How amazing has it been for me to be with Jessica for five years now!?!
I love her so much and she is so beautiful and sweet and amazing.
We’re on our way to Yosemite this weekend to celebrate!
Pelicans have no need for Perl 6
With Perl 6 coming up, now is a good time to assess the various popular web programming tools. It seems like a certain backlash is happening against the venerable interpreted language, of course it’s hard to tell how much of that is from bloggers complaining about Movable Type. I’ve heard that dealing with old Perl code is sometimes an issue from people working on enterprise systems with enormous amounts of complex code written in a language where “there’s more than one way to do it” and everyone might have their own way.
I’ve always liked Perl since I started working with it in 2002 but all my recent development work has been in PHP. If I look beyond PHP for something else, I think the dramatic changes in Perl from 5 to 6 make the switching costs that much lower because the new version pushes me down the learning curve anyway.
I can see both sides expressed in this article [excerpted below in single quotes]:
‘It seems every day I am questioned about why I write in Perl versus PHP, Java, C#, Ruby, Python, or [insert your favorite language here]. People say things like, “Perl isn’t used anymore is it?” or, “Ruby on Rails is all I read about anymore.”
[…]
Perl is, in fact, alive and thriving, and it is uniquely suited to a variety of programming projects with its flexibility, power, and extensive code base. I write in Perl because it provides everything needed to support enterprise software applications. I write in Perl because it is actively being maintained and developed. I write in Perl because nothing else gets the job done better: long live Perl.’
For my small-scale development needs I’m betting that at this point something gets the job done better. For now, anyway, pelicans have no need for Perl.
New PSP offers minor tweaks
With the extraordinary hype over the iPod this year, not much has been said about the PSP. That’s understandable, but for a certain segment of the market the PSP offers a very cool handheld device and its new version offers a few new features.
The Internet, of course, is going to be more accessible over the iPhone and run much more sophisticated web sites. But in range of wi-fi, the PSP is very good at browsing text-based or mobile sites, and it has a very nice, large screen. The games are of course the main feature, along with the ability to play UMD movies.
One of the main new features of the new model is its smaller size and silver color (at least the one I saw in the picture looks silver, and the old ones are black). It’s certainly a large device and though I don’t mind its width because it affords a wide screen the PSP is definitely more of a backpack device than a pocket device, and making it smaller can’t hurt for usability.
It seems like the real key feature of the new version is its ability to output its signal to an external cord. This is something that can allow anyone with the right cord and monitor to play games or watch movies on a TV screen. While that may be a poor substitute for a PS2 in gaming, there’s value in allowing people to view the UMD movies, which seem to come in at pretty high quality and might look alright on medium or small screens.
I can’t say I regret getting the first model earlier this year, but Sony has definitely given a small but measurable increase to the utility of the PSP with the new tweaks to the device.
Gonzales gone doesn’t mean civil liberties are back
The US attorneys scandal and Alberto Gonzales were more than a side skirmish in larger political calculations, and his resignation is welcome and will lead to the end of the attorney general’s bizarre version of the “American dream,” but will probably not lead to restoration of American liberties.
This scandal was not about broad issues of separation of powers so much as defending senatorial privilege in a loosely defined system. Senators are territorial types–and they didn’t like the open defiance and lying that Alberto Gonzales displayed at their hearings. Besides that, his boss George W. Bush had sought to take away the great privilege Senators enjoy in their home states–the ability to consult on choice of U.S. attorneys–by using a new provision in a tyrannical law.
Why a majority of senators voted in favor of stripping themselves of this particular power in the “Patriot Act” reauthorization bill is a mystery only known inside the Hart Senate Office Building, if there.
But that’s all this was about. Now, for the most part, the power struggle is over and the various political parties and branches of governments can get back to colluding to deny ordinary Americans their civil liberties.
Congress just passed another absurd concession to the president in the recent “temporary” wiretapping bill. This appears a better indicator of where things are going politically–at least until the next election or for a while anyway.
No charges appear to have yet been filed for the lies Gonzales told, no impeachment proceedings have been called in the House. Just because he resigned doesn’t mean that he didn’t commit perjury. And liberals may hope for improvement in the DoJ now, but knowing the Bushies it will be another corrupt bastard so what does it matter anyway.
And what about Karl Rove and Harriet Myers? Will Congress let Bush get away with not having them testify?
Bush is extremely unpopular; he has claimed powers he simply does not have (to invalidate laws, to indefinitely imprison citizens without charge, to wiretap without a warrant, and so forth); and his administration has done a laughably bad job of leading the country.
Now is the time to open up a full-on political assault on the worst administration in the country’s history, for the purposes of avoiding more harmful mistakes like an Iran invasion and punishing the lawless and stupid president to set a precedent.
But that’s not likely to come from the Democrats, some of whom (like Hillary Clinton) are ready to collude with the Republican/media establishment once in power.
