No plan survives contact with reality

I just finished watching a webinar about Future Proofing Identity and Access Management. Lots of good thoughts, but one of the key things I took away, which was never explicitly addressed during the presentation, is that somewhere between 50-70% of the time was dedicated not specifically to IAM/PAM, but to the difficulties almost all organizations have in getting projects across the finish line.

Unclear scope, problems with team cohesion, lack of early buyin of all departments involved, resistance to change after a project is partway finished, etc., are all problems regardless of what technology is being addressed. Also critical is that most projects are not as freestanding as we would like to believe. A particular technology such as IAM/PAM is dependent on, for example, SSO, which might not even be involved in the IAM discussion because it's seen as separate.

There aren't any magic bullets to fix this, but it does suggest that no significant IT/IS project should ever be undertaken without continuous access to a resource with really good project management skills. Whether that's a part time person out of the PMO or that's a person from IT/IS with some good cross training has to be determined and will vary from organization to organization and in some cases from project to project.

I want to make a callout to @Guidepoint Security for a great monthly series of webinars on various topics. There's no way anyone in cybersecurity can be an expert in everything, or even most things, but we all benefit from having enough knowledge to understand what someone else is telling us.

Technical debt horror show

 Once upon a time, a university decided it wanted a computer, so it acquired an IBM 704. One of the first things to be programmed was the payroll system. I don’t know what it was written in but COBOL wasn’t available yet. It may well have been 704 assembly language.

Eventually that computer was outgrown, and the university upgraded to an IBM 709. The 709 had a different architecture from the 704, so the payroll system wouldn’t just transfer over. However, an emulator was available for the 709 that made it act like a 704, so the payroll system could be executed by the emulator.

Sometime later, the 709 was replaced by an IBM 7094. Despite being bigger, faster, and far more reliable, the 7094 shared the 709 architecture, so the university just rolled right along running the emulator that now made the 7094 look like a 704. People kept getting paid.

But change was in the wind. The next upgrade was to an IBM System 360/65. S 360 had different word length, different addressing architecture, different instruction set, different pretty much everything. What was to be done for the poor old payroll system?

Computer people are smart, so someone created an emulator for the S 360 that made it act like a - 704? Oh, hell no. Why would there be any reason to try to run code from a computer that was now 3 generations out of date? However, the emulator would make the S 360 act kind of like a 7094. So now the payroll process was to run the 7094 emulator inside of which a 7094 operating system could run the emulator that made a 709 act like a 704, so that it would accept the ancient 704 based payroll program.

Not all was rainbows and unicorns. This process was now so fragile that 2 computer science PhD students were drafted into spending a night every other week trying to sleep on the computer center floor, so somebody would be there to try to get the process back on track if/when it stumbled off into the weeds. Clearly it was time for a complete overhaul.

One would think that it was a “simple” matter of running the original code through a S 360 compiler and working out the kinks, but. There was certainly no program that ran on the S 360 which knew how to interpret 704 assembly language. Besides, by this time the original source code had been misplaced, and the entire kludge had depended for years on executing a 704 object module, which had survived on punch cards, inside the emulator stack.

The university put together a project team and reverse engineered the original program, then rewrote it, now in COBOL, and successfully got the new payroll system running in an *almost* current environment. You see, by this time the university was already looking into upgrading its 360/65 to a System 370, which introduced virtual memory. We will never know whether the original 704 code could have been coaxed to run when faced with page swaps.

The moral of this story is “Never do today what you can put off for 20 years,” because you *will* be able to make it work then. No matter how long it takes and how much it costs.

Wolves, sheep, and cybersecurity

 Cybercriminals are wolves. The rest of us are sheep.

The ubiquity of the internet has made it much easier for wolves to eat sheep at very low risk. This is causing an explosion in the wolf population.

Under pressure from predation, prey animal populations will gradually adapt or die.

Each individual sheep (person or organization) has two things it can put effort into. One is trying to protect itself from the wolves. This looks like organizational cybersecurity plans that actually reduce risk. 

The other is working with the rest of the flock to evolve new behaviors that reduce the risk overall. Compliance efforts show all the other sheep that an individual is doing its part to be a good member of the flock. This eventually helps protect the flock, but does nothing to reduce the risk to the individual sheep.

Will the flock adapt into new behaviors that reduce risk before most of the sheep get eaten and the rest turn into wolves?

Just remember that whether it's by the wolves or the shepherds, the sheep always get fleeced.

I'll take door number 4, please.

