It’s spring time and the weather is starting to beg me to go outside! I went for a bike ride this afternoon and quite enjoyed myself. It was almost like I was 10 again—I biked through the now empty yard where a house once stood (it burned down about 6 months ago) and watched kids playing in various parking lots (I live in an area with quite a few apartment complexes). A couple of neighbor kids seem to have gotten their hands on a couple of gas-powered remote control race cars. All of their friends were gathered around to watch the duel. That looked like fun!

I hope this finds all of you well. Good luck to those of you finishing off the semester at school. Endure to the end, eh?

So I just have to blog about this as it’s been on my mind lately. Dick Cheney, apparently, asked to come to speak at BYU’s commencement ceremony and the invitation was accepted. This event, in case you were wondering, is what inspired my previously published nursery rhyme.

You can probably imagine that I am not very keenly in support of this interaction between my university and the Vice President of Pre-emptive War. So, I signed the petition in hopes that the board will reconsider.

I have to agree with one of the petition’s signers, Alex Peterson, who commented: “It’s like inviting Darth Vader to talk to young Jedi Knights.”

I didn’t know that the world trade center blueprints were kept from public view until they were leaked this week. No wonder there’s been so much controversy over whether or not the buildings could have come down by themselves—scientists and engineers didn’t even have the basic facts available for analysis.

Apparently even FEMA got it wrong when they claimed the exterior wall and “possibly central core columns” were “freestanding”. Rather, as Steve Watson points out, they were not freestanding. As shown in the blueprints, there were “large horizontal beams [that] cross-connected the core columns in a three-dimensional matrix of steel.” Since civil engineering isn’t my area of expertise, it would be helpful to have an architect look over these.

That these blueprints had to be “leaked” to the public begs the question, “Why were they hidden in the first place?” I’m sure the copyright is held by someone (the Port of New York Authority?), but in such important considerations as this, you would think copyright would be a lesser priority. And I can’t believe that the details of a now non-existent structure pose a national security risk—are we afraid the bad guys will try to rebuild the towers per the exact specifications?

Rather than veil facts such as these in secrecy, it seems to me that far more good can come from using these blueprints to understand and reconstruct what happened on September 11th. If only my policy of transparency had influence in some sphere outside of my own thoughts and actions

Little Dick Cheney
picks at his brainy,
and asks how he could have known?

“No warning at all
that the buildings would fall.
Well, except maybe building 7.”

While little Don Rummey,
arms over his tummy,
licks his trillion dollar cone.

“So, we’ve lost a few dollars.”
But nobody hollers,
’cause tomorrow’s September 11.

And little George Dubya
won’t even troub ya
to throw him a legal bone.

‘Cause signing his statements,
means no abatement
to the power before his throne.

Conservative preacher Chuck Baldwin had some interesting comments in his column today. After noting the existence of the Conservative Exodus Project (CEP), Chuck writes:

It is past time for conservatives to admit that the national Republican Party has crossed the point of no return and has no intention of nominating a genuine conservative for president. The GOP has become nothing more than a big-government, no-borders, war party.

He goes on to endorse Ron Paul for President:

Congressman Ron Paul of Texas embodies everything the CEP is looking for… He would solidify the conservative base of the GOP and would be very popular among independents, libertarians, and even conservative Democrats…

Absent a Ron Paul nomination, true conservatives will have nowhere to go next year, except to a third party. In fact, it is my prayer that if Paul does not obtain the Republican nomination, he would lead the exodus to the Constitution Party.

It is time for conservatives to do more than hold their noses and vote for the “lesser of two evils.” It is time for them to vote their principles and their conscience. It is time to only support genuine conservatives, even if that means such candidates can only be found in a third party.

I’ve been sickened by the abuses of power and corruption manifest in the Republican party—a party whose underpinnings are supposed to be based on Christian values and moral character. From the stolen election of 2004 to the secret formation of a North American Union; from secret rendition flights to torturing U.S. and Canadian citizens; from allowing or orchestrating the attacks on the world trade centers to carrying out a war in Iraq; from presidential signing statements to leaking classified personnel data; from illegal wiretapping to undermining the justice system itself, this administration is in serious peril of sparking a revolution.

I think Chuck has called it right on the money—this time, the revolution starts with a third party. Will it be the Constitution Party in conjunction with Ron Paul?

