Remembering CubeSpace

I was reminiscing about Cubespace recently, with a Golang startup guy, at one time located at the top of a US Bank building, but probably not the one you're thinking of, if you're thinking of one.  East side.  On Grand.

The point of Cubespace was cross-fertilization, which in horticulture is an important topic, as in gardening, but when it comes to tending a fragile open source ecology... we don't have much practice thinking in those terms.

I'll sidebar here to mention Sheri Dover popped up at OSCON, fond memories of our OMSI-side party the year before.  She knows horticulture and went to OSU for the purpose of studying it. Cross-fertilization would not be lost on her as an accelerator cornerstone.

The Ruby and Python meetups would be far enough apart to not mutually interfere with presentations, yet might be going on in parallel.  Universities foster synergy the same way, which is why maybe in a parallel universe a University of Portland might have made a Cubespace its priority.

We get the reality we get.

Today I imagine we would have Clojure and Golang groups adding to the mix, with more opportunities for all of us to lurk in on meetings.  I pick up Java going to Java meetups and just taking in whatever they say and do.  I'm not a missionary here to secretly convert anyone.  I'm brushing up on Java.

Perhaps a Language Palace will again materialize out of the mists.  Portland hasn't surrendered its forgotten crown of Open Source capital, bequeathed by Christian Science Monitor some decades ago.

BarCamp in a Box

I was thinking ahead to where the ESD maybe bused kids to CubeSpace, or a place like it, so that BarCamps might happen, similar to science fairs in that people man booths, take turns at the microphone, practice the Art of Lightning Talks.

However, teachers wouldn't be comfortable surrendering control to a bunch of alien adult strangers, so the idea would be for them to own and run the event, having been through it themselves. Take an average faculty and remap to FOSS boss positions. The english teacher learns DOM, some puppet string JavaScript, journalism takes firewall, history takes file management (a kind of sysadmin), and throw math teachers to the Pythons why not, or the Ruby mines? Teachers might think about it ahead of time, plus this isn't about typecasting or locking into a role. It's a quick training to give the flavor, then it's yours to have and to hold.

Whereas Python is looking strong along the discrete math track, sometimes bypassing computer science enroute to philosophy maybe, I'm realizing it's the whole ecosystem that makes us powerful, and that means Apache, also Jython and IronPython, not just the C version, currently the classic fast one everyone understands (is there a PyPy channel on YouTube yet?). We're close to Perl, obviously, but also to Postgres and MySQL, the latter becoming Sun and then Oracle or whatever epic myth. My latest QUIPP main menu routes into Elephant Land, but then I'm not in charge of all decisions DB.

That's why I'm thinking the EduPython conference, say at Pacific University, will have to wait for FOSS culture more generally to make some dent in education. We can't do it alone, as Pythonistas. We need our gnu and penguin friends across the board. In Portland, that means places like Free Geek and CubeSpace. In Chicago, there's Chipy. I can't tell you how it is in your town, so don't send me those questions. Ask around locally, check a coffee shop.

About the BarCamp training: I'd also be for sending 'em home with a goodie bag of DVD samples (yes, freely copiable), high quality high def stuff, suitable for classroom use. This gives you more to show and tell about when you get back to the day job, newly empowered to put new skills to good use. Your students will benefit, at least that's how we look at it, but allow for opt out (that's the default -- to opt in might involve jumping through some hoops, showing initiative in various ways, e.g. by volunteering at a PyCon, perhaps in Hong Kong?).

A Tale of Two Parties

jon bunce with globe

Our Wanderers gathering was special tonight in that we convened at Doug Strain's place to celebrate his turning 88 recently.

As we went around the circle introducing ourselves, we each talked about our connection to Doug. In my case, I mentioned being a Quaker and knowing that our Stark Street Meetinghouse had come to us from Doug's company Electro-Measurements Inc., which had in turn purchased the building from the Jantzen swimsuit company.

Others of us had connections to Doug through the Strain Science Center at Pacific University in Forest Grove.

Doug's favorite teacher at Caltech was Linus Pauling and Doug later endowed a chair at OSU in Pauling's name.

He was the major sponsor of ISEPP's project to rescue Pauling's boyhood home from oblivion and make it a rentable property, Cascadia Wild being one of the tenants (I was glad Marion could join us).

Great seeing Joe Cronin again.

bob mcgown with paper cubes

My second party tonight was at Cubespace, where many luminaries from Portland's sprawling open source community gathered for board games, beer and pizza (the 'za was gone by the time I arrived -- which I'm glad about, as I'd already overspent on calories for the evening (oops, spoke too soon, Kim & Jimmy just brought me a milk shake, yum)).

fun and games at Cubespace

Firefox bling

A Last Quaker Meeting in 2024

I made it to Multnomah Quakers today. I finally figured out how to donate using PayPal. Dawn would always write checks from our business account as I recall: Dawn Wicca and Associates (DWA), not publicly traded. Our last meeting of the year. Donations usually go up in December, as we close out our financial year.

Last weekend I visited Bridge City Monthly Meeting in the architecture museum on Grand Avenue, devoted to old Portland. My standing joke is when Quakers sit still, all quiet like that, on the museum's 2nd floor, they turn into a diorama. The way it was. Like a wax museum. Uncanny valley right?  

Kitty-corner is what used to be the two-story US Bank building, with CubeSpace likewise on the 2nd floor. CubeSpace was prototypical of WeWork, a place for geeks to set up offices, and for user groups to hold meetups. I attended a lot of meetings there.

I crossed paths with Lew Scholl at the top over Mt. Tabor the other morning. I'd decided to take the summit relatively early (say compared to yesterday), using the stairs from lower to mid reservoir on the west facing slope. I have lots of pictures of those stairs (see above) as my habit is to carry a camera, in addition to the cell phone being a camera. 

Lew is like the logistics supervisor for the Meeting in a lot of ways, doing property management. He's an engineer by training. Thanks to his efforts, the Meeting, a nonprofit, enjoys rather state of the art equipment, including when it comes to heating and cooling. The building itself has come a long way since the early days, when I first started going there as a kid. 

My friend Dr. DiNucci, long time president of Humanists of Greater Portland, is these days serving in a capacity not unlike Lew's in that he orchestrates these hybrid live action Zoom events that people are into these days. A contingent wants to join from home, whereas the more public in person venue is what others might prefer. The same individual might attend over the internet one Sunday, and in person the next. Quakers have Meeting for Worship by Zoom, although maybe only on set Sundays.

I met Sonya today, one of the Friends I've known for the longest time, since the Urners, Martins and Pinneys would all pool their kids and let us play together. Some of my earliest memories involve the Pinney family. I also recall crashing on their couch briefly, upon returning to Portland that time. Memories fade. 

