Amusing
"Maybe you have a Trojaned version of SubSeven."
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Setting the record straight: Mike Godwin (not Pam Samuelson) came up with the phrase "the coming of the anti-Feist" to refer to "database protection" legislation.
That legislation has reared its head again. I'm not sure what the best place to link to about that would be. The ALA database page hasn't been updated recently (it doesn't discuss the current database legislation), and that's where I first think to look. I don't think EFF has a more current page on this, either.
Aha, Peter Suber has something on it. First he invents Nomic, then he helps us keep track of database legislation hearings.
Peter Suber and a few other leaders of the movements he keeps track of make clear that changes in how people are thinking about creativity and intellectual activity are not just about software. It is easy to forget that if you get enmeshed in the free software community's issues. But other disciplines, activities, and communities are rediscovering some of their best traditions, and Peter Suber is helping keep track of the process.
Recently I joined Americans United for Separation of Church and State after reading a great deal about the Roy Moore case. I encourage you to join Americans United also; they really need moral and financial support right now.
I've written something about establishmentarianism and Roy Moore, but I still need to finish it.
One interesting thing the United States doesn't have today is open public debate about the merits of rival religious beliefs. There are some journals, there are some Internet mailing lists and old Usenet groups, and there are lots and lots of missionaries. The missionaries will come to your house if you ask them (or even if you don't); they'll stop you on a street corner in certain major cities, especially, in one case I can think of, if you have a beard. There are also plenty of institutions designed to promote belief among people who are already members of a particular community or tradition, and increasingly many to try to retrieve or recover "lapsed" members. (I described in my old Advogato diary attending a seminar put on one such project called Aish Ha-Torah.)
Some groups also have rallies or revivals, but these, too, seem mostly to target current or past members of these groups. Also, there's nobody at a revival meeting presenting a contrary view!
What we don't seem to have are many public debates, or newspaper op-eds, or apologetics books sold outside denominational bookstores, or anything like that. (I guess the dueling missionary web sites sometimes come close, if they deign to respond to one another, but I don't imagine a lot of people are reading these "discussions".)
I wonder if people are afraid that overt conflict over religious belief will lead to some of the horrors and atrocities it's provoked in the past -- if people will start to kill one another because they disagree about the divine. The Statistical Abstract of the United States says there were 1,385 reported hate crimes in the U.S. motivated by religion in 1997 (the last year available in the edition I have). Almost all of them (1,087) were "anti-Jewish"; 28 were "anti-Islamic" and 3 were "anti-atheism/agnosticism/etc.". I'm afraid the anti-Islamic figure must have increased substantially since 2001.
I wonder if there is a secret, unspoken, and pervasive terror that these figures would skyrocket if there were more open disagreement about religion -- if people fear that debaters would be murdered in bars or lecture halls, or that religious controversialists would be assassinated. We have made religion such a private matter, and not primarily by separating church and state. We aren't as afraid to talk about other things this way, are we?
I ordered four Noe Venable CDs (Down Easy, Boots, The World is Bound by Secret Knots, and a second copy of the latter, which turned into a birthday gift for Wolfgang early in September). I think they're a bit uneven, which is a famous limitation of the album format -- even a reason some people are rejecting albums altogether -- but in general I'm very happy to have them and feel like a proper Noe fan new. I've seen her in concert three or four times now (and she's been up for a Pacific Northwest tour recently, so Oregonians and Washingtonians may have had a chance to hear here).
My biggest disappointment is that there isn't a recording of "Juniper" with just Noe and a guitar. (There is one on her web site, and this is the first song I ever heard her perform, and she did an even better job live in San Francisco than in the Santa Barbara recording on her web site. Also, she changed "my father the thinker" to "my father the preacher", something I think I've already mentioned I consider a poor choice.) And "Is the Spirit Here?", a thrilling, stirring, piercing song, is somewhat more thrilling, stirring, and piercing in concert than on The World is Bound By Secret Knots. But many of the songs are very familiar from Noe's concerts and really quite good. On Secret Knots, are several treasures. "Simple Song", "Wings Again", and "Lilies" are a wonderful group right in a row.
and beauty is tired of playing dead
and beauty is tired of hiding her head...
