I work at least 8 hours a day on my MacBook Pro. Around noon I start to notice that my left hand is uncomfortably hot and I’m tempted to either shut things down (and waste time eating, for example) or go on for little bits at a time with my hand moving on and off of the keyboard.

Today, I found a better solution. It turns out that I’m not the only one with this problem, and in fact, a kind soul in Germany has developed smcFanControl2 which lets you turn up one or both of the fans in the MacBook Pro so that you can pre-emptively get rid of that heat. I was so pleased that I immediately donated 4 euros. Thanks, eidac!

I just read Gustavo Duarte’s essay, “Lucky to be a Programmer” and had to re-post some of it here. Rarely to I call a blog post an essay, but this one is so personal and so fun that I wanted to elevate it a bit:

Few things are better than spending time in a creative haze, consumed by ideas, watching your work come to life, going to bed eager to wake up quickly and go try things out. I am not suggesting that excessive hours are needed or even advisable; a sane schedule is a must except for occasional binges. The point is that programming is an intense creative pleasure, a perfect mixture of puzzles, writing, and craftsmanship.

My brother, Chris and I have often felt this “intense creative pleasure” and I think that’s why we are now designers / programmers. It’s such a fun job! Duarte goes on:

This analytical side is what most people associate with programming. It does make it interesting, like a complex strategy game. But in most software the primary challenge is communication: with fellow programmers via code and with users via interfaces. By and large, writing code is more essay than puzzle. It is shaping your ideas and schemes into a coherent body; it is seeking clarity, simplicity and conciseness. Both code and interfaces abound with the simple joy of creation.

All I can think of to say is, “Thanks for finding words to describe how I feel!”

I first heard about Three Cups of Tea from my mother-in-law’s book group. I felt a little interested in the subject matter, but the cover didn’t really turn my head. After having read this article in the New York Times, however, I am amazed that I missed the opportunity.

To summarize, Greg Mortenson has been building schools in Afghanistan that have done more good for the people there, and have provided more safety for us here than all of the bombing in Iraq. In the words of the article’s author:

So a lone Montanan staying at the cheapest guest houses has done more to advance U.S. interests in the region than the entire military and foreign policy apparatus of the Bush administration.

Mr. Mortenson’s work reminds me of the work of Douglas Johnston in the region as well. How I wish our leaders in government would be as farsighted as these two individuals!

I hang out on irc.freenode.net like many other programmers in the open source community. Lately, I’ve noticed that the #haskell channel has exceeded #rubyonrails in participation and “attendance”:

With all of the talk of parallelizing languages and multi-core processors lately, I think this can only be a good thing.

One of the things that gives me a lot of confidence in Haskell is the enormous academic brainshare invested in the language. My gut tells me we will be seeing a lot of innovation and stable, well-engineered programs coming from this area (i.e. more of the same, but at higher volume). It kind of reminds me of the Ruby community a few years back—there is a big emphasis on experimenting, playing, implementing new ideas, etc.

In other words, Haskell has matured to the point where I think it may have finally succeeded.

My brother, Chris does web site design and marketing. He recently built a beautiful showcase website for his company, splitfive. If you’d like to see some fine website design, or if you have your own website in mind, by all means, check it out.

The FISA bill I’ve been talking about recently (usually with regard to the retroactive immunity issue) passed yesterday in the Senate. I can’t believe Senator Hatch can be so anti-American (he voted “Yea“). There is now only one means of stopping it, and that is to take it to the courts to prove it is unconstitutional. From the ACLU today:

Hey,

Did you know that Congress has signed away our right to privacy?

It’s true! By making FISA law, the President and Congress have made it legal for US agencies to spy on our text messages, email, and phone calls to people outside the US, without any cause, reason or warrant. Does that sound like a right to privacy to you?

Help the ACLU overturn FISA by sharing your message of support now!

http://www.aclu.org/fisaaction

I signed today.

Intel CEO Andy Grove published an article at The American called, “Our Electric Future” in which he suggests energy independence is not only the wrong goal, but actually impossible to achieve in an increasingly global economy.