Everyone in that family is beautiful and vivacious. Phil, the dad, was a master gardener, the kind of guy who could keep whole estates going, and his own on the side.

Sonya was catching up about our way of memorializing Carol Urner, my mom, with the Gatherings for Carol (C4Gs). There's one in the planning for Lesotho this year. Carol and Jack were key players in Maseru for some years, part of the social scene. 

Apartheid was ending and embassies wanting to make a show of keeping their distance, by camping out in Lesotho, were now moving back to the Republic of South Africa. The population of foreigners was shrinking. On the other hand, a gigantic dam was under construction at the center of the country, which dad took me to have a look at.

My French Connection reminded me that if the Roaring 20s are a topic (School of Tomorrow) then I should be watching Betty Boop cartoons. That's what I've been doing today in fact, to help with fasting. I'm kicking my system back into ketosis for a spell. I don't get grumpy when I do it right. I get inspired.

PPUG @ CubeSpace

die.py

Sitting right at the same table, Matt McCredie emailed these three cool Python modules from his hard drive to mine: ap.py (classic screen saver), die.py (mouse rolls and drags 'em) and rot.py (rotating squares), all showcasing Python's ability to talk to Tk.

I'll be sure to mention on 'em on edu-sig, Dr. Zelle's hangout. He's a Python/Tk graphics guru of sorts, author of a top selling teaching book, other resources (like graphics.py -- easier than Tkinter).

Jeff Schwaber ran the meeting, per his experimental formatting suggestions, then flogged us through his brainchild, pretty effectively I'd say (more background in the archives). He told us our table should read and write code and discuss the Standard Library, which we dutifully did (e.g. we looked at Matt's shlex-based RPN calculator).

I stayed in the back, close to a power outlet, running Ubuntu on Dell, blogging in real time.

Jeff: "eXtreme Programming (XP) is an agile methodology..."

Our Beginners group was ironically probably the most advanced. Tom, new in Portland from Pittsburgh by way of Tuscon, is focusing on making GUIs more accessible, e.g. to vision impaired Python coders.

Accessibility remains a gaping hole in many open source projects (maybe Wayne could branch out in this area?). Microsoft has been pioneering in this regard, setting a bar for others to reach and perhaps eventually surpass (but how long will it take?).

Dwight had some good PyQt-based eye candy to share, competing with Tk's for attention.

Although we talked wxPython, none of us showcased it directly.

I was glad to see Tim Bauman in attendance at another table (he's no beginner, but then neither am I).

Other tables: ReportLab, Web Frameworks, Mercurial.

Jason talked about O'Reilly needing reviewers, and about a sample book he'd left at home (title again?).

CubeSpace was hopping tonight. Lots of meetings in parallel.

This business model is definitely a success. Alexia was thinking it'd fly in Clarksville and/or Nashville. The concept could be franchised and/or rebranded.

Maybe I'll ask at the front desk if they get inquiries from other cities (like Gresham, Lake Oswego?). No time for carousing tonight. Lots on my plate back at the office.

Relevant follow-up on edu-sig: Curriculum Fine Tuning (Fri Oct 12 21:13:57 CEST 2007)

ap.py

Bouncing Around

I'm still being kinetic though was more into stupid stuff today, parking a long way from my meeting (about HTML5), lulled by Portland's "small town, walk anywhere" reputation, then couldn't find Jive, looking for some hole in the wall.

OK, so it's a whole building, I got that. Locked up tight. Leif and I stood outside in the door frame, trying to Twitter our way in, otherwise nudge 'em, to no avail by the time I gave up and drove back to Richmond.

To me, this was more proof we need a new Cubespace. That was working so well for Portland's geeks, didn't have to be on time to not get locked out (a cool feature).

Earlier today I did my retarded guy thing, crashing in on poor Jody at work, ranting about real estate (her specialty):

USB killed Cubespace, didn't realize upper floor was "investment banking" (coworkers working), pulled plug, Americans too stupid for words (my perspective) so heading to meeting at post Cubes venue, SW Stark, live and learn (still don't know Portland, after only two decades plus).

But hey, I'm not being fair. USB was just the landlord. Tara took its side at dinner at Bagdad (packed, no recession evident), pointing out they were paying for power, weren't getting revenue, needed to pull the plug.

Besides, since when did Portland have any real investment bankers? I've only met one of those, Peter Jaeger of JPMorgan, and there's no one in Portland even remotely like him. We're a backwater. Podunk U.

We canceled the Wanderers viewing party for tonight, Why We Fight. Because we're too busy fighting? To keep our heads above water? Keeping busy at least. Practicing.

Lets see if that Math Forum posting gets through, more about chess and Wittgenstein. Got a lot of PSF work done today around Pycon 2010, working closely with Vern Ceder (our "watcher").

My great uncle Bill Lightfoot was by, treated me to lunch (except for the wine bottle, which I saved for a "rainy day").

Biz Notes

by D. Koski (Flickr)

by D. Koski (Flickr)

Yes, says Sir Koski, Zometool'll give us an octet-truss if we use the twisted greens. I've been checking out the patent on those zome hubs (4701131, Paul Hildebrandt), cool. The process for their manufacture is likewise a miracle. Respect the factory, not just the inventor: a lesson I learned from Stu Quimby & Co.

From my on-line resume:

Design Science Toys, Tivoli, New York (2005): Consulted on-site and remotely with the owner of an educational toy factory regarding the design and packaging of Strange Attractors, a geometric construction kit. Exchanged spreadsheets with the lead designer regarding the dimensions and color coding of the plastic rods with detachable magnetic cone inserts. Tested successive factory prototypes for quality and usability. Developed a custom Python library of spatial geometry programs for outputting Scene Description Language to POV-Ray, a free and open source ray tracer. Collaborated with the instruction booklet author and lead marketer to supply high definition color renderings of the product in various stages of assembly, for use in the instruction booklet and on the commercial packaging.

by K. Urner (Flickr)

The twisted green addresses the Zome hubs pentagon facets, but not straight on, at a slant. This gives five possible positions per strut and reconciles the exploded pentagonal dodecahedron (the 12 facets of said hub) with more FCC-like capabilities, taking advantage of the "five cubes" phenomenon.

I'm hoping Laughing Horse Books has or will get this new movie The Garden, about an oasis community in LA, deliberately undermined by the city to keep a success story from continuing. Of course the saga is ongoing, as the news spreads.

LW is trully concerned about Muddy's, isn't clear to what extent they might have a real business plan. She strode off to their recently called meeting, a reconnaissance mission.

