Bierfaristo Blog

When Google first began killing Reader, I was very sad. But I saw the writing on the wall and began promptly looking for alternatives. After investigating, I settled on Tiny Tiny RSS, a project run by a curmudgeonly guy in Russia. He is famous in the support forum for savaging people that ask stupid questions without having bothered to do their homework.

TT-RSS requires some resources and a bit of technical expertise to set up. You need a LAMP server and you have to know how to manage permissions and start a daemon. But it really only takes a few minutes, if you have the necessary resources and you know what you're doing.

I had first set up an instance at Dreamhost and then later on the BCRC server. Dreamhost shared hosting isn't a good solution for tt-rss because they wont't let you run a daemon. You can run the updates out of cron, but it's not very satisfactory. The instance I ran on the BCRC server was OK, but I wanted to make it available to students and faculty using ldap, which uses http-basic authentication. This required some extra effort to offer public shared feeds and left Phil out, since he's not in the Department. He had switched to using The Old Reader, but it has been slow (or just unavailable). So last night, when he mentioned that, I offered to set up an instance on my new home server.

Since North Star wasn't using the computer I built with the students, I decided to bring it home and use it as a home server/workstation. I needed something since my laptop, which had been the repository of all my files and data, started failing this spring and the replacement laptop, provided by the university, is pretty unsatisfactory -- and doesn't have a large enough drive to store all my files. So far, I've been able to get Ubuntu to easily do anything I've needed to do.

It took about a half hour to set up tt-rss on the stock Ubuntu install. It wanted a php with curl, so I had to google up a command to do that. And I had to google up an init.d script to start and stop the daemon. And this morning, I found a problem: we were getting errors trying to subscribe to our shared feeds "XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity". When I had created the config.php file (which you do by copying and pasting from the installer, now) I had accidentally left in a blank line at the end of the file.

As I say, I'm very happy with tt-rss. The web interface is excellent and there is also a good client for android, which I was willing to pay for. I don't miss Google Reader at all.

I contacted my US Representative and encouraged him to support the Amash Amendment.

I urge you to support the Amash amendment to limit funding for rogue NSA surveillance of the American people. Allowing the tools of a police state to be constructed without check is an existential threat to our democracy -- a greater threat by far than terrorism.
I also urge you to push for immunity for Edward Snowden so that he can return to the United States and testify about the unlawful and unconstitutional activities of the intelligence services. This is a debate that we could not be having without his courage -- he should be acknowledged as a national hero.

I also contacted my senators to encourage them to use whatever influence they have to support passage of the amendment. The White House, of course, opposes it.

[...] we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our intelligence community's counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.

Actually, it seems to me that unconstitutional data collection based on using secret decisions of a secret court is what is not the product of an "informed, open, or deliberative process". Let's stop it in its tracks and then have the open debate.

Mi aliĝis hodiaŭ al la Aŭtuna Renkontiĝo de Esperanto kiu okazos ek de la 11a ĝis la 14a de oktobro. Mi dum multe jaroj partoprenis ĝin ĉiun aŭtunon, sed pasintjare mi sentis min tro malkontenta pri Esperanto ĝenerale por partopreni. Ĉijare, mi sentas min pli bone.

Dum multaj jaroj, mia patrino venis kune kaj ni dividus ĉambron en la "Inn" -- la hotelo ĉe Silvero. Ĉijare, tamen, ŝi ne volas plu vojaĝi tiel malproksime, do mi iros sole kaj restos en la junulara domo.

Mi proponis programeron: Ni Verku Rengaon. Mi ĉiam ŝatis verki rengao -- japanaj ligitaj versoj. Oni komenciĝas per "hokku" kiu similas al hajko: 5-7-5 silaba strofo. Sekve, aliiu verkas 7-7 silaban respondon kiu prenas unu econ el la antaŭa strofo kaj plilarĝigas aŭ amplekigas la aferon. Poste, aliiu verkas 5-7-5, kaj poste 7-7 kaj ĉiam oni nur rigardas al nur la lasta strofo por elekti ideon. Dum unu verkas, la aliaj babilas -- kaj kutime trinkas sakeon. Eble mi kaŝe kuportu sakeon por dividi dum la programero. Ĉe la fino, la verso emas zigzagi de unu afero al alia -- kaj ĉiuj tro ebrias por zorgi ĉu ĝi estas bona aŭ ne.

