Beagle

One of the things I'm really hopeful about is technology that can improve the transparency of government. Money is a corrupting influence in politics, but websites that track every campaign contribution, contract bid, earmark author, and the passage ... [More] of every bill through its development give corrupt politicians and self-interested lobbyists nowhere to hide. And that's a good thing.  Sunlight, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, is the best disinfectant. When Larry Lessig announced his campaign to end corruption in politics, he started encouraging hackers to attack this problem, to build websites and databases that lay bare the innerworkings of our politics. There are a few well-known projects in this area, like The Sunlight Foundation, Open Secrets, and followthemoney.org.  There's also USASpending.gov, the website "where Americans can see where their money goes," the product of a law co-sponsored by Barack Obama. Recently on twitter I learned that Charlottesville provocateur and long-time friend Waldo Jaquith created and runs Richmond Sunlight, a one-man sunlight site to track Virginia state politics. On it, you can track the progress of bills and the activities of the legislators in the Virginia state congress. The site has no ads and no for-pay section and Waldo runs it purely because he believes in what he's doing. Running the site takes a huge amount of work, and a little money.  One of Richmond Sunlight's most important features is the collection of videos of the Virginia General Assembly. To get these videos online, Waldo has to manually convert DVDs provided by the state into a format suitable for posting online.  It's a lengthy process that involves OCRing parts of the video to extract bill numbers and legislator names to index and tag the videos properly.  He's doing all this on his only computer — an aging Mac Mini.  And unbelievably, Waldo actually has to purchase these videos from the General Assembly.  And he has ambitious plans for the site.  Last night Waldo posted an appeal for resources to help him grow the project: While hundreds of thousands of people have found the site very useful, I look at it and see unfulfilled promise. I want to rewrite Richmond Sunlight and give it away to a nonpartisan political group in every state in the union. I want to complete the API so that anybody can write software to interact with the Capital Sunlight in their own state (and let even more newspapers integrate it into their own websites). I want a Facebook application, I want daily podcasts, I want people recording secret subcommittee votes, I want to mash up the daily floor calendar with campaign finance data with minutes with video and create the most radical transparency a state legislature has ever seen. Waldo is doing exactly what Larry Lessig is encouraging us all to do.  He's dreaming big about open government.  But he needs help today to do the daily business of running Richmond Sunlight.  So, what do you say we pitch in to help a corruption-fighting geek in need?  If you'd like to help buy Waldo a new computer so that he can put these videos online faster without spending his whole weekend swapping discs and waiting for codecs to convert, visit his blog and drop him a line. [Less]

Finally, after ages, “soon” is here, and my loyal readers can ascertain that I am, in fact, still alive. A wider, life update will come later (heh), but for now … Preparation for FOSS.IN/2008 is well on way, and this year is going to be different. ... [More] The Call for Participation is out. The newest thing in there is that there aren’t going to be nearly as many talks as before. You’ll see the term FOSS WorkOuts rather prominently displayed, and this is where the action is going to be. We’re going to be seeing a lot more doing than in years gone by. Head on over to the CfP to learn more. Atul’s post on the new format has caused some furore in the community, in addition to some pockets of encouragement (links abound and the topic is hackneyed, so no linky). All I have to add is this — a lot of people who are working on distros and doing packaging seem to be gravely offended. Well, I’m a packager too (erm, did I mention that I am now a Gentoo developer?), and there is no reason to take offense. What we’re trying to say is that we can be achieving more at the event to increase both the number of contributors as well as the depth of contribution, and the latter especially is the focus. I can expound on about this, but there’s been enough talk. The cool folks over at IndLinux have already started plotting, and we’ve been trying to get some traction on some GNOME performance work. Hope we can get some more folks to run with it. I, for one, am looking eagerly forward to the proposals we get this year. [Less]

Download the Android SDK 1.0 release 1.Walt Mossberg: "The first real competitor to the iPhone ... the software is slick ... the G1 is a powerful, versatile device."But the sui generis: Android is open to developers, open to consumers, and open to handset manufacturers. Cannot wait to see what's next.

