Yay! IMAP from GOO. Sweet! Why? All my email will now be routed through my Google apps Gmail account and I’ll receive via IMAP. I only use IMAP because I don’t want to lose my email archive and the best way to achieve this with the least effort on my part is by leaving a copy of all my emails on the server. Also, this means I can use Google’s spam filter.

First plastic bags, now bottled water; San Francisco is certainly setting an example. Mayor Gavin Newsom signed an order this week banning the use of City funds to purchase single-serving bottled water. –San Francisco Mayor Bans the Bottle (TreeHugger)

Errrg…plastic bags need to be banned! Bottles too. It’s difficult to avoid plastic while shopping. I try to remember to bring my reusable bags. I often forget. I never mean to get plastic bags, but it’s automatic with the baggers. They default to plastic! I was at Ikea a couple weeks ago. They’ve implemented a bag tax. This is wonderful. No one was leaving Ikea with bags. Go San Fran. I wish San Diego were as forward thinking. I’m not in favor of legislating common sense, but it’s very difficult for me to avoid plastic bags. Perhaps a state bag tax is in order. Ultimately we tax payers will pay for the pollution anyway.

Cross Post

This video is longer than the last, but I think you'll agree it’s worth the 20 minutes of your life. Live Data Services is one of the most exciting new features coming in the Hayes release. With Live Data Services DekiWiki's original goals are reaching fruition as a web framework for developing enterprise and social applications. Specifically one can register a webservice with DekiWiki, describe the new service in DekiWiki's services manager control panel, and thereby operate on external data as if it were local or extend DekiWiki with other applications and widgets. DekiWiki is now a social media aggregation platform, easily integrated with other applications and data stores, and very easy to extend with additional functionality.

This video is a screen capture; so, you’ll probably want to watch it in full-screen mode in order to be able to read the screen text clearly. To put the Viddler player into full-screen mode mouse over the player and you will see a command bar appear at the top of the player. Click the icon to the far right.

We’ll be providing a video-cast weekly. Please send us your requests for topics. We’ll happily reorder our current schedule of topics to suit requests. If you have questions about items we show in the video you can insert comments into sections of the video. If you have suggestions about the mechanics of our vids please email me directly.

Cross Post

I promised previously to highlight a developer a month. This month I'm highlighting Pete Erickson. I guess this makes Pete our developer of the month. Roy told me he was unwilling to peaceably relinquish his crown. Too bad Roy. It's Pete's turn to shine because he's a superstar and you're old news.

First a little background on Pete. Pete was born and grew up in a teeny tiny village in way northern Minnesota called Roseau.. He attended college at Bethel and then NDSU. He was hired by Great Plains software after school. Pete tells the story of his first week at work. He was informed the company was purchased by Microsoft. He was sufficiently pissed he considered quitting. He didn't though and he continued to work with Microsoft for a couple of years in and out of Redmond, WA. PeteE (as I call him) is passionate about open source and open standards. He enjoys participating in triathlons, biking, hiking, camping, and long walks on the beach with pina coladas. Ok, the last two items I manufactured, but the rest is true.

 Open Source Developer Poster Child

Pete manages most of our infrastructure stuff. He's probably the best Linux guy we have other than Geoff. He codes mostly in C# although he's recently become adept in PHP. He manages the NOC, all our software packaging, install guides, and upgrade scripts. Mostly recently he's done a lot of work in Hayes on Lucene with search indexing, he wrote the RSS API, and he even wrote a Drupal authentication service for DekiWiki.

Pete was actually the first engineer hired by MindTouch. He was a contractor even before Roy came on as a full time employee. He was introduced to me by his now girlfriend Marianne who was doing some business administration work for MindTouch. Pete literally worked with me out of my windowless basement for a couple of months off and on. Unfortunately Pete still lives in MN. Hopefully his recent surfing expedition in Pacific Beach with Max will entice him to move to San Diego very soon.

Pete blogs on rare occasions too. He's done a nice write-up about the upcoming Hayes Beta2 release. Specifically he highlights:

• Hayes has a web installer! No @#!t! And PeteE wrote it too.
• New parser
• Live data services
• External Authentication services
• Extensible storage provider model
• New indexing service
• Nicer UI, but I think he means improved presentation layer

Pete's post is a useful read for all you interested Gardeners. Enjoy! Oh, and be sure to click on the photos in this post so you can see the witty Flickr notes I placed on the photos. 😉

Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies, according to a new letter from Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to Cheney.

Bill Leonard, head of the government’s Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), told Waxman’s staff that Cheney’s office has refused to provide his staff with details regarding classified documents or submit to a routine inspection as required by presidential order, according to Waxman. – The Blotter

Throw these bastards’ corrupt asses out of office and try them for war crimes already! I am dead serious. Many of these people belong behind bars. The Dems aren’t any better. If they were they would have pushed for impeachment and fought the twice illegal seizure of the office of President. Any 2008 Presidential candidate that seriously pushes to impeach these pricks gets my vote. I guess this leaves Kucinich. He’s definitely one of the most intelligent candidates even if he is a tad liberal for my taste. Gooooo KUCINICH!!

