I continued upstairs, chilled to the bone, in spite of the muggy heat of the building which hadn't seen electricity for at least 2 months. My little room wasn't much better off than the rest of the building. The desks were gone, papers all over the place . . . but A. was there! I couldn't believe it — a familiar, welcoming face. He looked at me for a moment, without really seeing me, then his eyes opened wide and disbelief took over the initial vague expression. He congratulated me on being alive, asked about my family and told me that he wasn't coming back after today. Things had changed. I should go home and stay safe. He was quitting — going to find work abroad. Nothing to do here anymore. I told him about my plan to work at home and submit projects . . . he shook his head sadly.


I stood staring at the mess for a few moments longer, trying to sort out the mess in my head, my heart being torn to pieces. My cousin and E. were downstairs waiting for me — there was nothing more to do, except ask how I could maybe help? A. and I left the room and started making our way downstairs. We paused on the second floor and stopped to talk to one of the former department directors. I asked him when they thought things would be functioning, he wouldn't look at me. His eyes stayed glued to A.'s face as he told him that females weren't welcome right now — especially females who 'couldn't be protected'. He finally turned to me and told me, in so many words, to go home because 'they' refused to be responsible for what might happen to me.


Ok. Fine. Your loss. I turned my back, walked down the stairs and went to find E. and my cousin. Suddenly, the faces didn't look strange — they were the same faces of before, mostly, but there was a hostility I couldn't believe. What was I doing here? E. and the cousin were looking grim, I must have been looking broken, because they rushed me out of the first place I had ever worked and to the car. I cried bitterly all the way home — cried for my job, cried for my future and cried for the torn streets, damaged buildings and crumbling people.

Mars perihelic opposition

Right now, Earth and Mars are just 56 million km apart. Every night as I cycle home from the office, the planet hangs straight ahead: a brilliant orange light, magnitude -2.9.

Mars and Earth are currently on the same side of the sun, so in the sky Mars is more or less at the anti-solar point, the point opposite the Sun. Look to the east in the evening after sunset, west in the morning before sunrise. Since it's on the same side of the Sun, that means Mars is "full" — it has phases just like the Moon. Mars is also currently at the closest point in its orbit — the perihelion. That's why it's so big and beautiful.

Apple

Macromedia have just announced Studio MX 2004, which is a set of web-related authoring tools: Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and of course Freehand which always seems to be limping one version behind.

The remarkable thing is that Apple have devoted a huge chunk of screen real estate to this announcement on their home page. You'd swear you were at Macromedia.com (which BTW has just had a small design upgrade and is looking quite sharp).

There are different ones. The key difference is that the Catholic Ten skips the one about graven images, which I note prohibits making a likeness of anything at all. That explains all the Catholic iconography, I guess. In its place it splits the commandment about coveting into two. The first Hebrew commandment is an introductory paragraph: not a commandment at all. But the second Hebrew commandment covers both graven images and worshipping other gods.

Moses was possessed of the furies. Let's be honest: he was a nasty piece of work. And anyway he broke the first tablets. The replacement tablets (Ex. 34) are a little different. Four Commandments relate to feasts and ceremonies. One states rather frighteningly that "All the first-born are mine." There are no moral Commandments at all: they relate to religious practices only (with the possible exception of the last one: I just have no idea).

And here are the Ten Commandments of the Ethical Atheist.

Religion and the United States

How can the constitution guarantee separation of church and state, while the Alabama's chief justice insists that Christianity is the bedrock of the law? Roy Moore was given until Wednesday last week to remove his marble monument to the Ten Commandments from outside the Alabama supreme court. Christian activists have been descending from all over the country to defend the monument, some wearing T shirts that read, "Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder."

This is a fascinating article that attempts to explain why Americans act so crazy.

Here for no particular reason are three of my favourite songs...

• Aimee Mann, I've had it
  Like most amazing things
  It's easy to miss and easy to mistake
  For when things are really great
  It just means everything's in its place
  
  


• Townes van Zandt, To live is to fly
  Days, up and down they come
  like rain on a congadrum
  forget most, remember some
  but don't turn none away.
  Everything is not enough
  and nothin' is to much to bear.
  Where you been is good and gone
  all you keep is the getting there.
  
  


• Cowboy Junkies, Bea's song (River song trilogy: Part II)
  John says I look at the moon and the stars
  these days more often than I look into his eyes
  and I can't disagree so I don't say nothing
  I just stare on past his face at Venus rising,
  like a shining speck of hope hanging over the horizon

Civic Creche

A child behavioural worker says she noticed odd traits of several children emerging from the Christchurch Civic Creche and says that therefore Peter Ellis is "guilty as sin." Unfortunately the issue isn't really whether these children were abused, but whether the trial was fair. Even a guilty person is entitled to a fair trial. The reasons being 1) obviously you need a fair trial to establish guilt and 2) without prosecutors obeying strictly defined, impartial rules, anybody could become the next target, and we would live in a police state.

