Sandbenders.org

I spent part of Saturday on the Capitol Steps in Salem with Michele Darr.

Michele has started a hunger strike for the Oregon National Guard. Her strike aims to see a resolution passed that argues that the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for Iraq is invalid, since it was based on the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction, among other things that were found not to be true. Her letter here.

At the same time, most of my family was at a Pampered Chef party, which from what I hear, seems to have been a front for a Corona (and possibly raspberry vodka) party.

On the way home from the party, my mother and grandmother had a discussion of the effectiveness of activism, my grandmother's position being that it's an ineffective strategy.

And, I have a rough draft of a "researched position essay" due today at 6PM. I think I found my position: not only has activism been effective, but it is the only way for concerned citizens to enact change.

Open Office Sucks, but I won't go into that right now.

Gnome Office is a loose-knit set of apps that I think is a shadow of the ideal solution.

Step one: Create a unified project, with a unified naming scheme and logo design for apps, move all the code and bug trackers into the same place.

Step two: Make everything support ODF that can. Get rid of proprietary formats where possible.

Step three: Begin to unify the look and feel, conform to Gnome UI standards where it makes sense.

Step four: ?

Step five: Enjoy an open source office suite that suits and integrates with the open source community and Gnome in a way that Open Office can't.

Woo. Having a good morning, well besides worrying about my employer being able to make payroll, and having coworkers flee from the accountant's office in tears.

Ben asked me to make a deluge shirt, which I have worked on a little bit, the result so far to the left (SVG attached). It definitely needs some more work.

I'm not sure exactly what they have in mind, but it looks like I'll probably end up using two of PMS 277, 278 or 279. Which are the same three colors Langenburg uses for everything, so I'll have to choke back the PTSD to finish it.

Honestly, though, it hasn't been traumatic for me. I've been entirely too calm about all of it. Lies, cheating, worrying about my finances, worrying about a job. I'm enjoying it way too much, or at least I've convinced myself that.

The image I was told to base the above on is seen to the right. It's a little asymmetrical, in ways that I had to assume were unintentional. I'm not entirely sure why deluge wants such a strange looking creature on their shirts, but I like it. Its name is Drippy. It reminds me of the Drupal logo, but is different enough to have it's own identity.

I have to say I much prefer the logo as seen on their website, seen to the left. It seems to me that the project could benefit from an effort to nail down its image.

For example, I could see how it might be possible to slightly change the tidal wave image to draw a lower case d. The gradients are too explicit for me, very "Web 2.0". I think increased contrast, with softer gradients could make it feel much more solid, more refined. It reminds me of the Obama logo (though it may have preceded it).

An open source may not immediately realize that it can, or should, market itself much like any product. As more lay-users enter the open source community, image will become more and more important. People are willing to deal with a buggy, slow, and even expensive piece of software, if they assume that the other option, with it's absent or ugly logo, is worse. Many users are so unwilling to try the alternatives, they'll pick the one that they like based on it's name or it's logo, and assume that if it's the prettiest, it's the most popular, and the best. Successful projects even now have to take this into account. Look at the effort put into marketing Ubuntu. That effort is a lot of how that distro pulls in average "human beings", and knowledgeable users will gravitate toward a solid and attractive brand image, if the specifications are otherwise the same.

Deluge, compared to many projects, is doing quite well. A Google image search reveals mostly the tidal-wave-in-a-drop logo. And they have mostly avoided inconsistency with typefaces, one of the easiest mistakes.

Collecting images from other sites and vomiting them into a blog entry is not content, it is stealing.

Creating a list or collection of other people's content without contributing something is not content, it is pointless.

Creating a list or collection of lists or collections of content is not content, it is a bad joke.

Seriously, stop it.

I've been emailing back and forth with some old friends that run a Drupal-based web development company, and had a conference call today with another professional Drupaler, specializing in work with non-profits. All together, it makes for a list of modules to play with and things to try to get Drupal to do.

I've gotten farther in than I have before. I installed FCKeditor and IMCE, which play nice with eachother. I'll probably use the same setup for the Drupal I am working on for ROP. I've also got Tagadelic installed, and like it so far.

I also need to play with views some, custom content types and CCK. Also, the non-profit dev mentioned a module that generates url aliases from content titles, which would help a lot with ROP.

Also, once I get through the fun part of playing with modules, I'm going to muck through the theme system.

I happened to stumble on a conservative blog entry that I won't go into any detail about. I found the content amusing, but I found the ads to be more so. They were all insulting their audience.

All in one ad:

• "Beware the dangers of weight training","The ultimate fitness program" (fat, or otherwise image conscious)
• "No equipment required" (poor)

One for an electric ab stimulator:

• "Works all your stomach muscles at once, with no exercise!" (fat, lazy, gullible)

I thought they proved that those were dangerous and ineffective a couple years ago.

