Douglas Purdy

I just completed a move of douglaspurdy.com.

I was using wordpress.com for hosting previously, but I decided to move to a different provider so I could have more control over the environment.

I had considering asking the WordPress folks to give me a little more control, but I decided this that it was better option to get ssh access some place.  That and the fact that Scoble, who I pinged to figure out how he worked his magic on his site, didn’t get back to me until this week.  Apparently he only answers email when outside the US.

Long story short, I got myself my first official LAMP hoster.  I have always used Windows Server hosting before.  After a long selection process  (actually I just wrote a random selection program, as that has as much chance of making a ‘good’ selection as reading all the google searches in the world), I selected Media Template aka (mt).  I suppose that they use (mt) as their name since they are based out of LA, making them automatically hip and therefore legally entitled to use just shortcuts.

After a quick setup, I configured MySQL and a Wordpress instance.  (mt) only has 2.3 or some ancient version available as a 1-click install, so I needed to do my own 2.7 install.  I then moved all my content over.  It was completely trivial (as trivial as working remotely over ssh can be).  Really.

Well, not really.  One issue that remains is the fact that my images are still on the wordpress.com site, as they are not part of the generalized export/import.  But other than that, really.

I have to tell you that this experience is calling into question some basic assumptions that I have had around how the software industry is going to work over the course of the next couple of years.  More on that later (as I think more or I just forget it and you do too).

Reading The Phenomenon of Life, The Emperor’s New Mind, Meditations on Violence (all of which fall into the changed my life category) and Outliers (give me my money back and don’t waste yours) in the past few days leads me to offer up chapter 15 from Thus Spake Zarathustra below (it was a complex and long journey to this chapter that am not going into on a blog).

I really encourage you to read the entire thing and consider these questions at the end:  What do you value?  Why?  If you could create your own value system for humanity, what would it be?  What would the goal of humanity be?

Many lands saw Zarathustra, and many peoples: thus he discovered the good and bad of many peoples. No greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than good and bad.

No people could live without first valuing; if a people will maintain itself, however, it must not value as its neighbour valueth.

Much that passed for good with one people was regarded with scorn and contempt by another: thus I found it. Much found I here called bad, which was there decked with purple honours.

Never did the one neighbour understand the other: ever did his soul marvel at his neighbour’s delusion and wickedness.

A table of excellencies hangeth over every people. Lo! it is the table of their triumphs; lo! it is the voice of their Will to Power.

It is laudable, what they think hard; what is indispensable and hard they call good; and what relieveth in the direst distress, the unique and hardest of all,—they extol as holy.

Whatever maketh them rule and conquer and shine, to the dismay and envy of their neighbours, they regard as the high and foremost thing, the test and the meaning of all else.

Verily, my brother, if thou knewest but a people’s need, its land, its sky, and its neighbour, then wouldst thou divine the law of its surmountings, and why it climbeth up that ladder to its hope.

“Always shalt thou be the foremost and prominent above others: no one shall thy jealous soul love, except a friend”—that made the soul of a Greek thrill: thereby went he his way to greatness.

“To speak truth, and be skilful with bow and arrow”—so seemed it alike pleasing and hard to the people from whom cometh my name—the name which is alike pleasing and hard to me.

“To honour father and mother, and from the root of the soul to do their will”—this table of surmounting hung another people over them, and became powerful and permanent thereby.

“To have fidelity, and for the sake of fidelity to risk honour and blood, even in evil and dangerous courses”—teaching itself so, another people mastered itself, and thus mastering itself, became pregnant and heavy with great hopes.

Verily, men have given unto themselves all their good and bad. Verily, they took it not, they found it not, it came not unto them as a voice from heaven.

Values did man only assign to things in order to maintain himself—he created only the significance of things, a human significance! Therefore, calleth he himself “man,” that is, the valuator.

Valuing is creating: hear it, ye creating ones! Valuation itself is the treasure and jewel of the valued things.

Through valuation only is there value; and without valuation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, ye creating ones!

Change of values—that is, change of the creating ones. Always doth he destroy who hath to be a creator.

Creating ones were first of all peoples, and only in late times individuals; verily, the individual himself is still the latest creation.

Peoples once hung over them tables of the good. Love which would rule and love which would obey, created for themselves such tables.

Older is the pleasure in the herd than the pleasure in the ego: and as long as the good conscience is for the herd, the bad conscience only saith: ego.

Verily, the crafty ego, the loveless one, that seeketh its advantage in the advantage of many—it is not the origin of the herd, but its ruin.

Loving ones, was it always, and creating ones, that created good and bad. Fire of love gloweth in the names of all the virtues, and fire of wrath.

Many lands saw Zarathustra, and many peoples: no greater power did Zarathustra find on earth than the creations of the loving ones—”good” and “bad” are they called.

Verily, a prodigy is this power of praising and blaming. Tell me, ye brethren, who will master it for me? Who will put a fetter upon the thousand necks of this animal?

A thousand goals have there been hitherto, for a thousand peoples have there been. Only the fetter for the thousand necks is still lacking; there is lacking the one goal. As yet humanity hath not a goal.

But pray tell me, my brethren, if the goal of humanity be still lacking, is there not also still lacking—humanity itself?—

Thus spake Zarathustra.

I would love to see someone take V8 and the Shell.cc sample, build it for all platforms and make it available as a binary download.  

Perhaps someone has already done it, but I can’t seem to find it.  I am sure that this cannot be a new idea.  I would do it, but I am somewhat “encumbered“.

The next thing I would love to see is a “JSRT” (Javascript Runtime).  Think of this is a x-platform library for important native functions like I/O, etc.

