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An archive of older items from MonthlyDigest. And links to the permalink pages for archived items. The permalink is always of the form MonthlyArchiveYYYYMM?.

Archive of MonthlyDigest

• Archive of MonthlyDigest
  • Private Equity Firms Explained
  • 10 Things to Know about John McCain
  • The Obama Speech
  • Rendering sparklines on TWiki using google charts
  • Keith Olbermann at WTC on 9/11/2006
  • January 2006
  • Royal ezVue 5 PDA
    • Installation
    • b-splines
  • December 2005
    • Statistics Package in ruby
  • November 2005
    • Combinatorials
  • October 2005
    • Fully automatic clocks
    • An old but easy to set clock
    • Analog clocks
    • Ovens and Microwaves
    • Car stereos
    • A really 'special' device
    • Setback Thermostat
    • Wristwatch
  • A Puzzle
  • June 2005
    • Durbin Opposes Torture - Bush Does Not - Who Should Apologize?
    • Sudoku Puzzle Solver
  • May 2005
    • Powerball Analysis
    • Powerball Analysis (pre August 2005)
    • Perpetual War
  • April 2005
    • Ruby, Rails, and Ajax
    • Japanese Language Learning
    • Spanish Language Learning
    • Google Maps
    • Links to google map hacking information
    • Commentary on Google Maps Technology
    • Google Maps Applications
    • Miscellaneous

• DigestPage0805

Private Equity Firms Explained

Private equity leveraged buyouts explained.

• DigestPage0804

10 Things to Know about John McCain

... received in an email newsletter from moveon.org

• DigestPage0803

The Obama Speech

Until yesterday I had planned to vote for the Democratic candidate for President, based on the premise that either Clinton or Obama would be better for our country than McCain. I wasn't excited by the prospect, and never believed that either candidate would do more than strengthen the status quo in ways that are marginally less harmful than the disastrous policies of the Bush administration. But after reading Obama's speech I've changed my mind: I am voting for Obama. Full stop. If I have to write his name on my ballot, then that's what I will do.

For the first time in my life a viable candidate for high office has spoken honestly about race in America. For the first time a candidate had the courage to say what we should all know by now: racism is a tool used by the wealthy and powerful to divide working people and the poor. Finally there is a candidate who says that white resentment against affirmative action would be better aimed at the corporations that are shipping our decent jobs overseas for 'nothing more than profit.' Finally a candidate who acknowledges that the gains we have made toward greater equality, better working conditions, and greater liberty have been made only after great struggle by large numbers of ordinary people.

Obama made only passing reference to the casual racism of the ruling class - the casual racism of Geraldine Ferraro, the comments by Bill Clinton in South Carolina. Obama rightly sees this as mere noise and a distraction. For 25 years, since the early days of the Reagan administration, we've been treated to a non-stop litany of complaints by right-wing commentators about affirmative action, about the 'special treatment' given to minority races and to women in America. These complaints have had the intended effect of convincing white Americans that they are somehow at a disadvantage, and that blacks and latinos are to blame. And they've had the effect of diverting attention away from the deep problems that we face: health care for profit that fails to deliver adequate health care at an acceptable price; the massive loss of good jobs; the end of defined-benefit pension plans; the loss not only of factories but of the engineering base that would have allowed America to continue to lead the world in technology; and the ever increasing accumulation of wealth by the wealthy, by way of massive federal corporate welfare. I believe Obama is the candidate who would be willing to recognize these problems and lead the way towards solutions.

The media has made much of pastor Wright's 'God Damn America' speech. Ignoring the bombast for a moment, Wright made two claims that I believe should be uncontroversial: he stated that America was built on a foundation of racism, and he stated that 9/11 happened in response to US foreign policy. I honestly do not understand how either of those statements can be refuted. Howard Zinn devoted a significant portion of 'A People's History' to demonstrating the truth of the first statement. From the beginning of the colonial era to well into the 20th century racism was used as a tool to divide workers and to divert their attention from their own exploitation. Racism served to create a large bloc of poor and working class whites who would defend the status quo, with their lives if need be. Working against their own interest, working class whites often stood against the struggle to achieve a more just and prosperous society. It is painful to acknowledge past racism; and for many whites today it is difficult to recognize the fact of racism in contemporary America. Obama had the courage and the insight to describe the legacy of racism, but also to point out that we have made great progress, and that we can do more in the future.

