Frank Rich in Sunday's paper on the Republicans who've run out of ideas:

The crisis is at least as grave as the one that confronted us — and, for a time, united us — after 9/11. Which is why the antics among Republicans on Capitol Hill seem so surreal. These are the same politicians who only yesterday smeared the patriotism of any dissenters from Bush’s “war on terror.” Where is their own patriotism now that economic terror is inflicting far more harm on their constituents than Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent W.M.D.?

…

The current G.O.P. acts as if it — and we — have all the time in the world. It kept hoping in vain that the fast-waning Blago sideshow would somehow impale Obama or Rahm Emanuel. It has come perilously close to wishing aloud that a terrorist attack will materialize to discredit Obama’s reversals of Bush policy on torture, military tribunals and Gitmo. The party’s sole consistent ambition is to play petty politics to gum up the works.

David Leonhardt discusses ideas in The Big Fix in the NYT Magazine:

Rahm’s Doctrine[:] “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Emanuel said. “What I mean by that is that it’s an opportunity to do things you could not do before.”

…

Germany and Japan, on the other hand, were forced to rebuild their economies and political systems after the war. Their interest groups were wiped away by the defeat. “In a crisis, there is an opportunity to rearrange things, because the status quo is blown up,” Frank Levy, an M.I.T. economist and an Olson admirer, told me recently. If a country slowly glides down toward irrelevance, he said, the constituency for reform won’t take shape. [Mancur] Olson’s insight was that the defeated countries of World War II didn’t rise in spite of crisis. They rose because of it.

…

ONE GOOD WAY TO UNDERSTAND the current growth slowdown is to think of the debt-fueled consumer-spending spree of the past 20 years as a symbol of an even larger problem. As a country we have been spending too much on the present and not enough on the future. We have been consuming rather than investing. We’re suffering from investment-deficit disorder.

…

WASHINGTON’S CHALLENGE on energy policy is to rewrite the rules so that the private sector can start building one of tomorrow’s big industries. On health care, the challenge is keeping one of tomorrow’s industries from growing too large.

…

In Orszag’s final months on Capitol Hill, he specifically argued that health care reform should not wait until the financial system has been fixed. “One of the blessings in the current environment is that we have significant capacity to expand and sell Treasury debt,”

…

Goldin’s and Katz’s thesis is that the 20th century was the American century in large part because this country led the world in education. The last 30 years, when educational gains slowed markedly, have been years of slower growth and rising inequality.

On the 9th or 10th of January 1989, I flew from Dublin to New York. That was the last day that I ever lived in Ireland.

I came to the U.S. on a tourist visa. It was no lie. I had a round-the-world ticket and I would go on to Australia in early March. In June, I left Australia and traveled to Bangkok and Hong Kong. Sometime in July, I landed back in Ireland to settle up my affairs. I fit in a trip to the South of France with some old friends.

In August, I would return to America to attend graduate school. I have lived in the U.S. ever since.

I graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1987 with a B.A. in Computer Science. The Celtic Tiger was not yet on the horizon. Unemployment was high, as it had been for years. There were some software development jobs to be had in Ireland, but the pickings were slim.

After a couple of months, with some help from my former academic advisor, I got a job at InterContinental PhotoComposition (ICPC), a small scientific typesetting company on the northside of Dublin. It didn't pay much, but I got to write a text editor from scratch—unfortunately, in Vax Pascal.

My father urged me to go the United States and get a Master's degree, arguing that it would open more doors for me. He was willing to fund it so I was willing to go.

I knew very little about American universities at the time. The World Wide Web had yet to be invented. I had managed to wangle Usenet access for myself sometime in '86 or '87 on the Maths department computer at Trinity. (The Maths department had a student-run PDP with Usenet access via UUCP. The CS department only let its undergraduates use an unconnected Vax.) From reading the technical newsgroups, I began to notice that certain universities were well represented. This, essentially, was how I decided where to apply.

The first step was to arrange to take the Computer Science GRE. This wasn't held very often in Ireland, but I think I took it in Dublin in the autumn of 1988.

I applied to six colleges. I presume that I had the GRE results back by then, but I can't remember. I recall applying to Brown, Georgia Tech, UC Davis, and Harvey Mudd. I believe the fifth was CMU. I think the sixth might have been MIT or Yale.

More to come.

[Eric holding forth on BuildBot]

Eric and I attended Northwest Python Day 2009 today at the University of Washington. There were about 50 people present, with a few out-of-town visitors from Portland and Vancouver BC.