He suggests, rather, that our goal should be “energy resilience”—meaning we should be focused on shifting to electricity as our primary “energy source” since it is possible to create electricity from many different sources (e.g. wind, solar, diesel, oceans, etc.)

From a software engineering perspective, this makes a lot of sense—it’s like building a properly decoupled system where each layer can act on its own. For example, software engineers know that the “model, view, controller” paradigm is a useful one because it is important to be able to represent data in multiple ways—as charts, or as graphs, for instance, as well as in a spreadsheet or on printed paper. In Grove’s terms, this is “data resilience”, meaning that the data can be used to render multiple views without restructuring or re-writing the models.

Sounds good, Mr. Grove! Let’s work toward energy resilience (get your car converted to electric? ).

I hand-delivered the following letter to Senator Orrin Hatch’s office on July 4th last week:

Dear Senator Hatch:

Please reverse your position in defending bills of retroactive immunity for the telecommunication companies that broke the law while possibly helping in the fight against terrorism.

I understand the need for protection, and I can sympathize somewhat with your intentions, but I see more danger in the path you are pursuing than in the path laid out by our fore-bearers. Their path is a strict adherence to the laws of the land with no means of retroactively assigning guilt or innocence by changing the law.

I would like to focus for just a moment on Article 1, Section 9 of the Consitution which reads: “No … Ex Post Facto law shall be passed.” It is vital that our society retain its respect for the rule of law–and to do so, we must respect the highest law of the land, namely the Constitution which we celebrate this week. If you decide to continue to support this idea of retroactive immunity, you will succeed for a moment in the war against terror, at the price of undermining the principle of a free society in the long run.

Think about the consequences of this precedent. If an individual knows his rights, and defends them in front of a government agent such as the police, or the FBI, or the CIA, what can that individual do in response to the following? The agent could say, “The law you are familiar with is no longer valid. It will be changed next year.” Whether or not the statement is true, a precedent like this retroactive immunity for telecom companies will cloud justice and obscure our most sure rights. Or worse, a company or corporation that has sway with the legislative body could ask that its past transgressions be swept under the carpet. Where is justice then? To whom can we, as a people, look for an example of integrity and justice if not from our highest court, the representatives of the people, our lawmakers?

Senators everywhere are being asked to represent us, the people of America, in this decision. Will they be loyal to the President, or will they be loyal to our Constitution? I hope it is to the latter.

I hope our Senators are able to refuse or else filibuster this awful piece of legislation.

Scott Thorpe read my last post about my green wireless access point and we got to talking about wireless, self-healing “mesh” networks at the community level: it turns out that several open-source solutions are already around!

A website dedicated to supporting these free community wireless networks, cuwireless.net, has an interesting kit available to create a weather-proof outdoor access point.

I haven’t been able to find any Provo-based wifi networks based on this idea yet. Are there any Provo-ites out there who might be interested in building a network / mesh like this?

Update: Scott has posted a blog about our conversation too.

One of my projects over the last year has been to build a “green” server. The idea is that I can have an always-on file server and wireless network access point that relies 100% on solar energy.

I started by building a solar panel and battery charge system using a sealed 12 V deep-cycle battery. It’s one heavy sucker! I connected a Xantrex C35 Charge-Load controller to it, and then connected that via a long, heavy-duty electrical wire to a 60-watt solar panel outside our back door.

Finally, I have a 2000 watt Maxx SST power inverter that converts the 12 V power to 110 V AC (i.e. like a wall-socket). The total cost for the system came to about $500. It’s probably even cheaper now, since prices for solar components have been dropping.

Yesterday, I re-assembled all of the parts and mounted them to our office desk so that they aren’t lying all over the room. I’m pretty happy with the result! This allows us to plug in our wireless router and Qwest DSL modem into our now “green” power source…

As a somewhat unexpected boost to my ego, we had a power outage this morning that caused all of our neighbors’ wireless routers to go offline… meanwhile, our little wireless that could kept on chugging away. Since we have DSL, the phone company keeps us connected as long as we have an alternate power source. How cool is that?