…Tell me your own politik

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten fired up about politics.

Aside from local skirmishes here and there, such as the tree sitters, I haven’t really given a damn since 2004. Even 2006 and the Dems winning back Congress was sort-of nice-but-not-interesting.

I’ve become complacent in being a Berkeley moderate. Which is to say; relative to students here I fit in quite well. The opposite was true through high school — as many of my old friends can recall, I was the one always turned to for the liberal opinion. I’d get fired up, rail on, and generally try to stand out. In some regards, it’s easy to see where I burned out; I protested war since Jan. ‘03 — and yet it happened, and only now does the majority of the country agree with me. I hoped for change in the 2004 election — and then felt shafted.

Tonight, that’s a bit different.

Since he came onto the scene in 2004, My name’s been a decent barometer to measure Barack Obama’s popularity in the Bay Area. When I introduce myself (”Hi, I’m Barak”) most people will guess it’s Eric-with-a-B, but a growing percentage have tried to remember it through association with Barack Obama. Even Prof. Zakhor last semester would call me “Obama” as sort of a mnemonic. And since he announced his candidacy, that number has been increasing slowly.

Those who’ve talked politics with me in the past may have noted I loosely supported Obama — but until tonight, I held a bit of reservation. I didn’t know if I was ready to throw my full support behind any candidate. The extremist in me liked some of what Ron Paul was saying, the pure mercenary in me liked Edwards (as an electable Democrat) but on the whole, I liked Obama the best — but was uncertain if supporting him was a pipe dream.

Tonight was very interesting, not only in that he won by a (large) 8 point margin, not only because a conservative state voted for an African-American, but most interesting was the fact that nearly twice the number of Democrats came out to vote compared to the caucus in 2004. Twice. Most of them new voters. Pundits will assert, and I largely agree, that he has the youth vote, and a percentage of the female vote; but rarely has anyone been able to convert popularity with those demographics (esp. the youth) into actual votes. The Republicans drew record numbers too, but came almost to half as many Democrats. This is unusual.

So when Obama speaks to the desire we have for change, I’m starting to believe him. When he speaks of hope, I’m starting to believe him. The rabid liberal of my youth, now tempered with some age, is beginning to get excited again.

People have been comparing the “feeling” of the Obama campaign with that of JFK. Thanks to the power of the internet, we can compare JFK’s nomination acceptance speech to Obama’s Iowa Victory Speech tonight. I see sort of what they mean now. You can feel JFK trying to break the stagnation and the fear of the 50s, just as one could say we have fear and division in the 2000s.

In that JFK acceptance speech, the following passage rings out as true today as it was 48 years ago:

Perhaps we could afford a Coolidge following Harding. And perhaps we could afford a Pierce following Fillmore. But after Buchanan this nation needed a Lincoln - after Taft we needed a Wilson - after Hoover we needed Franklin Roosevelt…And after eight years of this Administration, this nation needs a strong creative Democrat in the White House.

For me, that Democrat is Barack Obama.

So my little project while I’m bored at home is PumaCreed — a poorman’s Google MapReduce. (astute hunter-types will notice the anagram name)

I’ve been toying with the idea for the past few days since I got inspired by the MapReduce chapter in Beautiful Code. Mostly it’s a cute little project that’s trendy and scratches an itch of mine — namely, how do I utilize the full power of my little cluster of machines?

My end goal is to bootstrap this on top of the raytracer Lin and I did in CS184 as sort of a proof-of-concept, and run speed tests. Other simple ideas include MP3 encoding (split the wav file, give each machine a piece, and then mp3wrap them together at the end) or if I get really daring, video re-encoding (which would be damn cool for saving off my HD streams)

The idea on top of all of this is that: you split up a problem, you do something to the pieces (Map), you can emit intermediate values (to be further sorted or combined in Reduce), and then you can combine the problem back into the original spec in some way (or not, depends on how you write Reduce). So long as there’s a common NAS (Granted, it’s no GFS, but then, I’m not dealing with petabytes) there can be the necessary file output sharing. SSHFS counts too — it’s just slower.