Mi alvenos vendrede sed la programo ne komenciĝas ĝis la meztago sabate. Mi demandas min ĉu ne indas organizi iun laboron kiun grupo povus kune fari dum tiu unua vespero. Se iu havas ideon, bonvole proponi.

There have been a flurry of good articles about the McDonalds/Visa Budget site. I particularly liked this one by death and taxes mag, but the funniest commentary is undoubtedly the article by Business Insider which says things like:

Yes, $20 a month on health care sounds low [...] in some places, like New York City, low-income residents may be eligible for free health care.

Get that? It just sounds low because Lucky Duckies might be eligible for Free Health Care!

$0 for heating is exactly what I plan on spending this month and for the rest of the summer and fall. Come winter, that cost will increase, but I, like the sample budgeter, can reallocate money from other areas, such as — if it comes to it — savings.

Because, you never have other expenses or have to pay more than $100/month for heating.

As for food and clothing, perhaps they aren't included in the budget because they aren't consistent expenses [...] you eat out more or less depending on available funds

Sure -- it's not like you buy groceries every week. And talking about going out to eat shows just how completely out-of-touch the author is. Maybe groceries aren't a "consistent expense" in their budget, but someone -- or a couple -- trying to live independently on $2000/month is trying to put food on the table, not wondering where they'll dine this evening.

Note that if you have a full-time job at Mcdonalds ($1105), you don't even have enough to meet the minimum monthly expenses detailed in the budget ($1206), let alone having enough for the multitude of things not listed, like food or gas or medicine or repairs. Or any spending money.

If you look at the graph in the death-and-taxes article you can see the productivity has gone way up, such that a minimum wage worker ought to be earning $22/hour. (A similar disparity exists with respect to median wages as well). But, as I said in my recent post Everyday Evil, the poor have been brainwashed to blame themselves. And to blame unions.

There are unions trying to organize fast food workers, like Fast Food Forward. As I've indicated before, I think we're going to see conditions for middle-class and working class people continue to decline until they rediscover the idea that organizing has value. For that reason, I have mixed feelings about raising the minimum wage. In the long run, it would probably be much better for the poor to organize and be part of a union than for the monied class to agree to bump up the minimum wage a bit, which will reduce the impetus that the poor feel to fix the problem. We can't wait for someone else to fix the problem. Organize!

Recently, I saw the movie Hannah Arendt. I found the movie gripping and very relevant to issues today. People have long recognized the sentiment that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing. The movie wrestles with that concept at several levels.

A concern I've had -- especially since the Iraq War -- has been the growing sense of responsibility for the irresponsible actions of my country. In 2007, I published a set of haiku Mia Lando about my growing distress that my country was doing things that I could never condone. At the same time, I have continued to pay taxes. I voted for Obama. Yet he has continued the same murderous practices as his predecessors. How am I not culpable? How are we all not culpable?

Hannah Arendt wrestled with how to judge the behavior of Eichmann, who was simply a good bureacrat. He organized transportation as efficiently as he could. He argued that the fact that the outcome of his efficiency was genocide was irrelevant to his culpability. He argued that it wasn't his role to think about that. They hanged him anyway, of course. Arendt described his inability to think beyond the surface of his actions as the banality of evil.

But Arendt also described how the actions of the Jews also contributed to the outcome -- and this another place where I saw parallels with issues of today. The Germans had created an environment in which Jews were made to feel hopeless and that no matter what they did, it could amount to nothing. This helplessess contributed to the inability of the Jews to organize and save themselves. I believe that the same thing has been done to the poor in the United States.

The poor have been convinced to blame themselves for their plight. They have been taught that, if they were worthy, the economy would reward them with opportunity and wealth. And they believe that if they have neither opportunity nor wealth, it is their own fault. But the wealthy and powerful have designed an economy that will leave many people out. And will continue to leave more and more out in the future. People blame themselves and fail to organize when they should be blaming the ones that have ruined and stolen their future from them. They fight among themselves for scraps when they should organize and take what is rightfully theirs from their oppressors.