I'm always thinking tourism could save the day, like people would venture through Portland precisely to seek out and savor subcultures like SE Belmont's. But that's probably out of date thinking.

People come to Portland on business, for meetings, not for uncompensated fun in the sun. That turns some coffee shops into media centers, more like CubeSpace, or into co-working zones.

Live musical performances, including karaoke, have an integral role in keeping wheels turning, especially when working cross-culturally, as often happens given our Pacific Rim situation. We saw James Jameson doing karaoke awhile back, and I acknowledge he's good at it, as good as he'd claimed.

So, if you're already in Portland on business, are from out of town, check out Muddy Water's on SE Belmont. Check out Red Cap, Three Friends.... No reason to be afraid of SE Portland, including the Hawthorne District (Bagdad Theater etc.)

Also check out (and consider giving a donation to) St. Francis Dining Hall. Quakers volunteer there sometimes, including myself and my daughter. Check out Laughing Horse Books. Then visit Dignity Village on your way back to the airport? It's close to Ikea.

PPUG 2009.4.14

I gave the opening lighting talk, testing some of my newfound Python skills, like saying WTF a few times, OK once maybe. We streamed out to a few onlookers who couldn't make it this time, a similar setup to Jeff's at Pauling House.

I told the story of my rant regarding the Red Cross web site, pitching Cubespace as a source of real talent in Oregon, ready to help out with relevant skills galore. That's probably a true statement, but the devil is in the details, I admit. I should interrupt myself here: Red Cross was quite responsive and professional about my negative feedback below.

Michel presented on the dis module, rallied the troops to cough up a volunteer for next month's show & tell. We got one, a noob (doesn't mean inexperienced).

Bret went over his many experiences at Pycon, Jason following with a look at his upgraded shell slash presenter, a kind of poor man's Crunchy, brilliant and spare.

Michelle shared some great pictures, then pitched her idea of working together on a new blog for our user group. Lets all squeeze into a beer bar and hack up a storm. She's a born leader.

Someone asked what was the best talk at Pycon. Bret liked extensions in C, I mentioned Designing Django which I caught after the fact (did catch Django in the Real World at the venue).

Now it's time to raffle off the OS Bridge ticket. Chris Pitzer wins.

I think we should look for sister user groups around the world and contact them, exchange a few memes, Python-related of course.

There's free beer in the kitchen, 65% foam but still tasty.

I'd've loved to stick with Michelle's web site development project, maybe pick that up later? My two inputs in the meeting: host from Uzbekistan, just for fun, and get some vodka company as a sponsor, to help pay for our parties. Just a thought.

Wanderers has a medical doctor on tap for this evening, and if I haul ass I might just catch the tail end of it. It's a public policy discussion.

I like getting doctor perspectives -- a horse's mouth kind of thing. Is it true that a third of the kids in Newark are on Ritalin? I should ask Julie Steele.

A Meme Campaign

Tara was writing me notes this morning, instead of speaking, reminding me of a campaign I'd seen on Facebook, a day of silence for gay rights. I remarked this seemed like a tough commandment, as I'd already broken it through ignorance. The irony was apparent, as many get second class treatment simply for crossing invisible "color lines" that might not be advertised.

Being on the wrong side of history, for having been born on the wrong side of the tracks, like in some kind of prison camp (like Kiyoshi Kuromiya was, Heart Mountain, Wyoming), is the kind of unfairness this campaign was meant to signify. What's civilization about if not addressing inequity? As a species, we tend to enjoy serving justice, without sharing the same norms. Allowing for differences in taste is a skill among lawyers, as among other brands of diplomat. Kiyoshi became a respected gourmet in Philadelphia in a land of opportunity.

Anthropologists understand how orthoschemes (template orthodoxies) tend to model an indigenous cosmology, such as Adam's and Eve's in the Middle East. We don't learn if the snake in the garden was gay, not from Genesis, and in hermeneutics more generally the snake is hermaphroditic, meaning not sexless but ambisexed, that "third kind" we read about in the Coyote tradition (a school of Lakota), responsible for some local casinos.

This "original family" (not counting angels) soon became dysfunctional, per Abel and Cain, our mnemonic friends in group theory per our everyday algebra.[1] The implication was they'd disobeyed God and the rest was history, or "koyaanisqatsi" as the Hopi call it, also known as "oblivion" if you wanna sound bleak about it.

With the invention of jet travel, American tourists would come home with Kodak slides of other climes, where other models and cosmologies led to alternative outward behaviors of various kinds e.g. pictures of French kissing in public. Margaret Mead's subjects made disavowaling noises after awhile and who can blame them?

The spotlight of the over-curious, the paparazzi, grows wearisome. How do you say "none of your business" in generic Unicode. Britney Spears says it well, in her Piece of Me.

Nevertheless, these stories got back to us, making extra work for the pastors, who needed to reassert the prominence of tribal dominance according to community standards and practices. Even pastorless brands of Quaker, such as NPYM's, had to adjust for globalization. Portland's position as a sea port, though not as prominent as Seattle's, kept us from playing an ostrich with its head in the sand. Sailors came back with stories, sometimes more than stories.

For the most part, the various zip codes adapted to the news, but in different ways well known to market researchers. How far is the nearest airport? Do they read books? Demographics matter. Families near Las Vegas, even if nuclear, might not require the same Avon products as an equally nuclear family in Omaha. It even depends on what part of Omaha.

In 97214, being gay is not necessarily "a problem" (no one cares either way, except in terms of finding a good match) whereas you'll find other neighborhoods where "gayness" is only spoken about in code. An "out bishop" would likely be "out of a job" in some sects, whereas others expect same gender relations as a consequence of enforced celibacy between the sexes, including among their top dogs.

Oregon has an "end of the trail" ethic which is somewhat live and let live. Getting this far was an ordeal on steroids, involving covered wagons, ornery horses, sometimes dissenting natives.

Portlandia's sons and daughters share that pioneer spirit of liberality that allows for (even close) collaboration across ethnic lines. You might be a Chinese rail worker, earning credit in grad school (signals engineering), or you might be a Nashville musician turned geek, networking in coffee shops, getting established. Both of you would be welcome at Cubespace, where no embedded sensors go off just because you play wii and/or snake charm and/or perl dive for a living (alluding to Barcamps, their obvious diversity).

[1] the properties of a mathematical group are Closure, Associativity, Inverses, Neutral (or Identity, iNverses), with Abel a pun on Abelian (a subclass of group).

Hippie Dude

:: micheal ::

I'm watching Simpsons again, with Tara, heading to Cubespace next, after just a taste of the Evening News. Crackdown on banks...