It’s also cute in that it can spread other time-intensive tasks across machines. It doesn’t even have to transfer files if what you want to compute is somehow representable. Since I’m writing it all in Python (or C# where necessary) a good example is to spread minimax subtrees across machines to make a faster, smarter CS188 Pacman (which would merely return the value of the root-node move — all across TCP).

The backend interface looks something like this right now:

[02:37] michener@enjolras:~$ telnet 192.168.0.16 6278
Trying 192.168.0.16...
Connected to 192.168.0.16.
Escape character is '^]'.
Welcome to the PumaCreed Server on fantine.
Type 'help' for details.
> help
help jobs ls newjob stat quit shutdown
> stat
Computer Name   System  Ranking Threads Description
fantine         Linux   9000    1       2.6.21-2-686 #1 SMP Wed Jul 11 03:53:02 
enjolras        Darwin  9000    1       9.1.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.1.0: Wed O
> shutdown
Connection closed by foreign host.
[02:38] michener@enjolras:~$

Not much, but it’s a start. The machines know about each other, there’s networking and threads and config files going on (praise be unto Twisted) — not to mention the start of a MapReduceProgram class from which all code run on the cluster should inherit (Or at least implement the interface of).

We’ll see how it goes.

Venti Peppermint Mocha: $4.20

Remainder of Amazon’s gift card: -$0.84

$20 bill: -$20.00

(Rings up — Change: $16.64)

36 cents in my wallet: -$0.36

Screwing with the Starbucks cashier over exact change: Priceless

There are some things money can’t buy.

For everything else, there’s MasterNerd

Thursday was awesome.

I got myself down to SOMA to go to a justin.tv tech-talk. Sure, they were talking about OAuth (which is pretty much a nice standard for authenticating to share data on the web) but of much more interest was who “they” are. But let’s back up.

The point of my going down there was to answer the question Dad asked me at Thanksgiving:

“Where do you want to work?”

I hadn’t really thought about it in the sense outside of “depends on who wants me”. It started to grow on me, and when I heard about this talk through Karen through Facebook, I found an outlet. Over time, it’s gotten in my head that, (a) there are a lot of tech startups in the City, (b) they do either cool or lame things, or some of each (depending on the startup) and (c) the lifestyle is vaguely like being a pirate: you have a small crew of dedicated folks; much riskier life, but also more rewarding in other ways.

So I figured I’d test the waters.

I found myself chatting after the talk with some of the people I’ve read about in tech blogs and whatnot; people who do crazy and interesting things. I rode back on the BART with a similar sort of buzzing feeling as when I first visited Berkeley as an eighth-grader, and it lasted all afternoon. I may not know exactly with who yet, but I think I’m starting to figure that I’m understanding where I want to work. Or at least how it should feel.

On the other side of the coin, I’m flying up to Seattle in a few days to be shown around Amazon. Amazon strikes me positively in other ways — the benefits of a bigger, more established place. My take on their “corporate culture” as I can see it from here is that it’s roughly a looser, friendlier Microsoft; though part of the goal of going up there is getting a very solid read on it, and what exactly they’d want me to do. They may really surprise me, and I may come back really jazzed.

But now they’ve definitely got that buzzing feeling I got from the cool kids* in the City to compete with. Which is good for all parties involved; if I really want to work at Amazon, I’ll know.

The rest of Thursday was cool in that I helped a friend-of-a-dancing-friend with his computer troubles for an hour or so; and for my time, he helped me brush up my piano skills and showed me how to improv some blues — cause this is what he does for a living. I’ve yet to record myself, but it sounds pretty good when I plunk on my keyboard here.

And then I went to 920, as always. All in one day!

*I say “kids” — I was probably the youngest one there, but the vast majority were 20-something, so I didn’t feel out of place at all.

A quick note before I make another post about why the other day was awesome:

My Ubuntu install on eponine had been freezing. Just up and freezing. So I built a FreeBSD install from scratch — decided that, for the desktop, it was lame (though the next time I overhaul fantine, my server, it’s going FreeBSD; what I learned makes it kinda rule for non-X11 things). So I tried 64-bit Ubuntu — which had the same problem, but fortunately worked just as well as 32-bit in terms of proprietary functionality (nVidia drivers, Flash, etc). Currently sitting on 64-bit Fedora 8; but it’s not apt to stay too long.

