Entries in Life

Christ is Born! Glorify Him! This year, we gave our kids their major gifts early: a Wii and a TV after spending most of the year without one. And, other than those two items, we told them this would be a Chrstmas of hand-made gifts. And this year, since I had been out of work since the beginning of November, it made a lot of sense. I didn’t know what to expect for Christmas morning. The kids dragged me out of bed, we read Luke’s narrative of the Nativity, sang a couple of Christmas carols and then headed to the tree to open the gifts our children had given. Like I said I didn’t know what to expect: I had pretty much forgotten that we had told the kids they would be making their own gifts. And, as I found out later, Alexis didn’t remind them of their responsibilities. So it gave me a great deal of pride to see the gifts and their response. Our oldest daughter had knitted a cap for the youngest. The other daughter wrapped up some sugar cookies she had made earlier in the week. My wife wrapped up some Ferrero chocolates that we had bought. I remember how I would have reacted had this been my Christmas as a child. Barely any gifts under the tree — you could still see the treestand, after all — I think the disappointment would have been only too visible on my face. So when my son was overjoyed with the chocolates, when my daughter demonstrated the knit cap, I was almost bursting with pride. My children were happy with, even thankful for, practically nothing. (Sure, they had a new Wii and we had a new TV, but these were not the focus of their Christmas morning.) When I see my children showing more maturity and thankfulness than I remember posessing when I was young, it makes me think that at least this one thing is right.

Last night, I signed up for a three month contract with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), set to begin in January. I’ll be working offsite with Tim Starling as my mentor. My primary duties will be to “Support MediaWiki Code Review and Release Management process”, something I feel especially well suited for. The WMF has been working to formalize the process (see, for example Special:Code/MediaWiki) and I’ll be helping with take it further. I have plenty of ideas, but my first task will be integrating myself into the environment. I’m pretty excited to have a full-time position on such a high profile piece of Free Software. Last night, I started reading “Shop Class as Soulcraft” and, while my work is not anywhere as tactile as the work Matthew Crawford talks about in his book, I’ve found that working on Open Source software provides me with a similar sense of accomplishment. It gives me something I can point to and say “I did that” or “I fixed that”. And, with MediaWiki, the thing I can point to becomes something that much more recognisable to others. “You know Wikipedia?” I’ll ask, “That’s what I work on.” (Oh, and if you want, you can throw a few in the pot to help pay the rent for the WMF.)

So, the non-profit (which shall henceforth remain anonymous) that had me all excited called today and let me know that they had hired someone local. Oh well. I’ll just have to work on my consulting.

I’m still waiting to hear from them: Do I or do I not get the job? Pins and needles!

I’m in San Francisco for the day. Last night I had a great time with danlyke of Flutterby fame. Since right now is the the Advent Fast, he took me to Café Gratitude, a raw Vegan restaurant where every one of their dishes is an affirmation. I couldn’t help but giggle when they handed me my coconut curry soup as they said the mantra “You are Thankful!” I would imagine that The Secret has done better here than in Lancaster County. “But, Mark,” I can hear you not asking, “What the heck are you doing in San Francisco?” About a month ago, a non-profit here contacted me about a position they’re trying to fill. They need an open-source person to be, essentially, their community liaison for code contributions to their open source project. At the time, I was still working for IntraHealth, so I told them I wasn’t interested. But the following Monday, I found out I was not going to be working at IntraHealth any longer. A new (but smaller) round of funding came through and they just didn’t have room for me in the budget any more. With this new-found freedom from obligations, I called the HR person back and told him, “Guess what? I am interested after all!” In the meantime, this has been one of the more productive periods of transition I’ve ever had. Friends of mine who freelance have tossed a couple of gigs my way and I’ve spent a little more time with my kids. Only once have I glimpsed into abyss of fear and self-doubt that the recently jobless can end up in — the rest of the time I’ve been excited about the opportunities. So, here I am in a San Francisco hotel room early in the morning. My body is still on Eastern time and I can hear the city slowly coming to life around me. I plan on scoping out Berkeley this morning and then, after my interview (during which, in my fantasy, they offer me the job on the spot) I’ll go see how far CalTrain will take me.

