Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,
Because it jumps like a skittish horse
and sometimes throws me
Because it is poky when cold
Because plastic is a sad, strong material
that is charming to rodents
Because it is flighty
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers
Because it leaps forward and backward,
is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a boulder
And it winks when it goes out,
And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of
gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods
strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out
and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at
“delete” so it teaches
of impermanence and pain;

And because my computer and me are both brief
in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me
right inside the tent
And it goes with me out every morning
We fill up our baskets,
get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

—Gary Snyder, “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer”

 An internet (lowercase “i”) is any collection of separate physical networks, interconnected by a common protocol, to form a single logical network. The Internet (uppercase “I”) is the worldwide collection of interconnected networks, which grew out of the original ARPANET, that uses Internet Protocol (IP) to link the various physical networks into a single logical network. In this book, both “internet” and “Internet” refer to networks that are interconnected by TCP/IP.

…in Craig Hunt, TCP/IP Network Administration.

Crisis averted.

You’ll need an Amazon AWS account. If you’re new to AWS, your first year of hosting is free, as long as you stay below certain thresholds for bandwidth and system resources. Sign up here.

To deploy Redmine:

• Launch an Amazon EC2 instance with image ID ami-3d3bee54. That’s the most recent BitNami Redmine Stack, which includes everything you need to deploy Redmine (Ubuntu, MySQL, Ruby, Rails, Apache, Mongrel, Redmine, and the necessary configuration files).
• Navigate to http://{YOUR AMAZON PUBLIC DNS}/redmine/ (where {YOUR AMAZON PUBLIC DNS} is something like ec2-XX-XX-XX-XX.compute-1.amazonaws.com)
• Log in with username “user” and password “bitnami”.

That’s it–Redmine is now up and running! Instructions for lightweight configuration are below.

Mapping a domain

Inside the EC2 console, allocate a new elastic IP address and associate it with the instance you just launched. Then, create an A record for your domain and point it to the elastic IP address.

Configuring the URL root

By default, the BitNami Redmine Stack lives at http://{domain}/redmine/. To configure Redmine to live at the URL root (i.e., http://{domain}/, without the /redmine/), follow these steps:

• SSH to the server:

$ ssh -i ~/.ec2/YOURKEY.pem bitnami@ec2-XX-XX-XX-XX.compute-1.amazonaws.com

• Edit the Apache configuration file for Redmine at /opt/bitnami/apps/redmine/conf/redmine.conf to read:

⟨VirtualHost *:80⟩
  ServerAdmin example.com
  ServerName example.com
  ServerAlias server
  ErrorLog "logs/error.log"
  CustomLog "logs/access.log" combined
 # this not only blocks access to .svn directories, but makes it
 # appear as though they aren't even there, not just that they are
 # forbidden
 ⟨DirectoryMatch "^/.*/\.svn/"⟩
    ErrorDocument 403 /404.html
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
    Satisfy All
  ⟨/DirectoryMatch⟩
  # This passes through remote_user to mongrel
  RewriteEngine On
  # Redirect non-static requests to cluster
  RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://redminecluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]
⟨/VirtualHost⟩

#ProxyPass / balancer://redminecluster
#ProxyPassReverse / balancer://redminecluster

⟨Proxy balancer://redminecluster⟩
  BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3001
  BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:3002
  # The number of balancer members depends on the number of mongrels running
  # We use only one mongrel on port 3001 by default for the BitNami Cloud Hosting
  # Please remove the others like 3002 above in such a case.
⟨/Proxy⟩

(Borrowed from the BitNami documentation.)

Replace example.com with your domain.

