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.

vocoid now has a SL venue

Thanks to my friend Michael, Vocoid now has a venue in second life for live performances. I'm working on a launch party right now, which will hopefully coincide with the release of the second medl album, coming soon!

If you wanna check out the space (or just hang out and listen to the SomaFM digitalis or pigradio.com streams):
Club Vocoid

Another New Album: Challenged

I know, it seems like I was just saying this (okay, maybe not) but I have yet another new album. I just finished my submission for the RPM Challenge (rpmchallenge.com). You can check out the fruits of my labor of putting out an entire album in a month on Vocoid:

Challenged

New Audio and Images

I just "released" my first set of tracks, I guess it used to be called an ALBUM, on vocoid. I've been working on them for a while, and had actually hoped to have one more finished, but decided that 3 was better than none. Sometimes you just have to kick things out the door. I hope you enjoy them!

http://vocoid.com/?q=dsl/releases/triad

Also, I updated the Sight link to point to both my youtube page, and my flickr page. There's not a whole lot there right now, but more is forthcoming.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/looprock/

More code

I added 3 new entries to the Code page. They're all command line tools I thought people might find useful. There's an ssh wrapper, system lockdown script, and the original script that became 'upbeat'. If you're sys-adminish, you might want to check them out.

General system performance app

I wrote my first GUI applescript app this weekend. It's allows you to enable and disable some system parameters to increase system responsiveness for heavy IO and CPU related tasks under OS X. If you think it'd be useful, you should check it out Here.

Vocoiding into the future

If you haven't already checked it out, most of my work these days is going into a music project with DJ Squelchy, Medl. We just release our first full length album Medly, and are currently trying to pimp it out to labels. I'm also investigating the possibility of taking submissions for vocoid, and maybe one of these days making it into a more "real" label.

I've also been taking some time to go through the EOI archives from when I had "The Hole", and extracting some of the more promising parts from them. There's even talk of doing an offline album among some of the other members, so an EOI03 isn't entirely out of the question. Even if this doesn't happen, I'm hoping to distribute the loops I get from this and publishing them under a Creative Commons license, and hopefully even hosting a ccMixter contest with them. You never know.

Other than that, not much to report, but check out vocoid and the new album!

New trix and trax

After a very log vacation from working on any full tracks, I'm proud to present Bridges and Gates.

I figured out a new method for composition, and I think this track is substantially different (yes, read "better") than my previous work. As always feedback is appreciated.

To anyone looking at midi control surfaces, I'd highly recommend checking out the M-audio trigger Finger. I picked one up on Monday, and I've been having a LOT of fun with it since then.

Other than that, not much to report. I had some nice downtime in germany last month, and then the recovery period, so please excuse the long update cycle.

Late (of me to be) Breaking (this) News!

Okay, I guess the news isn't new, just my posting of it. PCF released their first OSX public beta version of DTV! They actually did this August 9, so I'm a little slow to put this up, but hey, late is better than never I guess. Along with DTV, the launched their channel guide for feeds, which, over the course of the last 9 days has grown to around 200 feeds at last glance. I'd have to say, I'm very impressed. There's a decent amount of good content out there just waiting to be viewed, for free no less. I'd highly encourage everyone with a mac to check it out. PC folks, don't feel too left out. The windows version is on its way, but they haven't released any dated for that yet.

I've been putting together a little video accompanyment to my track jump,skip,repeat over the course of the week, so hopefully my own feed will have some new content soon. Until then you can at least browse through some of my low-res productions from yesteryear.

On another subject, I have a lot of the SeaMS functionality working that I wanted (amazingly enough), and just updated the page to use the new backend from it, so I might actually be releasing the code in the near future. I have auto-page generation, page directory display, "hidden" pages, and well as some other nifty features working, and it's "hopefully" fairly easy to set up for anyone familiar with php includes. It won't be ready tomorrow, but if I take some time to finish it shouldn't take that much longer either.

I'm currently collaborating with Squelchy on music again, so keep your eyes peeled here for some new audio releases.

A + V

I started doing a little volunteer work for Participatory Culture Foundationrecently, bugtesting the mac version of their "channel" aggregator.They're doing some really intereststing things with distributed video, and Iwould highly recommend checking them out if you have or might want to start doing any video work you'd be willing to distribute for free.

Their distribution system is tailor made to work in conjunction with the Creative Commons licensing structure and Archive.org's help with storage and bandwidth.

PCF's software is still in beta, but it looks promising so far. I tried to do a video hosting experiment in around 2001, but this is a lot simpler and less demanding of personal resources (video servers on a low-bandwidth DSL connections are not a ideal).

I've posted some of my video work under the sight link above. All of it is older, but I've been working with flash as an animation tool lately so hopefully I'll have some new content up soon.

DOORS

They say that for every door that shuts, another one opens, but no door opening can make up for the one that shut tonight.

In loving memory.

OpLog

OpLog is a message broadcast service for our various monitors, notifications,
etc.; think twitter for sysadmins.

The main goal for OpLog was to replace email as the main client for
notifications. Operations e-mail accounts are constantly filling up with
things we may and or may not care about, numbing us and eventually causing us
to stop paying attention to most emails we get. This also costs us time and
energy cleaning up our mailboxes on a regular basis.

OpLog is designed to be a minimally intrusive system. The current client
notifications can be passively disregarded or looked into further if more
details are desired.

The current interfaces for OpLog are:
* The cgi you're about to set up
* Omnigrowl/Snarl notifications
* RSS feed (and associated Dashboard widget)
* Via your Jabber/XMPP capable IM client

To fit into our current infrastructure, the input mechanism that was chosen
for OpLog was email. To "port" an application to use OpLog notifications, you
only need to add the appropriate e-mail address as a recipient.