizens are bonded in debt or reliant on welfare.

If I'm desperate, I can't hold my politicians' feet to the fire. Instead I'm doing something more like harassing and begging, which is really just more powerless and desperate -- a ready victim. But there is a more powerful option, but it isn't pretty. The other option is to try to extort it through civil disobedience, a move which hurts everyone to extort a bit of favor for yourself, as we saw in London.

People who don't know where they would stand if all of a sudden the river of government or economy went dry. And they don't know because they don't know their own financial situation from a hole in the ground (which it likely resembles very closely). The scared are always going to either hop onto any bandwagon promising hope and change -- rescue from their own plight -- or try to rob or extort their financial security at the governments expense like children throwing a tantrum to get more dessert.

Even if the government balances its budget, it will be powerless and at the whims of debt if the people are in debt. Scratch the surface of that conclusion just a little deeper and we see that it is our debt, handing over our unearned money for things of less value then they really hold, that actually caused the government debt crisis -- on so many levels.

Only a nation of individuals who practice financial freedom and stability can scrap with the politicians, letting them know that the politicians are really the needy and desperate ones. Only then can we hold their feet to the fire to give that money the respect it deserves. Only then can we collectively accept the need for real risk sometimes, but know when to draw the line before it robs us of our needs, and thus robs us of our freedom.

You can help out by making your own balanced budget. Take simple small steps that will wind up giving you the financial stability to look fearlessly at the times ahead, and help prevent such problems in the future.

And then, and only after that first step, help encourage others to do the same. From your neighbor to the federal government itself.

New JonesBlog update. STS-135 Landing photos and my visit to Kennedy Space Center

A Photographic Study of The Fly with anatomical details and discussion of potential applications in unmanned aerial vehicles here.

risible
adjective

• causing or capable of causing laughter; laughable; ludicrous.
• having the ability, disposition, or readiness to laugh.
• pertaining to or connected with laughing.

Adam and Eve are the center of the creation story we all know well. God creates a stage with everything we see naturally occurring. It isn't until a man walks across the stage, however, that the plot starts. And the first act is to create a woman. And unlike other stories that woman is not someone to save from a dragon or someone to clean a house as neither are yet introduced in the story.

Whether the man likes video games, or the woman likes sewing, or vice versa, is completely extraneous to the plot. It isn't worth even bringing in to fill out the characters on the stage. The story only progresses on one point, they continue creation together -- equally needed.



But the story is not unique to the branches of early Judaism (Christianity and Islam being two major branches). Norse mythology recognizes Ask and Embla as the first two humans. Hindu mythology points to Adam and Hevas. A Chinese mural may even show that a similar legend was told there, it shows a man and a woman in the setting of earth creation, and a mischievous monkey with a peach.

A great number of creation myths mark a different apex of creation that isn't human centered, yet still honoring the same duality where the father is the sky and the mother is the earth, and all living things are their children.
Humans are usually still created as man and woman, and sometimes work together in some form of rebellion to remake the world from the originally conceived environment to what we have today. For instance in Maori and Hindu tradition, they actively battle the sky and the earth apart. To what degree their rebellion, or how they work together differs. For instance in Greek mythology, Pandora acts alone with no real male figure around, to bring sorrow and pain into the world.

Today, we piece together a vision of the past, inductively. Many of the same elements still exist. Creation of everything living could have started in the spark of lightning in a methane filled sky creating a primordial soup on the earth that eventually roots into direct sustenance from the earth. Some theories even have a more direct seeding from living bacteria which evolved and formed in space on comets, that later roots into the earth.

Then at some point, man appears with the unique (to that point) ability to greatly affect the environment around him. Then this species moves from a state of being a hunter-gatherer, living directly off the life offered by the original creation to one that is actively involved in maintaining his own environment through toil and labor. Sort of like being kicked out of the house and having to live on your own, in a cultural progression from natural to civilized. In the act of changing the environment, mankind becomes responsible to upkeep -- live or die-- on their change.

The two key elements I glean from this elevation. One is how creation happens between the interaction of a complementary duality which story tellers can identify as a father and mother -- both equally necessary. The other is the responsibility -- or rather the transition of responsibility involved from the creator to the created for the environment they create for themselves.

Now, of course there are theories and myths that fit this model to various degrees, some even providing notable exceptions. I admit to taking some license with the altitude of the fly-over of the landscape of all of these different stories. For instance, the anthropological model of the paradise before civilization is not very paradisaical. Being dependent on untended mother nature to provide food can be quite hazardous to your health. And having to hunt and gather is no life of ease. And all of us are ultimately still dependent on the whims of mother nature, however emancipated by our own creation of houses and such.

But I maintain that in general, this is an fair way to characterize the path of civilization.