Cynics laws of thermodynamics cybersecurity:
0th: You must play the game.
1st: You can't win.
2nd: You can't even break even except under special circumstances.
3rd: The special circumstances don't exist.

Anyone who spends sufficient time reading commentary on cybersecurity will notice that many posts  fall into three major themes around the topic of "how to fix it:"

1) Do the basics and fix 90-99 percent of the problem. 

2) Attacks are continuously getting more sophisticated and we need to be as technically advanced as the bad guys.

3) We are facing a no-win situation and we have to do the best we can but not let it grind us down.

I enjoyed reading and happen to agree with all three articles, but regardless of how true they ring, they cannot all be simultaneously right. So what's really going on? Is our cynicism an accurate reflection of reality?

Certainly any single cybersecurity professional, or any single organization, cannot survive the wild west we currently inhabit. But regardless of how far away from broad concensus on solutions we may be, I think that everyone on the side of the white hats will agree that the current situation cannot go on. To continue borrowing metaphors from other disciplines, economist Herbert Stein observed that "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop." While we are never likely to attain a complete mitigation of security threats - after all, despite decades of effort, in the United States we accept around 35,000 traffic deaths annually as "normal" - history repeatedly shows that in the face of collective threats, populations will eventually achieve, through some combination of market forces and central control, a state we can put up with. The current situation cannot go on forever, and so we will make it stop.

Therefore, I think that all our common formulations are correct but incomplete. We will not solve our problems with a single approach, nor are we doomed to go on with the good fight in spite of knowing we will fail. Although our effort will go on for years and decades, the belief that must sustain us is that, in the fullness of time, the sum of the security efforts of all who prize order over chaos will enable us to take door number 4, then look back and say "I survived the bad old days."

JuxtapoTrainwreck

Well, that didn't take long. It is clear that attempting to come up with daily wisdom from combining wisdom sources did not survive contact with reality. Nevertheless, there are a number of findings which I can take out of the exercise.

 A Common Meditation for All Souls features posts cherry-picked from a large variety of sources. We only get the good stuff (at least in the judgment of Galen) with none of the froth. The common liturgy is structured to provide the entire contents of the 4 gospels over a 3 year cycle, and the bible is full of both wisdom and story. It's not always so easy to see what we're supposed to take away.

Sunday gospels (of which I have covered none) are dramatically longer than those for the rest of the week, because there is a base assumption that most people will only ever hear the ones that are read on Sunday. The most important parts, from a Christian perspective, are therefore placed there. This is a mixed bag; in some cases the most important parts are the parts that UU's would have the most trouble with, so I'm missing an opportunity to see just how thoroughly the traditions can be reconciled. On the other hand, it may be saving effort that would be wasted on trying to get wisdom out of what is actually doctrine, or even travelogue.

The gospels of Easter week are probably not the best place to start, because the problems listed last paragraph are just magnified during the most important liturgical week of the entire year.

Unless one is willing to uncritically accept whatever is in the bible as given, it's impossible to look at the gospels without also thinking about historical context. It also does some of the passages a disservice to show them dissociated from the surrounding content. I'm trying to glean wisdom and I don't want to do biblical criticism or defense. That almost inevitably means the passages from the Liturgy will be, at least part of the time, more rich with content than I'm willing to spend the effort to investigate. This probably isn't an effort that's worth doing part-way.

Extensive thought and analysis is incredibly time consuming so a number of the posts seemed pretty banal. Katy warned me.

I still think there's some value in doing something, but I haven't figured out yet how to try the next approach to it. But Juxtaposition is dead, dead, dead.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.(Reinhold Neibuhr)

Theism for Unitarian Universalists

Sermon given at the Unitarian Fellowship of Houston

Forrest Church, former senior minister at All Souls UU in NYC, who died of cancer a few years ago, frequently noted that when he talked to parishioners (or others) who said they didn’t believe in God, he’d ask them to describe what they didn’t believe in. Almost universally, he was able to say “I don’t believe in that kind of God either.”

He has not, so far as I know, put in writing just what the characteristics described were. I bet that we could pretty easily imagine the typical conversation, tho.

We could describe a god who was dictatorial in telling us what to do, limiting in telling us what not to do, and interventionist because he would punish us if we didn’t do as we ought. But more than that, for we can say those things about natural forces such as gravity, we would also describe someone arbitrary, in singling out the select, and capricious in behavior, so that we could never be quite sure where we stood. In fact, this is the god that William Ellery Channing called “a being, whom we cannot love if we would, and whom we ought not to love if we could.”

