Tyler Vann-Campbell's Weblog

There is a slight chance that in the near future, posts to “The Casimir Effect” might become scarce for a short period.

The reason? Money.

I’m (finally) being paid large sums of money in exchange for that ever elusive commodity, my free time.

I know. Believe me, this announcement pains me more than it does you. I’ll do my best to keep everyone informed of my adventures in the world of monetary gain, and look for regular posts again in a few weeks.

Hillsborough must have exported its hills early in its history, along with Zephyrhills. Where did all these hills go? East Pasco County, that’s where. Site of the Annual St. Pete Times Bike Tour. You remember, the one I mentioned this morning?

In case you missed it, you can leer at the rugged, unspoiled country roads from afar, via the magic of my camera phone: the biggest camera I dare carry on my bike.

Prior to the ride, we were completely unsuspecting.

The early flats were also misleading.

Then we met with some rolling Florida hills. They are scenic from the top, if you’re not panting too hard.

After 30 miles of rolling hills, I lost interest in the scenery and focused doggedly on my front wheel.

After 40 miles of grueling hills, one can roll across the finish line victorious.

My favorite quote of the day:

“These hills aren’t that hard compared to the ones in Italy.”

I think most of my complaining stems from the fact that this was my first ride of the season. I can hardly wait for the Strawberry Century.

Like gawking at lots of fit people in Lycra? Don’t lie now.

In any case, the streets of East Pasco county can be your gawking ground this morning. Come on out, it’ll be fun, and I’ll be able to say that I have a cheering section.

As you know, I like to exploit my readers in the name of beta testing, especially when I’ve done something I consider neat.

Like atomic energy, some technologies can be used for good or evil. With that in mind, I’d like some of you to test out a new AJAX-enabled, MySQL-backed mass-mailer.

Before you throw rotten fruit, any suite of web-based campaign software worth its salt needs one of these, and used properly, it sends messages only to opted-in database contacts in a mailing list format.

I’m kind of hoping the AJAX will be so snappy that you won’t realize what the script is actually doing. So (and you’ll only hear me say this once) check out the test link and send me some spam.

From an economic perspective, I am a fan of the mixed-market economy. Free markets are great for innovation, but there comes a time when too fierce competition creates a destructive kind of competition that stifles innovation. To use Richard Stallman’s analogy, capitalistic competition is like a race: as long as those competing stick to the business of trying to run faster than their fellow runners, the fastest person is awarded the prize; however, if one or more runners decide to win by pulling out a gun and shooting all the runners faster than them the race is no longer doing its job of rewarding the fastest runner. To take the analogy further, the race can often degenerate so far that running is no longer the objective, the finish line is never crossed, and instead the racers just play last-man-standing with their guns. In this all-too-capitalist scenario, the consumers don’t win; the only winner is the runner with the most guns. Get where I’m headed?

Telcos are proposing pulling out the big guns with respect to the Internet. One of the best things about the Internet from a purely capitalistic perspective is the low level of barriers to entry for new innovators, combined with the most level playing field around. If you have some good ideas, there isn’t a great deal stopping you from hacking together some code, getting a server, and trying your luck at building the next Google; the tools are there for anyone who wants them, and the network (that amorphous in-between stuff) treats all services equally. We’ve seen it over and over again. Skype and Vonage are stealing phone revenues by offering lower rates, it was only a matter of time before the Telcos realized they could choke people’s access to these services by selectively throttling their bandwidth. I can’t be clear enough on this: if the network isn’t content-provider-neutral, you won’t see free web-applications like Tadalist, the price to access a large market share will be driven up by Telcos trying to monetize their pipe in every available way. Internet Service Providers are free to charge for the service of routing data from one paying customer to another, according to terms of service. They should not be in the business of deciding which data is routed to whom. Doing so is anti-competitive, and you should tell them so.

Thanks to Catherine, who is Out In Left Field for bringing this to my attention.

AJAX is the thing. All the cool kids are playing with it now. Implementing it from scratch can be an exercise in masochism, especially from a debugging perspective. Enter SAJAX a PHP library that makes AJAX applications accessible to the masses of web developers still using boring, synchronous, form-centric POST and GET. (I know what you’re thinking: how passe!)

In any case SAJAX (in the developers’ words) “makes it so simple to do this that your friends will make fun of you if you don’t.”

So. What are you waiting for? Go there. Use it or I’ll make fun of you.

Okay, there aren’t many holes to speak of in GNOME, but continuing the Beatles motif was irresistible.

Since I have been drooling over the new features of Ubuntu Linux, I thought it only appropriate to attribute some of the more stylish features to their source, GNOME.

