A Short Holiday Wish

A short Happy Holidays for all of you (like what, two of you?) who checks this blog - my family and I arrived at our holiday destination safe and sound, and a good Christmas day was had by all. So despite challenges of weather, airlines, distant family relations, etc., all is good this weekend. So celebrate, for how often can one say that all is good for a weekend?

When Good Computers Go Bad

Boy, do we take these pounds of silicon for granted. I mean, we walk in every day, flip the switch, and expect it to work perfectly. Daily, without fail. I mean, we don't work that way - from injuries to daily aches and pains, it's hard to claim that humans can flip a switch and be ready to go. I mean, in all honesty I need at least 10 minutes to wake up!

That is, of course, when it does work. But now I've been staring at my work computer for thirty minutes trying to get Dreamweaver 2004 to start up. I flip the switch, it winks at me with the familiar start-up screen, and then shuts down without warning. As I am a web designer, this is perhaps the single most important tool I have - from writing code to managing uploads, Dreamweaver does the heavy lifting for me. So now that it isn't working, I'm feeling pretty pissed.

I mean, I'm using all in my bag of tricks to get it back - restarting the computer, restoring prior settings. I'm up to reinstalling from disc, a place most veterans loathe to go. And what can this be traced back to? An installation of new software? An iffy start-up or shut down? A specifically-created Macromedia virus? No idea. The program was up and running perfectly right until I shut it down on Friday.

It's at moments like this when anthropomorphizing your computer makes sense. This program problem seems pretty whimsical. Perhaps there ARE gremlins in the machinery. Perhaps the computer is jealous that I get a few days off this week while it sleeps. Perhaps it wants a Christmas gift. But for me, I'm slightly clueless on fixing it, and entirely clueless on the cause.

So please think good thoughts for me while I court my computer all over again...

SCO Saves the Day?

Okay, there is a headline I never expected to write! But stay with me for this twisted bit of logic. On NPR this morning, there was a report that a U.S. Senator from Michigan was calling for the seizing of voting machines in a nearby Ohio county. Presumably, this is because he feels there is evidence that the machines (electronic voting machines, I'm assuming) might have been tampered with. And of course, this highlights the problems with receipt-less voting machines - how do you prove fraud, especially without records or a whistle-blower?

Then it struck me, the recent furor over SCO and Linux might provide the answer. And here's how: in response to SCO's claims that Linux appropriated sections of SCO's Unix while failing to provide examples, many third-party developers have built utilities which compare the code of a Linux build against an available SCO Unix build. Much like the "Find" feature on your computer, it scans the separate codes looking for and comparing similarities. At least that's what the developers promise.

So why can't the same kinds of programs be used or developed for catching voter machine tampering? I mean, you could just have the program scan the suspected machine against a "control" machine that hasn't been tampered with, and then examine the inconsistencies? While it may not tell us what a true vote count SHOULD have been, it would give us a quick and handy way to see if machines have been changed after the factory. Of course, it also doesn't cover conspiracies from the factories themselves, but nothing is perfect.

So developers unite - help show whether we can trust our current voting technologies. Oh, and while you're at it, could you graft a receipt printer on from the local grocery store - there's no reason for an ATM to be more sophisticated and user-friendly than a voting machine, is there?

Requiem for a Museum

Over the past week, courts in Pennsylvania have ruled that the Barnes Foundation may vacate their current location in suburban Marion and move instead to "Museum Row" in downtown Philadelphia. While this may not ring any bells for the general public, I greeted the news with sadness.

In case you are unfamiliar, the Barnes Foundation is/was a public art school founded by Alfred Barnes early in the last century. Barnes believed in the educational value of viewing fine art. So after amassing one of the finest Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early Modernist art in America, he organized his home into a personal museum/art educational venue. His interesting, if sometimes quirky, combination of objects (such as traditional Amish ironwork next to African masks next to Cubist Picasso) was designed to engender discussion amongst visitors. Notoriously anti-art establishment, he left control of the museum after his death to Howard University with the stipulation that the arrangements of the works could never be changed. Unfortunately, the current board has decided to break his will once and for all and have now been given permission to move the entire collection into a new building near the other art institutions of Philadelphia.

While this will certainly cause the foundation to sit on more secure financial grounds, I mourn the loss of the original space and viewing experience. Since I came through the fine arts university system, one would have to define me as a product of the "art establishment." And I have to admit that I approached my first (and now looks like only) visit to the Barnes Foundation with skepticism - I mean, how important can artwork placement be, anyways? I thought it more likely that Barnes was a coot. However, I found the visit to the Foundation a moving experience, both because of the quality of much of the work and the placement of the work next to each other. One of my favorite memories was viewing two Picasso portraits as they flanked a small collection of African sculptures; never had the connection between early Cubist works and traditional African art been clearer in my mind. While I still believe Barnes might have had a screw or two loose (there are many interesting biographies available on him), I cannot deny the fact that his museum wields power over the viewer, a power often found lacking in more "traditional" art institutions. Thus I am quite saddened that the current Barnes board has gone the easy (and presumably more profitable route) of moving the art at the expense of the Barnes experience instead of finding a way to preserve both the art and it's context.

Doomsday Scenario

Well, spent part of the weekend doing laundry and trying to catch up on classic movies out on DVD (man, gotta love the library); this week's selection was "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Considered a classic of SF films, it chronicles the arrival of the alien Klattu and the robot Gort to our planet as they try to dissuade us from pursuing our violent, nuclear-armed ways. Rather enjoyable, and considered daring at the time for it's anti-atomic weapons stance amid the Cold War, McCarthyism, and similar paranoid national stances.

However, something at the end struck me as odd. The message that the friendly, if stern, alien delivers is to disarm or be destroyed. Klattu's explanation is that the advanced races of the universe disarmed and given enforcement to a band of police robots like Gort; at the first sign of aggression, the robots destroy the offending planet to a burnt cinder. Thus, no one can risk being aggressive and everyone lives in peace.

Fine and good. Except, is that the same logic that drove the arms race during the Cold War, one of mutually-assured destruction? But hey, you answer, their system is better because it doesn't rely on human frailty - the cold logic of the machine makes the judgment. But haven't we learned that machines are also fallible, and that cold logic alone can often fall short when reality is involved? I mean, isn't that the point of movies like "Dr. Strangelove" - that a machine's black-and-white judgment (or, to keep with the theme of the blog, on-off binary judgment) often magnifies a small error (like a broken recall code receiver) into a huge error (global destruction). Think about it - would you want to give your computer the power to obliterate the world? Gives "screen of death" a whole new meaning.

New Program, New Opportunities?

Hello all - I'm now testing a program I've just heard of called MacJournal, a virtual diary program that will allow you to keep multiple journals on your Macintosh. Why is this important to you? Well, one of the handy features is a publish to Blogger button, so hopefully this will encourage more regular, and more interesting, entries from yours truly. No promises, of course...