On Boots, I have to recommend "Boots", "Prettiness", "Look, Luck", and "Don't Stop Crying".
I also got a limited edition Noe Venable feral cat dream pillow (#2 of 50). It's supposed to contain herbs that promote vivid dreaming, including catnip. Sure enough, I've been having vivid dreams ever since. Of course, I've been in acupuncture, too.
Riana helped me find the original German of my father's favorite part of The Trial in my copy of the German, and I transcribe it below.
"In dem Gericht täuschst du dich", sagte der Geistlich, "in den einleitenden Schriften zum Gesetz heißt es von dieser Täuschung: Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter. Zu diesem Türhüter kommt ein Mann vom Lande und bittet um Eintritt in das Gesetz. Aber der Türhüter sagt, daß er ihm jetzt den Eintritt nicht gewähren könne. Der Mann überlegt und fragt dann, ob er also später werde eintreten dürfen. 'Es ist möglich', sagt der Türhüter, 'jetzt aber nicht'. Da das Tor zum Gesetz offensteht wie immer und der Türhüter beiseite tritt, bückt sich der Mann, um durch das Tor in das Innere zu sehen. Als der Türhüter das merkt, lacht er und sagt: 'Wenn es dich so lockt, versuche es doch, trotz meinem Verbot hineinzugehen. Merke aber: Ich bin mächtig. Und ich bin nur der unterste Türhüter. Von Saal zu Saal stehen aber Türhüter, einer mächtiger als der andere. Schon den Anblick des dritten kann nicht einmal ich mehr vertragen.' Solche Schwierigkeiten hat der Mann vom Lande nicht erwartet, das Gesetz soll doch jedem und immer zugänglich sein, denkt er, aber als er jetzt den Türhüter in seinem Pelzmantel genauer ansieht, seine große Spitznase, den langen, dünnen, schwarzen, tartarischen Bart, entschließt er sich doch, lieber zu warten, bis er die Erlaubnis zum Eintritt bekommt. Der Türhüter gibt ihm einen Schemel und läßt ihn seitwärts von der Tür sich niedersetzen. Dort sitzt er Tage und Jahre. Er macht viele Versuche, eingelassen zu werden und ermüdet den Türhüter durch seine Bitten. Der Türhüter stellt öfters kleine Verhöe mit ihm an, fragt ihn nach seiner Heimat aus und nach vielem anderen, es sind aber teilnahmslose Fragen, wie sie große Herren stellen, und zum Schlusse sagt er ihm immer wieder, daß er ihn noch nicht einlassen könne. Der Mann, der sich für seine Reise mit vielem ausgerüstet hat, verwendet alles, und sei es noch so wertvoll, um den Türhüter zu bestechen. Dieser nimmt zwar alles an, aber sagt dabei: 'Ich nehme es nur an, damit du nicht glaubst, etwas versäumt zu haben.' Wärend der vielen Jahre beobachtet der Mann den Türhüter fast ununterbrochen. Er vergißt die anderen Türhüter, und dieser erste scheint ihm das einzige Hindernis für den Eintritt in das Gesetz. Er verfluht den unglücklichen Zufall in den ersten Jahren laut, später, als er alt wird, brummt er nur noch vor sich hin. Er wird kindisch, und da er in dem jahrelangen Studium des Tërhüters auch die Flöhe in seinem Pelzkragen erkannt hat, bittet er auch die Flöhe, ihm zu helfen und den Türhüter umzustimmen. Schließlich wird sein Augenlicht schwach, und er weiß nicht, ob es um ihn wirklich dunkler wird oder ob ihn nur die Augen täschen. Wohl aber erkennt er jetzt im Dunkel einen Glanz, der unverlöschlich aus der Türe des Gesetzes bricht. Nun lebt er nicht mehr lange. Vor seinem Tode sammeln sich in seinem Kopfe alle Erfahrungen der ganzen Zeit zu einer Frage, die er bisher an den Türhüter noch nicht gestellt hat. Er winkt ihm zu, da er seinen erstarrenden Körper nicht mehr aufrichten kann. Der Türhüter muß sich tief zu ihm hinunterneigen, denn die Größenunterschiede haben sich sehr zuungunsten des Mannes verändert. 'Was willst du denn jetzt noch wissen?' fragt der Türhüter, 'du bist unersättlich.' 'Alle streben doch nach dem Gesetz', sagt der Mann, 'wie kommt es, daß in den vielen Jahren niemand außer mir Einlaß verlangt hat?' Der Türhüter erkennt, daß der Mann schon am Ende ist, und um sein vergehendes Gehör noch zu erreichen, brüllt er ihn an: 'Hier konnte niemand sonst Einlaß erhalten, denn dieser Eingang war nur für dich bestimmt. Ich gehe jetzt und schließe ihn.'"
