Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

*whew* I did a bunch of things yesterday. We took our kindergärtner to her first Friday at her new school (and were about 10 minutes tardy. oops). We then took our toddler to a nearby playground with swings and slides and let her expend some energy. After she had been sufficiently exercised, we walked back home, stopping at a coffee shop on the way. The baristo (you call male baristas “baristos,” right? :) ) recognized my MC Frontalot shirt and asked whether I had caught him the previous weekend at PAX. Unfortunately, I have not attended PAX since 2006, but I *did* purchase the tee directly from The Front himself ;)

When we got home, I worked a bit on an English Language parser implementation and then went to the University of Washington to meet with Emily Bender about getting in to the Professional Master’s program in Computational Linguistics. It all looks good, and I even got the good news that the GRE is no longer required!

After the meeting, I headed home and poked at the parser for a little while longer. I then picked Scarlet up from after-school care and brought her home. I then hopped in the car and drove toward Bellevue to meet up with Monty while he’s in town. I over-estimated the amount of time traffic would steal on my way to Bellevue, and had an extra hour to blow. So I dropped by building 41 and shot the IronPython bull with Dino. It turns out he’s got an android phone, too. I told him it was possible to put a debian chroot on it and that he should even be able to ‘apt-get install ironpython’ to his phone soon ;) We talked briefly about the CodePlex Foundation and Sam Ramji’s departure from The Evil Empire. Dino seems skeptical about the project. I don’t have enough information to have much of an opinion. However, it sounds like some folks I trust are involved, so I’m hopeful.

I left MS just in time to make it to the wrong address at the specified time. My phone had just enough juice to call Monty to get the right address and then use the navigation system to find my way there. I wasn’t able to make reservations at the place we intended to go for dinner until 8:15, so we went to the Barnes & Noble for a bit. They only had one NLP book in stock and the examples are all in Python. I should learn that language one of these days… As we were leaving the Pacific Place, Monty mentioned to me that he is on the advisory board for the CodePlex Foundation, and that they have been responsive enough to his input that they changed the Mission statement, at his recommendation, just one day before the Foundation was publicized. He feels that this is a very good direction for Microsoft to be heading.

My brother Chris was kind enough to watch the kids while we went out to dinner. Quick note: he recently graduated from UW with a BA in Electrical Engineering and is looking for work using his acquired knowledge, in case anyone needs one of those ;)

We met up with my wife, Hannah and our friends, Mike & Cynthia at our place. Monty graciously avoided mentioning the terrible state in which our apartment has recently found itself. The kids were super cute and polite and said hi/bye.

Over dinner we discussed building an android app (Monty has one, too ;) ) to automate the process of creating bounties for apps and getting folks to implement them. We also talked about MySQL and MariaDB, of course. Hannah and I recalled my time working for MySQL, Inc. on the MaxDB project and some subtle cultural differences we noticed while traveling. It was interesting getting the inside scoop about the Sun acquisition and some of the recent goings-on in the MySQL/Sun/Oracle world. I wasn’t aware, for instance, that the EU is balking on the merger because of monopoly concerns.

Tags: android, autotools, c.j. insider, dlr, family, free software, friends, frontalot, git, ironpython, language, mariadb, maxdb, microsoft, mono, mysql, politics, python, social networking, sun, telephony

Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

http://opensourcetogo.blogspot.com/2009/07/real-floss-community-and-faux-floss.html#c5581975764835681515

Tags: c#, debian, free software, journalism, mono, politics

Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

But then I thought better of the idea. Anyone who still takes bn seriously after the recent terrorist actions is likely not going to be swayed by facts, proof of their hypocrisy, their total lack of participation in the community and failure to engage with campaigns they claim to support.

Rather than taking the time to write something up proper, here are some questions I asked and the answers that I had to find myself, since was a curious lack of response.

12:07 < cj> 1) do you condone, condemn or have no feeling on the actions taken against Schlesinger?

http://boycottnovell.com/2009/06/12/smears-against-boycott-novell/#comment-66238

12:08 < cj> 2) What are your thoughts about patent-laden mesa code in the default desktop releases of many popular distributuions?