Much of the movie was actually a bit tedious: at least an hour of the movie was devoted to closeups of the actress smoking. But watching a movie where someone was thinking was still a welcome change from most of what passes for cinematography in this day and age.

UMass has just completed interviewing five candidates for the position of Chief Information Officer. The Rules Committee was invited to meet with each of the candidates for an hour. We constructed a set of questions to ask all of the candidates:

1. What do you find attractive about this position?
2. What do you see as the main challenges facing public research universities seeking to maintain effective IT systems for research, teaching, and administration in a time of tight finances?
3. UMass IT support is currently highly distributed with some departments and colleges managing their own servers, services, networks, and wiring plants. In addition, administrative (and online educational) IT support is divided between the campus and the system office. How might you approach this? If you think greater centralization would be useful, explain how you might structure to attain it, and what incentives you might put in place to encourage it.
4. Much of the work involves teams, and even well-functioning teams have bad days. Can you give us an example of how you've led a team of your own or helped another team leader lead their team through bad days?
5. The UMass Amherst campus uses Free Software in many key functions and commercial software in others. How would you deal with the different demands posed by operating each type and balance managing both?
6. What has been your experience in working with faculty governance on the selection and deployment of a large-scale infrastructure change? What do you regard as the key aspects of working with faculty governance effectively?
7. What do you see as the most significant challenges likely to arise in the next five years for people running university IT operations? If resources were insufficient to do everything, what would be your priorities?
8. How do you deal with keeping up with all the technical and organizational changes that seem to characterize the world of IT today?
9. Do you have any questions for us?

It was illuminating to see the perspectives of the different candidates.

UMass looks attractive in part due to the ongoing strategic planning and the obvious role that IT will need to play as a partner in reaching those goals. And, probably also because, to people elsewhere, it looks like there is a lot of obvious low-hanging fruit here, that can be leveraged to build the organization the way they want.

I was encouraged to see that most of the candidates expressed a commitment to building strong partnerships with units of the campus. Some expressed genuine delight at the notion of working collaboratively with researchers to figure out how to support their enterprise most effectively — and not just looking for how to sell their particular vision.

I was a bit disappointed to see that none of the candidates had what I would consider a really nuanced perspective regarding Free Software. We had written the question in an intentionally vague way to see what we got. They mostly heard "free software" rather than "Free Software". (If you're not clear on the distinction I'm making, read the Wikipedia article on Free Software which summarizes the issues.) Some, after a bit of prompting, indicated they liked Open Source… Sigh… Thanks, ESR. Some recognized the importance of participating in the software development community, if you were going to play in that sphere. But for many the question is moot, because…

We were asking about software, when it's clear that, increasingly, all enterprises are being pushed to buy software-as-a-service. Office 365 backed up by Exchange, Abobe's Creative Cloud, Google Apps, etc. The question is becoming no longer what "software" the campus will run, but rather, what services (if any) will be provided locally. Personally, this is one of my greatest concerns: being able to provide services is intimately tied up with the ability to innovate. I see these as further steps toward the commoditization of technology: turning software into opaque services that people can't inspect, modify, or remix.

The candidates that I liked best acknowledged that a research institution will inevitably have units that need to support their own enterprises. The ones I liked least focused on the idea that there needed to be a "transition" while units that used anything other than mainstream software and services were brought to heel.

A key theme among the candidates was the need to build trust that institutional services would be both adequate and accountable. You create a false economy when you try to economize in providing services: people create their own which, in the end, costs the institution more.

I want to believe. I really do. But the single biggest thing I learned from the experience was what a tough job this person is stepping into. The different stakeholders for a CIO, both above and below, all have wildly different expectations — and there isn't going to be anywhere near enough money to satisfy all of them. It's not a position I would want to be in. In fact, you have a wonder a bit about someone who would intentionally put themselves into a spot like that. We have words for people like that in the English language…

We the People (aka "The United States of America") have been doing some really nasty stuff lately. We're flying robots around the world killing people extra-judicially -- that is, unconstrained by any national or international law. We operate a prison camp that is outside of either national or international law that has been detaining demonstrably innocent people for many years with no end in sight. Most recently, we have learned that, as many suspected, we are also running a surveillance police state that sweeps up, indexes, and stores vast amounts of communications data. We — you, me, all of us — are doing these things.

