Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote a beautiful letter of good will to the American people yesterday. In spite of any ill feelings and suspicions that people harbor against him, I think he is an honest man who is trying to make his country and the world a better place. That’s more than I can say about our political leadership.

I find it interesting that while his previous letter in May was addressed to President Bush specifically, this letter is addressed to us (or, if you don’t want to count me as American, to you), the people of America. His reason for this distinction is laid out clearly: he is aware that the people who govern us in this country are not properly representing us as they swore to do. And he goes to great lengths to show that in spite of everything we hear from our government and media, there is a common ground that can be sought after if only there were honest dialogue between our two countries. Perhaps he has conceded that efforts to negotiate with our largely corrupt government is futile.

It strikes me that Iran, more than any other nation will—like the mother of an illegitimate child—bear the responsibility of the political chaos and social upheaval we started in Iraq. According to General Scheid, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld actively discouraged the top US strategists from planning the restorative “phase 4″ of the war. From the word “go”, we never intended to stay in Iraq and clean up after ourselves. Although I find this disturbing, it seems to align well with what others, like the BBC, have identified as a plan to govern by fear by means of an indefinite “war on terror.”

In these troubled times, I wish President Ahmadinejad the best and hope for more sensible dialogue between our two nations. Thank-you, President, for extending a hand of good will.

The past year has been an education in discernment. I used to trust the big-name news services much more than I do now. But things have changed, and I think it’s been a good experience over all. I’d like to share what I’ve learned.

• On many important subjects, Americans don’t usually get the same story as the rest of the world. For example, Newsweek published an article, “Losing Afghanistan” last month (October) which was printed everywhere but the U.S. I’m sure there was a lot of political pressure that went in to that decision, considering the GOP was about to lose congress to the Democrats.
• According to Reporters Without Borders, an international watchdog association, Freedom of the Press in the United States ranks 53rd in the world. President Bush’s “War on Terror” is often used as a pretext to suppress truth, citing “national security” as his wild-card reason.
• American News seems to me to have deteriorated in to a kind of entertainment. I’m not a big TV watcher these days, but shows like Planet Mancow and Hannity and Colmes are ridiculous. They don’t look for new input, they look for ways to mock and make fun of people who hold opposing points of view. I urge anyone who wants to get more of the truth to visit websites such as TV News Lies and What Really Happened. I also highly recommend this roundup of untruths: “What Else is the Mainstream Media Lying About?”

With such a poor record of late, I wonder how Americans can with such naivety claim that if it wasn’t reported in the mainstream news, then it must not be true. For example, on a recent Planet Mancow show, there was a “debate” on the subject of whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. The primary evidence used by Fireman Brian Harvey (in support of his belief that it was not an inside job) was that if 9/11 were an inside job, then we’d have heard about it on the news—and we haven’t, so it wasn’t.

I’m sorry, but you have to find other ways to discern the truth these days. The media companies aren’t doing it for you.

I was fascinated by a recent “Math Lesson” on glumbert.com called A new way to multiply. It shows how to use the intersection of lines to basically “count” your way to the solution. This was great for small digits like 1 and 2, but as I practiced the method it became apparent that it wasn’t a practical way to multiply large numbers.

So I extended the method to be able to multiply large numbers and / or large digits. For a number of reasons, I think this method is better than the standard method of multiplying. And for practical reasons, I think it is better than the line-intersection method:

1. Unlike the standard method, you can easily check your work for errors at any step along the way.
2. The grid is easier to visualize than the standard method, thus it may be possible to perform larger multiplications in your head.
3. Because this method extends the line-intersection method of multiplication, it can be easily taught as a “more advanced method” once students grasp the concept of counting intersections.

Click Here to Watch Me (1.5 MB Quicktime)

This is a minor update to the Column Comments plugin. We discovered this morning that some changes to edge rails had caused the plugin to fail. Note: This will not work on Rails 1.x. Use the older version 1.2 of the plugin (linked below) for non-edge Rails.

What is the Column Comments Plugin?

The ColumnComments plugin makes the necessary modifications to ActiveRecord to allow for an optional :comment in your table migrations. In addition, it includes the same feature provided by the AnnotateModels plugin (rake annotate_models), but also includes the database-stored comments in the auto-generated header.

See my original post for a full explanation. Download version 1.2 here.

Some of our users at FamilyLearn have wondered about what Amazon has to do with FamilyLearn, and how our new software system is going to hold up under high demand. While most people usually associate Amazon.com with books, software engineers like myself are starting to think of Amazon as a bag of tricks and solutions to common web development challenges. For example, here is a brief overview of our plan, using Amazon:

• Using Amazon’s S3 storage servers, we have unlimited space for all of the pictures and stories that FamilyLearn users upload and send while working on their projects. The data is stored in a fail-safe system so that we’ll never lose anyone’s pictures or books. The final, press-ready PDF files that our system generates are also stored on Amazon S3 so that users can download their finished product.
• We’ve also started using Amazon’s EC2 computing servers. This gives us a way to increase our computing power on-demand when traffic gets heavier. For now, we haven’t implemented the “on-demand” part of the plan, but we can turn on more servers manually when we see the need.

The technology behind iMemoryBook and Pyxlin is a fairly complicated process. Being able to see a book “published as you go” is a wonderful thing, although it comes with some cost. As it turns out, converting what you see on the internet in to a printed and bound book is a fairly intensive computational task—and in our case, we’re doing it on-the-fly. For those of you familiar with such conversion tools as laTeX, ImageMagick and pdftk, you can imagine what it must take to respond to each web action by converting it and presenting it back to the user as a visible image in the browser. We look forward to optimizing the system so that it will be more responsive in the future; but, for now, we’re quite happy with the way it’s turned out on EC2.

Being election day and all, I thought I’d just make a note that I am very interested in the outcome of the many decisions made today. I wish that I could be more involved—and I’m getting better at that within my sphere of influence—but as a non-citizen, I do not have the right to vote in this country.

I recently read an open letter from Mike Krause, a war vet. He writes:

That nearly 80 million people didn’t make it to the polls that day [in 2004] was a special punch in the gut to my friends and me, because we were watching the election results from deep within Iraq’s Sunni Triangle. Some Americans heard political commentary that night- we heard mortar fire.

Our country is at war. A 60% voter turnout isn’t good enough. … Today, you can make your voice heard.

If I could vote, I’d vote for the Constitution Party. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference immediately, but anything I could do to help send the GOP packing would be worth doing. More than ever, we need honesty and transparency in government. The Republicans under Bush have not been honest, nor have they been transparent.

Update: If you’re interested in the issue of vote fraud, or if you just want a good laugh, check out The Problem with E-voting Machines. Thank goodness for comedians. Without Jon Stewart, I might develop a tumor just thinking about all of the threats to our liberty.