Micheal was by, cycling many miles in the rain and the dark, enlivened by the experience. This guy is resilient, a survivor, also a pamphleteer. I'm more his dramatic foil than sidekick though. You can hear that on radio.

His latest publication is Eco Peace (Free or $1?), 99 New Trends & Sustainable Organic Solutions. I'd call it thought provoking, and like nothing you'd ever get from a politician. This is hippie lit.

The way I tell it, I met my first hippies when hitch hiking to Myrtle Point Oregon. Beade and Denise, a lot like Brian and Susan, though Princeton wasn't really a hippie school, 2D notwithstanding, while my own life as an expat made me a different brand of freak. But that's just me in a private namespace, YMMV.

I salute Micheal for exercising his freedoms in democracy, pursuing happiness. May his path be filled with joy and prosperity.

WhereCampPDX 2011

Ironically, I forgot where Metro was and got lost looking for it. Although I have a Google Android in the company taxi, it has no thoughts on these matters, as I have no designated sponsorships earmarked for any on board GPS at the moment. The Android itself is from the Mighty Python Empire.

I phoned mom and she looked up Metro's location on the web for me. I'd driven right by the place. She asked if dad used to be director of Metro, but I don't think Metro yet existed when he headed up the Portland Planning Bureau in the 1960s, before taking the job with the Libya planning office (land use planning).

I might offer an unconference talk on Food Not Bombs. We need those GIS / GPS dashboards, mainly for dispatchers in their bunkers, sending bikes to food recovery sites, flash mob servings.

Having such gizmos is down the road as far as the SE chapter is concerned. The same principles apply to BizMo dispatching in general (FNB operates "bike bizmos"). LCDs keep track of them. Dave Ulmer's for example.

Many of our chapter are doing food logistics for the 2011 October Occupation. Other chapters are helping out in cities around the globe. Some of the main monitor pages are claiming over 800 metro areas have at least token representation from the 99%, mostly their own inhabitants (at least in Portland -- we live here, are not outsider agitprop agents).

Speaking of the 99%, last night I was lucky enough to be invited, on short notice, to a rather exclusive showing of Life in the Material World, the new documentary about George Harrison, directed by Martin Scorsese. The art museum theater was completely packed.

Our host mentioned how it was something of a coup to be getting this movie (from London, to Roger Ebert, to us), and the guy next to me said "yeah, we're like the 1%", which I thought was funny. I'd be rejoining the 99% later, in their privileged position at the downtown camp site (good lighting, convenient bus access, lots of music and public meetings).

Metro is like the planning arm for TriMet, which is the operational arm (more like the AFSC vis-a-vis behind the scenes Friends). ESRI, Portland Development Commission, GeoLogi, Metro and TriMet are among our sponsors, buying us breakfast and lunch, providing facilities. The hackathon tomorrow will be at Pie (Portland Incubator Experiment).

I'm heading into a talk on the history of map making at Metro, going back to the early 1970s (ruling pens, Rapidograph pens, tape on mylar...).

Amber Case is here, a lot of other geeks I know (Ward Cunningham... Audrey, Igal), from OS Bridge, BarCamp, CubeSpace other venues.

GNU High School Algebra

Sometimes I dress up in what I imagine to be Chamber of Commerce clothes and go knocking on doors, figuratively speaking, looking for allies in thinking SQL should have more of a footprint in high school algebra classes, in part so we might start talking ~SQL with a more informed public.

OK, that was cryptic, I admit, SQL (ess kyoo ell) not really standing for anything some say, though Structured Query Language is the favorite, a kind of algebra for doing bookkeeping against trusted data stores, focused on verbs like "select", "update", and "grant" (as in access rights), just as you'd expect.

We're basically talking about basic file cabinet operations and indeed one of the hot new document stowages is called Tokyo Cabinet, recently installed to my Ubuntu Dell laptop through Synaptic, looking through my catalog for coffee shop classes, other user groups at CubeSpace and so on. Zope / Plone, Durus, Schevo... ~SQL has a strong track record already.

Put another way, Tokyo Cabinet, like CouchDB, is ~SQL by which I mean "not SQL" as the tilde (~) means "not" in many math books. You'll see like (SQL | ~SQL) where the "pipe character" (|) means "or". So don't just blame me for being cryptic, I had a lotta help (smile). Think of Hamlet going (Be | ~Be) if you want a mnemonic.

The informed citizenry part is we might start doing more medical records, for example, in a "schemaless storage" i.e. in ~SQL, even as we continue building FOSS stacks atop MySQL and PostreSQL. The "new neuronics" is to use MVC with HTTP's request and response objects as the only client-server go between. Use HTTP to control everything, much as we configure routers, other hardware, through web browsers these days. Have Apache on the other end, hosting some framework (like Django, like Rails) and hit against (SQL | ~SQL), or both.

Average high schoolers aren't supposed to be able to crank out reams of legal SQL on a day job, just for having been briefed, given overview, some hands-on practice. The point is to help guide their decision making in terms of career choices, with DBA (database administrator) being a hot job, lots of perks, plus we have way too few of them, or at least that's how it seems from my position.

Considering how expensive it used to be to even get close to "big iron" (mainframe computers running pricey business software), I understand why we almost snuffed out the whole geek subculture, but that's where GNU / FOSS comes in, free and open source counterparts the schools are starting to use more effectively, to share these skills and storylines with a more literate student body.

Urner-Holden Workshop Etc.

Python for Teachers:
Part 1 of 2
Part 2 of 2

I was blessed with some deep thinking attenders, had a great A/V team (volunteers with yellow shirts, Pycon branding). Having field tested this talk a number of times, I have to say I was both prepared and not prepared.

I was prepared in the sense of having just about three hours of material, which I got through smoothly and coherently. My demos worked, including with sound. The night before, I added the bell curve from Walking with Nobby to stickworks.py as a test, along with its first and second derivatives.

:: bell curve in stickworks ::
( click for larger view )

Steve and I had not met or pre-rehearsed the co-production, so he mainly gave me a sense of quiet confidence, plus he blessed what I'd said at the end, which made it all seem very official (he's chairman of the PSF, also the father of Pycon itself).

He felt free to leave the room on occasion, handle business by cell. Ian showed the video clip about public key cryptography just ahead of my walk through my little RSA module (the same one I shared with Wanderers).

The free-wheeling real time discussions from then onward have been most welcome & rewarding. Comparing notes from all around the world, having Python in common, is a rare and interesting experience. I'm an elder statesman around here, a recognized MVP.