Our government claims that these are in our best interests. They argue that America has a special, "exceptional" role in the world. Foremost, they argue, they must do these things to "keep us safe". They say, "America is special" and ask that we all wave a little flag and look away while they do things to others that they would never accept be done to us. Are we OK with that?

Once upon a time, We the People were bound together in a shared mission. We had a shared fate and saw that we sank or swam together. That is no longer true. The United States has become a platform for the monied interests all around the world to maintain their hegemony. But We the People, who actually live here, have become incidental to their goals.

The United States of America is no longer ruled by We the People. It is ruled by the tiny coterie of people who control essentially all of the wealth and the apparatus of the state. They use the United States to maintain their interests throughout the world. The United States is still a democracy, but in name only: neither of the dominant political parties is actually aligned with the interests of the people who happen to live in the United States.

And any state that does not align itself with maintaining the interests of the extremely wealthy is labeled a "rogue state". Any country that tries to use its wealth for any other purpose finds itself pariah.

Edward Snowden, by revealing the extent of the police state that we have constructed, has provided a brief moment of illumination when it is possible to see where we are -- and where we are going. In return, the United States has made him a stateless person and is bending all its will to catch and punish him.

We the People just violated the sovereignty of Bolivia, in a brazen and illegal attempt to catch Snowden. The United States would never tolerate its Head of State being treated in such a contemptuous manner. Is that exceptionalism? Or just plain imperialism? We the People really need to decide.

I call on Barack Obama — if, as he says, he truly welcomes this debate — to pardon Edward Snowden and invite him back with a guarantee of immunity, to testify publicly before Congress and the American People. Democracy demands it. The failure to engage in this dialog in a meaningful way demonstrates the failure of Democracy in the United States. Terrorism is not the existential threat to our Democracy: it is our own police state.

When I first got interested in haiku, almost 20 years ago, I read a lot of books about haiku. I participated in some haiku writing circles and approached the craft in a focused way. Since then, I've continued to write haiku, more or less frequently, but I haven't done much reading about it.

Recently, when I was in Champaign, we went to an excellent book store that had several interesting books on haiku that I hadn't seen before -- or at least that hadn't looked at in a long time. One of them, talked about aware, a "Heian Period expression of measured surprise", which led me to look up mono no aware at Wikipedia. Or, again, to look at the page anew -- I think I'd read it before. It struck me that this is very much the aesthetic I often aim for with my haiku. Like this one:

post ol ŝtorm' pasas,
la suno ne revenas…
kaj nokto venas
----
after the storm,
the sun does not return…
and night comes

Or this one:

mallarĝa lito
en malgranda dormejo…
solecaj sonĝoj
----

a narrow cot
in a small bedroom…
lonely dream

Hence, I really appreciated it awhile ago when Stæld Lakorv ‏tweeted

@limako Viaj malgajaj hajkoj ja belegas. Malgraŭ ilia mallongeco, ili ja inspiras fortajn bildojn kaj sentojn.

That really makes me feel like I'm hitting close to what I'm aiming at.

Mi vidas lastatempe la bildojn de samideanoj kiuj studas Esperanton ĉe Nask kaj baldaŭ okazos la landa kongreso de la usona Esperanto-movado. Mi notis ke, laũ la tagordo, aferoj restas plimalpli kiel ĉiam.

Estas unu jaro ekde kiam mi demisiis de la estraro de Esperanto-USA. En decembro, mi elektis ne renovigi miajn membrecojn en E-USA kaj UEA. Ekde tiam, mi ne plu apartenas al la Esperanto-movado.

Mi tamen ankoraŭ iomete esperantumas. Mia agado iom velkis, sed ni foje kunvenas en mia loka grupo. Mi partoprenis grupon kiam mi vizitis Phil. Mi renkontis kelkajn internaciajn vizitantojn, Kalle en NovJorko kaj José Antonio en Bostono. Kaj mi verkas. Ĉiutage, mi verkas hajkojn en Esperanto kaj mi daŭre afiŝas ilin ĉe Twitter. Baldaŭ mi intencas eldoni plian libron de hajkoj. Mi ankaŭ verkas hajbunojn. Unu estas aperonta ĉe Beletra Almanako kaj alian mi poluras nun. Sed la movadon mi plimapli ne plu atentas.