Another notable exception is the very centerpiece I mentioned first (merely because it is the one I personally grew up with). The original creation figure is uniquely singular, "God" who needs no other interaction to create anything. Even if you take the plural connotation of the original Hebrew, you could argue that they stand united without need of anything around them, to create. However, their creation emphasize a creation duality in the culmination of creating mankind as man and woman.

And perhaps that is the point. This congruence between many stories could simply be an artificial anthropomorphism, something we relate to and understand like how we relate to each other as human beings. It is something universal that we found and then understand intuitively using the circuitry of our brains created for socialization. It could also be the opposite, an emulation that we picked through millions of evolutionarily adjustments to the natural environment around us.

At this elevation, whether contrived by mankind to understand nature or imbued in mankind by emulating nature, it looks like the same thing to me. It looks like a principle that is both elemental and natural, as well as personal and human. They both mirror the other with no real way to establish which came first, it is a uniquely human version of the chicken or the egg conundrum.

So its no wonder to me you can come to the same climax of the story whether or not you start with a lone intelligence of omniscience, or a duality that combines together to create life at the get-go. For what creates a whole universe and then culminates in the duality of man and woman? Or what is the duality or a mother earth and father sky which then humans emulate naturally?

By a duality of creation, I mean to denote those cases where we have separation and distinction in the participants of creation. The ability to procreate is not given to one alone, the ability is broken into complement parts and separated between two: sky and earth, man and woman.

Another separation happens in the transfer of responsibility. In moving from direct dependency on nature to one's on ability to create your own environment within nature, there is a degree of separation between nature and the creation. In becoming responsible for one's own environment where you must plant now to have food later, you have become somewhat separated from the dependency for nature to take care of you.

And now I walked us through the whole stage, the universe that Adam and Eve find themselves in, we come to the next act. Creation isn't over with the distinction of the man and the woman. The final act of creation is their marriage, bringing them back together. It is their assuming responsibility for what they create until they pass it on again to those they create. Its a recursive pattern, repeating itself and renewing itself with each generation.

Even in the stories of father sky and mother earth, often the culminating act for the two trouble makers who just changed the whole earth is to be united in marriage. I read this a few ways, one is "you two caused this together, now you two have to deal with it together". But there is also a romantic aspect of it, they worked together to conquer something they both didn't like and now their reward is each other and a heritage they created that is given as legend to each generation thereafter.

Their act, their creation, their choice, their ability to create, lives happily ever after even after they die. Hence the birth of legend and heritage itself. Adam might not walk on the stage carrying a book, but Eve (or rather the nature of their union and creation) becomes the mother of necessity for books.

At this point, one might see this as an attempt to say marriage is what it is, "yeah, yeah it is man and woman we get it already". It might be seen as an appeal to whatever natural circumstance created tradition in the first place to justify tradition. I think if I went down that road, I'd have to once again tackle that chicken and egg problem.

But I'd rather point out, that the healing of the separation or uniting of what is lost, is all happening through marriage. And that makes marriage the perfect story of egalitarianism, the naturally perfected model of enlightenment and equality.

What I described might be how marriage came to be as a natural product of the universe, but it is definitely the very model of equality that we hope to understand further by participating in it.

As I mentioned before, at that pristine point in the story (and here we have to look primarily at the myth rather than the inductive reasoning of anthropology) there is not character backdrop that gives us any reason to believe that one owned the other, or that there was any inequality between them. They might have been hunting buddies, they might have gathered together, they might not have. We have no insight in the division of labor until after they changed their own environment.

Sure, the primordial soup that really created life may have been made with just one stroke of lightning, but back then it is likely that Father Sky produced an order of magnitude more lightning then it does today and sustained that over millions of years. The energy used by either the sky or earth before life caught on is impossible to measure, but the value of their contribution (given that that model is accurate in how life was created) is not. Both were necessary, both were needed.

Here's an experiment in equality for you. Go to some room in the house where a light is rigged to two switches. You'll notice that either of them can turn it on, or off. Operators at both switches have to agree to some position relative to the other for the light to remain on. At each switch put two people, but reward them for the opposite result. For one person, offer five dollars to keep the light on. For the other person, offer five dollars to keep the light off. After as much blinking of the lights as you can stand, stop the process. Likely neither participant will feel sure enough in their victory to stop switching. The light was on and off the whole time, at different times so who wins? So in that uncertainty they likely will continue to try. You might have to assure them that they both lose, just to stop the blinking.

Now look at the other possibility. It is much easier to achieve one or the other if both are rewarded for the same outcome. It is settled almost immediately and both receive a reward.