During drinks afterward, I was happy to see our Portland team from Cubespace / PPUG milling about, heading for sushi. Michelle is back from Nashville I note (good talking). Fond greetings to Jason, Adam, Michel, Bret.

That being said, there's a technical core development community based around the system languages which I'm not much a part of. That's more for the hard core engineers like Allison Randal (Parrot VM), and the Swallow team, the PyPy team (e.g. Laura). However, at dinner, I was able to get some updates on these invitation-only summit meetings, which keeps me in touch with our snake's beating heart. How Python is Developed by Brett Cannon, will be informative. I'm reviewing Andre's talk on edu-sig.

Sorry to hear about Bruce Eckel's broken leg -- he was to talk more on metaclasses, one of our subculture's esoteric topics. The African and South American community organizer guy missed his plane or was otherwise delayed, so that talk will be Sunday (I'll probably be diving downtown to take in the museum exhibit, enjoyed the Africa updates at OSCON). I've enjoyed talking to Luciano Ramalho, the Brazil's user group chief, especially about Unicode issues.

As a nominee to the PSF, I need to be at the LAX room for lunch. I'll be an observer, not voting on anything.

OK, we're on to lightning talks.

PSF meeting: let's protect the logo.

VMs meeting (packed room): panel discussion with delegates from PyPy, Jython, IronPython, CPython and Unladen Swallow (a branch of CPython). Our host, Django guy Jacob, actually came to Python by way of Jython (running Django on the JVM is a goal). Google is branching CPython because it wants to accelerate services such as YouTube, a huge volume of Python code, a lot of it tied to a SWIG-based C++ library. Speed may not be the top goal of all of these projects.

At Work Again

Lets hope the Wanderers retreat went well. My weekend was cram packed, what with the Race for Justice, sampling the music scene, Quaker solstice party, Carrotmob.

Back at work, I'm blasting that DM track with help from the Philippines. Ateneo de Manila, a Jesuit academy, and the State of Oregon, are about the same age (150 years old this year). I've reported back to my user group re OS Bridge, wearing my "math teacher" hat, also zapped that Synovate resume to Mosaic for followup (yes I'm head hunting again).

Not having Cubespace puts a crimp in my style, but there's always Fine Grind for small meetings, Urban Grind for large ones, so I'm not planning to stress too much about the change in routine (not that I was always in there or anything, mostly for meetings). Lucky Lab is another hangout.

The next big topic will be classroom layout. At West Precinct (HPD), we used a U shape, with workstations (Redhat) facing the wall, conference table at center. Students could shift between two modes, while the training team (two Saturday Academy teachers in our case) had an easy time seeing over shoulders, no need to squeeze between rows.

This configuration makes it easier to simulate planning meetings, including watching shared projections, taking turns with lightning talks ("be phase") punctuated by implementation ("do phase") i.e. pair programming, solo exercising, self testing, performing routine sysadmin duties, other development. We're simulating a school intranet for teacher trainees sometimes.

Here's a diagram:

Also, given cultural differences, the benefits of XP (eXtreme Programming) will need to filter out differently. The same software tools used to pair program at a distance may be used in close proximity. Sometimes, rather than pair chairs, we'll pair subnet IP numbers (it's not either/or).

Sara Ford showed us their setup in Redmond, yakked about their pair programming practices, how to "talk to the room" etc., with junior and senior devs not hiding behind closed doors. Everything seemed more open and egalitarian, even with division of labor and hat switching. But that's just one corporate culture. How does Google goo?

Today I also helped Glenn with the inventorying of 87 ISEPP tapes (isepp.py), plus lent him a scanner. We're trying to get more organized in anticipation of our Wanderers reviewing project.

logging assets

GIS Meeting

I'm not marketing myself as a GIS expert, not primarily, and so know enough to recruit a current PSU student to fill me in on some of what's cooking.

We met at The Bagdad and went over some stuff, me explaining about the broken pipeline using the e | m | h | c motif, which looks cryptic, but just means elementary then middle then high school then college, or basically K-16. We see a break pre-college, when a lot of students feel heartbroken that they'll never "get math".

Our proposed fix is to use FOSS. GIS / GPS uses FOSS too (per FreeGIS etc.), so that's the bridge.

I learned more about SEEDS and Corpus Linguistics. There's both a physical and a mental geography, in the sense that zip code areas might be filled in with more DemocracyLab data.

I explained about the idea of deliberately spicing your rants with icons, changing the markup behind the scenes, because we want the search algorithms to take these rants into account i.e. we work with the grain of the design, to make the summary representations more cogent.

We're not summarizing in some distant board room, sharing exclusive secrets. The mirroring is right back to the ranting public, providing feedback for steering.

Anyway, the DemocracyLab stuff was more a sidelight. More to the point was the urban gardens, their interplay with the schools, institutional buyers. We want to improve the cafeteria food with Farmer's Market type produce, something Portland is already doing to a limited extent.

Even more to the point, the GIS systems need to show kids where the animals might be, including domesticated farm animals like sheep (a theme for today), and semi-wild animals like muskrats, herons, possums, coyotes, deer and raccoons, all native to Greater Portland.

Make that a Python list, then study some GIS maps, help with the data collection in some case. I saw both a heron and muskrat today, near Dignity Village.

I talked a lot about my visit to Immersive Media with my University of Rochester connection. If you get to practice your skills in some immersive world, like Second Life, then graduate to the real deal in some field trip up the Columbia Gorge, then maybe you'll be less likely to peel off from our math track. You'll think it's exciting and relevant and the GIS objects we give you (an API) will impress you with their power and ease of use.

Maybe you'll get to make mashups? Having mastery over a Controller (often a computer language) in the MVC design, is a key to future happiness in this regard. MIT's Media Lab's work on the Landman Report Card is a case in point.

Close to the surface in my thinking was Glenn's global matrix approach, which uses simple and elegant mnemonics to add more of a time dimension to these global data displays, i.e. he pushes global awareness back to those ancient civilizations we read about in Critical Path as well.

In my "road show" model, I'm able to segue to or from Glenn's segments pretty easily, the idea being to field a rotating cast with swappable members.

I look at Cubespace as a base for some of these trainings, Wanderers for others, e.g. I represented ISEPP at Pycon when doing my three hours, with segues to contributions from both Steve (PSF) and Ian (Tizard / Stanford).

In terms of fantasy worlds, I don't mind asking "where is Python Nation?" as like a question about Middle Earth. Now that Pycon has this Rivendale reputation, that's easy to do, plus the geography is actually quite well developed, thought out.