You’ll also need to edit the Mongrel configuration file at /opt/bitnami/apps/redmine/config/mongrel_cluster.yml to look like this:

---
prefix:
log_file: log/mongrel.log
port: "3001"
environment: production
pid_file: tmp/pids/mongrel.pid
servers: 2

Finally, restart the server:

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart

Confuring email

Configuring an SMTP server allows Redmine to send you email notifications. Create /opt/bitnami/apps/redmine/config/email.yml and include the following (these settings work for a Google Apps SMTP server but can be easily modified):

production:
  delivery_method: :smtp
  smtp_settings:
    tls: true
    enable_starttls_auto: true
    address: "smtp.googlemail.com"
    port: 587
    domain: "smtp.gmail.com"
    authentication: :plain
    user_name: "{YOU}@{YOURDOMAIN.COM}"
    password: "XXXX"

For some reason, after I create this file, the server becomes unresponsive to HTTP requests. Rebooting the EC2 instance solves this.

Enjoy.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 48% of Likely U.S. Voters believe that most members of Congress are corrupt. Just 28% disagree, and another 24% are not sure.

More.

Former Louisiana Senator, John Breaux, laid it bare:

Of the four top lobbying Democrats, Breaux — who served as chairman of both the Democratic Leadership Council and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — fits most comfortably into his lobbying role. Breaux won fame in 1981 when, after getting huge sugar subsidies inserted into Republican-sponsored tax-cut legislation, he told reporters, “My vote can’t be bought, but it can be rented.” In 2010, his firm, the Breaux Lott Leadership Group, a subsidiary of the Patton Boggs LLP law firm, had billings of $11.83 million from such clients as Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, General Electric, AT&T, Tyson Foods and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

More here.

I’ve spent the afternoon playing with these datasets to find the answers to some more interesting questions. For instance, what’s the average donation amount for each candidate? How do contribution and expenditure patterns evolve over time? How does fundraising activity correlate with high-powered fundraisers?

To my dismay, the bulk data doesn’t seem to align with the FEC’s summaries or candidates’ own accounts of fundraising activity. I’m posting my methodology here with the hope that somebody smarter than I can spot an error.

I downloaded the bulk FEC data in CSV format from this page (the direct link is here). Based on the FEC’s data description, I created a MySQL table with the following schema:

CREATE TABLE `contributions` (
    `id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    `committee_id` VARCHAR(10),
    `candidate_id` VARCHAR(10),
    `candidate_name` VARCHAR(200),
    `contributor_name` VARCHAR(200),
    `contributor_city` VARCHAR(200),
    `contributor_state` VARCHAR(20),
    `contributor_zip_code` VARCHAR(15),
    `contributor_employer` VARCHAR(200),
    `contributor_occupation` VARCHAR(200),
    `contribution_receipt_amount` DECIMAL(20, 2),
    `contribution_receipt_date` VARCHAR(200),
    `contribution_receipt_realdate` DATE NULL DEFAULT NULL,
    `receipt_description` VARCHAR(250),
    `memo_code` VARCHAR(100),
    `memo_text` VARCHAR(250),
    `form_type` VARCHAR(100),
    `file_number` INT
);

I imported the CSV using MySQL’s LOAD DATA INFILE command:

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE '[...]/P00000001-ALL.txt' INTO TABLE
    `contributions` FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '"' ESCAPED
    BY '\\' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' IGNORE 1 LINES (`committee_id`,
    `candidate_id`, `candidate_name`, `contributor_name`,
    `contributor_city`, `contributor_state`, `contributor_zip_code`,
    `contributor_employer`, `contributor_occupation`,
    `contribution_receipt_amount`, `contribution_receipt_date`,
    `receipt_description`, `memo_code`, `memo_text`, `form_type`,
    `file_number`);

Finally, I converted the “contribution_receipt_date” field from a string into a MySQL DATE field:

UPDATE `contributions` SET `contribution_receipt_realdate`
    = STR_TO_DATE(`contribution_receipt_date`, '%d-%b-%y');

There are 74,797 rows, which matches the number of lines in the CSV (plus an extra row for field names):

$ wc -l P00000001-ALL.txt
   74798 P00000001-ALL.txt

With the dataset loaded, I determined the types of contributions represented:

SELECT DISTINCT `form_type` FROM `contributions`;

This returned three values, which correspond to transaction types on FEC Form 3P (PDF): “SA17A” (individual contributions), “SB28A” (refunds to individuals), and “SA18″ (transfers from other authorized committees).