As for the claim that we brought 9/11 on ourselves because of our foreign policy - what is there to object to? Chomsky has been very persuasively arguing the same thing since September 2001. What is the alternative theory? That they 'hate us for our freedom'? That slogan, and that way of thinking, is simply idiotic. We were attacked in 1994 and again in 2001 for exactly the reasons that the terrorists said they attacked us: the US forces in Saudi Arabia, our unwavering support for the racist and zionist regime in Israel, and our military support for repressive regimes throughout the Muslim world.

Obama chose not to address the causes of 9/11 - I really don't see how he could have done so. The sound bites would have destroyed him, no matter how carefully he phrased his analysis. But everything else in his speech makes me believe that Obama will not be willing to pander to the neo-con idiocy that has driven our policies these past 7 years.

This is the most important presidential election since 1968. The difference this time is that we have a shot, just a shot, at a candidate who has the vision and the courage to be honest with the American people and who is willing to tackle the really big problems. He may be beaten down by a combination of right-wing media and the right-wing pandering of the Clinton campaign. But for now there is hope.

Dale Brayden - 20 Mar 2008

• DigestPage0712

Rendering sparklines on TWiki using google charts

Google recently made public their chart creation api. Very simple, very cool. The idea is that you specify chart data and settings in a url, and get back a generated image.

I wrote a little code that renders sparklines-like graphs using the google charts api, from TWiki. In my case I call the code from one of my plugins - but I'm probably the only person on the planet that uses that plugin, so you would need to call it from somewhere else.

The basic idea is simple: create the simplest, smallest legible line graph for a set of data. Small enough that it can serve as just another 'word' in a sentence, yet convey a relatively large set of quantitative information.

My approach was to invent some wiki syntax: ((sparkline)(number1, ..., numberk)), e.g. ((sparkline)(1500.0,700,1244,400,800.0,1921.5,2100.2,500,900,600,800,1000,1921.5,2100.2,500,900,600,800,1000)). This gets rendered as shown in this example. It's all fairly easy.

... more

• DigestPage0609

Keith Olbermann at WTC on 9/11/2006

And lastly tonight a Special Comment on why we are here. Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space.

And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

And all the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and — as I discovered from those “missing posters” seared still into my soul — two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me… this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are “soft”, or have “forgotten” the lessons of what happened here — is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante — and at worst, an idiot — whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However. Of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast — of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds… none of us could have predicted… this.

Five years later this space… is still empty.

Five years later there is no Memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country’s wound is still open.

Five years… later this country’s mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later… this is still… just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

... more

• DigestPage0601

January 2006

Royal ezVue 5 PDA

My wife recently bought a Royal ezVue 5 PDA, as an inexpensive way to find out if she would use a PDA. It's a fairly nice unit with plenty of built-in applications, and it comes with PC synchronization software.

I ran into a fairly significant problem after installing the software on Windows XP : her USB scanner driver stopped working. After much tinkering I got things working, but it was a bit of a pain.

1. I set up 2 hardware profiles, which I called "Scanner" and "PDA". In the "PDA" profile I disabled the USB scanner.
2. I told the PDA sync software "SmartSync" to not start up automatically at boot-up
3. I leave the PDA USB cable unplugged until she'e ready to synchronize.
4. To synchronize :
   1. Boot into PDA hardware profile
   2. Plug in the PDA USB cable, with PDA off
   3. Start the SmartSync application
   4. Turn on the PDA and initiate synchronization

Also, it appears that the synchronization will often duplicate address-book entries. I haven't done enough testing to confirm this, and I have no idea why some entries would be duplicated and some not.

Installation

Be sure to follow the instructions : install the software before plugging in the USB cable. If you plug in the cable then try to install, you'll get a message about "an instance of this driver is already loaded". Also, no matter how you install it, when you first plug in the cable XP will complain about the "Megawin USB Bridge" software not being XP logo compatible. Just say OK - what else can you do?

The SmartSync software will want to start automatically at boot-up. If you find that the software is incompatible with any of your other USB devices, then click on SmartSync's tray icon and select "Settings" and tell it not to start automatically. Then reboot, and your other device might be fine until you run SmartSync again.

b-splines

I've posted a ruby implementation of b-splines, along with an explanation of how b-splines are calculated.