I'm astonished at the richness of this parable. "Er vergißt die anderen Türhüter, und dieser erste scheint ihm das einzige Hindernis für den Eintritt in das Gesetz." This is true (I would have put it in my collage if I had known about it, and if my collage had been created with my perspective today instead of my perspective three years ago). "He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this first doorkeeper appears to him the only obstacle to his entrance into the Law."
A pilot reader, noting my curiosity about the air traffic control system, answered some of my questions and pointed me to a series of columns about ATC written by an actual controller. It's called Say Again.
This is really pretty cool. My reader also helped me understand the difference between a tower, a center, and an approach control facility. (He explained that airspace is dividing among controllers not only horizontally but also vertically, so that two different controller might control airspace at different altitudes above a single point on the ground. This makes me wish for a three-dimensional map of U.S. airspace showing which ATC facility is responsible for controlling flights through each point.)
An "actionable strategy" means "a strategy which can get you sued". But some business people have, amusingly enough, started to use the word "actionable" to mean "practicable". So "actionable strategies" are seen as good things in business jargon.
I found this funny when I completed a questionnaire about Microsoft's Peter Biddle, which asked me whether he was good at creating actionable strategies.
Speaking of Peter, we have just posted a position on trusted computing as well as a position on VeriSign's Site Finder service. I wrote both of these. You should be able to find the trusted computing position from the EFF home page.
Ren found this cool site on plane curves with a lot more detail on methods of generating new curves from old than I'd ever seen anywhere. Some of this is in Gardner (for example, deltoids, cycloids, evolutes, and involutes), but not nearly all. If you liked the Spirograph toy, you'll love this site!
The debate between me and Mike Wolfe of Microsoft is no more -- it's been cancelled by SDForum.
I went to SFOBUG this evening to hear Ryan Lackey speak. He talked a lot about techniques for running secure applications in other people's colocation facilities. He has different solutions for different threat models and levels of paranoia. One example is using transparent disk encryption with keys stored only in RAM. If the machine reboots at all, it won't be able to access its disks; the person who knows the keys has to supply them again over an SSH session and can investigate the cause of the reboot before doing so. (It's somewhat hard to get keys out of RAM or subvert security policies, even given physical access, without a reboot. Having keys only in volatile RAM makes it likely that a reboot will be remotely visible.)
Ryan seemed to describe this mechanism as the lowest level of security precautions he had deployed recently when colocating a server.
We had an interesting discussion about trusted computing. Ryan likes having components capable of remotely proving their identity and integrity to him, because he can colocate them far away and protect them against all sorts of attacks. That doesn't mean he's a fan of initiatives like TCG and NGSCB, however. In fact, he's a skeptic. To overstate and oversimplify my case slightly, he's also only concerned about having machines he owns prove their integrity to him. He isn't trying to deploy applications with security models in which other people's machines prove their integrity to him or his machines prove their integrity to other people; at least, he didn't mention any such applications.
That superficially suggests that (contrary to some skeptics) trusted computing systems, even including attestation, are genuinely useful to security, and that (contrary to other skeptics) if they are, having attestations useful only to the computers' owners or their agents does not destroy the utility of the attestations. Of course, this is oversimplifying. For one thing, the attestation capabilities of a deployed TCPA TPM simply do not meet Ryan's needs; he's already buying more elaborate hardware for this purpose.
One thing I hadn't realized is that EFF's new sysadmin is the president of SFOBUG. I remarked that you can work with someone for weeks and not realize what he's president of.