13:17 -BNc:#boycottnovell- [schestowitz] Truly Free Software 3D Driver for ATI/AMD Gets Better http://ping.fm/0Ly0M

12:12 < cj> 3) have you or do you plan to contribute to the Software Freedom Law Center?

http://wp.colliertech.org/cj/?p=447

Tags: abuse, c.j. insider, free software, freenode, irc, journalism, pgp, politics, spam

Originally published at The Pædantic Programmer. Please leave any comments there.

I was reading Lefty’s recent blog post and was reminded (by way of a certain scene) of being pissed off by Broderick’s s/egg/globe/ in the 2003 production of The Music Man. I was going to put the following in the comments, but I decided not to in order to keep the conversation on topic :)

Which reminds me of a tangential blather. Did any of you see the recent re-make of Music Man with Matthew Broderick? Do you recall how he changed the script to refer to Columbus and the *globe* instead of Columbus and the *egg*?

That really irritated me. You can’t see it in the above picture, but while I was in the pit and waiting for our cues, I was coincidently reading Larry Wall’s Camel book. I was so confused about Harold Hill’s reference to “Columbus’ conception of the egg” until I read the following:

http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl3/cookbook/prf2_01.htm

Anyway…

Tags: blog, c#, c.j. insider, free software, gnome foundation, linux, microsoft, music, open source, perl, politics, rms, social networking, software, web 2.0

Spoke with Specter's judiciary committee. Asked for clarification about the Rusher papers.

It was suggested that I Call Mr. Rusher and ask for his permission to make the CAP minutes available for public review.

Does anyone have his number? I'll be starting at Princeton...

Tags: alito, cap, library of congress, politics, rusher, senate, specter

For those of you interested, Mr. Kennedy has been trying to get access to the CAP records since November of 2005. Mr. Specter has been avoiding acknowledging his requests.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/11/cap-timeline/

In my opinion, this is dishonest and untrustworthy behavior on the part of Mr. Specter. I would like to hear him explain his actions. His refusal to allow Mr. Kennedy, congress and the public to look at these documents is reason enough for me to feel very skeptical of the nomination of Mr. Alito.

If Mr. Alito has nothing to hide, there seems to be no reason that Mr. Specter should avoid discussing the documents with Mr. Kennedy.

Thoughts?

Tags: alito, kennedy, politics, senate, specter, supreme court

Senator Cantwell,

There is a standing request from your constituent that the senate look more closely into CAPS before any progress can be properly made on the Alito decision.

http://cjcollier.livejournal.com/190124.html?mode=reply

If a decision is made prior to this request being fulfilled, I will personally be less than trusting of the senate's fitness for its task of making such a decision.

Thank you,

C.J.

Tags: alito, caps, politics, senator cantwell, supreme court

In the cut, you will find the boiler-plate response to my email to Senator Cantwell.

I had never considered that Senator Alito was not a woman before now. He seemed capable of answering the questions put before him, and he denied knowing anything about the atrocious "good old boy's club" that he used to belong to. He said that he knew nothing of its racial and gender prejudice and that the only reason he attended was because Princeton was considering removing the ROTC from campus, and he believed that it had a place at the school.

This sound fine to me, but it also seems unlikely that while attending meetings of said "good old boy's club," it would be difficult to miss the blatant prejudice being slung about and laughed at. I noticed a very strong attempt on the right side of the aisle during the hearings to avoid looking too deeply into the past of Alito's involvement with CAPS. I wrote about it here:

http://cjcollier.livejournal.com/190124.html?mode=reply

Senator Cantwell, there is a standing request from one of your constituents that the senate look more closely into CAPS before any progress can be properly made on the Alito decision.

Thank you,

C.J.



( From the Senator )

Tags: alito, cantwell, maria cantwell, politics, senate, senator cantwell, supreme court

http://normaadams.colliertech.org/2005/11/the_emperor_wears_no_clothes.html

Tags: norma, politics

I do not support the president of the United States of America

Nor do I support the war he mongers.

But I do support my brothers and sisters who are there because they were sold the idea of a few years free college and three squares a day in exchange for liberating a nation.

The truth is that the nation does not need to be liberated. If it did when the war was started, it has been by now or it never will, and we should leave.

I think that we should remove the country of Iraq from a state of occupation.

Maybe I'm thinking too much. But that's what I'm paid to do.

Tags: politics, war