And that brings me to retroactive legislation (example). I think there has to be nothing more immoral than this. A woman was recently convicted for having sex with a 13 year old boy some years ago. It turned out that this wasn't strictly illegal due to an ommission in legislation. "No problem, we'll just change that." How do I predict what is going to be considered immoral in twenty years time? My own morals are not much use as they tell me that eating animal flesh is a disgusting, dirty habit, yet most people disagree.

Earthquake

The entire South Island of New Zealand was shaken by an earthquake last night at 12 minutes after midnight. Here in Christchurch I felt it as a very slight swaying motion, as if overcome by a little queasiness. I was facing southwest and felt it as a left-right motion, I think. I should really have paid more attention. The S waves oscillate at right angles to the direction of travel. Since the source was the southwest of the country, the left-right motion would fit with that.

At magnitude 7.1, that's the size of the 1929 Arthur's Pass earthquake or the 1968 Inangahua earthquake., and the size of earthquake we should expect about every ten years. The Inangahua earthquake recorded ground-shaking of 0.61g (i.e. 0.6 of the force keeping us pinned to the ground). That was the strongest ground-shaking recorded in the world at the time. The earthquake hit just after 5 in the morning, and locals recalled their beds being tossed around their bedrooms, windows exploding, furniture falling over, ceilings failing, houses collapsing off their piles, fencelines sagging on the ground from the wire being stretched. In Kahurangi National Park, there are rivers dammed into lakes by this quake, and valleys with a series of slips along the entire length. The 1929 Arthur's Pass quake caused a massive (60 000 000 m³ landslide from what is now called "Falling Mountain."

Here by the way is a chart of latest world earthquakes. Each integer in the Richter scale represents an energy increase of 32 times. And here's the US Geological Survey's report of the earthquake. Finally, here are the world's ten largest quakes.You can see that they all lie on the Ring of Fire.

Flash Minigolf

Cool!

Politics and science

A website alleging wide-ranging meddling by the Bush administration in scientific agencies and policies, with examples ranging from lead levels and AIDS to ecological problems at Yellowstone National Park.

Scientific American: Self-Repairing Computers

"By embracing the inevitability of system failures, recovery-oriented computing returns service faster". Interesting article listing five ideas for improved reliability.

Massacre of the peacemakers

The United Nations chief envoy to Iraq was killed yesterday by a massive suicide truck bomb that blew his office in Baghdad to pieces. Sergio Vieira de Mello was among at least 20 people killed in the bombing and the death toll was still climbing last night.

The wing of the UN headquarters that housed Mr Vieira de Mello's office was obliterated. Where it once stood, a concrete roof was hanging precariously from the side of the main building. This was the day the American occupation of Iraq turned into hell. Mr Vieira de Mello and his staff, not part of the occupation forces but here to help the people of this ravaged land, were crushed by falling concrete and blown apart in their offices.

No one can remember an attack on the United Nations as devastating as this. Everybody in Baghdad is wondering who will be next. An immense cloud of yellow dust was still rising when we got there half an hour after the bomb went off, so powerful was the explosion. The truck was parked in an alley next to the wing housing Mr Vieira de Mello's office, fuelling speculation that it was a deliberate assassination. Or else, the target may have been the UN in general.

What came before was nothing to this. The daily rocket- propelled grenade attacks on American soldiers. The bombing of the Jordanian embassy. None of them killed so many people or sent a shiver of fear down the spine quite like this. "Why did they attack the UN?" one Iraqi asked angrily. "The real target is in front of their eyes." He gestured angrily towards the American soldiers trying to hold back the crowds.

US admits cameraman was shot dead at close range

The American army admitted yesterday that its soldiers killed an award-winning Reuters cameraman. Mazen Dana, a Palestinian, was shot dead by a US tank crew at close range while trying to film outside Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison on Sunday, after a mortar attack on the prison.

The Americans claimed that the soldiers mistook the camera Mr Dana was holding for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher - a claim that was immediately rejected by journalists who witnessed the killing.

"We were all there, for at least half an hour. They knew we were journalists," said Stephan Breitner of France 2 television. "After they shot Mazen, they aimed their guns at us. I don't think it was an accident. They are very tense. They are crazy. They are young soldiers and they don't understand what is happening."

The Mental State Called Flow

If you lose yourself in the task, you're not interrupted, you know what you're doing, you're relaxed, everything zings . . . I used to feel this at work. I felt more productive and I wrote good code. But I haven't felt like this in a while. I think it's been an unintended victim of our open-plan office environment.

Fascinating reading.