Fortunately, we are not stuck with only that god. Nor are we stuck with any other image which we have created or been given and have associated with the word “god.” Instead, what we have is the realm of what Forrest Church called “transrational.” This is the realm for anyone who cannot accept the “standard model” God, but who nevertheless remains convinced that there’s something out there which we don’t, and maybe can’t, ever understand, but merely experience.

Our question then becomes: what does this mean to me? And that’s where we need to decide what *sort* of something we believe in.

In its broadest meaning, "theist" simply means someone who believes that at least one god exists. This definition carries no overtones about the sort of god or gods implied. The currently common definition, which equates theist with "stereotypical Christian God" really didn't start to take shape until the eighteenth century, when Deists, who believed a supreme creator had wound up the universe then left it to run, distinguished themselves from those with more traditional views by calling everyone else a Theist.

If we look at the entire spectrum of gods across history, I think that, taking a very broad brush, we can divide them all into three categories. Objectified gods are those who are directly associated with something we know in the physical world. The one that is perhaps most familiar to modern Americans is Pele, the goddess of the Hawaiian volcano. Animal spirits, some of the Egyptian gods, and ancestor worship also fall in this category. These gods are generally "right here" in the sense that they coinhabit something we know from our physical environment.

Personified or anthropomorphic gods are those who look and act like us, only more so. Greek, roman, norse, finnish, hindu, and possibly Wiccan gods fall in this category. They generally have the characteristic of living "out there." From Mr. Olympus on, they've always had a place the rest of us couldn't get to.

The last group are the "diffuse" gods. These are the ones who are simultaneously both everywhere and nowhere. The great spirit of Emersonian transcendentalism, the universe is god or universe is part of god theories of pantheism and panentheism, the ultimate Gaea hypothesis, and the cosmic consciousness movement all fit in this class.

It is interesting to consider the Christian trinity, and note how the triumverate of father, son and spirit seem to correlate with the three classes. I find this interesting and suggestive but it may well be nothing more than coincidence.

Thus far we have talked about the physical characteristics. But what about their behavior? Any god, regardless of class, can be evaluated along two major axes. First, do they intervene in our daily lives, or they leave us alone, except, perhaps, for offering advice when we open ourselves to it? Secondly, are they stern and perhaps even cruel, or do they tend to the side of infinite love?

Now we have a toolkit with which we can describe any sort of transrational entity, whether it is one which mirrors one we have personally experienced a glimpse of, or one which is completely the product of our imagination. The concept of God is so broad that it can encompass any set of assumptions about the physical realm and still embrace something spiritual, welcoming, and amazing.

Instead of a stark choice between a god we cannot believe in and a non-existent one, each of us has a huge palette of ethereal colors to choose from as we paint our personal image. And that leads me to note that no matter how people have viewed the ultimate reality, they all seem to have shared some common beliefs about ethical behavior. As a universalist, I think that’s important, because it looks to me like no matter what we believe, we all have the power to live with wisdom. Wisdom comes from many sources who follow many different traditions, and we do ourselves a disservice if we ignore some bit of it because it also comes with ideas we find unappealing.

I say it doesn’t matter if you believe there’s a god, and it doesn’t matter what kind of god you believe in. It doesn’t matter if you use “god” as a shorthand word to refer to something fuzzy that you can’t really describe but need to have a name for. It doesn’t matter if you think the entire question of god is nothing but “nonsense on stilts.” What matters is that we each find our own spiritual center, and live our lives as a brilliant testimonial to what we find there. To let our light so shine out in the world, we must carry an image of the ultimate truth - of god - that is true to both what we know with our brain, and what we know with our heart. To borrow from another famous tradition: “Love your god with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:30-31)

Techbits

With all the news about the Heartbleed security hole, it's a good time for a review of how to create and manage passwords. The advice is particularly useful in light of certain reports that came out post-Snowden that the NSA really didn't work too hard to put backdoors into online systems because they could usually just guess the passwords people used with much less effort. Most common password? Still long time champion "password."

Nikon's latest Android based camera continues to blur the line between camera and cell phone. While it would be extremely painful for me to ever give up my digital slr and 40mm macro lens, I don't carry it around most of the time. Having a high quality camera that also just happened to make calls and let me update my fantasy football roster could be a real convenience. We will see what the market says.

Chromebooks have been the one bright spot in an otherwise horrible market for traditional pc's and laptops. The devices, running Google's Chrome OS, which is pretty much just a power infused version of the Chrome browser, are popular because they are light, (usually) cheap, free from worries about viruses, and extremely quick booting. Now it looks like there may be Chrome OS tablets as well. It will be interesting to see exactly how these compete with standard tablets running Android, Google's other operating system. Perhaps people predicting the eventual convergence of Chrome and Android are on to something.