In "Mortal City" by Dar Williams, there is a scene in which the two characters decide to sleep in the same bed during a storm. The song says that
If there was ever any thought of what would happen in that bed tonight
There was no question now
I have always assumed that Dar intended for her listeners to have "no question" either, and for it to be obvious. But it's never been obvious to me.
If you've heard the song, do you take "no question" to mean there was no question that it would happen (since the characters' intimacy had developed rapidly), no question that it wouldn't happen (since "they were wrapped up like ornaments / waiting for another season"), or no question for the characters themselves but lingering uncertainty for us as listeners?
Since a registered Republican voter once lived here, we recently received a California Republican Party mailing urging people to vote Arnold Schwarzenegger for Governor. (The plurality sentiment in our household appeared to be that members of it "liked [Gov.-El.] Schwarzenegger better as an indestructible robot", as Zack put it.)
The mailing is very interesting and quite different from most of what we receive, since most of the people who have ever registered to vote at this address registered as Democrats, and some people belong to organizations or subscribed to magazines that sold their mailing lists to Democratic Party organizations (grumble grumble grumble).
Anyway, at the bottom of the mailing, it says
Paid for by the California Republican Party [...] Major funding by Chevron/Texaco and William Lyon Homes, Inc.
Oddly enough, the Charlotte Observer reports that
As governor, Davis has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from chemical, oil, timber and development concerns that have broken anti-pollution laws or been embroiled in disputes with environmentalists.Among Davis' contributors are Dow Chemical, Enron, Duke Energy, Pacific Lumber, Georgia Pacific, Chevron, Tosco, Monsanto and Waste Management.
Why did ChevronTexaco donate to both campaigns? Is it just demonstrating to politicians its ability to have a "major" influence on campaign finance in future elections? Or does the Observer mean that ChevronTexaco donated to the original Davis election campaign but not to his anti-recall campaign?
I just posted an Advogato article asking programmers and technologists there to help oppose the broadcast flag.
I'm asking you to do the same.
I am apparently not the only one of my friends to have been mistaken for a lawyer.
If you could find and read old shell history files of mine, you would see many enormous strings of commands something like this:
w who df finger w w ls -l ls df ls -l ls ps x w w df ls -l w w who ls -l finger df ps x
I would habitually run simple status-reporting commands whenever I had nothing else to do. As a result, I would gradually absorb information about the state of the system, getting a deeper sense of what was going on, and quickly noticing certain kinds of problems if they arose.
When I used GUIs, I would do a somewhat similar thing -- I would constantly pull down all the menus and submenus of each GUI application, and then close them. Or I would do a "Help About". You could call it a nervous habit. Some people watching me found it very confusing or distracting. I thought it was a great and altogether natural way to get to know the computer better.
I seem to remember that Neal Stephenson wrote something about computer users who like to receive status information constantly from their computers and other computer users who find it frightening or disconcerting (because they assume that something is wrong, or lack context to interpret the status information to decide whether something is wrong). I just re-read much of "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" in the hope of finding this passage, but it didn't turn up.
I argued to various people that constantly playing with your computer and trying to get it to elicit status messages or at least to disclose interface elements would give you a much deeper familiarity with it -- that it was a good way of learning even while you were doing something else, or while you were doing nothing at all. And it was a good way of getting closer to the machine. ("It is only by amusing oneself that one can learn." Cited by Kasner and Newman.)
I noticed that, although I am still very active whenever I use a computer, I rarely type "w", "who", "finger", or "ls" unless I specifically need the information provided by these commands. (I still type "df" and "ps" and "ps x".) I wondered what had changed to alter my Unix habits so significantly.
I thought of four relevant changes:
I have been very excited about the Hashcash approach to fighting spam.
I thought of some problems with it. I think most of these problems have been considered by the promoters of hashcash, and I hope to find out if they have good ways of dealing with them. (Briefly, the idea of hashcash is to try to get people to attach "postage" to their e-mail, at least when they're mailing people with whom they've never corresponded. That would make spam uneconomical. Mail without any postage could be rejected, or treated more skeptically, by the recipient. But to avoid having to create a financial payment infrastructure, the postage is not actually money, but rather "proof of work" -- easy-to-verify solutions to very difficult math problems. In order to see whether a message contains valid postage, you simply verify whether the math problem solution attached to it is correct. If it is, it serves to prove that whoever is mailing you spent an economically significant amount of computer time to solve the problem, so that it's very unlikely that the message is spam.)
