It’s awesome, check it out.

Last week, we went to rainier vista and had a reception with the Seattle Housing Authority, Ignition NW board members, and a lot of residents of rainier vista and members of other Seattle Communities.

This tree, designed by Seattle’s Iron Monkeys, is the first permanent art piece installed by a grant from Ignition NW. It’s going into Rainier Vista, a mixed income housing project in Seattle that is pretty much ideal as far as neighborhoods go, and right next to public transit.

Our efforts at getting involved in our local community are paying off!

Deck logs are not “Captain’s Logs”

A deck log is not a daily diary written by the ship’s captain. The “captain’s log” was a dramatic device used by the creators of the televison series Star Trek to introduce each episode, and does not exist in the U.S. Navy.

People must have been asking. This is strangely hilarious

What: The Ignition Northwest Spring Town Hall

When: Tonight, 4/17 at 7:00

Where: The CHAC Lower Level (just down the ramp) at 12th and Pine

Come on down TONIGHT for the INW Spring Town Hall. You could learn things to your advantage. On the agenda.

• Critical Massive Updates
• Election Information
• INW Outreach
• New Festivals
• Art Art ART!
• New INW Programs
• Community Announcements
• Oh, and did I mention…T-Shirts?

Come on down. See and be seen. Meet your community. Learn what we’ve done and what we’re going to do and how YOU can be a part of it. I hope to see you all there.

I’d heard about Yuri’s Night in previous years, and there was one in Seattle this year, but I very much wanted to go to the Bay Area one, so I was happy when my plans fell along with it. I was fortunate enough to be able to volunteer as security staff for the event, and got to hang out with a number of other friends of mine who were also volunteering. It was, all in all, an awesome time; although as someone who’s hilariously allergic to wheat, I need to remember to bring Lara Bars in infinite numbers to events when there isn’t easy-in, easy-out.

The exhibits were awesome, the theme was awesome, my friends were very much in evidence, and it was altogether a great time. I’m very glad that I was able to go.

Act I: the beginning (1 hour)

The first hour was spent registering for my precinct, and then sitting in the bleachers waiting for things to happen. I noticed something in particular, which was that a lot of the Clinton delegates who showed up were fairly hostile, which was strange, and generally about 10 years older than I was. This (the age) was a surprise, because at my precinct caucus, the people who showed up were more or less demographically indistinguishable from any other crowd of seattleites. The Obama delegates had about the same number of people of that age, but it was if the Clinton campaign only took that demographic. (This is, of course, a generalization and completely anecdotal evidence.)

I had a lot of fun talking to a delegate (for Clinton) that I knew from a company I worked at several years ago. I also made some new friends who were also Obama delegates. At the precinct level, there were a lot of people who I knew through their involvement in the Seattle tech community. The only person I saw from my precinct at the district caucus was a really bad Clinton delegate whose speech at the precinct caucus switched a bunch of people over to Obama.

Act II: the interlude (2 hours)

A lot of the second act was spent writing email on my iPhone to various people, because not a lot was happening. A record number of people wanted to be delegates for Obama at the next level (around 500, one announcement said), which was a number that was past unprecedented and into WTF? areas. I spent a bunch of time talking to the union organizer who was there (because I was in UAW for a while (graduate assistants at the UW), I got a nifty UNION DELEGATE sticker.)

We had a bunch of speakers during this time. A lot of the judges that we have the opportunity to vote for came up and spoke. We also had Ed Murray, our district’s state senator talk for a while, which is always fun. Ed Murray is my favorite Seattle politician because he always brings up his ties to minority communities by stressing that his fiancee (male) of 17 years is Asian. Most Seattle/Washington politicians at least once you get past the Seattle level are mostly Irish, and their attempts to connect to the whole crowd are frequently bizarre logic jumps. (My ancestry is mostly also Scots and Irish, I just hate bad logic.)

Also speaking was Jim McDermott, whose speech was essentially ‘My colleagues in Washington are always amazed by the fact that I keep acting like an ultraliberal freak and you people keep sending me back. But that’s why you do it, Right?’ … the crowd then goes wild, which it generally does when he says things like this. This is a true thing he is saying, they don’t call this the People’s Republic of Washington for nothing, folks.

Eventually, the mass crowds died out and they processed everyone through. I was in the last group of alternates to be called out of the ‘alternate and guest bleachers,’ the methodology for this strangely resembled The Price Is Right.

Act III: Dramatis Personae & Exeunt Omnes (1 hour)

As I was walking over to my credentials check across the high school gym, the announcer called out that Sean Astin was in the crowd and would be addressing the audience. I’d been getting ‘dodgeballs’ that ‘Sam’ was at other caucuses, but there was a lot of idiot SMS traffic that day and I was more or less ignoring it. But, Sean Astin came out to speak on behalf of Hilary Clinton. However, by the time he reached our crowd, all the delegates but me and about 30 other people were already seated in the other room.

I walked over to the auditorium where the delegates were sitting, and it was so packed that I ended up sitting outside and chatting with my friends Eric K (Clinton) and Brian W (Obama). Eric has been a perpetual nuisance on the local burningman-bcwa lists with his strident Clinton cheering, which I only object to when he’s just promulgating media spin and not giving his own opinions. So, I chatted with them for about an hour. Mostly, we just talked about the event and the day, because we both know the others well enough to know that we’re all fixed in opinion.