If you have an old laptop around that's gathering dust, you may be able to trade it in for credit on a new one, perhaps even one of those Chromebooks. Just don't be the person who causes them to end the program. At least, not until I've had my chance to do it.

Juxtaposition 2014.04.10

We start today with the Common Meditation, to which my initial reaction was "yes, of course, everyone knows that." Certainly we are judged, both for our acts and our omissions, and we frequently are our own worst critics. In fact, we tend to be dismayed and offended by behavior in others which seems to show that they fail to criticize themselves when they ought. But this begs the next question: knowing that we live in a fishbowl where we will be weighed and measured, what should we do?

SF author Lois McMaster Bujold once had one of her characters note that "reputation is what the world knows about you; honor is what you know about yourself." It seems to me that today's gospel answers our question by telling us to know ourselves, to know what we are doing and why we are doing it, and to pick reasons that we feel, as our own critics, are good for us. In that way we can increase our honor, and the more we, for good reasons, honor and revere ourselves, the more capable we become in offering honor and reverence to those we surround ourselves with.

This hits rather close to home. I have what I think are excellent reasons for blogging. Since I also really enjoy every indication that someone else likes it too, I clearly also have some reasons that are rather more suspect. 

Common Meditation for All Souls

We are all of us judged every day. We are judged by the face that looks back at us from the bathroom mirror. We are judged by the faces of the people we love and by the faces and lives of our children and by our dreams. Each day finds us at the junction of many roads, and we are judged as much by the roads we have not taken as by the roads we have.(Frederick Buechner, 1926 - )

Revised Common Lectionary

Jesus said, "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.
"So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.
"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
(Matthew 6:1-6,16-21)

First, find a backpack...

The first episode of Dora the Explorer that I ever saw (out of an admittedly tiny set) involved Dora and Boots finding a magic stick. The stick, it seemed, would perform a trick, but first they had to take it across a snake filled river, over a wall, and to the top of the highest mountain. I know how they felt, staring at the river.

We have a computer. Well, we have several, but this is about one in particular. It's a Mac Mini that's 6 years old. The IRS and I don't agree on much, but we do both agree that after a computer is 3 years old, you ought to be thinking about replacing it. It's running OS-X 10.5 The current version of OS-X is 10.9 or maybe 10.10. Each plus-one increase in that .n would cost around $30-40, along with the attendent grief of doing a software upgrade. The problem is twofold: first of all, it runs slowly. Secondly, we can't install anything new because no modern software developer would ever consider actually being backwards compatible that far. So, this is getting to the point (or past it) where the pain of getting a new system becomes less than the pain of not doing it.

You can tell how long an IT professional has been in the field by how badly they shudder when they hear the word "legacy." Legacy is actually a code word which means "the old crap you have that won't play nice with what you want to get but which works just well enough that you don't want to scrap it all and replace it just yet." In addition to the poor old computer, we also have a variety of legacy peripherals:

• A printer we got from one relative that's older than the computer.
• A scanner we got from a different relative that doesn't work with the computer, but which does work with another computer which has its own set of problems and we also need to get rid of.
• A VGA monitor. You know, the old kind with the 15 pin connector. We used to have two, and I was pulling my hair out (what's left of it) trying to figure out how to use a "perfectly good monitor" with new computers that only have HDMI and that are cheaper than the monitor. One died, so now we only have one that won't work with anything new we get.
• Assorted pictures, music, recipes, and miscellaneous files loaded on the Mac, on a USB hard drive that's plugged into the Mac, and in various little pockets of cloud.

So, we are here, about to find a magic stick that will do a trick. But first we have to cross the snake filled river, climb the wall, and walk to the highest mountain. Should be a no brainer. Stay tuned for updates.

Juxtaposition 2014.04.09

Today we are given the opportunity to ponder the nature of teaching, or perhaps the difference between education and training. Our All Souls reading mirrors the flavor of what is probably the most common statement of the problem: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day, but teach him to fish and you teach him for a lifetime. Of course, teaching someone to fish would clearly be training - if you teach them to fish and then move them to the desert, you have wasted their time, and yours. But if we look at this as fishing for ideas, then the parallel becomes much more apt, for pupils can, we hope, learn to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions, rather than simply be repositories of preselected knowledge.