I really enjoyed the Mountain West Ruby Conference in Salt Lake City this past Friday & Saturday. There was a great mix of uber geeks, web developers and language enthusiasts all in attendance. My favorite talk, however, was certainly the keynote by Chad Fowler. I don’t think it had a title, but if I could make one up it would be “My Challenge to the Ruby Community: Let’s Win Within”.

Basically, Chad expressed his thoughts and fears about what it means to have “won” in the professional world. Ruby is now a respected language with a “killer app” (Rails), and it’s gaining greater acceptance every day. But that same success, Chad argues, could become its downfall. The culture of our community that has both created and evangelized the Ruby language could become our undoing. For example, if we continue to pretend that Ruby is perfect or flawless, then we might open ourselves up to the kind of hubris that undermines progress. Ruby isn’t flawless—in fact, as the JRuby guys (Charles and Tom) pointed out, the MRI (Matz’s Ruby Interpreter) we’re all fond of can’t scale to multiple processors (it doesn’t have native threading) nor does it support Multilingualization features like Unicode that are standard in any serious web development langauge.

I was excited to see the progress of JRuby, Ruby on .NET, and Rubinius—these three implementations are important in that they not only offer hope for solutions to these problems, but they are actually forming a kind of collaborative network that’s helping to define the Ruby spec and move Ruby in to new territory. JRuby—the most advanced of the three new implementations—is capable of native threading and supports both Rails’ and Java’s solutions to the Unicode problem.

The Ruby community is definitely in flux right now, and along with Chad I hope that we can build a stronger identity by rising to the challenge within ourselves. Ruby can be so much better! Let’s put the temptation to hype Ruby aside and get to work again.

A friend of mine, Paige Harris, recently had her laptop motherboard give up on her. She’s owned a Sony VAIO for a while and with its passing, she asked a few friends what they’d recommend as a replacement. Since I switched to a Mac a couple of years ago, I’ve been extremely pleased with the operating system and how it has directly benefited my work flow, so I recommended it to her with very few caveats.

Since I promised Paige that she’d be impressed with what Mac OS X could do for her, I thought it would be a nice idea to highlight some of my favorite features.

1. Exposé with Active Screen Corners

   In Windows, the desktop is a static kind of place where clean-freaks keep nothing but a Recycle Bin, and the utterly unorganized keep everything (many enjoy this—I know).

   Using Mac OS X, however, the desktop actually became a useful place for me to store related things that I was currently working on. Because of Exposé—a feature that, among other things, lets you swish all of your currently opened windows away to “expose” the desktop—I could access my relevant “current items” as I would on a real-life desk top.

   Imagine the Windows alternative: you would have to drop what you’re doing, “minimize” all of your open windows to reveal the desktop, and then continue with your workflow.

2. Drag and Drop: The way it should be

   One of my favorite features is the way that Mac OS X takes full advantage of the Drag and Drop concept. While it’s true that you can drag a thing or two in Windows, most switchers will be utterly amazed by what they were missing once they have a short training session.

   For example, even some seasoned Mac users don’t know that the little “document icon” in all of their applications’ title bars is actually clickable and draggable! How’s that useful? Well, let’s say that you’re writing a Word document (OS X supports Microsoft Word for Mac). As you finish writing it, you realize you’d like to email it. How do you tell your Mail program, “Hey, just mail that thing I was working on 2 seconds ago”?

   In Windows, I would open my Mail application, create a new mail window, click the ‘attach’ button, and then search my files and folders for the document I was just working on.

   In Mac OS X however, things are very different. Instead, I click the “document icon” in the title bar, and drag it to Mail. BAM, I have a new mail message open with the file pasted in as an attachment. Same goes for pictures, videos, whatever.

   Combine this drag-and-drop ease with the fact that you can “swish” your windows out of the way (by moving the mouse to the corner of the screen) to reveal the desktop, or shrink them all so you can move your focus to another window (again, using exposé) this is a killer workflow feature in my day-to-day use.

3. Installing and Uninstalling Software

   I remember when I was a kid, I used to use DOS for most of the games and programs I used. Installing new software was not necessarily obvious—whether you had to use the INSTALL.EXE program on the disk, or just copy things over was 50/50. But uninstalling was a dream: just delete the directory (folder) it was installed to!