• DigestPage0512

December 2005

Statistics Package in ruby

I've posted a statistics package written in ruby. The source can be downloaded as a zip file

• DigestPage0511

November 2005

Combinatorials

I've posted a set of classes and methods for generating combinations and permutations.

Source code (zip) : http://www.brayden.org/twiki/pub/Software/RubyCombinatorials/Combinatorials.zip - RubyCombinatorials

• DigestPage0510

October 2005

ClockUserInterfaces ...

I have nearly completed the twice-yearly ritual of adjusting all our clocks to account for the daylight saving time change. There are clocks that I don't mind setting, and others that are a genuine pain in the neck. I wonder why this should be so - why would it be hard to design a user interface for setting a clock ahead or back by one hour? And isn't that the most common thing that we do when we set the time on our clocks?

I've made a catalog of some of the best and the worst of our clocks.

Fully automatic clocks

We have 2 clocks that are fully automatic. They are so-called 'atomic' clocks. Of course, they are not really atomic - they are driven by ordinary AAA alkaline batteries. But they have radio receivers tuned to WWV and some logic to decode the WWV time signal. (And the WWV uses the NIST atomic clocks when generating their signal, hence these are 'atomic' clocks - get it?) These are wonderful clocks. They automatically adjust for the daylight saving time change, and I have to do nothing whatsoever.

An old but easy to set clock

I have had this clock radio since 1983. I got it for free for listening to a one hour sales spiel for ... I don't remember, maybe a timeshare condo or something. This clock has been a real marvel. It has endured years of abuse on mornings when I smash down on the snooze button with undue force. It has lived through drywall demolition, uncovered and filled with gypsum dust. It still works perfectly.

The clock is rather large, maybe 10 inches by 6 inches. It has 2 buttons and a slide switch. The buttons are labelled 'Hour' and 'Minute'. The slide switch is labelled 'FWD - LOCK - REV'. To set the clock an hour ahead or an hour back you slide the switch to 'FWD' or 'REV', then press the 'HOUR' button once, then set the slide switch back to its center LOCK position.

Excellent!

Analog clocks

We have a couple of these. They are the battery powered quartz crystal type of clock with an analog face. There is a small wheel on the back on the battery holder. You rotate the wheel in the appropriate direction while watching the front of the clock until you have reached the correct time.

This isn't bad, but you do have to have another clock or watch available to check the time, or simply remember which minute you were on before you started to set the clock. But for $8.95, I can live with this.

Ovens and Microwaves

Our microwave clock is pretty typical. You press the 'Clock' button, then use the numeric keypad to enter the time. It doesn't have a 24-hour setting, as far as I know, so if you set the time in the afternoon you simply set it to whatever 12-hour time it is (like 2:24).

Our new oven is similar, except that it doesn't have a numeric keypad. It just has UP and DOWN buttons. To set the time you press the Clock button, which blanks the display, then press it again, which turns the display back on, but now the time display is blinking. You then press the UP or DOWN button to adjust the time. If you press and release the time changes by one minute. If you press and hold the time starts adjusting by 10 minute increments.

You have to remember that these are digital clocks and are amazingly accurate. The only time I ever have to set them is at the daylight saving time switchover and after a power outage (which, thankfully, does not occur often). So fully half the time that I set these clocks it is for daylight saving time. But neither device has an easy means of changing the time by exactly one hour.

Car stereos

Car stereo manufacturers seem to delight in making it challenging to set the clock. Actually, after you've figured out how to do it it's not terribly difficult. But the manufacturers apparently spend a great deal of time figuring out clever ways of hiding the magic handshake needed to initiate the clock-setting process.

In my case there actually is a button labelled 'clock'. It is a small, shy, and retiring button. If you press it, the clock display disappears. If you press it again the clock display re-appears. Hmmm. OK, so you press and hold it. Then the clock display starts blinking. Bingo! Now what? Well, the buttons used for the radio presets have small and very hard to read labels above them. Two of those labels are 'hour' and 'minute'. So, to set the hour back to standard time in October, you press the 'hour' button, 11 times, until the correct hour shows up. Be sure to do this quickly, because if you delay for 2 seconds, the time-setting function no longer works, and you are simply selecting preset number 1, repeatedly.