Next, I tried to duplicate some of the FEC’s calculations. This is where things went wrong. As an example, Michelle Bachmann has reportedly raised $2,288,336 in contributions from individuals. According to the FEC’s formula, this number is the sum of individual contributions (from field 17a) minus the sum of refunds to individuals (from field 28a).

To reproduce the FEC’s figure, I calculated both of these values:

SELECT SUM(`contribution_receipt_amount`) FROM `contributions`
    WHERE `candidate_name` LIKE '%Bachmann%' AND `form_type`='SA17A';
# Result: $682,727.00
SELECT SUM(`contribution_receipt_amount`) FROM `contributions` WHERE
    `candidate_name` LIKE '%Bachmann%' AND `form_type`='SB28A';
# Result: -$3,200.00

The net result is $697,527.00—far lower than the publicly reported amount. I thought perhaps I’d made a mistake with the form types, so I calculated all of Bachmann’s contributions, regardless of type:

SELECT SUM(`contribution_receipt_amount`) FROM
    `contributions` WHERE `candidate_name` LIKE '%Bachmann%';

The result was the same: $679,527.00. Ok, it might be possible that some outlying negative values are skewing the results (I’ve encountered extreme outliers in government data sets before—for instance, in disclosures of lobbyist campaign contributions), so I calculated the sum of the positive values:

SELECT SUM(`contribution_receipt_amount`) FROM `contributions`
    WHERE `candidate_name` LIKE '%Bachmann%' AND
    `contribution_receipt_amount`>0;

Alas: $682,727.00.

I ran similar queries on the other major candidates, with results that also fell significantly short of the public numbers. I tried identifying contributions by candidate ID instead of name, in case of a naming problem, but the results were identical.

I’m worried that my only choice will be to parse the FEC’s full committee summary data, which comprises many dozens of gnarly fields. I’m also a bit surprised that the FEC’s bulk download doesn’t seem to match the public numbers. I’m probably missing something obvious. Can anybody help?

Update: As commenters pointed out below, it turns out the issue is that committees aren’t required to report contributions of less than $200, so those contributions are not itemized in the FEC dataset. Thanks, all, for your help!

Dear Supporters,

We’re writing to invite you to attend (at no charge) an important upcoming conference at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. It’s called the Conference on the Constitutional Convention, and more info can be found at www.ConConCon.org.

From both the Right and the Left, citizens are increasingly coming to recognize that our Republic does not work as our Framers intended. Reform of any kind is stalled by a status quo that profits from blocking change. No side in the political debate benefits from this inertia.

The Framers created the Article V Constitutional Convention as a way to escape captured government: If two-thirds of the state legislatures pass resolutions calling for a convention, then all sides will have the opportunity to argue for the changes they believe will restore our Republic. Any amendment proposed must then be ratified by three fourths of the states to become law.

On September 24th and 25th, people from across America and across the political spectrum will convene at Harvard University to discuss the advisability and feasibility of organizing towards a Constitutional Convention. The conference’s lead organizers include proponents and opponents of an Article V convention and we actively encourage the participation of those who support a convention, those who are ambivalent, and those who oppose holding a convention at all. The conference is sponsored by Harvard, Fix Congress First, and the Tea Party Patriots; it’s being co-chaired by Fix Congress First’s Larry Lessig and the Tea Party Patriots’ Mark Meckler. You can review the agenda and register—for free for the time being—at www.ConConCon.org.

Thanks so much, and we hope to see you in September.

Joseph Mornin
Fix Congress First

P.S. The conference is open to the general public, so please forward widely.

If you’re like most Americans, you probably buy your Internet service from one of a small handful of corporate providers. The big incumbent broadband providers—like Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable—often enjoy monopoly or duopoly privileges in the areas they serve.