Anstataŭe, mi dediĉas min pli al miaj profesiaj devoj. Mi partoprenis la gvidan komitaton de la fakultata senato kaj aliĝis lastatempe al la estraro de Amherst Media. Certe ne mankas farindaj aferoj kaj subtenindaj organizaĵoj.

Mi tamen legis ĉe Libera Folio, artikolon de Osmo Buller pri la daŭra membrofalo ĉe UEA. Kiel kutime, ĝi enhavas kaj la bastonon kaj karoton egale.

Manka kono de historio estas komprenebla ĉe novuloj, sed estas strange, ke foje eĉ iuj, kiuj partoprenas en la movado jam de longe, kvazaŭ perdis pecojn el sia memoro.
[...]
Ni esperu, ke la Estraro trovos la ĝustan ŝnuron, kiun ĝi tiru, por ke eksaj membroj komencu reveni kaj novaj aperi. Ni ne scias la nombron de la parolantoj de Esperanto en la mondo, sed ili estas multe pli multaj ol la membraro de UEA. Potencialo por kresko ekzistas, eĉ por rapida kresko.

Kiel verkis Istvan Bierfaristo antaŭlonge pri la Esperanto-movado:

gutoj malgrandoj
ja traboras graniton…
ĉu vian kapon?

Mi deziras nur la plej bonan al Mark Fettes kaj la teamo kiun li devas starigi por savi UEAon. Kaj mi deziras al ili plenan sukceson. Ĉu ili trovos ŝnuron sufiĉan por kapti kaj tiri min? Ni vidu…

Starting this fall, UMass has chosen to go with Google to provide most basic IT services to undergraduates: email, calendaring, apps, etc. For that reason, I've been holding my nose and going back to look at all this stuff since it probably will be the only sensible way to try to interact with undergrads. But what a nightmare. It just gets worse and worse and worse. I really dread when I have another google account I have to work with: how are they going to interact with one another.

I've been increasingly coming to hate Google anyway. I was sad when they killed off Google Reader. I don't like Google Plus any more than Facebook. (OK -- maybe a little more, but it suffers from the same problems: too many graphics mixed with sloppily edited text). But for years I've been using gtalk and have been very happy with it. Unfortunately, Google is trying to wreck it now too.

I started using Gtalk when it was a simple XMPP service. Or, at least, that's the only way I've ever wanted to use it. It works well -- I use it with Adium and/or Pidgin, so I can use Off-The-Record Messaging, which means that the messages are encrypted end-to-end (with some other cool stuff related to accountability with plausible deniability). Gtalk was great. But then Google didn't want to just provide a chat service. They decided to add voice and then video chats. Then they decided to add the "hangout" feature.

So I don't know the exact timeline here, but I think things really started to suck with the introduction of Google Plus. Google decided to add their social media framework and then twist everything around into arcane shapes to fit that somehow.

Why does this matter? If I try to open certain types of Google pages, it tries to include a Gtalk client on the page and these confuse Adium. And they appear at least on Google Plus pages and Gmail pages -- maybe more. But the pages/clients are different and have different controls scattered in several different places, with privacy controls off someplace else entirely -- its hard to tell what does what. Somehow, when I inadvertently signed out of Gtalk in Gmail, I then became invisible in Adium -- people couldn't see my status anymore. I began looking for settings and changed this thing and that thing and the other thing to no avail. Eventually, I tried signing in with Gmail to see what the settings looked like there, and it started working again. So I closed the Gmail window leaving the chat client signed in. But now, I seem to have added everyone who's in my "circles" so they show up as "buddies" in Adium. So, now I get notified every time Lawrence Lessig checks his gmail when his status becomes active for a few minutes. And then again when he leaves. Lucky me.

Companies act like people want integrated services that can do everything. In point of fact, I think people are much happier with clearly defined services that each only do a particular thing well -- and they want to have different services to do different things. So it must be that companies are doing this in spite of what people want because they think they can make more money this way. Capitalism sucks. Sigh…