In each scenario the energy both put in by each operator was roughly the same. The reward in each scenario was likewise the same for both participants, but not the same for both scenarios. That makes it equality along a very narrow interpretation for the operators. But in the marriage interpretation of equality, the importance of each person to a unified outcome is valued the same in only one scenario. The responsibility for each person is likewise unified for the same goal in only one model of marriage equality. And that also happens to be the only model where both participants receive the reward, both in the scenario and in the marriage.

That is a very binary example of the same dilemma that marriage hopes to unite people behind.

When ever my wife and I might contemplate divorce, (I'm not afraid to say that has happened) a few things come into much sharper focus. The first is that if either wanted the marriage off, it was off. We both had to be united to make it work to keep things together. We both had to be united for the same goal, and for the same purpose.

The other was that if we were divorced two things would not change. The first, we would both still be related through our children. We couldn't really escape from each other and be justified by the court in doing so. The second is that while separated we would not have any chance of equality. The third is that the separation, both in what was irreparably destroyed as childlike ideals, and in the confusion of what parenting is in the separation, would damage and hurt the children. There may be a way to forget the pain, but fixing the pain would be even harder.

Another fourth item came into focus, primarily for my wife. Life and career would be much harder for her than myself. She, having a father who still delinquent on child support in her parent's divorce, realized that like her mother she more stuck with the children then I would be. I might be a gallant sort who does everything I can, or I might not be, and she is at that whim. And even if I am gallant, her investment already in childbearing put her at a disadvantage in the career marketplace. I've already written a lot on this subject, that the gender gap in salary is really just a manifestation of the marriage gap. Women's tie to children makes them less able to take on the extra-demands that very high paying jobs give. Flexibility to handle children comes at a cost in salary that men seem to be able to dodge better then women (and I credit women for it because I feel it is because they are ready to take on that responsibility).

But just look at the statistics, Google them if needed. Single women vs Single men, the difference in their careers isn't a pretty picture. At some point something's gotta give, someone's got to take responsibility for the kids and that requires flexibility from work. If women further seek emancipation from that responsibility, then it only comes at abandoning the children even more. Men seem to have their hands firmly on the switch of freedom from the kids.

On the other head of that same coin, however, are a movement of men who feel the women have completely cut them out of their children's lives. Men who still break down in tears about the last memory they have seeing their kids, men who would gladly mean more to their children then being a paycheck. These are men who claim they were falsely accused of things they never did, and guilty by vague suspicion only. Women seem well in control of the switch when it comes to custody.

What does this tell me? Well, it tells me that single women need more of our support. It tells me that we need more wisdom in how we handle custody. But it also shows, and what all four of those items showed me and my wife if we ever thought about separating, is that it is impossible to equally value each others responsibilities and rights if we were separated. Only when we were united for the same goal would we really achieve that reward.

So, we make it work. We do whatever it takes to make it work. We both are united for the same goal of equality, to equally value the rights and responsibilities of our spouse and the children we have together.

Only then does the marriage bring us the happiness we always expected it to. A happiness that only marriage can bring.

We are two people who need each other, we have that duality of creation. We are two people who have taken responsibility for our children, instead of letting nature have their way directly with them. Our choices are leaving a legacy with our children, just as my parents stuck it through some hard times we are continuing that example for my children. Just as my wife's mother took responsibility for her children, so is she continuing in that example. We are both taking the best of our parents, and passing that on. And the best always seems to be that heritage of changing nature to facilitate taking responsibility for each other and our children. Just like Adam and Eve, really.

The egalitarian model of marriage is -- to equally recognize the rights and responsibilities of the man, woman, and child they potentially have together. The unit is unique, it is the unit of procreation in humanity -- man, woman and child. It is unique in its completion of complementary duality of humankind. It is unique in its position to pass through example and emulation the principles of egalitarianism -- the integration of complementary duality and responsibility -- to the very products of that union.

Marriage is directly linked to creation, and my argument here has been that it is is the epitome of the model of egalitarianism because it is directly linked to creation in a way that has created civilization as well, and all that creation has meant throughout history.

To much? Too flowery? Too mystically universal? No. It is just as simple as a man and a woman ready create a child together, knowing full well that to fully stand without accusation they need to equally respect each others responsibilities and rights in how the child is created. So often we are told that history will judge us in how we come down in the debate about marriage. Should we be ashamed that we want to bolster our adherence to the egalitarian model of marriage? Well, perhaps more important to ask yourself is will you be accused of neglecting your responsibilities to your spouse or your children. Did you equally recognize their rights and responsibilities with yours?

But perhaps no better put then the place I first learned it, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."

As Tevia and his family sings about this very repetition of life, the bride and groom stand with quickly beating hearts. Sunrise, and sunset, quickly flow the years, one season following another. The passing of responsibility through the generations is like the beating heart of civilization itself.

[queue sunrise-sunset]