Other ads:

• "Here's how I made rediculous sums of money all at the push of a button!!" (lazy, gullible)
• "Win a free cruise" (gullible)
• "Are you a slave to your creditors?" (in debt)

These are all ads that the site chose to cater to it's readers.

The owner of the site is telling people horrible things about it's own readership, It's interesting that people don't read into ads that way, to see what the rest of the message is: "If you are interested in my article about how I hate immigrants, you're probably low class, dumb, fat and in debt."

I doubt the average conservative American reader would ever visit the site if they saw the same message I do.

I was curious about media and Internet and things. I found this study.

According to the study, during the 2008 election year, 60 percent of those surveyed chose television as their first choice for their "Main source" of campaign news, 15% chose "Internet", and newspapers captured 12% (More than double that of the 2004 election).

Of internet users, many seek news from large, corporate news sites: 26% chose MSNBC.com, 23% CNN.com, 22% Yahoo! News. The next largest site is Google News, at 9%. "Other", the category that even the most successful progressive political blog or news site falls under, was chosen by 20% of respondents.

That doesn't sound bad, until you multiply. We can conclude from this study that progressive online media reaches less than 20% of the 15% of voting-age Americans that get their news online (3%). I also highly doubt even half of "Other" is progressive. "Other" includes email saying Obama is a fanatic racist Muslim; it includes UFO sites saying McCain is a reptile beast from another galaxy (the only bad thing about him I could come up with that wasn't actually true).

If people think that Internet is the Mecca of the Free Press, unfettered by the political interests of corporate America, they should look again. If an idea is going to reach the public quickly, it has to be on TV, in a major Newspaper, or on a big-business website. For you to get your ideas to the public quickly, you still need lots of money (or have ideas that are compatible with those that do have lots of money).

Only the minority of people that know enough about progressive politics to seek out progressive media are consuming progressive media. It's a chicken-egg problem that doesn't have an easy solution. So we are left to figure out the best ways to get ideas to the public that aren't quite as convenient as mass media, or new ways of using what we do have to attract the eyes and ears of those people whose eyes and ears aren't already open to our message.

We need an educated public for democracy and capitalism to work. Tearing down the information asymmetry that makes people unable to act in their own best interest is the only way to change things. The internet isn't going to do that by itself, it takes more work than that.

Complaintzilla is a really cool idea. Like any bug tracker, users submit things they find wrong. Unlike any other bug tracker the subject is reality.

People submit bugs like:

Complaint 25 - Time Moves Too Fast

Assigned to: God
Description From Your Mom:

An hour passes in what would seem to be only a few minutes. Before I know
it it's 2 AM and I haven't got a damn thing done today! 1998 was already 10
years ago and my little brother is turning 16!

Seems like someone accidentally set the time speed variable too high in the
latest patch.

This gave me an amazing idea: someone runs a bug tracker for reality, as this one, but actually seeks to resolve the filed bugs.

Working together, much like an open-source project, a group of activists goes and tries to better the world. Someone complains about a local problem, a local group is assigned the ticket, and seeks resolution. File a bug about litter in your neighborhood, file a bug about the business practices of a local company, and the ticket assignee will call, picket, or whatever.

Yeah, I know it's out there, even for one of my ideas.

Me: "Hi I was just wondering if there was any reason why 'Special K with Red Berries' isn't just called 'Special K with Strawberries'".

Kellog Representative: "I honestly don't know that there is a reason."

Me: "Oh, ok. I was just wondering if I should be concerned."

Kellog Representative: "No, I really don't know why our marketing department made the decision to call it that... Is that all?"

Me: "Yeah, Thank you very much. Have a nice day."

I have resumed development on my pythonic MOO server and core. If you aren't familliar, python is amazing (I won't go into detail), and MOO is essentially a user-editable, user-programmable, object-oriented MUD.

One thing I run into with python is GIL. I can't just spawn a bunch of threads and have them use all of a multi-core CPU. That's not really a big deal, and I understand why they don't think threads are for concurrency, since multiple processes is a much more flexible solution.

Multiple processes would be amazing, allowing for scalability to a cluster of machines, not just SMP boxes. Just, I can't see an easy way to implement it. I need to be able to have objects refer to each other across processes. PyRO will do that for me, but PyRO can't do remoteobject.property.property properly. It serializes and sends me a copy of the object, which just won't do.

Ruby (DRb) makes things easier, by allowing control over whether objects are passed through the remote request, or if they remain, and only their methods are accessed, and allows proper functioning of object.method.method.

So, all my code is in python, and I'm stuck on one CPU. When I finally buy a quad-core CPU, I'll be wishing I had re-written things in Ruby, or that whatever is wrong with Python/PyRO/GIL is fixed.

I should probably start rewriting it in Ruby sooner, rather than later. Unless someone has an answer to the python concurrency dilemma.