A really 'special' device

We have a combination 'atomic' clock, indoor, and outdoor thermometer. It is huge - about 8 inches by 12 inches. It displays the current month, day of month, day of week, moon phase (really), time of day, outdoor temperature, and indoor temperature. There is a remote device that I have mounted to the exterior north wall of our house that has a radio transmitter that periodically broadcasts the outdoor temperature. The device inside has a radio receiver to receive those broadcasts. The device also uses its radio receiver to receive the WWV time signal. The device can display temperature in fahrenheit or celcius, and can show days of the week in English, French, Spanish, German, and, for all I know, Esperanto and Tagalog. The device will be happy to display the current time on a 24 hour clock or a 12 hour clock.

Oh, and did I mention? The device can also serve as an alarm.

In short, an amazing and useful gadget.

Unfortunately, the user interface on this device is horrible. There are no buttons on the front of the device. There are 4 buttons on the back. Two of those buttons are devoted to the alarm function, the other 2 are for changing all the other settings.

So, to set the clock ahead or back one hour you

1. sit in a comfortable, well-lighted place with the device in your lap
2. you turn the device around and identify the 2 buttons you will be pushing
3. you position 2 fingers over those 2 buttons, then turn the device around so the display is facing you
4. you begin pushing the 'function select' button. Repeatedly. You will see various parts of the display begin to flash. You will have the opportunity to change the language, time-zone, day of week, day of month, month, fahrenheit/celcius, 12/24 hour clock display, DST on/off, hour, minute.
5. Oops - when you see the hour begin to flash, press the other button until it shows the desired time. That would be 11 presses in the autumn.
6. Press the first button to make the minutes flash. But you don't have to change anything here, so press the first button again.
7. Now, and this is important, when you've pressed that first button and absolutely nothing is flashing on the display, STOP PRESSING BUTTONS. Because if you press that first button again you will have to cycle through all the settings, again.

Well. This is horrible on so many levels.

1. Having made certain fundamental decisions once (like language, time zone, fahrenheit/celcius, 12/24 hour clock), why must I see those settings again when all I want to do is change the time of day?
2. The device is huge. But the display only occupies about 30% of the available area. The rest is simply decorative plastic. Why not put the buttons, and more of them, on the front so you don't have to be a 2-fingered accordionist to set the time?
3. Since it is receiving the WWV time signal, why doesn't it adjust automatically for DST?

Setback Thermostat

We have a setback thermostat with a digital display and an array of push buttons. It has a clearly labelled button called 'set current day/time'. Next to it are buttons labelled 'Time Up', 'Time Down', and 'Day >>'. I naively thought that the procedure would be to press the 'set current day/time' button, then press the 'Time Down' button until I reached the desired time. Hmmmm, no. That wasn't right. Actually, to set the hour you press the 'set current day/time' button, then each time you press it again it adjusts the time by one hour ahead. Press it 23 times, then press 'Run Program', and voila! the time is set. Actually, maybe the 'Time Down' button would have worked, but to actually store the setting you need to press the 'Run Program' button, and NOT the 'set current day/time' button.

This is actually not a bad user interface, but it suffers from spillover effects from other similar user interfaces. On digital devices the common pattern is : 1) press a 'Clock' button, 2) press a time adjust button repeatedly, 3) press the 'Clock' button again to end the cycle. But on the thermostat you have to press a different button to end the cycle, and pressing the original 'clock' button actually has the effect of resetting or altering what you have done before.

Wristwatch

My wristwatch is the quartz-crystal analog-face type, with classic pull-mechanism to enable the watch-setting function. This is OK, but as with the similar analog clocks mentioned earlier, it is virtually impossible to set the time back by an hour and wind up with the minute- and second-hands set correctly. So my procedure on this is to wait until the second-hand is straight up, set the watch back 59 minutes, then watch an accurate clock until it is exactly on the minute, then press the setting mechanism back in to restart the watch.

OK - maybe that's a bit anal retentive, but since the watch itself is accurate to within a second or two per month, I see no reason to set it to anything other than the correct time.

A Puzzle

Given 1 < x < y and x + y < 100.