Daniel Goleman, in The Meditative Mind:

The key elements of flow are (a) the merging of action and awareness in sustained concentration on the task at hand,
(b) the focusing of attention in a pure involvement without concern for outcome,
(c) self-forgetfulness with heightened awareness of the activity,
(d) skills adequate to meet the environmental demand, and
(e) clarity regarding situational cues and appropriate response.

Beyond good and evil

Good and evil are moral models we learn to apply to people from a very young age. We are taught these concepts with fairy tales. The message is reinforced by TV, movies, and politics.

But it's not a very good model. It leads us to say "Person X did action Y because he or she is evil." Not exactly very insightful.

A much better model is to cast aside this dichotomy and think of people as independent agents with a variety of interests. Each interest may be more or less selfish or selfless. Each interest is also informed by that person's belief system. A person's actions are a result of weighing these interests.

Set up a home network and play a war strategy game like Age of Empires against a friend, partner or loved one. They become the enemy yet they are not evil. They merely have a different set of interests.

Politicians cast a group as evil when that group's interests are different from and in conflict with the politician's group, and when that group's actions are sufficiently alien that they appear to be incomprehensible, without a little analysis and understanding.

So a suicide bomber has two interests: the Cause and personal survival. The cause is a selfless interest and personal survival is selfish. The suicide bomber is performing a selfless (albeit heinous) act.

There's a difference though between understanding and accepting. You can change what you can understand. If you cast a behaviour as evil all you can do is attempt to suppress it.

Peace

You know in school when you're like 10 and someone hits you so you hit them back and they hit you for hitting them and you have an epiphany that perhaps this could go on for ever. Or where you argue with your sister and you discover that if you don't let her have the last word (or she discovers if she doesn't let you do so) then once again it could go on for ever. Fundamentally somebody has to do the mature thing and endure the injury without responding. Then peace ensues. This idea is so banal that you probably got bored and wandered off in the middle of that paragraph. But why can't people apply it?

Enter the Middle East peace process. We always know what will happen. Things will settle. Then somebody will do something provocative and all deals are off. Peace is not something that happens of its own accord in between wars. It is something you struggle to achieve. You don't struggle with guns but rather with words and your conscience. Or maybe people simply don't want it: they download a trial version, evaluate it, and find it doesn't suit their needs.

The Israeli government knows that some Palestinian extremist is going to attempt to disrupt any agreement or negotiations by bombing something so why get on the train when everybody knows they will be jumping off at the first stop? They are doing exactly what the Palestinian extremists want them to do. I can't help thinking that the Israelis don't want peace at all. They just want the appearance of working towards peaceful resolution. I might be wrong but I'd like to hear a better explanation.

The bombing threatened to derail the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan. In a first move, Israel called off the planned handover of the West Bank towns of Jericho and Qalqiliya to Palestinian control. The handover was to have taken place later this week.

Here in New Zealand, Maori groups appear to be pushing for full ownership of the New Zealand coastline. The government is scrambling to argue that the people of New Zealand own it, and Maori have customary rights to parts of it. Maori groups are saying "that's not good enough — we want European-style freehold."

Here's my opinion.

Land ownership is a necessary evil, about as sensible an idea as fleas fighting over who owns the dog. I want to own my property, but it is only a few square metres of land of no use for any purpose other than what I'm already using it for (living on). The further from a city centre you go, the less meaningful it becomes. Ownership of mountains is a good example. If you are standing on top of a mountain, you don't own it: it owns you. That's why you keep a wary eye on the weather. Ownership of high country farms: I see this as stewardship. You take care of that land for the people of New Zealand and for the benefit of the land itself. Ownership of coastlines: it's just ridiculous. I don't support anybody owning these including freehold titles that are already assigned (although in these cases customary rights might apply). So I disagree with the Green Party on this. But to be sure (and to over-simplify) I'm further left than they are.

This is a remarkably divisive issue as a lot of progressive white New Zealanders who have previously supported the Treaty process are finding they can't go along with this. Some Maori groups are destroying the widespread goodwill of the rest of the country. Some might argue that there is no such thing as Pakeha goodwill, and you only get what you fight for. But I think those who paint the world using only the two shades of light and dark, right and wrong, good and evil are dangerous fools who should be locked up for the sake of the safety of the more morally sophisticated rest of us.

Why don't we debate who owns the earth's core or who owns the sun, moon and stars? And maybe the air?

Also I object to being called a fucking pakeha.

Yesterday I was driving home listening to the strangest thing on the Concert Programme. It was like aliens had landed on the car roof. And the volume levels were fluctuating so wildly I kept swerving into the oncoming traffic. I discovered what it was: Pentes by Denis Smalley, who is or at least was apparently from New Zealand. In fact he studied at Canterbury thevery university I wasted all those years. Sure OK so I'm not exactly a sophisticated electroacoustic connoisseur (hell I don't even know the difference between that and musique concrete — is it the same thing) but hey it was pretty cool. Surfing some more I found this site also cool: no type, where you can download stacks of music. So much so that it's hard to know where to begin. But try this.