The Journal has a great primer on this morning's compromise bailout bill.Do read the article, but the gist is this: The Treasury will initially have $250b, and up to $700b, to buy either directly or via auction bad loans and assets from financial ... [More] institutions, in return for warrants for equity. Compromise language includes disincentives for high CEO pay, additional congressional oversight, and a surprising requirement for the president "to submit a legislative proposal to seek reimbursement from the financial institutions that participated" if the value of the purchased assets yields a net loss.The best analogy I can come up with to describe the crisis is the lemon problem, exasperated by mark to market accounting: Balance sheets are full of mortgage-backed or otherwise related assets, the popping of the housing bubble resulted in a revaluation of these assets, and capitalization requirements are driving banks to liquidate the assets. Enter the lemon market. Is the bank selling the assets because it needs cashflow, or because the assets are full of subprime contagion? Is this the firm's best or worst assets? The information asymmetry has snowballed to the point of credit market implosion. Thus the government's first solution, improving lending opportunities. When that was found insufficient, as the last few weeks have witnessed, we enter this second round, where the government actually buys the troubled assets.It is hard to comprehend how dire this situation is as the economy still "feels" okay. Gas prices might be high, but unemployment is not at 30%. Yet while the societal ramifications are not as bad, the financial conditions are worse than those that kicked off The Great Depression. [Less]

As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state. (CBS News)

If you are not reading my food blog, Food Tastes Good, you are missing out on recipes such as …Spaghetti alla Carbonara con Lobster MushroomSlow-Braised CarnitasPesto alla GenoveseWild Mushroom Risotto with Green PeasRed Wine Braised Beef Short RibsIf not the actual dishes, at least the pictures are ambrosial.

It's been a while since I wrote regularly on this blog, and people have been asking, with decreasing regularity, why my blog posts sputtered out. At first, I wanted to take a break to shake off the "I can't wait to blog about this" impulse that was ... [More] starting to spring up in the middle of almost everything I was doing, and was threatening the in-the-moment joy of life's little adventures by making them into a kind of low-grade performance literature. Then, in early 2007, I moved to Munich and got busy learning about another culture.  Moving to a new place has a way of disrupting all your old habits, so I stopped going to yoga and I stopped posting here, but I started programming a lot again (yay!), and running a few times a week. And then twitter erupted into my social group like an invasive species and I found that my public-writing energy was being picked away in frequent nibbles, never building past whatever critical threshold is required for something to be (dare I say) bloggable. And then, unexpectedly, at a conference in Paris, I met the most dazzling girl.  Smart and kind-hearted, and with an incredible appetite for life, she lived in Munich.  When I moved here, she helped me find an apartment and get settled.  And somewhere in there, she completely stole my heart.  And so, earlier this year, on a hill in San Francisco, I asked her to be my wife, and she said "why the hell not" (I'm paraphrasing here). We both love to travel, and she's amused by my sense of whimsy.  Over the last year we've had a lot of fun running around Europe.  (More on that later.)  And so I've found someone I want to share life's adventures with, and you guys have recently taken second priority.  Sorry about that, but I'm sure you can understand :-). We do plan to have an actual wedding sometime next year, though we're not sure exactly when or where.So, stay tuned for future episodes, now featuring Stephanie (introductory glam shot below). [Less]

Ok, I don’t want a long rant about this, but 2 things that bother me.  We never care about EULA’s. Why care about this one? It’s an open source project so even the most absurd clause ever in the EULA is effectively unenforceable. Stop whining, let ... [More] the lawyers tell us what it means and stop speculating when your an engineer or journalist and not a lawyer. It’s not ‘Apple’s Webkit’ I hate that a great open source project with a lot of companies and contributors behind it gets completely attributed to Apple. While I appreciate that not everyone is going to get credit in every sentence, can we offer some semblance of recognition that Apple is not the only organization working on the Webkit platform?  Ok, thats all, just wanted to get it out of my system. [Less]

So I was experimenting with the new Ubiquity extension from Mozilla labs and fell immediatly in love. Needless to say, Twitter integration was great, but I needed Remember The Milk. So, Viola! rtm_ubiquity My Ubiquity Feed Page It’s pretty ... [More] straightforward, the only command is ‘addtask’ and I think we can all guess its purpose. I’ll hopefully be making it more intelligent soon, its really just a ‘Hello World’ right now. [Less]