I don't know what's up. It feels like a good portion of my brain is currently not available for my conscious use. It started yesterday. I would like to know what those bits of my brain that aren't around for me to use are doing. I suppose I shall find out eventually. :-)

This TV documentary type spot from 1987 is a really excellent review of various aspects of how our government has come to function. It has a lot of things that are very relevant today, and it's really interesting to see the evolution of our government over the past 20 years, and it's also interesting to see some current politicians (like John Kerry) saying interesting things 20 years ago.

• The secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis, by Bill Moyers

I must say that 20 years ago, I remember it being on. I did not fully appreciate it then. I was 16 at the time this was aired, and had been raised Republican. I had a strong selection bias going then, a bias I am now missing.

On an even more personal note, one of the people in my life who I greatly appreciate is svairini. I feel that she frequently disagrees with my opinions, especially some of my more libertarian inspired ones. But, she never overtly expresses that disagreement unless she gives me a real, worthwhile and thoughtful question to consider.

When talking to others, I try hard to emulate this. People, no matter what their opinions, are people, not sheep or fundies, or Ayn Randians or whatever other pejorative you might choose to label them with today. Making them the 'other' is never helpful.

The willingness of Obama to get up and make a speech in which he avoids this labeling, even for people who clearly hold racist opinions, formed a significant basis for my respect for him as a leader.

merchanta recently came back from Canada and has interesting (though not public) reports of just how bad the border crossing actually is. She references two interesting stories:

• Citizens' U.S. Border Crossings Tracked - basically the US government is tracking anything and everything it can about every single person crossing the border, US citizen or not, and freely sharing that data with random entities even for such purposes as mundane as that entity making a hiring decision.
• Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands - Because of a combination of bad legal advice and a stupid bureaucratic foulup, a 34 yr old Chinese immigrant, a US citizen by marriage is detained for several months, denied medical treatment for various serious complaints and eventually dies of cancer and a fractured spine.
• And then merchanta talks about a critical massive bicyclist who is assaulted by a police officer who then lies about it. A video of the event accompanies her post.

Totally broken. Authority out of control. Will you do something about it? Do you have any ideas for what can be done?

Now my PersonalJournal project allows people to register. It automatically brings them to a registration page if they log in with an unknown OpenID. It also uses the OpenID SReg (Simple Registration) extension to try to fetch registration information for a new OpenID to auto-fill in many of the form fields when registering them.

I think I'm going to work on a simple posting interface now. I'm going to allow a given PersonalJournal instance to host posts by multiple users, but I'm going to require that they be given permission to post by a site administrator.

One interesting case is mentioning someone in a post using their OpenID when the OpenID's owner hasn't registered at the site yet. I think I will give that OpenID a stub registration that the owner can change if the OpenID owner registers with that OpenID.

Another interesting case is when a posting user believes that several different OpenIDs refer to the same owner. That's tricky. Right now I allow several different OpenIDs to be tied to the same 'user'. And then all access control is on the basis of 'user', ot OpenID.

I think that what I will do is only allow the owner of an OpenID to tie that OpenID to any others. And the user can 'take over' an OpenID from a different user if they can prove they are the id's owner. This will only work if the OpenID being taken over is associate with a 'user' that has one and only one OpenID associated with it. Then the user will be deleted and all other references to the taken over user will be changed to refer to the taking over user.

It is tempting to only allow automatically created user's who have never registered and turned into 'real' users to be taken over, but someone might log in and register using one of their alternate OpenIDs once without realizing what they're doing and then need to suck that OpenID into the main user they are reigistered under. It would be nice to be able to do that without admin intervention.

____________   ___   _________   ______
            \ /   \ /         \ /      
             \     /           /       
___   ___   / \   / \   ___   / \   ___
   \ /   \ /   \ /   \ /   \ /   \ /  
    \     \     /     /     \     \  
___/ \   / \___/ \   / \   / \___/ \___
      \ /         \ /   \ /      
       /           /     \        
______/ \_________/ \___/ \____________

This thing has atrocious HTML. It's not hard to write well formed XML, and if you're righting a program that produces it you should have a clear idea how to do it. I don't understand why all these quiz and LJ-meme sites, especially more intelligent ones like this one, have such badly formed XML/HTML.

So, omnifarious, your LiveJournal reveals...

You are... 1% unique and 18% herdlike (partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy women). When it comes to friends you are a total whore. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are keen to please. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is conventional.

(The average level of weirdness is: 27.
You are weirder than 70% of other LJers.)

I managed to put together a TurboGears application that allows logging in via OpenID. Well, OK, not completely, but the hard part of setting up the two step process of verifying an OpenID someone enters is done.

This was one of the small hurdles to putting together my PersonalJournal project.

Some parts of this like the oid_store and a few other components should be split out into a general package so other people can make TurboGears programs that support OpenID as a client. I would like to know how to make TurboGears extensions that can be used when you're starting a TurboGears application to add new model classes, like the identity extension. OpenID needs some model classes for the OpenID store.

I also stuck in a framework for putting mini-sessions around certain tasks within a session. This is so that my site will be resistant to cross-site scripting attacks based on POSTing to a random URL. I intend to make most POST URLs include a sub-session identifier as part of the URL or a required part of the data posted.