   Then I moved to Windows. Things started to get complicated. You couldn’t just copy things over from your friend’s computer anymore—that almost never worked. No, you had to have the original install disks or CD and use the install program. Why? Because the number of locations on your system that the new software was sent to was more than 1. Installing also meant that things like the Registry would have to be modified. In short, installing software on a Windows machine is messy—and that makes uninstalling worse. If you were lucky, either the software itself was shipped with an uninstaller, or the Windows system uninstaller was notified of the program and would provide some way to remove the software. On more than one occasion I resorted to formatting my hard drive and re-installing windows just to start with a clean system slate.

   What’s different about OS X? Drag and drop to Applications to install. Drag and drop to the Trash to uninstall. The first time I did that I was like, “That’s it? Wow. Why can’t Windows be like that?”

4. No Start Menu, No Floating Hierarchical Mess

   Everyone knows how to use the Windows “Start” menu: click Start, go to Programs, choose a folder, slide your mouse, let go of the mouse button. How often have you used anything other than “Programs” in your start menu? In my case, aside from the occasional need to access the Control Panel, almost never.

   In Mac OS X, you get a simple Dock—always visible and always open (unless you configure it to hide itself)—where all of your most common applications go. One click and your program opens.

   The interesting thing here is that nothing goes in this “one-click” applications Dock unless you put it there. Psychologically, this helps me more than the Windows solution—that is, in Windows, your most commonly accessed applications magically get chosen by the OS to go in the Start menu’s direct access list. Rather, when I make a conscious choice to put something in the OS X Dock, I know exactly where I put it and that it’s not going to disappear by atrophy.

5. A Hundred Other Things I don’t have time to describe each of my favorite features in detail, but let me list a few others here:
   • Crashes: If an application crashes (and they rarely do), it doesn’t bring the system down with it.
   • Application Preferences: You can access each application’s preferences consistently by going to the same place under the same menu! What an idea!
   • Cameras and Printers: “it just works”
   • Apple Warranty: my LCD monitor died last month, two days before the one-year warranty expired. The $800 piece of equipment was replaced free of charge.
   • Viruses and Spyware: I heard once that a Mac OS X virus actually exists. I haven’t seen it yet.
   • Unix Foundation: While most people won’t know or care much about this, the fact that it exists says a lot about design, engineering and security.
   • TextMate: The text editor that’s so good, some people buy a Mac just to run it.
   • Packaged Software: You get nice stuff like iTunes, iMovie HD and Mail with a new Mac.

So is there anything I don’t like about a Mac? Well, yes. They aren’t show stoppers, but here are a few things I’ve experienced that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone else:

• I once had a bad printer driver that consistently caused a kernel panic. Some drivers, it seems, are less supported than their windows counterparts.
• Like Windows, I do occasionally get an application to crash. Losing data sucks, no matter what OS you’re using.
• I can’t run Internet Explorer for my Web Development testing. Although I would never use IE unless forced to, unfortunately being a web developer means my job forces me to
• When I get more than about 10,000 mail messages in various boxes, the Mail application gets sluggish. Occasionally it crashes.

As you can tell, if you’ve read through the article to this point, I’m a sort of a fan. I wasn’t always thus. I used to think Linux was the coolest thing ever, and that I would never leave for a commercial alternative. But my switch to Mac OS has been two years old now, and I can’t imagine moving back. I don’t have much to say to deride Apple’s operating system. Conclusion: I’ve benefited from switching, and if they ask me, I tell all of my friends that they’ll like it too.

See this blog from The Big Picture.

Update: Looks like the list has since changed… Mac OS upgrade is #40, Vista is #35 now.

Connor Boyack wrote an interesting article based on Chuck Baldwin’s recent letter titled “Why do Latter-day Saints ignore Ron Paul?”

Connor’s take on it is basically this: we as Latter-day Saints have slowly gone to sleep, thinking all is well in Zion, when in fact our country is being ripped apart from the inside out. As a result of this complacency, we’ve sluffed our duty to support decent, honorable men or women in government. Not intentionally, of course, but by the way we’ve turned inward and stopped actively participating with the outside world, we’ve let bad men and women lead our nation.

I think that if we (Latter-day Saints) really knew how well our conservative views and moral standards jived with Ron Paul (just check his voting record or short bio—something no one else in Congress or the Senate can outshine), we’d happily be giving this man a shoulder to stand on. He’s the real thing.