We (Microsoft) already have this with IDispatch and our IActiveScript ECMAScript implementation (FileSystemObject is your friend), but since I spend all my time on Macs at home, I really want something I can use from Terminal.

Net-net, I want a real Javascript REPL and library ecosystem without the browser as the runtime.

It is very bizarre to me that the most used imperative language on the planet (a conjecture) doesn’t have a footprint outside of the browser on any other platform than Windows.  I could be wrong and this already exists someplace and is in use — if so, let me know.

Clearly, this is not the real end state that I would like to see.  I could see the browser using the JSRT too (security model questions clear, but I think about existing security models that I have used including LiveConnect, etc.).  You could see this as an “escape value” for browser implementations that wanted to support “richer” apps.  In my happy little head, you could even go some far as to implement a browser itself in Javascript (shades of Smalltalk, of course).

BTW:  The V8 Embedder’s Guide is quite a good read.  I clearly haven’t coded against the different mechanisms yet (which is the real test), but it seems like a clean design, although I don’t see anything about explicit marshaling or calls from “native” to “managed”, but I imagine that code would make that clear.

For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us.  – Duino Elegies

I have not read Rilke before, but after reading this snip in the Economist, I had to read all ten elgies.

There is so much more here — I have a feeling that I will be studying this for a while.

Earth, is it not this that you want: to rise

invisibly in us? – Is that not your dream,

to be invisible, one day? – Earth! Invisible!

What is your urgent command if not transformation?

Earth, beloved, I will. O, believe me, you need

no more Spring-times to win me: only one,

ah, one, is already more than my blood can stand.

Namelessly, I have been truly yours, from the first.

You were always right, and your most sacred inspiration

is that familiar Death.

See I live. On what? Neither childhood nor future

grows less……Excess of being

wells up in my heart.

I bought my daughters two XO Laptops via the G1G1 program for the holiday.

A couple of things about this program:

• As a result of our involvement, two laptops are going to children in the developing world.
• Participation in the program allows me to continue to instill in my children the value of doing things for others (although I am very clear with them that it is ultimately in their self-interest to do so).
• It also allows me to educate them on the state of the world outside the our little “bubble”.

A couple of things about the computer & software:

• Both my children and I absolutely love both the hardware and the software.
• They are 5 (5 and 3/4, they tell me) and have had zero issues being “useful” with the device.
• The software includes so many wonderful educational programs (activities in Sugar) that I am simply overwhelmed.
• I know that we (Microsoft) are working to getting XP running on these machines (all I know about it is what I read on the Web), but I personally would prefer that it would be possible to keep the Sugar window manager and apps on top of XP.  It is my judgement that my kids simply could not have made as much progress using explore.exe and the suite of things that we are talking about offering on top of XP.

Net-net, this was the best gift that I could have given my children this year.

One last thing, OLPC really seems to be stepping up their marketing push.  The below is worth checking out.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b4GkGMiBDQ]

There is a interesting comment thread going on my One World post.

I closed my response to the comments by asking a question that I want to raise in a top-level post.

If we roll the clock forward 200 years, how do we think humanity will communicate quantitative information at a global level?

As a comp, take a quick look at what is going on in 1808.

I don’t consider this a science fiction exercise.

I consider it an exercise in brainstorming what we want the future to be like.

I am a fan of “The Long Now” and “The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!”

It is time for us to embrace that we live on “Spaceship Earth” (read the operating manual here).

There is a huge debate about how to “run” such a “ship” and what problems we need to address right away, but I would love for us to start with some simple things:

1. Adopt UTC time everywhere on the planet
2. Adopt the metric system (SI) everywhere on the planet

It is just unbelievable to me that I have to spend anytime at all doing time zone and measurement conversions (which I have been doing a lot of lately, so it is top of mind).

Also, I don’t think it is possible for people to work effectively unless they are all communicating using the same mechanisms and metaphors.

The same time and measurement mechanisms would be a great start to getting everyone on the planet “on the same page”.

Of course, that principle begs two other questions.  When do we move to a same currency?  When do we move to the same language (at least one we all agree that everyone should speak)?

I hesitate to even blog about this topic openly as know that these sorts of issues cause one to call into question one’s identity and values in a deep way, but if you have internalized that we are on a small ship in a vast sea with no land in sight (that could be taking on water), issues like language, currency, time zone, and measurement pale in comparison (at least for me).

One other point worth mentioning, I view measurement, currency, etc. as “encodings” for information.  The high order bit for me is efficient information flow.  Moving to a standard encoding (think Unicode, etc.) for time, economic value, etc. would be a huge win.

I wonder if there is an “Adopt UTC” or “Adopt SI” groups out there, may be I should start my own group: “Spaceship Earth Foundation”.

We are celebrating the winter solstice today.

Follow my thoughts about this (it is long causal chain)…

The solstice made me think of the Ancient of Days (below).

William Blake has been on my mind the last two days via Allen Ginsberg.

I read a wonderful Ginsberg quote from Andrew Sullivan yesterday that I think is apt for the winter solstice:

GINSBERG: Well, I had a sort of visionary experience in which I heard William Blake’s voice. It was probably an auditory hallucination, but it was a very rich experience.

LOFTON: This happened while you were masturbating, right?

GINSBERG: Yes, but after.

I also watched The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg last night which reminded me of Kaddish:

Dreaming back thru life, Your time–and mine accelerating toward Apocalypse,

the final moment–the flower burning in the Day–and what comes after

All of which brings me back to winter solstice as death leads to rebirth.

21 years old.  Still germane.

The interesting thing is the primary spine of the demo.

It is personally ironic since I am reading Hot, Flat and Crowded (more in another post on this).

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=100196171226719096]

For feedreaders: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=100196171226719096

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/12/most-popular-stories-of-the-week-dec-7-14.php