I alluded to Middle Earth in last year's Chicago talk as well, referring to Moria, a next stage on the journey after an abortive attempt to tackle an over-mountain pass -- metaphorically, Calculus Mountain, a chief obstacle on the older maths track, pre discrete math getting more of a footprint, thanks to FOSS and Portland's innovative math teaching subcultures (MLC a good example).

Qyoobin'

I grabbed Jasper Johns, a view cube overlooking SE Grand, right across from Dr. Jekyll, Ishmael to his rear, Ingres to mine. That must be the "fictional characters" aisle across the way, "painters" my theme. They address cubes by theme/subject here @ CubeSpace.

But my first task of the day was to lug polyhedra, laptop, speakers, projector, Ethernet cable, paperwork, to PSU for the sa: class, unit 4 of 5, giving Nick a lift in the process. Today we covered the MVC design pattern, using our "cave painting" delegates: Vector, Edge and Polyhedron classes for a Model, VPython and POV-Ray for Views, naked Python for the Controller (M = Model; V = View; C = Controller).

Jennifer used the time alone to surf the net, took off about the time I got back, perhaps to rendezvous around dinner, maybe OMSI tomorrow? She's from Miami, thinking to relocate to either Portland, Seattle or the Bay Area.

Now at Barcamp, I'm awaiting the Python Meetup while taking photos of some prototype XOs. This is the first time I've been this up close and personal with these machines. They're smaller than I'd expected, but that doesn't detract from their attractiveness.

Knitting (the activity with needles and yarn) seems in, as a unisex activity. Bagels and tacos with fixin's, coffee and sodas for drinking. And Bubble Tea: pretty sweet, and I forgot to ask for tapioca balls with my first one (an error since rectified).

The geeks are cramming into rooms, earnest, polite, and serious, trying to make intelligent use of their limited time. Networking skills aren't among the easiest to develop. Stay relaxed and enjoy real time visits with your peers, is my advice.

PPUG 2008.9.9

Jeff is explaining about pdxferment, literally about making yogurt, beer, other fermentables. Dark Horse Comics is here, recruiting a Python coder, as is Patrick (a Wanderer), Jason having moved on to full time work (right Jason?). We're about twentyfive strong this evening.

Brett Carter of Kavi (and a former astronomy student of Dick Pugh's at Cleveland) is talking about Python eggs, which are similar to Java jars. There was no eggified Zope 2.x MySQL adapter, which scared him. Summoning his courage, he tackled egg-making. Brett: "setuptools is just a giant monkey patch on top of disutils, adding on eggs, some other stuff." Getting your egg to include non-Python files takes some tweaking, then host your package at PiPy when you're done maybe.

Mark Frischmuth is here telling us about DemocracyLab, a think tank for building "democracy engines," a first one evolving as a Python application. He pointed us to the data model and source code threads on Clearspace. Coincidentally, I'm wearing a DemocrayLab T-shirt, but I don't say anything about my role.

Leo Soto is our visiting speaker, in the USA with Google's Summer of Code, also a Jython developer. He's here at Cubespace to share about his work around running Django on Jython.

What are the advantages? No global interpreter lock (GIL) for one thing. The Java ecosystem is rich, will read Excel files natively for example, through Apache POI support of OLE. You've got scalability with Hadoop, Hbase, JRuby... it's a lot like .NET, in terms of being packed with goodies.

In retrospect, J2EE was a big, horrible mistake (picture of Titanic). Sorry to hear that.

OK, so there's a new Web ARchive format (war). Unpacking a Django war looks something like jython manage.py war --include-java-libs = XXX.jar. War files are a kind of jar, so sort of like eggs you may have realized. There's no native MySQL or SQLServer adapter for Django on Jython, but then there's zxJDBC.

Leo showed us some back end code for talking to Postgres, importing from the original django.db.backends, but also from zxJDBC for more Java specific operations. There's only an experimental SQLite back end, per a question from the audience (not from me).

So Leo was able to get Django working on Tomcat, showed us a demo.

We can expect a finalized Jython 2.5 towards the end of the year.

I joined the more informal conversations afterward, at Green Dragon, a new brewery on 9th and Belmont, incorporating that old Q-hut that use to sell recycled computer junk. I like Jason's idea of organizing a Python 3.0 release party.

PPS Has Friends in the Silicon Forest

As we mutter like Gollum in doom and gloom, about some lost "precious" (our economy), let us not forget that Portland is looked to, by much of the world, as a capital of FOSS. Of what? Here you are in Portland and you probably don't know what an XO is either, and therein lies a problem. Our schools need to catch up with the times. This isn't Oliver Twist. The software is now open, and free (FOSS means 'free and open source software').

So how should PPS make friends with the geeks? That bridge has already been crossed. Winterhaven is a well known "geek Hogwarts", feeding directly into BarCamps at CubeSpace. I taught there as a volunteer, a mix of Google Earth and Python, so I know whereof I speak. PDX is on the map, and not just for Ikea. We're a capital of Open Source according to Christian Science Monitor (2005), and we'd do well to remember that (the ring!).

However, the mathematics curriculum is still dark ages, stuck in the days of calculators. The situation was so extreme in Hillsboro, home to high tech, that West Precinct police, under George Heuston and company, actually started their own school, a Linux lab (Redhat). I know this because I was one of the instructors, hired through Saturday Academy, Jerritt Collord the other one. The point: kids are desperate to gain entre to their high tech heritage, and the schools just aren't the gateway that they should be, so we the police will do this as a community service (bold move George!).

Roll the clock forward, and we're looking for ways to differentiate, make our town shine. Why not consider building the best, most relevant "on-ramp" to the information superhighway that money can't really buy, only help with? What it really takes is training, and lots of it.

But that's what we have in abundance: willing trainers, ready to show you the ropes on legally free software, using affordable hardware.

I think the key place to focus is on town-gown relations, but remember to include the private sector in "gown" (think "g for Google"). Don't be afraid to let "private industry" help with a makeover.

There's no philosophical conflict, between public mindedness and profitability, philanthropy and running a railroad. Some individuals feel conflicted, sure, but consider Mentor Graphics, a proud sponsor of the ISEPP lecture series and a generous source of tickets for local high schoolers and their teachers.

This is Portland at its best. The Silicon Forest cares about its public schools, always has. Let's keep that in mind.

GIS 2009

:: gis in action 2009 @ hilton, vancouver, wa ::

I'm at a Hilton in Vancouver, WA. Unlike at Pycon, almost no one is using a laptop. My 10:30 - 12:00 talk went very well, everything worked, room full, audience laughing at my jokes, asking intelligent questions, no complaints.