Recently, I had to compare several charting toolkits. Amongst the charting toolkits out there, I found three different ones that suited my needs, so I put them through their paces. They were: JpGraph, OpenFlashChart and RaphealJS. Just to be clear why I left some toolkits out, here is a list of the requirements I used. The toolkit we end up using must be:

• freely redistributable. This will be incorporated into the GPLed iHRIS Suite so a proprietary license means we can’t ship charting with the software.
• look good. Who wants ugly charts?
• work on Internet Explorer 6 and above. There are a few toolkits out there that require <canvas< support and at least one does not support excanvas.
• currently maintained. Many nice charting projects haven’t been touched in two or more years. I’m willing to fix bugs if I need to, but I’d like to know that I’m not alone.

All three of the charting libraries that I tried fit this criteria. After putting the three toolkits through their paces (source included), which one did we ultimately choose? Right now, we’re going with RaphaelJS — we were using a Flash-based toolkit before and wanted to rid ourselves of that dependency, and, since our primary server target is Ubuntu, JpGraph’s lack of anti-aliasing with Ubuntu’s PHP GD library knocked it out. I’ll try to post an update if I come across anything new.

American culture — especially American middle class white culture — is neurotic about parenting. From the idea of permissive parenting that Doctor Spock supposably espoused to the use of Baby Einstein to increase language — because a 1997 study suggested that language development was aided by the sheer number of words a child heard. The funny thing about both these ideas is that neither one is true. Dr Spock said “I’ve always advised parents to give their children firm, clear leadership”. Later studies (as Nurture Shock shows) showed that direct interaction with a child — not the number of words heard — helped language development. But even the revelation that scientific studies show children do not recognise recorded speech as words will not affect the sale of Baby Einstein products. (For its part Disney, the makers of Baby Einstein, has distanced itself from any claims that its products provide an educational benefit.) Myths about parenting continue to live and get spread through parenting culture. Which is why every parent should read Nurture Shock. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman take on a number of subjects that many parents think are settled issues — spanking, for instance — and show how empirical studies have flipped conventional wisdom on its head. I think, though, that much of this book is aimed at relatively affluent, white, middle class parents. When I shared some of the bits about race or sibling rivalry with my wife, who was born in Vietnam, she laughed at the “crazy Americans”. Vietnamese culture does not share some of the foibles the book addresses. But there is a lot that any parent, regardless of cultural background or parenting style, will appreciate. In a chapter titled “Can Self Control be Taught?”, for example, the authors reveal how a new program, Tools of The Mind, is enabling pre-schoolers to develop intrinsic motivation and self-regulation far sooner and far more predictably than previously thought possible. Even better, the chapter titled “Why Hannah Talks and Alyssa Doesn’t” shows a nine-month-olds vocal skills and, later, vocabulary, can be improved just by providing an immediate response (like a touch) when they burble something. For those who want to go further, the book provides 80 pages of end notes and references. But, since they avoided marking up the text with footnotes or super-scripts, it doesn’t affect the readability of the book at all. If you’ve got a child living at home — or if you’re just interested in child development — you should read this book.

Emacs23 includes default keybindings for scaling fonts up or down:

C-x C-+ — scale the current buffer’s face/font up C-x C-+ — scale the current buffer’s face/font down

This is good as far as it goes, but I’d really like something a little easier. So I’ve added the following to my .emacs file:

(global-set-key [(control mouse-4)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-increase 1)))  (global-set-key [(control mouse-5)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-decrease 1)))

Now, if I hold down the control key and scroll the mouse wheel, the font will get larger or smaller. Some other applications (e.g. Firefox) use “Control +” and “Control -” to do something similar along with “Control 0″ to return to the default size. You could set these keybindings in Emacs without losing too much (unless you’re used to C-- and C-0 as prefixes, in which case, you still have C-M-- and C-M-0):

(global-set-key [(control ?+)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-increase 1)))  (global-set-key [(control ?-)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-decrease 1)))  (global-set-key [(control ?0)] (lambda () (interactive)                                        (text-scale-increase 0)))

None of this will permanently affect the size of the font, so for the next buffer you open or the next time you start Emacs, you’ll have the same size font you started with. If you want to change the default font size, use M-x customize-face RET default RET instead.