Mathematician P knows the product x * y.

Mathematician S knows the sum x + y.

P: I can't determine x and y
S: I knew that.
P: Now I can.
S: So can I.

What are x and y?

I've posted a solution in ruby.

• DigestPage0506

June 2005

Durbin Opposes Torture - Bush Does Not - Who Should Apologize?

Senator Durbin apologized yesterday for his earlier remarks. Frankly, I have to wonder why - has our country come to the point where those who oppose torture must apologize for opposing it? Apparently so. In recent months we've seen:

• the senior Bush legal advisor who wrote or approved the majority of memos justifying torture and secret detention was nominated and approved by the Senate to be Attorney General;
• the senior officer in charge of Abu Ghraib promoted;
• a lieutenant in the Navy seals acquited for the beating death of a detainee in his custody, and then promoted;
• the Bush regime has defied a Supreme Court ruling regarding prisoner access to legal protections

And now, Republicans in Congress want to cut funding for the International Committee of the Red Cross because the ICRC has reported on the many prisoner abuses and violations of international law committed by the U.S.

There was no apology needed. Not from Durbin, not from anyone else, not even from the torturers. I do hope someday to see those responsible for the torture, i.e. Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Gonzalez, standing up in court to explain why they should not be punished for their crimes. But apologies? It's far too late for that.

Sudoku Puzzle Solver

This is a ruby application that solves the sudoku puzzle.

See SudokuSolver

• DigestPage0505

May 2005

Powerball Analysis

After originally posting this, powerball changed the odds and payouts. Instead of drawing the group of 5 from a set of 53, they draw from a set of 55. I assumed that this would be simply a reduction in the expected value of a ticket, but they also tweaked the payouts for 2 of the non grand prize winners, and the result was that the expected value of a non grand prize winner actually increased, from 17 cents to 20 cents.

Some of the increase in expected value was driven by the increased odds of 'winning' by not getting correct numbers in the group of 5. This is a very small effect, however, since the odds only actually increased for the nil case of getting no correct numbers.

This tells me that powerball revenue is affected as much by psychology as statistics. The net effect of the changes was to dramatically increase the odds against winning the grand prize, thus driving the average grand prize upward, thus increasing ticket sales. And since the expected value is still very low, increased ticket sales translates directly to increased revenue. In fact, a 4% increase in sales would offset the increased expected value.

Here is the new analysis, followed by the previous analysis.

Five balls are drawn from a drum with balls numbered 1-55. One ball is drawn from a drum with balls numbered 1-42.

The total number of combinations is

total = c(5,55) * 42 = 146,107,962

In the table above, payout is the amount that would be paid out for each type of prize assuming that all combinations were selected. The total payout for all combinations other than the winner is $20,888,592, or just under one sixth the total amount.

The following table shows statistical expected value of a $1 ticket for a range of grand prizes. I have extended the table to reflect the fact that the grand-prize nominal amount is over twice as high as the actual amount you would receive (before taxes) if you take the one-time payout option.

Ignoring the grand prize, the expected value of a $1 ticket is 19.7 cents. And the odds of winning the grand prize are so vanishingly small that it is reasonable to ignore it in the expected value calculation. Thus, you can expect that you will on average get back less than $10 for each $50 that you spend - not a good value proposition.

The marketing of powerball, and of state-run lotteries in general, seems to me to verge on fraudulent in 2 ways:

1. The stated prize value is misleading at best. The nominal payout is paid out over a 30 year period, rendering its net present value far less than the nominal value. The actual present value works out to about 47% of the stated prize amount. This fact should be prominently stated in all marketing material for the lotteries.
2. It is unreasonable to expect that consumers will engage in a laborious statistical analysis of the odds, payouts, and expected values of lottery games. Lottery game purveyors should be required to distribute an analysis, similar to the one taken above, to allow consumers to make better informed decisions about lottery purchases. Failing to do so simply exploits the inability of most people to reason effectively about very large or very small numbers.

I'm sure it is very clever to say that "lotteries are a tax on the (mathematically) stupid." But as a society isn't it our responsibility to provide the tools for people to make informed choices? In fact, haven't we accepted that responsibility in nearly every other area of our lives? We insist on truth in advertising for everything from corn chips to cars. But we exempt the lottery from that same requirement.