I also added secret data to the session object in the database. This is because I needed to have an HMAC key. I wanted to hand the client some data and wanted to make sure that when it handed it back to me that it was exactly the data I gave it. So the data includes an HMAC of itself using the secret as a key. I imagine this secret data will be more widely useful in other parts of the system.

A better name than 'PersonalJournal' might be in order. The WSJ appears to have used this in the past (or possibly even currently) for some feature of theirs. I'm actually OK with colliding with that though.

Today my Mac exhibited a very strange failure mode. It refused to talk on it's Ethernet port and almost completely refused to listen. It was the strangest thing. After I rebooted, it went away. And the wireless connection worked just fine.

This mattered because at home I set things up so almost no networking works except over an encrypted ssh tunnel when I'm wireless. So I generally prefer to be connected with a wire if I can.

This xkcd cartoon has the perfect analogy!

The Nintendo DS came out in 2004; the GBA, in 2001; the GBC, in 98. See a pattern? The next Nintendo portable should be around any time. My guess is, it probably was already designed by late last year, and they aborted the whole process, to incorporate what they learned from the Wii, and hopefully the iPhone.

Here is what I predict it will look like, in no particular order — I'm privately calling it the “Nintendo DT”.

• Two screens, like the DS, but both multi-touch, either 512x320 (more likely — that's “computer widescreen”, 16x10) or 512x288 (“true” widescreen, 16x9, might be chosen in order to make the device just that little bit narrower).
• No physical buttons, except for power, and possibly L/R. All controls are via touchscreen (and accelerometers). Or maybe it's too early for that, since haptic tactition emulation isn't usable yet; in that case it may keep controls similar to the DS Lite, making the bottom screen smaller (4x3 — 384x288). Possibly an analog nub. Two, if they really really feel like one-upping Sony.
• Video codecs and player built-in so you can watch your movies on the go (a must with the widescreen).
• Camera either built-in or sold as an add-on.
• Probably no stylus at all.
• Definitely no GBA compatibility. (But the homebrew scene will have an emulator — VBA probably — up in weeks.)
• Better Wi-Fi; at least 802.11n. And Bluetooth.
• Browser built-in.
• More built-in storage, maybe an SSD or even HD (hope not); WiiWare is making a lot of money, and for watching movies you'll need space too. Maybe an SD or MicroSD slot?
• Maybe music player software built-in as well. (Can anyone say MarioPod? Or is it PokéPod?)
• I wouldn't be too surprised if it uses Cortex CPUs.
• “Slave mode” where it basically becomes a souped-up controller (with extra display area) for the Wii. Hacked in two or three months to become a “slave” to a Linux machine; practical application for the hack doesn't arrive for a long time, if ever.

Oh, and I'll probably buy one, install some Free Software, and use it as my “netbook”. Sounds great for media and writing on the go ;-) Unless, of course, the Pandora arrives first...

I became really angry over some things ladyt37 said today. She criticized my friends in a way that was sort of fair, but also not, and rather exceedingly rude in my opinion. I have my theories about what's going on here, but those aren't for public consumption. Aside from that, I would like to talk about what she said.

Her specific criticism was that my friends complain bitterly about our society being a classist one while enjoying the benefits of such and/or not doing anything about it but complain. She then named a few specific exceptions among people I know.

I pick my friends very carefully. One of my biggest criteria, often not so consciously applied, is that my friends are a net positive to the world around them. I do feel that money is in general a mediocre to poor measure of this. But I pick friends who do not at base treat life as a negative or zero sum game.

I am frequently frustrated by the specific complaint ladyt37 voiced. I deal with it by trying to always be willing to talk about things and convince people and trying to show people actions they can take, like insisting on using Open Source software. Though, on a bit of reflection, I believe that ladyt37 also has a mistaken perception colored by her personal background.

A lot of her friends are from the world of high finance. I tend to not have a lot of respect for these people as a whole. I feel that they tend to either be 0-sum people, or people who create a net benefit for themselves and either a net negative or break even for everybody else.

Most importantly, I feel they are wedded to a system that is flawed (as any system is) and currently creates unjustifiable concentrations of wealth and political power. They are so wedded that they see everything through the filter of that system and can't step outside it to see that it's just today's agreement for a game we've all agreed to play and instead see it as somehow being so fundamental that it represents the true nature of reality.

At their most myopic, these people can begin to believe that all ways of measuring value can be reduced to the symbols in the system they know how to manipulate so well.

But that doesn't mean that I don't think there's some fundamental truth wandering around in there somewhere. I like pointing people at Linked: The New Science of Networks because it shows a glimpse of this fundamental truth. And it says that there will always be concentrations of both economic and political power, no matter what system is in place.

I've refined my idea of what a good system is based on that book. And in my mind, steep power law curves are worse than shallow ones as they imply that things are much more concentrated at the top and there's much more of a monopoly situation. Secondly, systems in which nodes with little power can become nodes with a lot of power relatively quickly and painlessly when they demonstrate a greater ability to generate value are also very important.

I think what we have in the US (and what much of the rest of the world has because of our dominance) has been slowly degenerating in both of these respects. But I don't really think the people deeply involved in the current economic system can really see that, or if they can, can't see how it might be changed since they see the current economic system as somehow inviolate and unchangeable.

In that sense, they are no better than the friends I have who complain and don't do anything to try to change things. In fact, I think that publicly complaining about a problem is often an important component of fixing it, so I feel that recognizing and saying something about the problem is better than not.