Balancing the budget

Dear Gov't,

The president recently releases a budget, and I've noticed some things you might be missing your your attempt to balance it. I want to do my part to help. Here are some suggestions I've come up with off the top of my head:

1. Stop all warrantless wiretaps. I don't know how much those cost but I'm sure they're not cheap!

2. Stop deploying dangerous and ineffective scanners at airports. They're not cheap either, and from what I hear, the initial cost doesn't even include maintenance.

3. Make incumbent telco providers start paying rental for the right of way they've been granted. I think they build-out cost has probably amortized at this point. If they don't like that idea, they can alternately start improving that infrastructure by laying fiber to the home to make it worth our while.

4. Start making lawsuit mills pay fines for tying up the courts with flimsy cases.

5. Fix the patent system, which would lessen stress (and cost) on the court system.

6. Increase the staff of the EPA and actually fine people for breaking regulations.

7. Close loopholes in corporate tax regulations and actually collect taxes from companies that owe them.

8. Stop subsidizing industries that promote health issues and contribute to our national health crisis.

9. Break up monopolies or duopolies that disrupt people coming into markets and providing real competition, creating jobs and increase tax revenue.

10. Re-regulate. We've slowly been peeling back regulations that have staved off the periodic wild swinging of our economy since the last great depression. If we hadn't removed some of those safeguards there wouldn't have been a need for billions and billions of bail-out funds propping up a failing private sector and trying to stabilize our economy. This won't put money in our pockets at the moment, but it would potentially keep the last few years from happening again.

There are more controversial suggestions I have but some of these wouldn't even require changes to existing regulations, and may might just have other positive societal benefits as well. Feel free to contact me for further advice.

Sincerely,
A concerned citizen

Mail as a "message bus"

Since I recently published Oplog and the beginnings of syscerone/machinfo 2.0 to github I decided to address a question I get a lot from developers. People always ask why I use email as a "message bus".

1. It's ubiquitous - Chances are you already have email set up! Not only that, it's probably already well monitored and troubleshot. For most of you it's used daily and you will DEFINITELY hear if your email system isn't working even if your monitoring system doesn't catch any issues. That means there's one less system you have to manage, maintain, monitor, troubleshoot, or any of those other tasks and gotchas.
   


2. It has built-in encryption - as long as you're using TLS between your internal mail servers and relays you don't need to worry about encryption.


3. It has built-in congestion control


4. It has built-in retry logic


5. No need to open another port!


6. It's programmatically trivial to address


7. it works!

I'm not saying it's prefect, and I wouldn't use it for any real time applications, but if your application can stand a little lag, email might be an acceptable choice. Take OpLog for instance. It's mostly an information gathering and aggregation service, so real time isn't a requirement. There are lots of potential inputs for it, so having to create some kind of traditional message bus hooks into all those sources could potentially be a significant amount of work. If you're using any kind of proprietary software it's possible you might not be able to create message bus hooks for it at all, but there's a fair chance you can make it send an email one way or another.

So-cial

Not only did I update the design of my blog, but I also published my code base for OpLog to github. That's gotta be record for me: http://github.com/looprock/OpLog

Typical conversation @ work lately

while (talking to developers) {
Developer: I need to do stuff.
Me: okay, What do you need to do?
Developer: Stuff.
Me: okay, But what do you need in order to do stuff?
Developer: Things.
Me: What kind of things?
Developer: The things I need to do stuff!
Me: But what do you need to do?
}

Just can't get enough

Do to sheer unadulterated laziness I've decided to ditch my personal website in favor of something I don't have to update for security, so welcome to my new blogger page!

If you notice any broken links, etc., please let me know. I think I've gotten everything ported relatively cleanly, but you never know.

Portland Barcamp

I meant to write about this a while ago, but I went to Barcamp here this year and I'd have to say it was a really interesting event. Lots of discussion about Location based services, some inspiring talk about xmpp, and lots of drupal and openID thrown in the mix. These happen regularly all over the US, so I'd highly recommend checking it out if there's one coming to your neighborhood. Lots of notes and user generated content found at the Portland Barcamp Wiki.

The Digital Un-divide

I've started messing around with the various SL (Second Life) <-> RL (Real Life) I/O and there are some real possibilities there. Given my fascination with -making things talk- I have a pretty decent skill set, email parsing, minimalist web apps, XML-RPC, to potentially do some interesting things there. As a matter of fact, this blog is currently getting transmitted to cubes in second life that will post the latest entry when someone touches them. How's that for coming full circle.