It’s rare to listen to a politician going so deep inside the “religious vs. secular” question. There’s the chance that this is purely strategic, but I want to believe (I really do) that one of the forerunners in the american presidential election is capable of such a clearness of mind.
On Monday, Prof. Richard Stallman visited CERN. I attended his lecture on “The ethics of free software”, and I must say I loved it. I had seen one of his lectures 4 years ago, back at FEUP. At the time, Free Software was still a growing passion, and Stallman was quickly adopted as the example of the great philosopher (and developer) who changed the world.
Today I see him as a front figure of the FLOSS movement, always trying to reinforce the “F”, sometimes losing some points because of some of his private obsessions (this “GNU/Linux vs. Linux” history), his extreme opinions (the idea that there should be no proprietary software at all), and his lack of hesitation when it comes to talk politics. In the other hand, I find the ideas of GNU and FSF completely true, mainly those who concern about individual freedom and access to information.
I totally disagree with bullfights and every other kind of torture. Here is a portuguese promotional video, which tries to establish the parallel between bullfighting and the act of stoning sinful women. It is quite strong, but maybe it’s the only way portuguese people will understand what they’re supporting.
In the name of liberty, in the name of freedom of speech, and based on the obvious fact that no-one owns a number…
We live in a world with “free” content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We tell jokes that reference movie plots without the permission of the directors. We read our children books, borrowed from a library, without paying the original copyright holder for the performance rights.
Lawrence Lessig
(Oh, and by the way, I hate DRM…)
After a small set of rainy days, the sun is now perfectly visible, here at the border.
The other day I found myself discussing with Piotr, my polish office mate, about Object Oriented databases. He believes there is a kind of “curse” hanging over this kind of DBMS. They work, there are a few implementations, but there’s a lack of interesting projects using them. Maybe Indico is an exception, at this point.
After almost two months of Zope’s ZODB usage, I would say that OODBMS are the future (and not yet the present, because of the lack of interest of the programming community, and some other reasons). With ZODB, I can easily transform my Python classes into persistent classes (without the need of any kind of auxiliary specification of behavior or structure), and add them to the DB (which, in practice, is nothing more than a big tree of Python objects). It’s all done in runtime, without the need for any kind of (pre-)compilation. And the news is: it’s fast! Well, not as fast as a crappy table would be, but it’s an amount of performance that most homebrew applications (and many commercial ones) can afford, in exchange for easiness of programming and a 21st century database paradigm.
Let’s face it. I am wasting computational resources right now. WordPress forces me to use MySQL (yes, WordPress still doesn’t support [at least officially] any other database system). MySQL is a high-performance [and resource consuming] relational DBMS, and this particular instantiation (mine) struggles each day to remain alive, with the limited amount of resources I am provided with by this server. I considered the sqlite option, but… no WordPress support (yes, this one is a killer application)… why? Well, if someone is to blame, it’s the WordPress programmers (not me, for sure): they have made their choice, and for sure they had good reasons to make it this way (if not for something else, for the lack of other widespread open source database servers). Let’s not forget that many people host their blogs in shared virtual servers, which do not provide even an SSH shell, and sometimes not even an MySQL database (yes, plain text files! you’ve guessed it!).
So, in order to use this particular piece of software, I am forced to install an enterprise-level database (although I have parametrized it for low memory usage): I’m killing the fly with the Tomahawk! If only I were able to use a smaller thing, I could spare this processor a little work, and free some memory for some other app. By the way, this webserver is powered by lighttpd… and it works pretty well.
Nowadays, the web requires more and more persistent storage. This storage is usually achieved through relational databases. If in linear programming contexts, this meant simplicity, in the object-oriented age (or post-OO, since we are reaching to the point of things like AOP), it means “big-and-full-of-hardcoded-sql data access layer”. This has been partially solved by frameworks like Rails or Symphony: this layer is built automatically. However, the problem remains: it’s all there! You want to do it different? You’ve got to mess with SQL queries, anyway. You’re just running from the problem, not solving it!
And that’s it for now… feel free to comment on this improvised essay…
Cheers.