I still need to hover more in the booth area, which splits exhibits between town and gown i.e. academic posters and private company booths safely cohabit, plus some of the private booths are university departments. This is a blend we might be shooting for at Pycons, thanks to Vern Ceder's new position. Currently we're pretty much all business.

I spoke at this seventeen year old conference a few years ago doing an uphill slog with lots of source code. Today's talk was far more autobiographical, winding through dad's Libyan sojourn, visiting our 8th grade class in Italy that time (About Zoning), the high school math teaching interlude, some mention of McGraw-Hill.

Given the 2005 lunch talk was about Civil War era submarines, I had a good excuse to segue to my uncle Bill Lightfoot's work, on submarines pre-WW1 (there's a slide with the book cover).

I was trying to explain my relationship with PPS, per local politics. I said nothing about Alaska, or Bhutan for that matter (given the lunch topic, the Mongolian Altai by Jim Meacham more stories from the Himalayas would have been appropriate, with links to Shirley MacLaine).

Fresh from Pycon 2009 (Chicago), I had lots of news. Then I connected the usual dots between New Math (e.g. Venn Diagrams) and Gnu Math (e.g. SQL), the latter being our campaign to run more FOSS on Intel and AMD chips, not just have calculators for brains in math labs. That's a well honed rap by this time, lots of heads nodding.

I went into Google Streets with Immersive dodecacams, place based education, PY3K. Ian's work with the ATM in the UK got some focus, as did some South African pilots. I told my Y2K story about watching the BBC in Lesotho, USAers freaking out about their superpowers (there'd been some apocalyptic literature, a crisis mindset).

Talking so much about my dad and urban / regional planning, was my way of reaching out to this other culture. Later, dad became an education planner, which is sort of where I pick up, given all my curriculum writing experiments, mom likewise an influence (she wrote quite a few textbooks during their stint in Thimphu).

It's OK to see prehistoric dino Pythons as a basket of hissy snakes, happy to work for ya for many years to come (no pressure to migrate 2to3 if you have no economic reason to do so). Unlike cars and trucks, bit-perfect Pythons don't wear out or break down.

I ended with a brief summary of CSN planning, given that's getting my focus these days.

When Boost goes 3K, that'll be a big milestone (a clue from one of my astute listeners -- these folks are pretty Python aware, thanks to ESRI). Will there be a Google Summer of Code focused on that project?

GPS-Photo Link with TerraSync looks cool. It's not a live demo yet, just screen shots (wait, here we go...). Demos are risky, but worth doing.

Although I rotated my cube between exhibits a lot, I didn't do much in live Python beyond disassemble a function (dis module), explaining what byte codes are all about, in the context of narrating about the VM summit, which I followed from a distance.

I steered a couple of folks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/3321022118/ as where to get some real Python overview, access to trainings.

I have Alan Potkin's Water in Mainland Southeast Asia PDF for Bob Pool, who expressed interest in learning how to do more with less. Perhaps ReportLab would help customers of GIS data get it all in one highly usable CD / DVD.

Adobe's PDF format has many under-exploited features. Patrick's idea of just distributing websites (per recent traffic with Synovate) is also state of the art i.e. browsers are the "universal client" these days. Microsoft was prescient in seeing them as replacing / augmenting the GUI.

People loved the spinning Compiz cube. I'm clearly an accomplished showman, had a whole table of artifacts, actually poured beans between polyhedra (Saturday Academy hat).

This wasn't a carbon copy of the IEEE talk at Portland Center Stage, but had some commonalities. Having Trevor touch base this morning, regarding some manuscript he's writing, got us off to a good start. He's my source for the "other tomorrow" meme, a feature in today's slides (3.x meg).

Hybrid SQL ~SQL applications appear likely in this domain as well (not just in the medical field). Come to think of it, Anatomy & Physiology is really just another kind of geography (interior mappings), as Fantastic Voyage reminds us.

Some data is amenable to row and column treatment, other documents might come in through mapreduce. The HttpResponse object is their confluence (a stream of suitcases). The browser doesn't care where these came from, so long as they appear secure (what that means is up to your firewall).

I was glad to finally meet Tim Welch who works with GeoDjango for Ecotrust. We chatted at the OSGIS booth, yakked about FoodHub some. I'll hope to make a future user group meeting. The PSU booth heard my rant on the Red Cross web site, something I've been sharing with Cubespace engineers.

Back in 97214

I connected with Patrick and Glenn today.

Glenn and I started our morning with Acme Coffee Shop (its real name) as I wanted to introduce myself to the owner. This shop is around the corner from the Pauling Campus with a back end facing the same parking lot.

Lindsey was in there recently talking up getting them a free piano. She's turned herself into a mini-Hubble, tracking heavy pianos people want to get rid of, in some cases still good, easily tunable and/or fixable. Of course moving them is an art in itself.

She'd like to intern at Immortal Piano or one of those.

The upright at our house likewise needs student-intern attention, might still serve to give music theory lessons (like the Yamaha gave when I was away in Baltimore).

Then Glenn and I went to Barebones (by way of Red Square, also on Belmont) which has replaced Muddy's (same server slot). We had simple fare (fresh bagels and bottled beer, some hand made apple pie), enjoyed the sparse ambiance.

We then went around the corner to where Flipside had once been, the site of our first radical math class for Portland Free School.

Glenn remarked on the professional nature of the new dry wall that'd gone in (we were looking through the window).

Glenn has recently acquired a new kite, one of those Oregon beach soaring models. He got it at a rummage sale for $1.

Patrick and I stared at Django code and managed to make some headway on a more user-friendly front end for his buzz bot. He's already using the BB's back end, harnessing its services to help with some Hollywood "what if" business. He's amazed how much money rides on decisions backed by practically no analytics or psychometrics e.g. a "sample size" of "five similar films" -- what does that even mean?

Lindsey has been in Portland for about a year, as of today. We're marking the anniversary of her arrival from Georgia, at the end of a long drive across country. In addition to pianos, she shares Mike D's focus on XOs, has other geeky plans for Laughing Horse -- which may be on the verge of closing after all these years, given the paucity of volunteers. When it's open, it tends to do some brisk business in books, T-shirts, other merchandise which in turn helps to pay bills.

I've parked a Dymaxion Projection in there a couple times, more as a symbolic gesture than as a real for-sale item -- same as I did for the Burning Man crew. Maybe contact BFI if you want copies.

In Other Words, which used to be in our neighborhood (as did Laughing Horse -- on Division) now serves fresh coffee. So could Acme could benefit from some science magazines? Inquiring minds want to know.

Glenn and I should do our next Flextegrity workshop at one of those tables. That might net 'em some new customers, plus Ken is one great portrait painter, with some example works already displayed.