Ubuntu development tracks GNOME development almost exactly, so the new release of Ubuntu should coincide perfectly with the release of GNOME (just a few weeks away now)

Davyd Madeley has his perennial preview of GNOME 2.14 out and the new features are worth more than my perfunctory GNOME lovefest.

For the first part, remember GNOME Love Day? Well, some people more talented than myself succeeded in making GNOME faster; much faster. From font rendering to memory allocation, there are some drastic speedups in 2.14

From the taking-eye-candy-from-strangers department, we have a composite-enabled Metacity now, incorporating many of the more impressive features of Luminocity, the technological testbed for future features. Wobbly Windows are only the beginning. Think Mac-ish people, it’s coming.

Home users will also enjoy fast user switching, enabled from the desktop. I know the members of my family that use Ubuntu have been wanting something like this for a while. The wait is over.

Beagle searching is implemented from Nautilus and the Panel now, and searches can be saved like folders and called back instantaneously. Run two searches on your computer, files returned by both searches will be in both “Saved Search folders” without changing location. This is the beginning of the end for hierarchical organization of data as we know it. For example, files related to Ubuntu and/or Novell could both be stored in one GNOME folder and organized by dynamically updating “Search Folders”. Cool, huh?

Features friendly to a corporate environment, like H.323 for voice and video over IP, seamlessly integrated with Evolution’s contact list and LDAP directory, makes videoconferencing a trivial implementation. CalDAV makes scheduling the aforementioned videoconferencing relatively pain free, since everyone works around the same calendar server.

So what are we left with? A speedy, pretty, full-featured and stable desktop with lots of extra stuff for productivity neatly packaged inside it. With a $0 price tag.

Which makes one think: if Windows Vista isn’t stunning, and I mean thoroughly amazing, the word “entrenched” might not mean what it used to.

The great thing about Ubuntu’s regular release cycle, is it gives me new stories on a six month basis. I tend to start obsessing over the new version as feature freezes start and the next release starts to take shape.

So what’s new in the fastest growing Linux distro? Quite a bit.

Someone hacked up a patch to Evolution to support bogofilter over spamassasin so now we have fast, reliably working Bayesian filtering.

XGL looks like it’s going to make it in, which puts some pressure on me to install Ubuntu on something other than my aging laptop. Hear that Gentoo? Your days on my younger-but-still-aging desktop may be numbered. In case you at home are wondering, hardware accelerated desktops are what make Macs so pretty and fluid. Longhorn/Vista promises a hardware accelerated desktop, but it looks like Novell and Ubuntu are going to beat them to it. Yay Open Source!

Speaking of cool Mac features, we’ve had Beagle for a while, but in effort to make things even more Spotlight-ish, the deskbar-applet now launches right into Beagle. Pretty nifty.

Oh, and for your development (outside of clisp) we have Scribes now.

I have to admit, it’s getting better, it’s getting better all the time.

I once posted about the addition of free wireless Internet access to express buses from New Tampa. It got shot down pretty quickly as a service largely unneeded by the “underprivileged.” At yesterday’s town hall meeting with the president, someone raised the question about why the highway bill earmarks money for projects that aren’t in our local budget yet. Hence this money sits there, unable to be used until we decide to build a light-rail system. The response?

I’m just not one of these guys — if there’s no hope, I got to let you know, brother. There ain’t no hope. (Laughter and applause.) They’re not going to — they’re not going to revisit the highway bill.

I think all of this attitude of how to spend money on mass transit stems from an error in perception. To be clear, I respect the person who shot down my previous post. I think she’s intelligent and has good and valuable opinions. I really try not to take it personally when people characterize my fellow riders as “underprivileged” or when a pro-transit article calls us the working poor. We’re certainly not over-privileged by any stretch of the imagination, but some of us wear ties to work; we carry briefcases, or laptops. We value getting to work on time, comfortably, without adding to or having to fight with the mob of cars trying to find the fastest way out of downtown Tampa from 4:30 to 6 pm every day.

But who can blame any individual when highway expansion is called an investment in infrastructure, but mass transit is given the unfortunate moniker of subsidy?

Why am I complaining though? The whole point of a blog is to influence public opinion. Honestly, if you’ve never ridden a bus, you don’t have a good idea of who rides them, why they ride, and what areas they see for improvement. Sounds like the makings of some real in-depth amateur journalism if you ask me.

Over the years, you’ve been the relationship that has lasted. You are what I read as soon as I wake up and you’re the last thing I watch before I retire to bed.

You tell the best stories. You make me laugh; sometimes you make me cry. Other times you do things like this and I do a little of both. I feel like I carry you with me at all times.

I feel I can trust you. Around you I can be myself, and though we’ve had our rough spots, times when you’ve withheld the truth, well, you know I never stay mad at you for long.

I hope everyone enjoys their V-Day. I know that the St. Pete Times and I are going to have a great day today.