Act IV: Performance Art and Resolution (1.5 hours or more)

Eventually, the Obama delegates left the clinton delegates in the auditorium and went back to the gym (because it was bigger), and each delegate who wanted to go on to the state level got 30 seconds to describe their qualifications to go. Lots of people spoke, but I think the total list was only about 100 - 200 rather than the original 500. So, people spoke about why they should go, some were funny, some were insightful, some were strident. After a really long time, we got our delegate voting sheets and I voted for the people I thought should go and then left. I missed some of the speakers, but I had said I’d actually get work done today. I think I selected a good range of people, but I was also pretty damn tired by this point.

My overall thoughts on the process is that the Obama campaign seems to be so successful here that it’s actually overwhelming the machinery of the democratic party through the amount of turnout it’s causing. Things that would usually just be a short exercise by the party faithful are getting many times the normal turnout. This doesn’t seem to be a plan on the Obama campaign’s part, it’s just occasioning such high turnouts and enthusiasm that the small number of volunteers that would typically suffice for these things are getting overrun.

One part of this is taking a lot of content over email — the scientists creating a lot of the content on the site are in the middle of the North Atlantic. Because of this, I’ve been using the drupal module mailhandler for a lot of things that would normally be done directly through the site.

Basically, changing the comparison from $data[0]=='taxonomy' to a case-insenstive comparison:

 if ((0==strcasecmp($data[0],'taxonomy')) && !is_numeric($data[1][0])) {

allows users to send in messages and have their mostly unambiguous intention followed. This is, in general, a good thing, and reflects the general net protocol practice of “be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.’ This is a general guide to good behavior and successful implementation and is generally called the Robustness Principle. I advise everyone to check out RFC 1122, because it has many entertaining things to say about the nature of the Internet at the protocol level.

Anyway, so when you can actually figure out what the person meant to be doing, you should probably accept it. This is a generic problem that pops up every now and then with computers. Surprisingly often, it pops up with case sensitivity at the protocol level. Here’s another moment for me with that same issue from about 7 years ago in Apache SOAP:

I proposed changing it to:

for (int i = 0; i < pds.length; i++) 
{ 
    if (0 == propertyName.compareToIgnoreCase(pds[i].getName())) 
      { 
        return pds[i].getWriteMethod(); 
      } 
}

from:

for (int i = 0; i < pds.length; i++) 
{ 
    if (propertyName.equals(pds[i].getName())) 
      { 
        return pds[i].getWriteMethod(); 
      } 
}

This does more or less the same thing, but is in Java. This was a case where the apache implementation wasn’t interoperating with the Microsoft implementation because the MSFT implementation had a different valid interpretation of the SOAP specification than the Apache server did. Both implementations had completely reasonable behavior, but when the MS SOAP implementation responded to Apache, it did so with its own capitalization semantics (based on COM — PropertyName) instead of the Apache SOAP capitalization semantics (based on Java — propertyName). So, this is an ongoing problem that keeps showing up again and again.

I appear to be destined to run into it and advocate for the robustness principle in every technology i use, apparently. Either that, or it’s just a slow day and I’m rambling. ]]> http://www.corprew.org/blog/2008/04/04/being-liberal-in-what-you-accept-implementation-interoperability-semantics/feed/ http://www.corprew.org/blog/2008/03/11/aperture-science-now-from-apple/ http://www.corprew.org/blog/2008/03/11/aperture-science-now-from-apple/#comments Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:11:06 +0000 corprew http://www.corprew.org/blog/2008/03/11/aperture-science-now-from-apple/ Tidbits, the apple weekly newsletter, missed the joke in their review of Apple Aperture 2.0.1.

In your review of Aperture 2.0.1, you note:

(Incidentally, the two videos on that page use Apple’s Victoria text-to-speech voice for the narration instead of a human voiceover, a practice I’ve not noticed before. It took a few seconds to pick out what was “wrong” - the occasional clipped words and odd pronunciations that indicated an artificial voice.)

This is a reference to the computer game Portal, the main antagonist in that game is a computer named GlaDOS, who has a voice somewhat similar to the victoria voice and that’s also the reason that there are some grammatical irregularities in the dialogue as well. (”Aperture [Noun]”, which is said several times alludes to how the computer in that game says “Aperture Science,” the name of the company.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluRVBhmf8w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0PDGp1hL4w

Thanks,

–Corprew

Not relevant to anything in particular, but funny.

More singers climbed the hill already singing the song, like a weird version of that old “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” commercial. And it was an honestly touching event: It’s hard to convey the power of dozens of people repeatedly singing “Forever’s gonna start tonight” all at once, but if you were there and you didn’t feel tingles, you must be a little dead inside.

Yesterday’s coverage from the Stranger’s Music Blog, which was really quite nice. I’m going to have to do a full media and blog roundup at some point, there has been rather a lot.

Please join me in Cal Anderson park on February 20th at 7:01PM to sing Total Eclipse of the Heart karaoke style for the 51 minutes that the eclipse is, in fact, total. There is a page for this event, and if you want to hold a similar event in another place, I will post it there.

If you want to bring along music to sing along to with your boombox, feel free. If you want to play an instrument, feel free. If you want to bring your whole band, go ahead. I will have a megaphone so that people can take their turn on the top of the hill if they want. If you bring your own megaphone, don’t be a dick.

Cal Anderson Park: http://www.seattle.gov/parks/park_detail.asp?id=3102

Event Start: 6:30P - End: ???
Totality Start: 7:01P - End: 7:52P

We go mobile if it seems like a good idea. It’s also my birthday the next day.

Feel free to pass this invitation along to whomever. Ideally, the skies will be clear enough to actually witness the Total Eclipse (of the Heart.)

Dress however you like, I suggest warm, festive, and moisture resistant.

Don’t come to take pictures, come to sing!

You may wish to bring coffee or other life-giving drink.

Inspiration:

fun will be had.