It was a mixed bag. I found the afternoon sessions more interesting than the morning ones.

The morning talks started with a set of five-minute lightning talks, including:

• ctypes being used to crack open a raw binary file with arbitrary bit alignment.
• Werkzeug: a set of WSGI utilities. Debugger sounds particularly useful.
• BuildBot: Eric talked about using it for Continuous Integration and how easy it was to configure and extend, compared to CruiseControl.NET.

Browser Interface, Local Server: creating a desktop app that contains, in one process, both a browser app and a local HTTP server, running on separate threads. The browser app can also be used to connect to a remote web server. Used wxPython to host an HTML control for the browser part.

The afternoon lightning talks included:

• Sphinx: a documentation generator built on top of reStructuredText.
• NodeBox: a Mac app for creating 2D visuals.
• vmshell: a not-yet-released toolkit for manipulating virtual machines using libvirt.

Sage is an impressive open-source package for doing mathematics, and a potential alternative to expensive commercial products like Mathematica and Matlab. Browse the Sage Notebook to get a feel for what it can do. Talk a look at today's Sage talk.

Google App Engine is good for a narrow class of apps: HTTP, request+response, time-limited, sandboxed. There are many quotas, known and unknown. The non-relational data store has restricted queries: no joins, only complete entities, limited comparisons.

Cython is a Python to C compiler that seems promising. It requires slight modifications to the classes and functions that will be compiled to C: declare them with the cdef keyword. It offers significant speedups for hotspot code and it's heavily used in Sage.

Ted Leung closed the day by talking about Python at Sun. All of the dynamic languages have been trending upwards in the last few years, hence Sun's (and Microsoft's) interest in dynamic languages. Jython, after years of struggling along, is alive and well. I really have to check out DTrace on Mac or OpenSolaris soon. One way to win mindshare for Python is better tools: NBPython will provide Python support for the NetBeans IDE: code completion, debugger, etc.

There were a handful of other talks that I didn't write up.

My thanks to the organizers for putting together a successful free conference.

What a month!

It opened well, when my nephew Harry was born. Frank died a day later. A cold dragged me down for over a week.

Last week's Obama inauguration cheered me up. He's off to a strong start. My story about attending the Bush Sr. inauguration omitted noting that 20 years ago this month, I emigrated from Ireland. More on that in some future posts.

Then there were the layoffs. Emma lost her contract job last week, primarily from having missed a lot of work due to ill health. And on Monday, some other friends were laid off, as were tens of thousands all around the country.

And my gout has flared up, though in a mild way.

There's a little-known special election coming up on February 3rd for the new elective position of Director of Elections for King County.

I recommend that you vote for Sherril Huff, and so do the Seattle Times and the Stranger. Everyone else in the race is unqualified.

Title: Paul of Dune

Author: Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson

Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5

Publisher: Tor

Copyright: 2008

ISBN: 0765312948

Pages: 512

Keywords: science fiction

Reading period: 14–27 January, 2009

Another novel in the Dune franchise. Paul of Dune is an interquel, largely taking place in the decade between the events of Dune and of Dune Messiah.

Paul Atreides has become the Emperor of the known galaxy. A vicious jihad has burst across the empire in his name. His prescience tells him that it's absolutely necessary so that mankind can break out of the course that leads to stagnation and destruction. But billions have died and many more are yet to die. He is feared and hated. A rebellion has broken out and must be suppressed. Attempts are made upon his life.

The main story is woven with extended flashbacks to Paul's first formative, experience of war, a few years before Dune. The War of Assassins took a toll on Paul's father, Duke Leto, but showed Paul what it is to lead.

The last book written by BH & KJA, Sandworms of Dune, was a sequel to the entire series. It was greatly weakened by multiple deus ex machina endings. Here, they are constrained by having to fit in between two previous books. This book works better.

I mentioned recently that the #39 route is closing, which would leave me without a direct connection to downtown Seattle. The new #50 route would run along 15th Ave S, two blocks from my house, to the Lander St Light Rail station in SoDo.

We attended the Metro Open House at the Jefferson Community Center this evening.

My concerns are slightly assuaged. The new #50 should run every 15 minutes and run until about 11pm. That's better than the #39 which runs every 30 minutes until 7pm, then hourly until 9pm.

In addition, the #60, which also travels along 15th and goes past the Beacon Hill Light Rail station, would run later and longer, giving me another route to downtown.

But neither of these alternatives gets me to downtown without a transfer.

