Tim, Noran, Virginia, Bear

Here's a great photo of Tim, Noran, Virginia and Bear. We took Virginia to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago to celebrate her second birthday. Tim was nice enough to meet us there for the occasion. A fun day was had by all.

Bear got to see some of his cousins.

Greta still remains missing. She was last seen near Niagara falls a few years ago.

Rememberance

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
— John McCrae



This is a day to remember those who came before us, and to reflect upon the legacy they left for us.

The time is now, always now, to decide what you can do to make the world a better legacy for our children.

Hezbollah has fiber?

Today's news of the unexpected is that Hezbollah, the opposition (terrorist?) group in Lebanon has it's own fiber network!

Wow!

Yet, I can't get fiber for a reasonable rate at work or at home in the worlds only remaining SuperPower... hmmmmm.

Found via John Robb.

ACL as punishment?

Over at Echovar, in the midst of a post summarizing the Internet Identity Workshop:

Chris Saad injected the data portability meme into the flow and suggested personal Access Control Lists, in the form of a “Sharing OK/Not OK” check box on data you give to individuals or companies. It would be interesting to watch Robert Scoble manually configure a complex ACL on his 20,000+ friends (Scoble rushes in where Angels fear to tread).

While it would truly be torture to force a person to manually configure an ACL for 20,000 people, it doesn't have to be that way. One wrong move, and you've lunched everything.

Giving away capabilities on the other hand would be a much easier thing. You have the host environment generate a capabilities token for the piece you wish to delegate access to, then send it through email, or on a web page, or whatever the end user's security policy specifies is the right thing to do.

It would make far more sense to have a system that lets users delegate capabilities to any given part of their information, blog posts, photos, etc. The fact that you start with a model of least privilege means that you start with the most you're willing to give away, and pare down from there. You don't have to worry about giving away the store by mistake.

Yes, Access Control Lists would be punishment, but being able to give away little bits, without fear, is a quite liberating alternative.

I look forward to the future.

QWERTY Considered harmful?

An interesting observation from Daniel Berger:

Larry Wall’s first rule of computer language design is, “Everybody wants the colon”³. Maybe the problem is that we just don’t have enough symbols on our darned keyboards. The result is that we’re left fighting over the scraps that QWERTY gives us, e.g. the colon. My opinion is that a limited number of usable characters limits our thinking and our expressiveness. (emphasis mine)

In my recent quest to push forward awareness of capabilities, the notion of expressiveness seems to be at the crux of everything. If you don't have a conventional way to express something, it takes a lot of work to come up with something to get your point across.

I believe that rich source code is overdue. The idea first came to me via Chuck Moore's ColorForth, but I think it could be applied in a wider array of places. The ability to simply highlight a section and make it a comment without worrying about syntax would be cool, but I'm sure there are far more powerful uses that would quickly arise, such as the ability to do literate programming, freely mixing source and documentation and content.

The arguments against any new programming technique usually tend towards the fact that pretty much any language can already express any program. These arguments always miss the expressiveness that a new language brings to making it easier to solve a certain class of problem.

Originality

Quote of the day:

Originality is overrated. Clarity, especially for those of us who have trouble achieving it, is also appreciated.

That was in response to an Megan McArdle's concern her post might not be original enough. It was, and I learned a few things. I liked the CS Lewis quote in the middle.

Almost useful capabilities demo - 0.012

So, I've done some more programming, and I'm now up to version 0.012. for my Capabilities demo.

The main page at http://127.0.0.1:81 is now the user page, with the protected content. You have to have a capabilities token to edit the data.

The administration page is at http://127.0.0.1:81/admin, which allows you to create and revoke capabilities, and see the current "protected content".

It's all implemented in python, in a single file, just to make it easy to demo.