Today's Lectionary selection is one parable included in a list of several of them. Jesus frequently uses parables as a teaching method, and just as frequently the parables present us with a mental challenge in figuring out why he used that particular example. Often, for example, a good result occurs but it occurs because of actions which were taken for bad motives. This use of parables as a teaching tool resembles the Zen technique of teaching with koans, or stories which are designed to wear out the analytical capabilities of the mind and force it into a new frame where it is open to new ideas. 

It is interesting that the two outcomes of biblical criticism most known for being unkind to the mystical content - the Jefferson Bible and the work of the Jesus Seminar - both retain the parables in their attempts to winnow grain from chaff. The Jesus Seminar, in fact, tends to grant the most authority to those parables which are most obscure. This particular one, which seems to be straightforward, they claim to be not the words of Jesus at all, but simply a screed by Matthew on one of his hobby horses: the need to separate Christians from those who hadn't gotten the message.

A Common Meditation for All Souls:

The aim of education should be to convert the mind into a living fountain, and not a reservoir. That which is filled by merely pumping in, will be emptied by pumping out.(John M. Mason, 1770 – 1829)

Revised Common Lectionary:

Jesus said, "The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."Have you understood all this?" They answered, "Yes." And he said to them, "Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old." (Matthew 13:47-52)

Oozing full speed into the 21st century

It seems to be the time for technology changes. While all the cool kids have been purely in an MP3 world for their entire lives, I started collecting CD's in the mid '80s. Between Jan and I, there was a considerable collection. If we still had all of them, storing them would take about 2% of the floor space in our current house.

At least six years ago, probably longer, I decided that digital was the wave of the future and started ripping the CD's to .mp3's. Starting with the ones I like and Jan didn't, and with several iterations of "where do we store this music?" we finally have reached the end. As of Sunday every physical CD we had has been ripped, and all 4000 or so tracks now live in Google's cloud.*

Considering the entire process, we've gotten back about 15 cubic feet of space, and eliminated a fair amount of dusting. I think it's a win.

*Don't tell anyone, but there's still a backup copy or two on physical media in the house. I love the cloud, but I just don't, quite, trust it fully yet.

May you live in interesting times

The Oracle at Delphi

Joseph Schumpeter is credited with the formulation of the concept of creative destruction in a capatilist society, when "innovative entry by entrepenuers is the disruptive force that sustains economic growth, even as it destroys the value of established companies and laborers that previously enjoyed some degree of monopoly power derived from previous technological, organizational, regulatory, and economic paradigms." In a previous post I had noted that I would probably never again buy a Windows computer, but didn't look into the reasons which are making that increasingly likely. I'd like to rectify that by looking at some of the disruptive influences which are at work in the computer industry today.

It seems to me that the two largest factors at work are the explosion of smart phones and tablets as end-user computing devices, and the likely upcoming end to the period of Moore's Law.

The IBM mainframe is 50 years old this year. The mainframe, immortalized in movies from the period as being in the big room with the white coated computer operators, the blinking lights, and the spinning tape drives, was a huge, expensive, power hungry machine which centralized the power of computing in the IT department of large corporations. In the 1980's, innovation in the microcomputer space, culminating in the introduction of the IBM PC, facilitated the transfer of computing power to departments, and then individuals, first at work, then increasingly at home. These machines have continued to increase in capability and decrease in price, finally appearing to plateau out in the form of laptops with a minimum price point in the $250 range for new Windows-capable devices.

We are now seeing the next stage in this democratization of computing power. Smart phones and tablets, which a few years ago were expensive toys, have also benefited from increases in the capability of microelectronics to the point at which 7" tablets can now be had for $31.50. Admittedly these aren't very capable tablets compared to what else is available, but they are utterly amazing when compared to the landscape 10 years ago. This has the potential of putting what is really a rather powerful computer in the pocket of nearly every person on earth within the foreseeable future, with huge consequences in terms of availability of knowledge and access to education. This trend will only continue with the current emphasis on wearable technology, as initially seen in today's hot e-toy categories: Google Glass and smart watches.

This trend has been driven by three factors:

• use of inexpensive (relatively) low-power processors based on ARM technology rather than on the Intel x86 ecosystem
• rise of free open source software largely based on Linux and exemplified by Google's freely distributable Android OS, which powers around 80% of all portable devices
• the incredible spread of the internet and the phenomenon of social networking

These have both made possible and created a demand for a legion of always-on, easily portable and inexpensive personal devices. People, once exposed to this sort of power, simply will not continue to be satisfied with computers which are controlled by others, or even personally owned ones which they have to be at home, sitting up at a desk, to use. While there will always be some applications which favor workstations, such as photo or video editing, or heavy duty wordprocessing where a keyboard is a great advantage, almost all other usage can already be handled perfectly capably by hand-held phones or tablets.