I also asked about routing the #36 along 15th all the time, but it's a trolley bus before 7pm and changing the route would require stringing overhead wires.

The closure of the #39 is not yet certain. Keep those letters coming.

The Pope has reinstated four excommunicated bishops:

Pope Benedict XVI, reaching out to the far-right of the Roman Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops on Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage.

Pam has more. Newsweek has context.

Last month, the Pope said:

that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

Shit like this reminds me of why I am no longer a Catholic.

I was raised Catholic in Ireland and spent eleven years at a priest-run school. It didn't take; I had lost my faith by my mid-teens.

But even if I still believed in God, I'd have a hard time being Catholic. I don't have anything Catholics per se, and I've known individual Catholic priests that I respected, but I can't stand the Catholic Hierarchy.

James Joyce said of the Irish, “we are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be”. It's no longer quite true—many Irish people only see the inside of a church now for “hatches, matches, and dispatches” (baptisms, weddings, and funerals). But it was certainly true in the Seventies and Eighties when I was growing up.

The Catholic Church had a stranglehold on life in the Republic of Ireland. Contraception was illegal until the Eighties, and, when first introduced, was available only to married couples with a prescription. Divorce only became legal about a decade ago. Homosexuality was decriminalized not long before that. Most of the national (public) schools were controlled by parish priests, and most private schools were run by religious orders. (Still largely true today, I believe.) Until 1970, no Catholic could attend the traditionally Protestant Trinity College Dublin without a dispensation from a bishop.

Education, the modern world, the European Union, out-of-wedlock births, declining vocations: all of these have loosened the Church's grasp in Ireland. The Bishop Casey affair (he had a son and embezzled for nearly 20 years to support the boy), the Irish pedophile priest coverups, and other scandals shook many people's faith.

In the larger picture, Popes John Paul II and Benedict have spent the last 30 years trying to roll back the liberalizing effects of Vatican II. They've stacked the hierarchy with conservative bishops and cardinals, ensuring their influence will last for decades after their own deaths.

The Catholic Church is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and I welcome it.

I made royal icing last night for the Christmas Cake to put over the marzipan. A very tedious half hour with an electric handheld mixer to beat the egg whites until they were stiff, and then beat in the powdered sugar.

The recipe that I used from an old Joy of Cooking called for the juice of 1 lemon. I used ReaLemon which says that 3 tablespoons = 1 lemon. I added two tablespoons, which was quite lemony. The recipe that I've linked to calls for two teaspoons, which seems like a better choice.

I had drizzled whiskey over the cake several times to keep it moist. That was a mistake. The cake turned out to be quite damp.

Before baking the cake in November, I had also thoroughly soaked the dried fruit for a couple of days in hot water and whiskey. The fruit was very plump, but with hindsight, I think I should have thoroughly drained the soaked fruit for some hours.

Still, it tastes good, but it could be better.

I mentioned Copilot a while back as a way of helping someone by connecting remotely to their desktop.

CrossLoop is another such service. If you want to charge someone for helping them out, CrossLoop will take a cut. Otherwise, unlike Copilot, it's completely free. Unfortunately, it's Windows only: there's no Mac or Linux clients.

I've used it a couple of times to connect to my parents' computers in Dublin and Cape Town. It works well, though it's still painfully slow.

This morning's problem: My father was no longer seeing images in his Yahoo mail. Somehow, he had managed in Firefox to block images on his Yahoo mail server, and only on his Yahoo mail server.

Salumi's has the best selection of charcuterie in Seattle. The range and quality of their cured meats is truly impressive. The flavor, excellent. Their counter staff, friendly and family-like. The line goes out the door.

But. But. But.

Their service is wretched. That line moves at a glacial pace. I've never taken less than 20 minutes to get a sandwich; sometimes twice that. The staff are slow and inefficient. Their stations are badly laid out and they have to fumble around each other in their pokey little store.

Every time I watch them at work—and I always have plenty of time to watch them work—I want to drag them over to Jimmy John's or Bakeman's. Jimmy John's is fast, efficient, and cheerful. Bakeman's is fast, brusque, and serves up a side of attitude. But, by God, you get a sandwich in five minutes or less.

Salumi's could double their speed and still be Salumi's. I wish they would.

I made my Christmas Cake back in November, but am only now getting around to putting on the icing. I've kept it moist with several applications of whiskey.

Last year, I made marzipan from scratch. Never again! It was a huge amount of work to blanch the almonds and the stiff mixture of sugar and almonds caused the food processor to seize up more than once.