Powerball Analysis (pre August 2005)

Five balls are drawn from a drum with balls numbered 1-53. One ball is drawn from a drum with balls numbered 1-42.

The total number of combinations is

total = c(5,53) * 42 = 120,526,770

In the table above, payout is the amount that would be paid out for each type of prize assuming that all combinations were selected. The total payout for all combinations other than the winner is $20,888,592, or just under one sixth the total amount.

The following table shows statistical expected value of a $1 ticket for a range of grand prizes:

Ignoring the grand prize, the expected value of a $1 ticket is 17.3 cents. And the odds of winning the grand prize are so vanishingly small that it is reasonable to ignore it in the expected value calculation. Thus, you can expect that you will on average get back about $10 for each $58 that you spend - not a good value proposition.

Perpetual War

For two and a half years I have been trying to understand the motivations behind the Bush administration's determination to attack Iraq. The idea that the attack was motivated simply by a desire to secure oil resources seemed facile - after all, Bush and his cronies have plenty of ways to make money from oil without securing the Iraqi oil fields. The Afghan pipeline boondoggle is just one example; opening up the Alaska north slope wilderness is another.

The unprovoked attack on Iraq could not have been motivated, or justified, by the need to combat terrorism : Iraq under Saddam was no friend of terrorists. Saddam's mission was to increase his own power, not to aid Islamic extremists whom he regarded with disdain and contempt. Though Bush tried to wave the anti-terrorism flag as part of the initial justification of the war, he quickly backed off once the absurdity of the argument was apparent.

The justification came down to the issue of 'weapons of mass destruction'. We know now, and suspected then, that the 'smoking gun / mushroom cloud' argument was trumped up and based on intelligence findings that had been guided if not mandated by the Bush administration. The New York Review ran an article (I'll see if I can find a link) in 2003 showing that of the 27 claims about Iraqi WMD made by Colin Powell to the United Nations in February 2002, all were either entirely or mostly false. Bush knew that the WMD claims were bogus.

So - what was the motivation?

The recent passage of the 'Real ID' legislation, buried in an $80 billion 'emergency spending bill' to continue financing the Iraq debacle provides the answer. Perpetual war allows the Bush administration to have its way with America. Congressmen who normally would see the Patriot Act and Real ID as the threats to liberty that they are, and who would otherwise oppose them, are blackmailed into support in order to avoid accusations of 'not supporting the troops' or even of being 'unpatriotic'.

The Bush administration, and the radical right-wing generally, seek to transform America into an oligopoly ruled by the very wealthy. Every domestic program pushed by the Bush administration has had that aim : elimination of the estate tax, tax cuts benefitting the wealthy at the expense of working people, gutting of Social Security, passage of the draconian anti-bankruptcy bill. The Patriot Act, predating the unprovoked attack on Iraq but justified by the perpetual 'war' declared on terrorism, strengthens federal police powers in ways that would have been unimaginable and repugnant to the authors of our constitution. But such an act is necessary if you plan to take power from the people and hand it to a small group of the super-wealthy.

Bush's fiscal policy has been one of bankrupting the government. Why would a conservative do that? Aren't conservatives characterized by their fiscal responsibility? The answer is simple: the best way to eliminate social programs is to bankrupt the government and then make the argument that we simply can't afford those programs anymore. And that, of course, is exactly what Bush is doing.

We have entered a new period in American history. We are no longer the land of the free, and the rest of the world knows it though most Americans can't see it. We are no longer the shining beacon of liberty and opportunity. We are a nation of sheep being led by wolves. Always before, the question for people outside the United States was how to get in. Now the question I ask myself is - how do I get out?

The answer, of course, is that this is my country and I shouldn't have to get out. Our government has been of, by, and for the people, and it can be again. But we will have to fight to make it so. We must confront every lie, expose every act of corruption and cronyism, resist every piece of legislation that threatens our way of life.

But it is not enough to merely resist : we must define our principles and take every opportunity to advance them. We lost in 2004 because we were afraid to say what we really thought. The democratic party nominated a man who did not have the moral courage to stand up to the Bush administration when it counted. He voted to fund the Iraq adventure and thereby lost all credibility. We can do better, and we must if our country is not to be dragged further into the mud.