Pedro
This series of conversations on artificial life gathers different personalities from the ALife hobbyist and academic community, in order to debate different subjects in the Artificial Life field. I had the privilege to take part in the Jan 20th episode (”Is Open Source good for Artificial Life”), and it proved to be a great experience actually discussing this subject with different developers from this area.
It is not new that Second Life’s client has gone open source. I’ve been discussing this question with Tom Barbalet, from Noble Ape, since we both believe that an ALife component would be interesting in such a simulation.
I’ve always been interested in flexible and “massive” simulations: the WoW phenomenon is a different kind of thing - it is not as flexible as SL, and has a well defined environment. Second Life, in the other hand, seems very user-configurable, perhaps too much user-configurable for an actual “game”. So, it looks as a kind of sandbox for different approaches to virtual worlds.
A possible Gaia component in Second Life would provide the game with a natural environment that would make it evolve towards a more realistic “world” simulation. Have you ever imagined an evolution-based ALife simulation where the selective force would actually include real people, progress, technology… well it could work as a test lab in order to build a small-scale model of our past, present and future world. It would be a great step towards the perfect distributed simulation: a simulation where “actually intelligent” people shape an ecosystem, and animals evolve according to natural and “human” (which is natural, too) selection.
Let’s see how the Second Life community goes with Open Source, and see if the ALife community finds it worthy of some work…
I forgot to mention this wonderful Christmas present i got from my sister. It’s an illustrated version of Álvaro de Campos’ famous “Tabacaria” (a long and profound poem which i love), translated into Spanish, English, French and Italian. It’s a great piece of art, and the translations look very accurate, to my simple eyes.”Tabacaria” is also the name of one of my other blogs, this one in portuguese:
It is a short story, still in progress, about the tragedy of life.
More info on Fernando Pessoa, and his alter ego Álvaro de Campos:
“I love you all, everything, just like a beast.
I love you carnivorously,
Pervertedly and twisting my gaze
On you, o things great, banal, useful and useless,
o things modern through
O my contemporary things, current and future form
Of the immediate system of the Universe!
The new metallic and dynamic Revelation of God!”
Álvaro de Campos, “Ode Triunfal” (translated)
Finally, I was able to read the the entire speech of Pope Benedict XVI, given at the University of Regensburg. Well, there are some conclusions to be drawn from it:
As usual, an infinite stream of nonsense keeps happening through the world…
Well… after some episodes of Penn&Teller, I feel tempted to swear in great, great amounts.
Some minutes ago, while watching one of the most seen TV shows in Portugal, “Portugal no Coração”, broadcasted by RTP, the public channel, I felt tempted to drive 50 Km to Gaia, enter the studios, and start yelling “This is crap! Can’t you f*cking realize this is solid crap?”
Well, the reason for such an enraged desire resides in the interview, conducted by the two beautiful and gentle female presenters, to the long-known pseudoscience advocate, Alexandra Solnado, daughter of the famous portuguese comediant Raul Solnado (poor guy). Alexandra defends that she is able to perform hypnotherapy sessions which transport people to their past lives… well, that would be enough to make me angry, but Alexandra decided to take it further, exposing her pseudotheology about human soul, body and behavior. According to Solnado, hyperactive children are a product of an experience in one of their past lives… she says medication is the worst thing you can provide them, and all they need is some of her “therapy” sessions. Well… that would be a perfectly harmless (yet stupid) claim, if she wasn’t being broadcasted to… let’s see… 10 000 000 portuguese citizens, plus 5 000 000 portuguese citizens living outside the country, and people living in portuguese-speaking african countries! I expected that our cute TV show presenters would at least ask her for scientific base for her affirmations, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Instead of taking it as her opinion, they even managed to give her credibility, by agreeing with her, and placing her questions which denoted some previous knowledge on the matter. Well, after the pedophilia scandal, now we find ou that our television channels are being run by narrow-minded new age fans.
Alexandra Solnado even claimed that, in the USA, scientists had found out that the new generation of children is born with a cerebral cortex that is different from the previous generations’. Well… I bet my cerebral cortex is different from hers… (thanks God) but I’d like to know more about such a study.
I immediately wrote a mail to the show’s official address, which I transcribe below (roughly translated into English, too).