I didn't use up all the marzipan that I made that time. I put the remainder into a sealed container, placed it in the fridge, and forgot all about it. When I took it out of the fridge yesterday, it was still good. Oh, the top half-inch had hardened and the rest was a tad dry, but it was good enough to use. I rolled it out and draped it over the cake.

I'll add a layer of royal icing at the weekend and let it harden overnight.

And then I'm going to eat it.

For several years, Firefox has been my default browser. Firefox's extensions have always been its paramount feature for me, but its performance and developer tools came close. I'm very happy with it, for the most part.

The one thing that makes me unhappy is Firefox 3's CPU consumption. Time and again, I find it running at close to full utilization of one CPU core on my MacBook Pro. The tipoff is usually the warmth of the metal case. Killing the Gmail tab tends to help, but not enough. In Firefox 2, the worst problem was the memory leaks. Within hours, it would have chewed up several hundred megabytes. Memory usage is better in FF3, but I still have to shut it down too often for my liking, especially after using Firebug for a while.

In the last couple of months, I've been trying other browsers on my MacBook at home. Camino and Safari have had their chances, but they run too hot over time. I'll be sure to give Chrome a shot when it's released for the Mac—I quite like it on Windows.

Opera is what I've been using for the last few weeks. It runs the coolest of any of the browsers that I've tried. It's snappy enough. The JavaScript debugger is decent, and far better than Chrome's or Safari's. I'd prefer better integration with Google Reader, as I have no intention of switching RSS readers.

Eight years ago, the Onion published a supposed speech by then President-elect George Bush, called ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’. How prophetic!

Finally, the long national nightmare of the George W. Bush presidency is over.

Barack Obama took the oath of office today. His inaugural speech was somber, reasoned, cautionary, and inspirational—of a piece with the man.

He faces enormous difficulties. There are enormous opportunities too, if he can but seize them. The polls say that the American people do not expect overnight miracles. I hope we will all remember that a year from now.

Here's to Obama and his presidency.

Twenty years ago tomorrow, I attended Bush Senior's Inauguration. By accident.

I was on my first solo trip to the United States, having arrived in New York the previous week. There I had purchased a 30-day unlimited standby ticket with Delta. It cost me only $400, as I could produce my round-the-world ticket.

For no particularly good reason, I decided to start the 30 days with a trip to Washington DC. There were museums there and it was nearby.

I hadn't been paying close attention to the news, and it was only when I got to Washington that I realized that George H.W. Bush's inauguration was to be be held the next day. Even so, I had no difficulty finding a bed at the Youth Hostel. It was the biggest deal in town, so naturally I went.

In practice, this meant standing on a grassy knoll on (I think) Pennsylvania Avenue for several hours, waiting for Bush's motorcade to pass. It was bitterly cold and no one around me seemed to be enjoying themselves much. My only real memory of the day is watching the enormous flag across the street, fluttering in the wind. The flag hung vertically; I think it would have lain like a crumpled rag had it been flown horizontally. Eventually, Bush's car crawled past, eliciting some cheers from the chilled crowd. I left then, to go somewhere warmer.

I had little feel for Bush Senior at the time. Reagan had not been popular in Europe. We thought him a dangerous cowboy, likely to provoke a nuclear war with the Russians. I thought Bush was probably little better, but I wasn't particularly engaged in U.S. politics at the time.

In retrospect, of course, he seems marvelous compared to the other President Bush.

(Before I wrote this post, I assumed that the inauguration was always held on the third Tuesday of January. Actually, it's been held on January 20th since 1937.)

Title: Milk

Director: Gus van Sant

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5

Copyright: 2008

Milk was a middle-aged closet case who moved to San Francisco in the early 1970s, became politically active, and started running for office, unsuccessfully at first. “The Mayor of Castro Street” was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, the first openly gay man to hold public office in the United States. A year later, only days after the anti-gay Californian ballot initiative, Proposition 6, went down to defeat, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered by ex-Supervisor Dan White.

Sean Penn is convincing as Harvey Milk, an ordinary man who became an impassioned gay activist and an inspirational leader, unapologetic about his sexuality. Both during his life and after, Milk's example leads other people to come out and stop hiding. Milk's relentless focus on politics costs him his personal life, driving away first one lover, then another.

Josh Brolin plays Dan White, not as a caricatured villain, but as a confused and angry man, who has a difficult working relationship with Milk.

Van Sant has created a believable and gripping biopic, showing the burgeoning gay rights movement in the brief, golden decade between the Stonewall riots and AIDS.