Please consider voting for DekiWiki as best new project at Sourceforge.net. It will take you two clicks. I’m a little late in announcing this. Therefore there is only a very short time left to vote. Every vote counts and the winner is included in a press release and is given an award at OSCON.

So much they stole his watch.

AC_FL_RunContent( ‘codebase’,’http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0′,’width’,’396′,’height’,’443′,’src’,’http://infographics-nos.kpn-is.nl/infographic?map=http://infographics-nos.kpn-is.nl/projects/pr01015/’,’quality’,’high’,’pluginspage’,’http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer’,’movie’,’http://infographics-nos.kpn-is.nl/infographic?map=http://infographics-nos.kpn-is.nl/projects/pr01015/’ ); //end AC code

Hopefully they got his wallet too.

Source

There are two points I want to get across in this post. #1: the federal government spends far too much money on the military. #2: we're running up a huge deficit at an unprecedented rate primarily due to the unchecked militarism of the United States of America.

‘Death and Taxes’ is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal income taxes. The data is from the President’s budget request for 2008. It will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress by October 1st to begin the fiscal year.

The poster provides a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities, that fluctuate yearly, according to the wishes of the President, the power of Congress, and the will of the people. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster. —Death and Taxes: A Visual Guide to Where Your Federal Tax Dollars Go

Visit the above website and play with the control for zooming and panning the poster. You can zoom in by department and branch of government. Very cool. Now let's briefly evaluate what we're spending our current federal budget on using the TrueMajority.com's graphic.

The big red slice at the top that accounts for more than half our federal budget is our military spending. The 15% X is a proposed decrease in this spending being proposed by the Common Sense Budget Act (CSBA). The proposal of the Common Sense Budget Act proposes we cut military spending by 15% and apply this $69 Billion dollars to:

• Provide health insurance to 9 million American kids who lack it
• Rebuild or modernize our public schools over 12 years
• Retrain a quarter million workers
• Cut our reliance on foreign oil in half over 10 years
• Restore recent cuts in life-saving medical research
• Invest wisely in Homeland Security by inspecting cargo containers entering our ports
• Save 6 million children who die of hunger-related diseases in impoverished countries annually
• Begin to reduce the deficits

Common sense really. This is a sound investment in our nation's future. I'm not 100% on board with the details of the proposed spending categories, but cutting our military budget by 15% is a damn good idea.

It is important to note that the above numbers on military spending are not accurate. This does not account for the hundreds of billions of dollars we're over budget on largely due to Iraq and "defense" spending This is not represented on the 'Death and Taxes' poster or the CSBA pie chart. We’re borrowing exorbitant amounts from other countries. Most experts have our daily borrowing pegged somewhere around $1.9 billion a day (some experts estimate as low as $1.36 billion). Yes a day. You read this correctly, almost $2 billion a day is being borrowed by the United States from other countries. The United States achieves this borrowing by selling interest-bearing promissory notes called Treasury bonds to foreign investors. One of the primary "investors" is China. The enthusiasm of foreign countries to purchase American Treasuries has for decades financed a false prosperity in the United States. This concerns many economists because our borrowing is like a house of cards constructed partially from the economies of other countries. We can't possibly afford to pay back these interest bearing bonds. When this house of cards collapses the repercussions will be felt by the counties that are currently financing our wars with their investments. Also, remember we're spending $2 billion a week on the occupation of Iraq alone.

Do we really need this much money budgeted for military spending? Not even accounting for the hundreds of millions were over budget, should more than half our federal budget be allotted for military spending? Of course not. Some may think that because of the prominence of the United States this outrageous amount of money is a necessary cost to protect us from people who "hate freedom". Not so. In fact, let's examine a rough break down of budgeted military spending by nation. The lunacy of our budgeted spending should be evident. Bear in mind this simple chart does not account for the $700 Billion in borrowing, which is largely poured into military spending.

$463 billion budgeted to the Pentagon is so unaccountable that not only could the Dept. of Defense not pass an audit, but the books are in such bad shape that an audit cannot be performed. We simply have no idea, nor does the Pentagon, where money is spent. See Financial Mismanagement in the Department of Defense Report.

What's driving us to spend this ill conceived spending? The American Corporatacracy of course. This is the American corporate oligarchs and apparatus warned of by Eisenhower that has been fully realized. What can you do? Write your state and federal representatives. Support the Common Sense Budget Act. Support the Sunshine in Government Initiative. Support state and federal term limits. This isn't a Republican/Democrat issue. This is a corruption issue that cuts across parties lines. Support some real campaign finance reform. Finally, simply telling your friends about this and building awareness will help. Forward this blog post or some of the links contained herein.

Some sources not previously linked to:

• Will Thomas
• National Debt Clock
• Economic Policy Institute:Debt and the Dollar
• SensiblePriorities.org

Cross-post

The first of what will be an ongoing series of technical video-casts from the founders of MindTouch. This short video provides a quick overview of the new DekiWiki “Hayes” architecture and explains some high level details of DekiWiki’s unique and powerful design.

Download DekiWiki