So here are the problems I know of.
There's also a metaproblem common to many spam countermeasures: it's a chicken-and-egg deployment problem. MUAs won't attach hashcash until there are a lot of recipients who demand it, but recipients can't demand hashcash until a lot of senders are willing to provide it, right?
Network effects!
Many congratulations to PLoS Biology on its launch!
One thing I didn't realize about PLoS journals is that authors have to pay $1,500 to have their articles published. (The articles are peer-reviewed; it isn't vanity publishing as we understand that term.) I had assumed that the foundation grants supporting PLoS would also take care of the expenses so that authors wouldn't have to pay to publish, but that turned out not to be the case. I suppose this is because many foundations hate to pay for "operational expenses" or "recurring costs", and presumably the costs of reviewing and publishing papers are nothing if not operational and recurring.
Peter Suber thinks this is not such a big problem, for many reasons.
For its part, PLoS says that
a new business model for scientific publishing is required that treats the costs of publication as the final integral step of the funding of a research project.
This model is different from some other open-access publishing, which may not have any "funding" in the first place. It really seems that the relevant costs are coming from the formal peer review and formal editing steps.
I was just re-reading a whitepaper on DRM by Alex Alben. Alben notes that DRM is very controversial, but jokes in a footnote that at least "[a]ll the parties to the debate can agree that DRM stands for 'Digital Rights Management'".
Amusingly enough, Alben is wrong! Thousands of uses of the expansion "digital restrictions management" are attested, possibly inspired by the FSF's suggestion that we that phrase. Many copyright activists are concerned by the use of "rights" to mean "policies" (I am trying to avoid that usage in "How to Abuse Trusted Computing"). Among other things, this might be because "right" (and its equivalents in other languages) has connotations of "justice", and the enforcement of some policy might not have any connection to justice.
Of course, this usage might not have been created solely to polish the image of policies associated with documents by publishers -- since it's also true that "right" has come to mean "policy" in some parts of security engineering. But it always grates on me when somebody describes a way of transmitting or enforcing policies like copy-control policies as "rights expression", "rights management", "rights enforcement", etc. This usage seems especially common among DRM vendors and customers.
I just found it funny that the only thing Alben could find that everybody agreed on isn't actually agreed on at all.
As I mentioned when I first met him, I think Daniel Ellsberg is "a great hero of the American people".
Praveen and I went to hear Ellsberg speak in Berkeley on Friday. I got an autographed copy of Secrets and a story I think is worth mentioning in my discussion of the Wannsee Conference House.
This reminded me that I really ought to finish my Wannsee essay and post it along with my Wannsee pictures. You might recall that I took those pictures but have yet to post them on-line. But I'm thinking that maybe I should read Eichmann in Jerusalem first. It may be that essentially everything I want to say about Wannsee is already there in some form. I suppose that doesn't make my saying it superfluous.
The Supreme Court granted certiorari in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow and Ashcroft v. ACLU. I don't feel very optimistic about either of these, although I feel more optimistic about Ashcroft than about Newdow.
I hope to go to D.C. to hear the Newdow argument.
Danny wrote an interesting piece about the difference between privacy and secrecy, and how we have no conventionally private interactions on the Internet, but only secret ones.
I think this is fascinating. The discussion of "register" is particularly interesting; I know I have wished for the ability to have private and not secret on-line conversations, in Danny's sense.
My own web diary, which you are now reading, is a funny example of some of Danny's concepts. I used to write a great deal about things of mainly personal interest -- you can find entries literally about what I had for dinner. On the other hand, I got a lot of public interest when writing about free software politics (a legacy of the Advogato origins of my diary, but also because I care about this). And I got a tremendous amount of public interest when I started to write about trusted computing. Indeed, I have a copy of a message showing that there are or were people at Microsoft who counted regularly reading this diary among their job duties.