The other major factor at work is the likely end to the march of progress driven by Moore's Law. IBM engineer Gordon Moore originally stated this "law" shortly after the introduction of the S/360 series mainframes. The law says, approximately, that our capability to put transistors on a silicon chip will double about every 12-18 months. This means that there should be steady and dramatic progress in the capability of the parts used to make computers. The law has been reflected in practice, so that, again approximately, the best possible computers are now hundreds of millions of times more powerful than what was available in 1962.

It is likely that this has led to a certain laziness on the part of software developers. After all, if next years computer will be twice as fast as this years, why put much effort into trying to make a program run faster on this years computer? Instead, we can put the same effort into adding extra features and attempt to use that to differentiate ourselves from our competitors. This viewpoint is not graven in stone. The Raspberry Pi, a $25/35 general purpose computer which was envisioned and originally created to get cheap computing power into schools, has been an incredible success with over 2.5 million units sold. This is at least partly because the Pi, which is based on a cpu chip that most techies think is horribly out of date, is managed by a non-profit institution. The Raspberry Pi foundation, in an effort to minimize cost as a primary goal, has focused on tuning and tweaking the software available for the Pi to make it as efficient as possible instead of just turning out a new model every year. Since developers and hobbyists are comfortable that the basic hardware will be around for more than a few months, they are much more willing to invest time and effort into optimizing their software. Concurrently, the low cost and huge user base are enticing many new people to experiment with the system, leading to a virtuous circle in which each new advance encourages more innovation and development.

If, as many believe, physical limitations mean that Moore's law cannot continue beyond one or two more generations, then it will become increasingly widespread to both innovate as a way of finding better solutions, and to write good code to make the most of the hardware we have. Both of these should tilt computer solutions toward using hardware longer and getting more value out of it, with the corollary benefit of reducing waste.

We are at or near an inflection point where we have ridden the old computing paradigm about as far as it will go, and need to embark on a new model. Exactly what that will look like 10 years from now is far from clear. It is a rule of paradigm changes that it is impossible to predict what a new paradigm will look like until after it's in place. But however this develops, it is pretty well guaranteed to be an exciting time.


It doesn't give me much help in trying to figure out what to buy next, tho. 

Juxtaposition 2014.04.08

Walt Whitman is attributed as having said "If you done it, it ain't bragging." 

Today's meditations share the concept of having to tread the narrow path of true humility while still getting things done. Both seem to say "don't take particular pride in what you have accomplished, but don't hide your light under a basket either." Do the best you can and embrace ownership of what you've done, whether amazing or banal.

A common meditation for all souls:

Humility is often confused with the polite self-deprecation of saying you're not much of a bridge player when you know perfectly well you are. Conscious or otherwise, this kind of humility is a form of gamesmanship. If you really aren't much of a bridge player, you're apt to be rather proud of yourself for admitting it so humbly. This kind of humility is a form of low comedy. True humility doesn't consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you'd be apt to think of anyone else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your own hand well than when your opponents do.
(Frederick Buechner, 1926 - )

Revised Common Lectionary:

Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, "It is written,
`My house shall be called a house of prayer';
but you are making it a den of robbers."
The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, "Hosanna to the Son of David," they became angry and said to him, "Do you hear what these are saying?" Jesus said to them, "Yes; have you never read,
`Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
you have prepared praise for yourself'?" 
(Matthew 21:12-16)

A spot of brightness for a gloomy day

Phalaenopsis sp.

It's overcast and drizzly, but looking at this I can pretend otherwise. Under halogen kitchen lights, with camera mounted flash, 40mm macro @~4"

Juxtaposition 2014.04.05

When we bought our house, it came, at no extra charge, with a stand of bamboo. I'd say it was a large one but that's not true. It only seems large when I'm trying to eliminate it.

All of the stalks got cut down last year, so this spring's project is to dig out all the roots so the stuff won't come back.  I've been working on this digging process every Saturday since January, because it's amazingly difficult to dig up bamboo, particularly for one who's days of being in shape are long gone. However, the remaining clump base is probably only about a third of the size it started with.