Recently, some communities have started to implement their own municipal broadband networks. These community-owned networks are often faster, cheaper, and more reliable than the corporate alternatives. In North Carolina, for instance, community-owned networks like Fibrant and Greenlight consistently outperform the commercial offerings from Time Warner, AT&T, and CenturyLink.

Similar municipal broadband projects are taking root across the country. Their expansion, however, threatens the comfortable markets that corporate broadband providers have come to expect. In what could become a typical case, Time Warner is supporting a bill in the North Carolina state legislature that would impose sharp limits on the growth of municipal broadband networks. Despite widespread opposition, the bill recently passed in both chambers of the state legislature. Time Warner, which reported $26 billion in revenue in 2010, has donated over $6.3 million to North Carolina politicians over the last four years.

The Institute for Local Self Reliance is leading a campaign to fight the political influence of incumbent broadband providers. To learn more, visit their Community Broadband Networks project at MuniNetworks.org.

“We believe that this legislative data, using standardized machine-readable formats, should be publicly available on House websites,” the pair wrote to House Clerk Karen Haas. “Ultimately, legislative data is the property of the American public. It is our hope that these reforms will continue to rebuild the trust between Congress and the people we serve.”

…

Cantor and Boehner note that the rules of the House adopted on the opening day of this session of Congress directed the Committee on House Administration “to establish and maintain electronic data standards for the House and its committees.” They ask the clerk’s office to help develop those standards with a goal of moving to open-data formats like XML.

More here.

(Via Sarah Schacht at Transparency Camp 2011.)

1. Information is not meaningfully public if it is not available on the Internet for free.
2. Primary data is data as collected at the source, with the finest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.
3. Data are made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.
4. Data are available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.
5. Data are reasonably structured to allow automated processing.
6. Data are available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.
7. Data are available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.
8. Dissemination of the data is not limited by intellectual property law such as copyright, patents, or trademarks, contractual terms, or other arbitrary restrictions.
9. Data should be made available at a stable Internet location indefinitely.
10. Data published by the government should be in formats and approaches that promote analysis and reuse of that data.
11. Government bodies publishing data online should always seek to publish using data formats that do not include executable content.
12. Published content should be digitally signed or include attestation of publication/creation date, authenticity, and integrity.
13. The public is in the best position to determine what information technologies will be best suited for the applications the public intends to create for itself.
14. Have a process for ensuring that data you disclose are accurate and reliable, and show that process to users.
15. To the extent two data sets refer to the same kinds of things, the creators of the data sets should strive to make them interoperable.
16. Other things being equal, technological choices should be avoided that essentially endorse a single profit-making entity.

More here.

Scene 2: A blogger at Red State (“Melissa”—presumably female) sinks in her fangs:

As per usual, the liberals are bending history and culture to their own view. The conquering, civilization-building, daring-do of men is lost in a haze of pillaging, raping, and aggression. The traits typically attributed to men are whole-sale demonized–and these men buy it. So, it’s not a matter of men even being capable of being fully masculine and noble. No, a fully masculine man is by his very nature wrong.

…

Of course women aren’t receptive! Hello? Mushy males are only appealing in theory. In reality, they’re a pain-in-the-ass bunch.

Scene 3: Hilarity ensues in the comments:

On behalf of my gender, I apologize for this poor representation of a man! Somehow, I don’t think we’d see John Wayne participating here, where he alive!

Can you imagine your daughter bringing one of these guys home for dinner. I have never seen such a sickening display of obsequious fawning……………except maybe the NBC/Obama interviews.

Dear God…My girlfriend wants me to be a man, not a mish-mashed tub of whiny goop.

Finally, one commenter advises this men to watch this video “to get back in touch with their masculine side”:

Only on the Internet, my friends.

This repository contains the complete United States Code. Its purpose is to publish the federal code in a way that makes it easy for interested individuals to access both its content and its changes over time.