I invented Owner Override one year ago today. The original formulation was very different -- it involved dumping the contents of RAM onto removable media -- and it's interesting to compare that description with the description in "Trusted Computing: Promise and Risk".
In several senses, Owner Override remains a thought experiment. Before it can be implemented, trusted computing vendors would need to make a conscious decision explicitly not to support "DRM-like" application security models, including lock-in, adware, spyware, forced upgrade, and forced downgrade behaviors. After making this decision, trusted computing developers would have to devise a particular mechanism and user interface for an Owner Override-like function.
Since a year ago, I have not proposed a specific user interface for Owner Override.
I think the insight that "as a technological matter, the functionality which unambiguously protects an end-user can be separated from the functionality which ambiguously protects the end-user" remains true. And this is a central point. The mechanism of making this separation is really less significant at this stage than the possibility of doing so.
I have an article on Owner Override in the December Linux Journal. It also doesn't describe a mechanism beyond the requirement that the computer owner be entitled to select the PCR values provided in an attestation if there is some reason that attesting to the actual PCR values would be against the computer owner's interest.
Stefan Bechtold has posted some informed criticism of Owner Override.
Happy birthday, Owner Override!
Aaron and I went over to the Seventh Circuit for a bit of judicial tourism. The Seventh Circuit seemed very small and casual. It doesn't have its own courthouse, just the top floor of the Federal Building in Chicago. It was mostly empty, and somebody was vacuuming down the hallway.
At the Clerk's Office, they said I couldn't take pictures, by order of Chief Judge Flaum; sorry to disappoint you.
The Seventh Circuit hurt my ratio for showing ID to get into courts. The court itself didn't seem to care who I was, but the marshalls or FPS people on the ground floor of the Federal Building wanted to see ID before we could go anywhere upstairs.
I've had to show ID to get into: Northern District of California, San Francisco venue (several times). Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
I've not had to show ID to get into: Northern District of California, San Jose venue. California Court of Appeal, Sixth Appellate District. Supreme Court of California (twice). Supreme Court of the United States.
I'll be in Illinois through Sunday; I'm speaking at UIUC on Saturday, and currently staying with Biella and Micah.
I'm back in San Francisco, after visiting Chicago and Urbana, IL. I saw Aaron, Biella, Micah, Brian, Vanessa, and Barbara Simons. I got to speak at Reflections/Projections 2003 on "How to Abuse Trusted Computing" and "Working Security for a Working Environment".
The Reflections/Projections and UIUC ACM people were really nice, and I had a great experience speaking at the conference.
Champaign Willard airport is the smallest airport I've ever been to. They have three airline counters and one terminal which is a single room with five gates. They are served by three airlines, with scheduled service to three cities. There is one baggage carousel. The people are very friendly and there are no lines for anything. (It's quite the astonishing contrast to fly from there to O'Hare, which is one of the three places you can possibly fly to from CMI. O'Hare is the largest airport I've been to, unless perhaps LAX is bigger.) Previously, the smallest airport I had been to was ONT, which feels about as big and about as busy as Bradley was when my family originally moved to Massachusetts.
The most amazing thing about Willard Airport is that the ticket agent didn't ask me what my destination was. That's because each of the three airlines operating from Willard flies only to one destination.
I'll try to get some pictures up when I get the camera back.
A Microsoft manager beats up on Apple's media format (AAC) for being proprietary and not interoperable. He then proposes using Microsoft's media format (WM9) instead, because it is more popular.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a drawback for Windows users, who expect choice in music services, choice in devices, and choice in music from a wide-variety of music services to burn to a CD or put on a portable device. Lastly, if you use Apple's music store along with iTunes, you don't have the ability of using the over 40 different Windows Media-compatible portable music devices. When I'm paying for music, I want to know that I have choices today and in the future.
Interoperability isn't a popularity contest. It's about the answer to this question: What does a prospective implementer have to do in order to make the implementation work? "Read the public specification" is the right answer. Answers involving signing contracts and paying money are the wrong answer. Microsoft and Apple both have media formats with the fatal defect of an attempt to require contractual privity with implementers. (In the free world, that attempt will fail, but that's little comfort to us in the United States.) Here Fester is suggesting that Microsoft's media format is obviously preferable because more implementers have signed Microsoft's license than Apple's.