We tend to think that projects should move forward in a linear manner - if I put in an hour of work, I should get an hour worth of progress. The bamboo, unfortunately, does not understand this logic. Sometimes progress is straightforward. At other times, I may go for days or weeks without seeming to accomplish much. At those times it's easy to imagine that the task is simply impossible. The last few weeks have been one such period: there's been a large root mass that was somewhat loose, but I didn't seem to be able to get enough leverage on it to get it out, despite trying every weekend. Today, the tide turned. Once the foot long piece in the photo got pried out from below the soil surface, other clumps quickly followed. My faith was rewarded and my doubts vanquished. For now, anyway!

From the Revised Common Lectionary for April 5, 2014

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.

“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”

And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry outto him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:1-8)

From A Common Meditation for All Souls

Despair and hope are inseparable. One can never understand what hope is really about unless one wrestles with despair. The same is true with faith. There has to be some serious doubt, otherwise faith becomes merely a dogmatic formula, an orthodoxy, a way of evading the complexity of life, rather than a way of engaging honestly with life.

(Cornel West, 1953 - )

I don't believe that an interventionist god decided to cut me some slack today. But I do believe that wisdom is all around us, if only we will be open to receive it. Perhaps I was just lucky. Perhaps after reading these, I was just that much more willing to push harder on the crowbar, or that much more careful about where I put the bar tip under the root mass. I don't know. I only know that when I was digging bamboo, these excerpts made sense.

Juxtaposition

Recently I made the comment that the biggest festering wound in Unitarian Universalism is our inability or unwillingness to find a way to resolve the long standing cold war between those who find inspiration and solace in some parts of the Christian tradition and those who have no use for it whatsoever. As a universalist I strongly believe that all spiritual traditions are part of a bigger whole, each contributing their individual colors to the tapestry of wonder which is life.

It seemed to me that if I truly feel this way then I ought to be willing to do something to try to heal the wound, so I'm going to try an experiment. For so long as the spirit moves me I'll be posting, each day, the current gospel from the (Episcopal/Lutheran) Revised Common Lectionary, along with the same day's meditation courtesy of Rev. Galen Guengerich, from All Souls UU in New York City. The RCL is exclusively of biblical origin, while the UU meditations draw from a wide variety of relatively modern authors.

My intent is to conclude with some comments about how the parallel readings strike me. I have no real idea how it will work out; from statistical principles alone I would expect a few times where the two are strongly parallel, many where they don't seem to have much to do with each other, and a few which may be directly contradictory. I do not intend to discuss these passages each day in detail, and if I did intend to, I doubt very much that I could. I imagine articles could (and in the case of the gospels, probably have) been written about each. Nevertheless, I hope that the exercise will provide some insight, and with luck, occasional serendipity.

From the Revised Common Lectionary for April 4, 2014

Jesus said, "I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. 

"If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." (Luke 6:27-36)

From A Common Meditation for All Souls

Talk about it only enough to do it. Dream about it only enough to feel it. Think about it only enough to understand it. Contemplate it only enough to be it.
(Jean Toomer, 1894 – 1967)

My initial reaction on reading the second selection was that it was about moderation and balance. After consideration I don't think that's right; it seems much more focused on moving beyond contemplation and into action. It was particularly appropriate for today because I was actually thinking that it would be more sensible to launch this experiment a bit in the future and this convinced me to go ahead and "just do it." Yes, we need to talk, dream, think, contemplate, but if we're not careful those can be traps we don't leave. If anything, this suggests that we should be a bit hasty on the trigger.

If the second selection is, in however small a way, about moderation, the first points up an area in which we ought to be all-in, all the time: loving. There is no contemplation required to decide if a given situation will be enhanced by our love, no consideration of cost and benefit, no allocation of resources. We simply must love, now and always, and we must love everyone and everything, even, and perhaps especially, those whom we least regard as worthy of it. In fact, if facing a situation where we are asked for some, we should not limit ourselves to what is asked but give even more. Lois McMaster Bujold once had a character describe marriage as a very strange kind of bargain: in one, you give up everything in order to get everything. This selection simply extends that point of view to be universal.

It is, of course, easy enough for me to talk - doing is an entirely different subject.

Double Take

400 block Heights Boulevard

If "Did I Really Just See That?" and "But Is It Art?" had a love child, it might look something like this. Part of a new exhibition of sculpture along the Heights Boulevard median, it definitely caught my attention as I was driving home yesterday. IMNSHO, the sight lines are best if you are driving north.

I'm left wondering if the maker had a purpose other than engendering surprise. Is it a comment on the futility of religion? The triumph of entropy? The collision of dissimilar cultures? The endless inventiveness of humans when it comes to extracting meaning where none was intended? Are we even in Kansas any more?

Overcast, about sunrise, 55mm. Photo edited online with Pixlr.