There’s also mention of applying this approach to the legislative process:

I think it would be very cool if something like github were used to manage the actual law, all in the open and fully visible to everyone. I imagine the official code as sort of a master repository. Each legislator could fork this repository and hack on his own copy. Legislators could pull from one another as they massage the language to get it right. The House and Senate would each have their own forks, as would the committees. The president, too would have a fork of the official repository.

I’m hugely enthusiastic about tracking legislation in a programmatic way. I’m also hugely skeptical about whether Congress has this kind of discipline, but I’m staying tuned.

Update: @ppolitics points out that OpenGovernment.org has been developing this idea on their wish list.

This howto is based on these instructions, with a few tweaks.

Installation

• On the phone, enable USB debugging (under Settings > Applications > Development, check “USB Debugging”) and allow third-party applications (under Settings > Applications, check “Unknown Sources”).
• Install AziLink on the phone (most recent version: 2.0.2).
• Download the Android SDK (most recent version: r10). Open the zip file, go to the “tools” folder, and run the “android” application. In the window that opens, select “Available packages” in the left column. Expand the “Android Repository” list to the right, check “Android SDK Platform-tools, revision 3,” click “Install Selected,” and then in the window that appears, click “Install” again.
• Go back to the Android SDK folder. Find the program called “adb” in the folder “platform-tools.” Copy this program to /usr/local/bin/ (this folder is under Macintosh HD, and you may need to show hidden files in Finder to see it).
• Install Tunnelblick (most recent version: 3.1.6).
• Install TunTap (most recent version: 20090913).
• Create a new text file called “azilink.sh” in your home directory (that’s the “yourname” folder in OS X; you can also find it at Macintosh HD/Users/yourname). Copy and paste this code and save the file. If you’re using Mac OS X Lion, use this code instead.
• Open Terminal and type “chmod 744 ~/azilink.sh” (without the quotation marks) and press enter.

Connecting

• Connect the phone to the computer via USB.
• Turn off AirPort (click the AirPort icon in the menu bar and select “Turn AirPort Off”).
• Open AziLink on the phone and check “Service active.”
• Open Terminal and type “~/azilink.sh” (without the quotation marks) amd press enter.

If it’s successful, you should see something like this:

You should now be online! To quit, return to return to the Terminal window and type “Ctrl-c” and press enter.

I recently found a version of the old Readability bookmarklet. It works well, but there’s an error in the code that causes the page to use a sans serif typeface, which isn’t as readable as the serifed alternatives. I’ve fixed the code and made it public. To use it, copy this link to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar:

Readability

Then, when you’re reading a page, just click the bookmarklet.

Enjoy!

EDIT: You can also manually create the bookmarklet, using this text as the location:

The Center for Responsive Politics has published a summary of lobbying activity surrounding the Democrats’ top policy priorities—the stimulus package, health care, financial regulation, and cap-and-trade. From the report: “Overall, lawmakers introduced 13,675 total bills and resolutions, and special interest groups spent nearly $7 billion on lobbying in 2009 and 2010. That’s an average of more than $500,000 per bill.”

More here.

As we all know, poodles are a type of curly-haired dog preferred by petit bourgeois retirees, ladies very much on their own who transfer their affection on their pet, or residential concierges ensconced in their gloomy lodges. Poodles come in black or apricot. The apricot ones tend to be crabbier than the black ones, who on the other hand do not smell as nice. Though all poodles bark snappily at the slightest provocation, they are particularly inclined to do so when nothing at all is happening. They follow their master by trotting on their stiff little legs without moving the rest of their sausage-shaped trunk. Above all they have venomous little black eyes set deep in their insignificant eye-sockets. Poodles are ugly and stupid, submissive and boastful. They are poodles, after all.

—Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

It’s been a week since I returned from the national Tea Party summit in Phoenix. Around 2,500 Tea Partiers from across the country–I met people from New York, New Hampshire, Alaska, and several other states–converged at the Phoenix Convention Center to talk about government and its problems. Here are some rough thoughts and reactions.