Chastised

Mark had the following to say . . .

Come ooooooooooooooooon Matt.
What's all this whining about Terraform not being a
market leader? You can't say you're worried about this
fact when you don't subscribe to the rules that
capitalism is based on. You didn't write Terraform to
fleece people of as much money as possible. You
created it, because, like me (even if you don't like
to admit it), you're a techie, and your satisfaction
comes from the actual work involved in the final
product. That's why we'll always be programmers
employed by someone else. When it works well, and does everything you
want it to, the fun has gone, and you just use it as a tool. So no more
complaining about the fact that it's not recognised as the best. It may
be the best to people like you and me, but we don't spend money on that
sort of thing. We write it for ourselves. The people who buy your
product are buying it because they don't have the
enthusiasm/ingenuity/curiosity to create their own version. They just
want to make some web forms that they can sell to their clients. They
are the ones into capitalism. Remember the beauty of it. The elegance of
good, functional, clean code. That's what makes it worthwhile. Not an
extra X dollars income every month. If you want to go that path, you
have to license your product to a marketing company who want to sell it.
But that'd make you a ho. No offence intended. I may be rambling, and
please don't be offended (it's been a long day), but after reading your
blog post, I felt I had to respond (from a techie perspective). I think
you should write some truly, truly useless software, that you could
never sell, but which does some funky stuff. It's the only true remedy.
Ok, rant complete.

And he added the following in a follow up email (in response to a colourful remark I made about his grandmother, or at least that's how I remember it) . . .

I don't mind if you blog it, I am always happy for my message to
reach the people, messiah in hiding that I am. However, I would like to
say that I think 'whining' was the wrong word to use. I think your term
was 'opinion'. Much better, and if you blog the piece, please state that
I have since rescinded my usage of the term 'whining'.

Oh and mirabile dictu he has updated his blog.

Ike onTap

Isaac of "I don't blog I only write novels" fame has in fact been maintaining a blog — in his exact words "I've now blogged 16 straight days(including tommorrow)." Well watch out because it's techy so put on your peril sensitive Elvis-replica shades and click on.

Anyway I often find there's a somewhat spooky correlation between what Isaac's working on and what I'm working on so I must keep an eye on that. Isaac's backyard cathedral is his content management system, Tapestry (which BTW I think has to be the best name out there for a CMS). He has recently spun off a framework project based on his work on Tapestry. The framework is called OnTap and provides an app construction environment as well as a suite orf tags, functions and what not to leverage.

The thing that interests me perhaps the most about this is that he has implemented an event model. It has been a year now that CFMX has been available and these event models are starting to mushroom. Mach II (née Fusebox MX) uses one; Isaac uses one; and I've been working on incorporating the functionality into Thrive, another CMS. It's a really nice way of keeping two separate processes that may or may not be mutually interdependent from getting too entangled in each other's code. A process does something and declares to the worl what it's just about to do and then what it's just done. Other processes listen out for that and do something in responce. The first code neither knows nor cares whether any other processes heard. I was watching Jamie's Kitchen today which has been surprisingly entertaining. And it's a bit like that — each chef yells out periodically, "I'm whipping the cream" or "I'm taking the bread out of the Aga" (that's my new pretentious word for oven) and anybody else listens and if they care they do something in response, like prepare the garlic butter.

It's so blindingly simple. Why are we in the CF community only starting to do this? Slow learners?

OK so I can't provide a proper evaluation here of what Isaac's done because what with the cocktail parties and the openings I just haven't had the time. Also I don't want to frighten well over half the reading audience too much.

Here's the thing. It's a fundamental truth of capitalism that having a better product does not make you the winner. Marketing folk would probably suggest the quality of the product wasn't even relevant. Somebody like me, that's the natural way I compete. Make it better, rather than market it better. I'm pretty darm sure TerraForm is the best and most powerful forms product available for ColdFusion. I've never seen one with near the feature set it has. But that's not enough. The market doesn't care. I'm too hung up on features. Sell Sell Sell.

Do you ever get the feeling that the entire Universe is against you? Perhaps it's not just you — perhaps it's everybody: entropy grinding everything down to a level, featureless plain. Sometimes I just run out of energy and I'm left staring at the things I'm involved in (TerraForm, NZ Tramper, photography) which I think are good but everyone else could apparently care less about and I wonder why bother. Entropy: every time you create something you will destroy something more complex than that which you created. And whatever you do create will be ignored. So don't bother. Sometimes I go on trying to work in the face of these truths. Sometimes I can't. Life is unbearable sadness on top of guilt and loneliness on top of abject misery added to lots of hard work with little reward. And the only answer I ever seem to come up with is to work harder. You see? This is why I shouldn't post what's on my mind.