Ok, it’s been a couple of weeks since I posted the 64bit Linux installer for Google Gears. And some people have asked for the diff or a smaller installer. Fair enough. There they are. The directions for compiling your own are simple enough. Here is a cut-n-paste list of directions:

svn co http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk gears  cd gears  curl http://mah.everybody.org/gears.diff | patch -p0  chmod +x third_party/gecko_1.9/linux/gecko_sdk/bin/xpidl  cd gears  make

If you look at the diff, you’ll see there is nothing particularly 64bit-ish about it. Its mostly just fixing warnings and declarations. So the real question I have is: Why doesn’t Google offer 64bit builds? (Now, if only I could come up with an Ubuntu package for this…)

Universal Health Coverage is coming! Universal Health Coverage is coming! Get out your guns! There is an enormous amount of fear mongering going on around the issue of Universal Health Coverage (UHC). From the UHC advocates, we hear about scary medical bankruptcies. From the UHC opponents, we hear that this is just a way for the government to run our lives. In fact, that last article was sent to me by an old college friend. “Is this the health care bill you want?” she asked. (Peter Fleckenstein (aka “the fleckman”), the creator of this “analysis”, posted a complete copy on his blog.) Well, if its as bad as the tweet-filled weblog post makes it out to be, no, I don’t want it. A couple of points.

1. Mr. Fleckenstein and many reactionaries harbor a deep suspicion of bogeymen such as ACORN and illegal aliens. These bogeyman don’t scare me. I will totally ignore those sections of the criticism. I don’t care if the government supplies health care for members of ACORN. And even illegal aliens are people who sometimes need health care. Which part of “Universal” did you not understand?
2. The bill being referred to, HR 3200 — “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009” — is over 1000 pages long. I don’t have time or interest to read every page. What I do have time to do is fact-check statements about the bill that I find alarming. Good thing “the fleckman” provides direct pointers.
3. This is the House bill. The Senate bills up for consideration aren’t finished. One doesn’t include a government-run plan — something that seems to be the biggest sticking point for many of the article’s complaints. I am personally more comfortable with the “co-op” idea of the Senate Finance Committee’s bill — it sounds similar to Germany’s version of UHC.

With that in mind, lets look at a few claims:

1. There will be a government committee that decides what treatments or benefits you get. (Sec. 123) The actual text says: “Committee to recommend covered benefits and essential, enhanced, and premium plans.” There is a big difference between a recommendation and a decision. As far as I can tell, no one is going to stop you from paying for extra treatment if you want it.
2. Your health care is rationed!!! (p 29 ln. 4-16) The actual text referenced here has nothing to do with rationing health care, but with how co-payments on the public option will be adjusted.
3. Government will have “real-time” access to individual finances. (sec 163) This is a modification of the onerous HIPAA regulations. The addendum the bill puts in does, indeed talk about “[enabling] the real-time (or near real-time) determination of an individual’s financial responsibility”. But again, this isn’t mandating access to your individual finances. Instead, it seems to be saying that they want universal standards for determining a co-pay or your liability for a specific treatment or office visit instead of the current system — which involves multiple rounds to the insurance company.
4. Government will have direct access to bank accounts. (sec 163) The actual text here: “enable electronic funds transfers [for] … health care payment and remittance advice”. This isn’t government access — this is the access for the health care provider. And enable processing isn’t the same as forcing individuals to surrender information.
5. Government will tell doctors how much they can charge. (sec 225) Just like they set payment levels for Medicare and Medicaid. Doctors are not obligated to accept the government plan. If you want health care from a doctor who doesn’t accept the government option coverage, then you can get it, provided you can find a way to pay for it.
6. Employers must enroll employees into the public plan. (sec 312(a)) This section is talking about how an employer can meet the government requirements. One of the requirements is “automatic enrollment”. Part (c)(2) of this section explicitly states that an employee may make “an affirmative election to opt out”. And the plan doesn’t have to be the government option. If the employer offers adequate private insurance, then they meet the criteria.
7. States give up some of their State Sovereignty. The horse is long ago out of the barn. When my friend and I were in college in New Orleans, there were news stories about a drinking age being imposed on the Quarter. Previously, it was illegal to buy alcohol if you were under 18, but not to sell it to anyone under 21. This makes an incredibly hard law to enforce. The federal government, in order to bring Louisiana into compliance with the rest of the country’s drinking laws, threatened to withhold federal money for roads if the laws weren’t changed. You can argue that this infringes on a state’s sovereignty — but no one is forcing the state to take the money. If it wants it, it has to change. If it is willing to fund its own road system entirely, it can leave the laws as is. This is a pattern the federal government has repeatedly followed when dispensing federal money. It has withstood Supreme Court challenges on the basis that it infringes a state’s sovereignty. But the state, if it really wants to be sovereign, can opt-out of the federal money.

The fear-mongering continues, but I’ve got to get to bed. The pattern I see here is that Mr. Fleckenstein is skimming (understandably) the 1000+ pages of regulation looking for alarming phrases and not bothering with the context. He ignores other parts (like the religious conscience exception on p170) completely.