The summit confirmed certain things I already knew about the Tea Party. First, there is no single “Tea Party.” It’s a loosely-organized network of local groups with a handful of formal organizations at the top. Second, many Tea Partiers are nice, decent people with legitimate concerns about what’s wrong in our government. They want to take matters into their own hands to improve our political system–in other words, they preach and practice grassroots civic participation, which I believe is a good thing. Third, some Tea Partiers–a minority, based on my informal sampling, but a vocal one–cling to a rather loose interpretation of reality, which they insist on promulgating in all kinds of vicious and destructive ways.

There’s much that I admire about the Tea Party. Convention-goers were walking around with copies of the Constitution and quoting passages from it–good–and most seemed to believe that more citizen participation in our political processes is beneficial to government and society–also good. Despite receiving funding from the likes of FreedomWorks and the Koch brothers, and despite high-profile support from the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the Tea Party is a grassroots movement at its core.

At the same time, there are things about the Tea Party that frustrate me to no end. At the summit, one woman hosted a session titled, “How your children are being taught to hate humanity.” “Enviro-nut-jobs” are infiltrating our schools, the claimed, and indoctrinating our children with “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Story of Stuff.” “Sustainability = communism,” she said, and Rachel Caron is “responsible for the deaths of 50 million children around the world.” Denise Levertov–Denise ever-loving Levertov!–is “despicable, horrible, nihilistic.” I wanted to roar–and probably would have, if not for Arizona’s legislation regarding the carrying of concealed weapons.

So, it was a frustrating experience. But I think there’s also some reason for optimism. I left the summit with two goals. First, we need less vitriol in political discourse–and my friends on the left are often just as much to blame as my new friends from the Tea Party. Second, we need to separate our principles from our policy goes. I don’t mean to suggest that policies shouldn’t be based on principles. My point is that Tea Partiers and progressives have much more common ground than either side admits. We all want government to be accountable to its citizens, for instance, and we don’t want lawmakers to be beholden to special interests. I think there’s a shared purpose. If we can work together to fix those things (a huge task), we can get back to having the fights that are worth having.

I know that corporations and unions can influence lawmakers in a variety of ways. Corporate PACs, for instance, can donate up to $2,500 per election to candidate committees, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United allows corporations and unions to make unlimited independent political expenditures.

But there’s a range of more subtle channels of influence. Some members of Congress, for instance, establish local charities in their own names, allowing them to take corporate cash in the form of charitable donations. Many companies will take advantage of murky disclosure requirements to enhance their campaign contributions with lobbying activity.

Has anybody cataloged these different types of influence? How can we get an accurate and complete view of a corporation or union’s influence over an elected official?

In “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” Doug Engelbart imagines a world in which we use computers not just to calculate, but also to learn, explore, communicate, and amplify our natural intellectual capabilities. He envisions a word processing system, for instance, that allows chunks of text to be freely and fluidly manipulated, enabling new efficiencies and creative freedoms for writers. What would happen if architects had computerized “clerks” to help them accurately model the complex properties of their creations?

Today, Engelbart’s vision of personal computing is largely a reality. We’ve reached Engelbart’s fourth stage of human intellectual capability—”automated external symbol manipulation”—in which our computers perform extremely rapid and complex data operations without the user’s direct interaction.

Engelbart contends that small changes in human–computer interactions can cause significant changes in the overall structure of the mind–machine relationship. In the decades since Engelbart first articulated his vision, there have been a number of developments in computers and our use of them:

• Data storage and processing: Moore’s Law has rolled on continuously since the early days of computing, giving us data storage and processing capabilities that are many orders of magnitude greater than what was available in 1962.
• Ubiquity: For many, computing power is always readily available.
• Mobility: Computers are moving from our desks to our pockets.
• Networks: Computers can connect with each other via the Net.

My question is, how do these changes affect the structure of human–computer relationships? Do these changes complicate Engelbart’s theories of how computers amplify human intelligence? Thoughts?