• DigestPage0504

April 2005

The MonthlyDigest page has been sitting around unused for a while, so I'm changing the approach.

I update the DailyLinks page nearly daily, but it is a mixture of links to damned near everything I run across that looks even vaguely interesting. I'll be using the MonthlyDigest to categorize and organize those links that are more interesting, or more focused on my current interests.

Ruby, Rails, and Ajax

Rails has been generating a lot of buzz for the past couple months. I haven't gotten any further with it than the tutorial at onlamp (linked somewhere on DailyLinks), but I'm impressed. If nothing else, rails imposes almost no barrier to entry. It's a clean implementation of model-view-controller. The model is driven from the underlying application database schema, customizable and extensible, of course.

The latest release of rails (0.11.2) has ajax support built in. I haven't tried this yet, but the hype is cool.

• AllRailsLinks?
• Effects demo page
• AjaxAndAspDotNet < Development < ThePettersons
• Craigslist and google maps integration
• defrang.com - Xavier Defrang's Place on the Web for Blogging and Stuff
• Exploring Ruby on Rails | Linux Journal
• Maturity is the new 'does it scale?' (Loud Thinking)
• Weblog | Ruby on Rails Rails 0.11.0: Ajax, Pagination, Non-vhost, Incoming mail
• ActionWebService: Web services on Rails | Hieraki
• YARV: Yet Another Ruby VM
• adaptive path » ajax: a new approach to web applications
• Anarchogeek: Rails, how does it scale for larger projects
• Why Rails looks so good (and why it matters) (Loud Thinking)
• Could Rails have been built without Ruby? | Bill Katz
• SAJAX - Simple Ajax Toolkit by ModernMethod - XMLHTTPRequest Toolkit for PHP

Japanese Language Learning

• KanjiResources
• KanjiPerDay
• HiraganaChart
• KatakanaChart
• Use Rikai.com to learn Japanese Kanji or as a Japanese Dictionary
• Rikai Kanji Flashcards

Spanish Language Learning

I'm re-learning Spanish. I can still get by, but after years of not speaking Spanish I'm pretty rusty. I can still read a newspaper with reasonable speed and comprehension, but most novels are pretty tough going. So, I'm devoting some effort to get my skills back up. I've been going to a Spanish conversation group one night a week at the local Barnes and Noble. This has been helpful in some ways, though I'm afraid that my accent will go all to hell if I keep going. Many of the people there have excellent vocabulary and OK grammar, but their accents are, for the most part, atrocious.

Anyway, I've put up a few links to learning resources at SpanishLanguage.

Google Maps

Links to google map hacking information

• HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map - Engadget - www.engadget.com. This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you’ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map.
  • http://www.geocode.com/
  • mozdev.org - greasemonkey: index
  • Google maps user annotation script
  • Sample waypoints xml
  • GoogleMapsHacking - An Unnamed MoinMoin Wiki
  • perl script to produce google maps line drawing
  • JavaScript Shell A command-line interface for JavaScript and DOM.
  • Google Maps Add Waypoint - .js
  • Google Maps Route Follow - .js
  • Google Maps Hacking and Bookmarklets
  • Home : myGmaps enables you to create, save and host custom data files and display them with Google Maps.

Commentary on Google Maps Technology

• mezzoblue - Google Maps and Accountability
• Jeffrey Veen: Google is watching

Google Maps Applications

• Google Sightseeing
• Craigslist housing + interactive google map

Miscellaneous

• KeyPass - Encrypted Password / Bookmark Manager - sales pitch from the website:

• Camtasia Studio - Screen Recording for Demos and Training Camtasia Studio is a complete solution for quickly creating professional-looking videos of your PC desktop activity. Anyone can Record and create a full-motion video tutorial or presentation, in real-time, and publish it in the format of their choice. No multimedia or programming experience necessary!
  • This is a very solid product. $299 for a single license, volume discounts available.
• Unitarian Jihad Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad.
• ColorCombos.com - Web Color Combinations Tool and Library This site was built to help web developers quickly select and test color combinations.
• Motion Induced Blindness Steady fixation favours disappearance, blinks or gaze shifts induce reappearance. All in all reminiscent of the Troxler effect, but stronger and more resistant to residual eye movements.