Milk is certain to earn some Oscar nominations.

Seattle's Metro Transit is changing a number of routes in South Seattle. They're proposing to close the #39.

Here's my letter to Metro:

To: metro-feedback-se@kingcounty.gov

Subject: Please keep the #39 open

I live two blocks from the busstop at 15th and S. Nevada, served by routes #39, #60, and #36. Metro is proposing to close the one really useful route, the #39 which takes me to work in Pioneer Square. The #60 gets me to 12th and S. Jackson, nearly a mile from work. The #36 only runs down 15th in the evenings; otherwise it runs through Jefferson Park, half a mile away.

The new #50 route will be a poor replacement, getting me only as far as the busway at Lander Street, about halfway to Pioneer Square. Transfers are inevitably tedious and it's all too easy to miss your connection, especially coming home in the evening.

The Beacon Hill Light Rail station is a mile away from me. It's unlikely that I will use it much, even though I work next to the Pioneer Square station.

Closing the #39 leaves me and my wife with poor transit options. But's it's not just me.

There are a lot of people on Beacon Hill who ride the #39, many of them low-income or immigrants. Every stop north of me on 15th and Columbian has plenty of riders. The VA Hospital is just to the south of me and the #39 stops at the front door. I see veterans on the #39 every morning; I don't know how the more disabled ones will manage.

I urge you to keep the #39 running. If you don't, please route the #36 along Columbian Way all the time, so that there's a direct bus between downtown and Beacon Hill.

We'll be attending the open house:

Paul Krugman:

Last Sunday President-elect Barack Obama was asked whether he would seek an investigation of possible crimes by the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he responded, but “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

I’m sorry, but if we don’t have an inquest into what happened during the Bush years — and nearly everyone has taken Mr. Obama’s remarks to mean that we won’t — this means that those who hold power are indeed above the law because they don’t face any consequences if they abuse their power.

…

There’s much, much more. By my count, at least six important government agencies experienced major scandals over the past eight years — in most cases, scandals that were never properly investigated. And then there was the biggest scandal of all: Does anyone seriously doubt that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into invading Iraq?

Why, then, shouldn’t we have an official inquiry into abuses during the Bush years?

…

Now, it’s true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we’ll guarantee that they will happen again.

…

And to protect and defend the Constitution, a president must do more than obey the Constitution himself; he must hold those who violate the Constitution accountable. So Mr. Obama should reconsider his apparent decision to let the previous administration get away with crime. Consequences aside, that’s not a decision he has the right to make.

The Democrats, with rare exceptions like Conyers and Kucinich, have shown no appetite for holding the Bush Administration accountable. Between starting the Iraq War, torture, billions given in no-bid contracts, Katrina, the U.S. Attorneys' firings, wiretapping U.S. citizens, and much, much more, there's a lot that needs investigating. And surely there's more that hasn't come to light yet.

Letting bygones be bygones just condones the crimes. It will certainly be politically inconvenient to have some accountability, but it's the right thing to do.

I'm not going to hold my breath, however.

I've always been a fast reader, faster than most people. I've read and reviewed 176 books in just over two years, or about two books a week. That doesn't count newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other online reading.

When I was 10, I had an operation on both my feet and I spent all summer with my legs in plaster. My mother had to go to the library every day because they'd only let her take out three books at a time for me. On the flight back from Ireland two weeks ago, I read two 500-page books. My personal best, though, was the long, long night that I read seven short novels.

I've known people who read faster than me, but not many. One friend at college seemed to read about twice as fast as me.

I just tried a couple of online reading speed tests, which rated me at 650-700 words per minute. One of the tests also indicated that online reading is slower than reading a book.

A reviewer for the LA Times read 462 books last year. I might be able to do that if I had nothing else to do. She talks about ripping through an 80,000 word book in 90 minutes. A number of the commenters claimed to be ultra-fast readers too.

I've never taken a speed reading course. I naturally developed a high reading speed. My comprehension and short-term retention is good. My long-term retention is not great, but this is equally true for movies that I've watched.

I think my high reading speed is why I have no patience for podcasts. I can read five times faster than anyone can talk intelligibly. Unless there's a lot of additional information in the soundtrack, such as music or an unusually talented delivery, I'd much rather read.

There are screen readers that will speak at triple speed for blind users: ‘To the untrained ear, the output is incomprehensible, but it allows [T.V.] Raman to “read” at roughly the same speed as a sighted person.’

Read on!