(Mostly, I’m coming to suspect it’s the ACPI — I’ve tried the nVidia beta driver to no avail)

Meanwhile….

I’m downgrading to XP on cosette.

For all intents and purposes, I did so about a week and a half ago — just booted my old XP partition. Hey, sudden burst of comfort, speed, and it worked right. Huzzah. But then I came to remember why I tried Vista in the first place — this old partition is starting to feel “dirty”. I need a reinstall.

The reason I hate reinstalling Windows, of course, is installing the software I like. If ever there were a major plus to Linux, it’s package management; go out, grab your favorite software, all with one command and be up and running just-like-that. I was able to switch distros like mad recently and it shows. You just can’t do that in Windows.

Until I went by the CSUA office today and was told of a magical XP image, with all the greatest hits installed. I grabbed it to my iPod and am now munging my partition tables but good (ntfsresize -P --force --force /dev/sda2) to throw the image over my Vista install, killing it forever. It’ll run overnight. And if it doesn’t work, I’ve got my trustier XP CD sitting here.

Meanwhile, I’m pondering putting a fresh install of Leopard on marius, my old Mac mini.

It’s the time of year to clean house, digitally.

And in case you’re wondering and like my naming scheme of Les Miserables characters; I’m writing this on enjolras, my MacBook Pro.

Today was fantastic. More later. Right now I’m going to sleep, cause I’m beat.

Let me show you them.

I have new pictures up! 34 of them even. (Finally….)

http://flickr.com/photos/barakmich/archives/date-posted/2007/11/29/

This covers the rest of summer, Yahoo Hack Day, the New Pornographers concert, and the Embarcadero Lighting Ceremony.

I think this brings me current. It’s good to be current.

Go. Comment. Have fun. I’m going to sleep.

(You can always see what’s new by viewing the “Starred Photos” over on the right there — the feed is useful for tracking my best uploads.)

Better make this quick; a fan in my laptop is dying and I’m going to call Apple on Monday; it’s momentarily fine, but it’s easily repeatable and needs fixing before the shit hits the fan. *drumfill*

Got my car an oil change today, then swung by Mekka. (Funny story — there’s free wireless, but it comes up with only a login prompt, no continue-as-guest or anything. Viewing the page source is a cheesy and horribly insecure way to find that “guest” is a valid login.) While there I helped this fellow with his old Powerbook get Firefox installed and gave him some pointers. Earned myself a free hot chocolate, so I can’t really complain.

Tonight I went to the Midtown Stomp; it qualifies as perhaps the largest consistent venue I know of — granted, it’s smaller than 920 on an open-house or some other big night; or even our Last Lindy at Night — but for an average week, this seemed to be a lot of people (although maybe it was a holiday weekend, meaning more people in town. Who knows?)

Anyway, lots of good dancing, but the DJs were always on high-tempo. Like, rarely dipping below 170 high. People get tired. People like to mix it up. Beats should do the same. You could notice the sheer improvement on percentage-of-people-dancing in the last half-hour when they slowed it down a little starting with “A-Tisket A-Tasket” and then went into the Motown Sound starting with “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”.

It’s been an interesting time at home. I’ve been quite reflective; of course, that seems to happen a lot when I go home. Getting away from all Berkeley-goings-on is a way of rationalizing all of them. Hell, I’ve been reading Kierkegaard — just to show you kinda what’s been on my mind (yay Existentialism)

On the way home from dance, coming up on Auburn, I saw a shooting star falling away from the bottom-left star of the Big Dipper’s cup. My mind went to three or four places at once (quite the momentary mind overload) — the next full second I had a wish in mind, apropos to all of them. *crosses fingers*

And then it occurs to me: You are lucky! Full moon tonight.

I wrote a long rant today on the Berkeley Oak Grove Protest in response to a post on the Berkeley LJ. I’m reproducing it here for view, posterity, and candor.

The Daily Cal’s version of the Open Letter that Prompted My Response

IMO, the whole thing is kind of an emotionally-charged psycho negotiation. But at heart, it’s a negotiation.