Facebook’s savvy move — open up, just a little
As Dave Winer wrote recently, “Facebook *is* opening up.” Of course that means different things to different people. Some would take that to mean that the recently added feature of “Facebook apps,” programs that run inside Facebook but are designed and maintained by outsiders. But the much vaunted Facebook platform, while it may accomplish a lot, still mainly offers trivial, fun applications largely targeted to college students.
No, the opening up that matters is the ability to post outside links as items in the user’s mini-feed (and thus the feed of friends on Facebook) for inputting content, and RSS feeds for getting it out.
How does that work? Well, I have a WordPress plugin on my blog that allows me to post a link to my latest post to Twitter. I also have a Twitter application installed on Facebook that allows me to put every Twitter message in my feed. So without even logging in to Facebook, I can share my photos or blog posts with friends.
This issue is very important to people like me. Why then have a photo blog, you might wonder, and have it link on Facebook when you can just upload your photos directly to Facebook? Because any friends that want to see the photos would then have to get an account at Facebook and log in. The fact that many people use Facebook to share photos is cool–but for me I prefer to use pacificpelican.us, Webshots and Flickr to handle most of my pictures. Certainly I still use Facebook to check on pictures from people I know–and I can’t help but admit it’s fun to get tagged on photos of friends and I can see why many people like the features Facebook offers. But what’s important to me is that Facebook is opening up a little [a very little, really–they are still mostly a walled garden of data] and making it easier to share my data from another web site with my friends.
So data flows into the walled garden, but doesn’t flow out–even if the data is thinner from me (links to images) than it is from friends of mine (images), it is still flowing one way. So that’s where RSS feeds come in. Facebook has made it much easier to get feeds about your friends’ activity as well as your own in RSS format. They can be read in most browsers and in RSS readers. These feeds, while their content links to Facebook pages that require login, at least contain the basic data about what they link to–and they flow out of the site. So, for example, instead of using Twitter to send updates about what you’re doing and letting people subscribe to the feed, you can just use your Facebook status updates and its feed. Of course, I’ve written a bit about these short messaging services and there are lots of alternatives, but Facebook’s accessibility and the ease of updating over my PSP via wi-fi has made it my choice among them at the moment.
It’s a cool start, and it may signal further evolution–Facebook may have realized that they need to open up a bit in order to continue to expand. It was a great move, and they’ve won a lot of geeks over for now.
An appendix to my biography
My sister Ellen has launched a very cool new site about my family. Here is my bio on it as of now:
‘Where does he live?
He’s in San Francisco. He went to Michigan State for undergrad and then University of San Francisco for grad school. He’s currently working toward getting a CPA.
Does he play any sports?
He played soccer in high school. He also has a skate board he likes to take on the hills of San Francisco.
Does he have any pets?
No. But if he did it wouldn’t be a dolphin. He hates dolphins.
What does he like to do in his free time?
He reads a lot and has an online blog. Here’s the link:
Right on! Except, I did have a pet earlier in the year, Fishasaurus, who Jessica got for me and though he didn’t live long he was very cool and he taught me to love all aquatic creatures–even dolphins.
Ellen did a great job designing the site. Don’t forget to read all of the McKeown family profiles and browse the photo album.
The shadowy side of the food court
Passed out drunk guy on ground
Don’t worry though–one minute the guy was flat on the ground, but a few moments later he was getting into a cab that I helped him to hail and heading down 7th Avenue toward Clement, muttering something about Garcia Street. He was probably just a little drunk, I don’t really know.
I was riding along Geary Boulevard on my bike late Saturday night-Sunday morning and the Inner Richmond bar scene was just about spewing out its leavings for the night. The two guys looking at him in the picture didn’t seem as interested in helping the guy a few seconds later when they saw I was using my camera phone. Too bad for them, though. They were in a public place and this photo is my property–their whines of “erase it” went unanswered.
According to Israel, Gaza in dark for "security reasons"
‘The Israeli military has said it will open a border crossing with the Gaza Strip for a few hours on Sunday to allow fuel deliveries to the territory.
The announcement comes a day after parts of Gaza were plunged into darkness because of fuel shortages.
The territory relies on Israel for fuel but Israel says it stopped regular deliveries for security reasons.’
Oh, security reasons. That and the fact that they bombed the power infrastructure there last year.
Nothing to do with collective punishment after that coup by Hamas?
People have been warning about this building crisis. It’s all leading up to more violence.
Check out Cat Tails by Jessica
Jessica has a short comedy video posted on her blog. It’s worth checking out.
Something about a marginal Olympic hopeful. Actually quite funny, I thought.
Now Jessica sends a lot of traffic to my site via the two widgets she so generously put on her page, so make sure to visit Cat Tails so I can partly compensate her with a little traffic from my site. 🙂