I'm cooking Together Friends lentils this evening, back to the brown ones. I tried this dish with red lentils recently and effed it up, though the hodge podge tasted pretty good, especially with soy sauce. This time I think I pulled it off, as I'm more experienced with lentils of this variety.

Last night we went out with Sam Lanahan on Flextegrity business. Tara doesn't appreciate fish, got the chicken strips instead. The cheesecake was just out of the freezer but still tasted OK (I don't eat it much, though did encounter some top-of-the-line example of that edible material in Fairfax, Virginia recently).

Although I'm scheduled to teach Martian Math this summer, it's not like I'm eager to abandon Project Earthala. A focus on Mars does not entail a loss of focus on Earth.

On the contrary, our geography-aware curriculum is about upgrading our diverse domestic civilizations to a point where we might one day realistically contemplate achieving such an esoteric goal as installing some human-habitable research facility on some other planet or moon.

We have a lot of homework to do, and studying doesn't happen when our students have so little security in so many necks of the wood. We retard the Zeitgeist by letting the Global U stay so far from "ship shape". What curriculum deficiencies might we address? What "more with less" learning strategies might we adopt?

Astronauts train in giant swimming pools. Undersea cities will likely presage true space colonies. Your geodesic domes had better not leak too dramatically under water. What math might we teach to keep these submarine dome-dwellers dry?

Might we need Old Man River City and others like it, to sustain our skilled work groups of ground-based personnel? "We need to address depleted infrastructure and move on to the next thing" hardly seems that controversial an hypothesis.

The Eisenhower Administration got the freeway network going (the I-net). Today's "freeway system" is more about fiber optics perhaps, with Google the new General Motors.

Speaking of ship-related skills, Glenn taught me some more tricks with string and rope during our circuit today. He also had his handsome handmade sling along for show and tell purposes. He's been making these things since boyhood, gradually improving on his designs. Boys Life was an influence, a popular magazine, not unlike Make: in some ways, disregarding the gender bias.

The math curriculum we're imagining has a lot in common with scouting programs, with a mix of stereotypically "boy" and "girl" type skills. Home economics, gardening, self defense and weaponry, navigation and mapping, diet and health... there's a math angle to each of these, as well as multiple timelines to simulate and contemplate.

Games like Civilization help students integrate the variables into sometimes non-linear relationships, with comic books and cartoons helping to fill in and flesh out what might otherwise come across as dry-as-bones statistics and demographics.

Of course anything so practical and outdoorsy must seem like a radical departure from the more commonplace and mostly sedentary approaches to matters mathematical -- because it is. These would be your more experimental pilot programs, not just run of the mill and not necessarily widely available in 2010. Geocaching R Us.

Getting our curriculum off the ground will be remain difficult minus an influx of trained personnel with an ability to impart some of these skills. Trainers are in short supply around the world, as is logistics capability. Afghanistan is absorbing much of this talent.

As we saw with Katrina and will see again if / when a disaster next strikes, if the guard for that state is mostly deployed in some remote, poorly-directed overseas misadventure, then it's unlikely the citizenry will accept some nebulous "war on terror" as a legitimate excuse.

Since when was it OK to rob the domestic front of its trained protectors? Many governors have asked themselves this same question.

I joined a thread at the Math Forum regarding other aspects of the curriculum. Having recently observed first hand how programming skills remain in demand in the aerospace sector, I was again nudging the math teachers to maybe pick up some of that slack even pre-college.

This is not some new party line I just invented for the mid-term elections of 2010. This is a tune people have been singing since computer programming became somewhat affordable to many schools in the mid-to-late 1970s, with the advent of the personal computer with languages like BASIC and LOGO.

Later, a more Unix-like environment would migrate to the personal desktop, in the form of Linux and FreeBSD, and some additional computer languages would percolate through the popular mindset.

Languages such as LISP, Scheme, APL, Smalltalk, ISETL, ABC and so forth, would migrate from their mainframe settings onto home computer hard drives.

Of course no rule says high schools must confine themselves to running what home computers might run, but as a rule of thumb one wishes to have some continuity in that regard, if only to keep parents somewhat in the loop.

Tomorrow I'm to meet with Dr. Bob Fuller, my mentor on the First Person Physics project. This isn't the same gig as the Nebraska-based initiative (as in Lincoln), but it sounds like there may be some commonalities, e.g. a focus on delivering the information in ways health care professionals might find especially useful.

The focus on biomedicine was a characteristic of some of Dr. Urone's books as well.

Dr. Fuller is a student of Dr. Robert Karplus when it comes educational theory and techniques. A Love of Discovery sits in my living room on the "time capsule" (semi-cylindrical shelves) between a book by Linus Pauling and Wolfram's thick tome.

Dr. Tag has been bouncing around the Middle East for the last few weeks. We connected by Google chat yesterday, me just back from Baltimore, Maryland, and she in Damascus at some outdoor cafe.

Perhaps an Islamic bank might want to work with Acme? The one in Whittier seems to be doing OK (mom went to one of their meetings).

I'm not sure what financial services Portland even offers of that genre. Some branches are little more than a few cubes in some "cube space" I would imagine (we used to have an official CubeSpace in one of our banks, where I used to show up for work sometimes, or for user group meetings).

Tara is home sick. Our $500/mo health insurance policy covers 0% of her $80+ antibiotics and 0% of the $200+ doctor visit. As MoF winner RBF put it in Grunch of Giants: the "system" has been gamed (contrived) to serve only those making $100K/yr or more. That's not an American design, hence his call to arms (including cyber-spatial) against this alien GRUNCH (his books tended to be acronym cities -- search these blogs for decoder rings).

Like I'm guessing the interest on the debt for Star Wars alone is probably sufficient to restore education budgets to their higher 1970s levels (relative to GNP).

Eco-tourism could easily pick up the slack when it comes to needing skilled engineers, including those in an aerospace pay grade. The insolvency of the "ray gun" school is hardly a state secret at this point. Investors aren't buying what can't be sold (an economic truism I realize).

Speaking of economics, buzz in the financial press suggest the SEC plans to use Python more. I wonder if this might be owing to its new decimal type (just speculating again, though not without evidence).

Basically any silo is free to suck down a copy of Python and use it for whatever work / study programming. The license is liberal in that way.

In sci-tech circles, it's the NumPy module that gets a lot of appreciation, plus other stuff on top of it.

The Panda3D project started out under Disney and was published with a Pythonic API following its further development as an open source project under Carnegie Mellon Entertainment Technology Center. What kinds of course-ware might we develop around this asset?