As pointed out, this is a demand letter disguised as a letter for dialog. While I do support bringing influential parties from both sides to the negotiation table, what’s screwy about this letter is that, in fact, the last thing the tree-sitters want (given their demands) is an honest negotiation.

The first rule of negotiation is knowing what you really want; and this is where the tree-sitters are blinded by rhetoric. That money-quote chasingred described (equating trees and humans or whatnot) is merely a result of that; I doubt they actually believe that human life is equal to a tree (or hope they don’t?). Mainly, in their minds, they have painted anything less than full capitulation by the University as failure. The real money-quote of the letter is, as pointed out, “help save the oaks and build the new training facility in an alternate location” — this is their sole victory condition.

On the University’s side, they would very much like to build the facility in that location. They have money for it (private, whatever — that’s a whole other kettle of fish) and it is, in fact, their land. It was their land when they planted the trees in the first place.

IMO, the legal high ground is entirely on the side of the University. Even free speech has it’s limits; I’m not up on my constitutional law, but an argument could certainly be made for the tree-sitters posing a clear and present danger or even imminent lawless action, especially now that the courts have gotten involved and ruled that the tree sitters should leave. IMO, they by all means have the right to stomp around campus, distribute flyers, write open letters like this one, etc… content should be free, they should push the limits of where and how they distribute it — and they did! (kudos from a free-speech perspective) — but they’ve clearly crossed the boundary here.

So really, the negotiation comes down to a moral argument instead of a legal one. Again, I’d say the tree-sitters are blinded into a false dichotomy. What they don’t realize is that they could “win” the moral argument without keeping the trees. And this is where the negotiation could take place — hammering out some environmentalist agreement, limited mainly by their imaginations and staying within reason. Revitalize the Eucalyptus Grove (and make it safe — hell, with all the UCPD watching the tree sitters….). Negotiate a UCB effort to study some environmental problem. Get some money thrown toward rainforests (as someone suggested). Hell, transplant a few of these so-called old-growth trees to somewhere else on campus. Any number of possibilities.

And I betcha the University would come to the table on that one, because let’s consider the weapons for each side:

Right now, the tree-sitters have:

• Endurance
• A higher “moral” starting ground from the public opinion
• Scare tactics, threats
• Liability/Danger Threats
• Position (they’re called tree-sitters for a reason)

The University has, in broad terms:

• Money (ours, some of it)
• Influence
• UCPD
• A growing public opinion
• Time

What I’m suggesting is that the tree-siters give up their threats and position for money and influence. Everybody wins, noone gets hurt, the building goes up in a legal way, and the tree sitters win a moral victory.

As suggested, the tree-sitters will lose in the long run if they maintain their current strategy. The UCPD will attrition them out of the trees (ancient art of siege) and the people will shun them, and favor the resolution of the conflict in favor of the university and the public interest.

When they sat in the trees for a month, they had a much higher public opinion than they do now, after being in the trees a year. That would have made their bargaining position better, had they gone for the moral victory as soon as the legal one was even tipping to the side of the University. Now, the more scary they become, the more blind rhetoric they spew, the more trouble they cause, the more the public will come to distrust them. It’ll seem as though the tree-sitters are against progress, their moral argument shattered.

They should negotiate while the negotiation is good, because it’ll be a smaller and smaller victory as time goes on.

(Disclaimer: Personally, I started pretty neutral; I don’t like the idea of so much emphasis being put on throwing a ball around, but then again, it doesn’t affect me too much. The trees are nice, sure, but the rhetoric around them is kinda nuts. I was okay with a protest and tree-sitting until it became a problem (a line crossed a long time ago))

Most hillarious misheard lyric in a long time. At Teresa’s karaoke birthday party tonight, someone sang Toto’s “Africa”, and the lyrics that came up on the screen (that all can see) were, honestly:

Like a leper above the Serengeti

Never mind the real lyrics are “Like Olympus” — I heard it as “Like a leopard” given the Africa theme… but this case of a bad mishearing was public and hilarious.

(this post dedicated to Katie-in-Cape-Town)