Here is an update from Ron Paul on the "Audit the Fed" bill I mentioned a few weeks ago. We have about 39 cosponsors to the bill now which is very encouraging. I hope that if you also want to see increased transparency in government you'll take a moment to encourage your congressperson or senator by writing to them.
The bradblog posted today about an easy-to-use feature of the Diebold electronic voting machine: press the "Clear" button in the audit trail and you get a nice, fresh start on what happened on election day.
In addition, the software was discovered to have a "Clear" button which, when pressed, would actually delete the contents of an audit log without even asking for confirmation from the user. That, despite repeated federal and state testing and certification of the software which failed to notice the egregious programming flaws in violation of federal voting system standards requiring indestructible logs to track all system events... Bales admitted that his company had "not yet" corrected the problem, which was first implemented in the company's software more than a decade ago.
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I've been lurking on the Haskell mailing list recently, and occasionally asking a question or two. I suppose you wouldn't be surprised to know that I've found a treasure-trove of Haskell-related information and resources that I hadn't been aware of. Really though, the Haskell community has created quite a rich store of documentation for itself and others, perhaps more than I've seen in any other community (which is not to say that other communities do a poor job). Here I've compiled a short list of these new pearls I've learned of, along with any other links that I've found useful:
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The Mountain West Ruby Conference was a smash! We covered a wide range of topics that really made me pleased to be a part of the community (at least in attendance!) Some of my favorite presentations were Daniel Philpott's "Tiger Team" and Jon Crosby's introduction to Middleware (aka Rack). It was also really cool to see James Britt's "Wii" link-up and hear him play some wild MIDI instruments on his "air wand". I'm sure he'll be tuning it in the near future :)
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I like the idea of auditing the Federal Reserve: there's nothing wrong with transparency and we have everything to gain by taking a count of where our (U.S.) money has gone during this flurry of bailout and rescue activity.
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Haque’s Law: “As interaction explodes, the costs of evil [begin] to outweigh the benefits [of evil].”
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As a programmer, curiosity is most often a helpful asset that leads to a grander and more unified understanding of computer science. With Ruby, for example, I quickly learned about the usefulness of closures because the array methods like "map" and "select" were so helpful. Closures became a new tool in my toolbox--something I could apply almost everywhere.
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I'm experimenting with using Haskell for a 2D game project in one of my computer science classes. It will probably involve the Chipmunk 2D physics engine (haskell has a binding to it called Hipmunk). Hipmunk comes with a demo app called the Hipmunk Playground, and it is a wonderful little demo of OpenGL and Chipmunk in Haskell.
# Make the Hipmunk Playground application for Mac OS XMacPlayground: Playgroundutils/macosx-app PlaygroundPlayground: Playground.hsghc --make Playground.hsRunPlayground: MacPlaygroundopen Playground.app
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I am deeply touched by the stories of those who have been "disappeared" by the U.S. government over the last 8 years, and hope that what they have to tell us--those who have returned to tell us--can help guide us back to a place of responsibility and strength by example. I wrote last year to my senator about my Canadian compatriot Maher Arar who was taken from his family during a visit to the US and later tortured in Syria. Recently, another man who is not Canadian but suffered similarly, Mohamed Bashmilah, has published a short account of his experience. It begins:
From October 2003 until May 2005, I was illegally detained by the U.S. government and held in CIA-run "black sites" with no contact with the outside world ... never once having faced any terrorism-related charges. Since my release, the U.S. government has never explained why I was detained and has blocked all attempts to find out more about my detention.
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