Update: Per Katy Carpman, the full answer is here. Much more practical - but I think my ideas are more fun.

But it's so (cute/ interesting /beautiful /unusual /rare)!"

A long time ago, in a land far, far away, people who liked experimenting with computers either had a couple of machines that ran Windows, or a couple of machines that ran Apple's OS X. They took up lots of space, generated plenty of heat, and were usually kind of noisy. Then things got exciting. Over the last 2 or 3 years there has been an absolute explosion of new hobbyist computer boards, any one of which easily has more power than the computers I was using when I first started working, and for a thousandth of the cost, or less. To put icing on the cake, you could put dozens of them in a drawer, and run 20 with the power of one incandescent light bulb.

People who have inadvertently provided me with an opening, or those dealing with my Christmas list, frequently find themselves hearing about a bewildering wilderness of microcontroller/microprocessor boards with names like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or Beaglebone Black. Since I am certain that all my friends and relatives are just as eager to understand this world as they are to appreciate the relative merits of Cryptanthus or Neoregelia, I thought it would be worthwhile to post this link to a rather good overview of the most common hobbyist microprocessor boards.

Of the boards named in the article, I currently have two Arduinos, one of which is controlling the water level in the fountain at Finch Estates, plus 3 Arduino clones, two BeagleBone Blacks, one of which monitored the greenhouse temperature over the winter, an Arduino Yun, and a Raspberry Pi. Plans call for the Yun to run sprinklers in the front yard and monitor the front door security camera, one BBB to run the backyard sprinklers and greenhouse monitoring, and the other BBB to act as a backup server. The Raspberry Pi is supposed to end up being a DVR for over-the-air TV, but it might also end up being the security camera driver for the back door. The Arduino clones will probably eventually find their place running landscape lighting, or potentially measuring soil moisture in the beds so the sprinklers can be run at need instead of on a fixed schedule.

There’s also a continually changing list of boards I'd like to get, but extolling their varied virtues will have to wait for another post. Just remember, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many examples of <insert your favorite hobby collectable here.>

Whirlpool

You'd think that installing technology to save $120 a year in water would be a no-brainer. You'd be wrong.

Anyone who has owned a house knows about toilets: every few years you have to replace the stuff inside the tank. It was that time, so I made a trip to da 'Po (Home Depot) for parts. You wouldn't think there would be much in the way of new technology for toilets, but this time I ran across some flap valve replacements which are intended to allow you to either do a "half-flush" or a "full-flush" under the presumption that some visits ... introduce more of a load into the toilet bowl.

We're environmentally conscious, and water conservation is an area of increasing focus, so I'm thinking "sure, why not?" I picked up a Fluidmaster model, since i've had decent luck with their fill valves in the past, and brought it home.

These units replace the standard flap valve and chain with a large unit that controls the water that flows into the bowl and a handle that goes either up or down, so it has a cable instead of a chain. Although it's not exactly a simple process, it did go in well enough, and after adjusting seemed to do the job pretty well. Unfortunately, it is a rule of home maintenance that any non-trivial project will require at least 3 trips to the store, so I should have known better. It only took Jan one test before she said "but the handle sticks out too far away from the tank!" It is true that with this model there is about a quarter-inch between the outside of the tank and the back of the handle. I hadn't, until it was pointed out, even noticed that. I'm not sure whether this is because males and females are different physically or psychologically, but the point is moot: this handle simply would not do.

Back to the store to look at other alternatives. There is another manufacturer who makes a slightly different model. It looked like the handle clearance would be smaller, but their design has a split lever with a short piece and a long piece instead of a solid lever which moves in two directions, so we had to evaluate the aesthetics of that. It looked like it might be ok, so that box came home, where we discovered that all the parts related to the flush valve were there, but the fill valve was conspicuously missing. I only wish it had been conspicuous to me when I was looking in the box at the store.

By this time it was too late in the day to consider doing anything else, since this is the only toilet in the house. That gave time to do some online research and consider things overnight. Online reviews are mixed, and it's not clear that using these valves is any more effective than just putting a brick in the tank, so the end result was to go back yet again to get the old standard model flap valve and fill valve. It's in, it works, and the handle snuggles right up to the tank. Saving water will just have to wait for another day.

Now all I have to do is make trip number 4 to da 'Po to return the ones that didn't make the cut. Of course, one of them has to dry out first...

Going off the rails on the crazy train

This lovely specimen is named "Lunatic Fringe." Given some of the things happening in our lives recently, it seemed entirely too appropos.

Cloudy bright, midafternoon, f8 @ 1/125.