His argument is not logic. It is Vae victis!
I went to Stanford with some of my EFF colleagues to hear Guido van Rossum speak. He was apparently your architypical "I am just a nice guy who happened to create a major part of the world's IT infrastructure" sort. (Andrew Tridgell also comes to mind in this capacity.)
I had actually heard Guido speak at a Linux event sometime around 1999, before I became a Python programmer. At that time, people kept asking him why there was a string module rather than having strings be objects with methods to perform common string operations.
Of course, that eventually got changed:
[schoen@zork(~)] python1.5
Python 1.5.2 (#0, Jul 5 2003, 11:45:08) [GCC 3.3.1 20030626 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2
Copyright 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam
>>> dir("foo")
[]
>>>
[schoen@zork(~)] python2.3
Python 2.3.2 (#2, Oct 6 2003, 08:02:06)
[GCC 3.3.2 20030908 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> dir("foo")
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'capitalize', 'center', 'count', 'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdigit', 'islower', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill']
What's more, the string module (in which you find all these functions in Python 1.5) has been deprecated and is slated to be removed entirely in Python 3.0. So I guess the people at that old talk got their wish!
Anyway, when I heard Guido speak in 1999, I had little or no idea what he was talking about. All I knew was that Python was a language many of my friends were getting interested in, and this guy was responsible for it. This time around, I was an actual Python programmer. I found the substance of Guido's talk quite clear and helpful. Among other things, he spent a good deal of time explaining the motivation for and implementation of generators.
A generator is a Python function that uses the "yield" statment. (Well, technically it's the object returned by calling such a function.) It allows you, in a succint way, to write a function with a complicated internal state that returns values sequentially in such a way that they can be used by another complicated function. Without generators, you would probably need to have a complicated data structure to save state in order to switch back and forth constantly between the complicated function and the thing it's callig. With generators, Python saves that state for you. Of course, Lisps had something like this first.
I haven't thought of a non-trivial application for generators, but maybe I would if I were writing some non-trivial programs. (All the things written about generators use parsers as a sample application, but as it happens I never seem to write any parsers...)
It's fun to have the language implementer himself explain language features to you!
Leonard is going to Arkansas to work for Wesley Clark. He decided to do this pretty suddenly. I once thought of moving abruptly all the way across the country to do some work, but I decided against it (not being, apparently, so courageous as Leonard).
I wish Leonard all the best for his experience in Arkansas.
I am apparently likely to write a book. The prospect of writing a book seems very exciting to me, although I think the idea that something I write can be a real book (publisher, ISBN, LOC record, binding, in libraries and bookstores, doncha know) is still very foreign to me and may continue to be foreign until it actually happens.
I recently met with a bookstore owner and a publisher who are both really excited about what they do. (The bookstore owner is, by her own admission, particularly insane because she is selling only new books. Of course, all new book dealers' inventory is essentially the same in the sense that they all can order any book in print at the same price through the same wholesalers. And many of them display essentially the same things in their windows and shops, although there is some small room for creativity there. Used bookdealers at least have unique and widely varying inventory and ability to obtain particular titles.) It's really encouraging to me to find that people are still excited about these businesses.
Both publishing and book retailing have become extraordinarily concentrated. (Remember "media concentration"?) Despite many obstacles, and many economic challenges, people are still going into these fields (outside of the giant consolidated firms) and still finding them rewarding and meaningful.
Experience feuding over copyright policy can make us less than respectful of publishers. Entertainment publishers, of course, are our regular villains in the sense that they are constantly engaged in trying to make really bad law. And other people have criticized them on many other grounds than copyright. (Oddly enough, copyright hardly came up in the debate over the FCC's media concentration policies. People were talking about access to channels of publicity, and about editorial power, and things like that.) There are nonetheless some publishers out there who are (1) not trying to create insane copyright policy and (2) personally invested in their books and trying to get interesting and meaningful things out to the public and (3) loving it.
It would really be very interesting to be a part of that in a small way as a published author.
Contact: Seth David Schoen