[ music | Nine Inch Nails – Somewhat Damaged ]

A friend linked me to this article and he asked for my opinion. I’m flattered he think my view matters, and he asked me to blog it. In short, I think this guy’s way off base.

First, remember this. When it comes to investments, you haven’t lost, or gained a penny until you cash out. You paid a certain price to buy in, and until you sell, your losses and gains are theoretical because you don’t have the money on the board, you have slips of paper in the company that are worth that much but only if you sell. So unless you sell those slips when they’re worth less than you paid, you haven’t lost anything. That’s why investing is for the long term, and not for the faint of heart.

Also, what the writer there fails to acknowledge is that while the Euro may be a “stronger currency”, it’s very bad for Europe’s economy if people start flooding it with investment cash because that’ll inflate the value of the Euro, making their exports more expensive, and hurting their economy. A little investment at once, or a lot over the long term is good, but a big influx at once causes instability. Additionally, just a few years ago the European economy was stagnant. It took the Euro to bring some balance to the continental economy. And now that all those countries are using one currency, one bank, economic issues in individual countries are harder to address because each country can no longer adjust their own money supply as needed. The US can because the dollar supply is managed by the Fed via interest rates. It can make credit more or less expensive, making it harder or easier to get loans and managing how people use their own capital. The US economy is more flexible for this, and more stable because exactly one country controls the dollar, while dozens of countries are all in cooperation with the Euro. History says European countries don’t tend to agree on any one thing for extended periods of time.

China has SO much invested in the US they can’t AFFORD to pull out. We’re China’s biggest customer, they can’t afford for us to go under either. Note how he values China’s “$1.4 trillion reserves.” Not Yuan, not Euros, but Dollars. The dollar is still the international standard. China has a lot of US debt. There are very few countries who can afford to buy that much debt, so China’s diversification options are limited by who can afford it, and who wants to buy it. If we’re that bad an investment, no one will want it. If they have no shortage of buyers, then we’re not that bad off.

The building boom didn’t start in 2002, it really started back in the early 80s, maybe a little earlier. The real estate market has been in a bubble for 20 years. Donald Trump got bitten by a correction in the early 90s, but even he knows that even in a declining real estate market, there’s money to be made if you invest wisely. The bubble is bursting because people’s bad investments are finally no longer able to ride the coattails of cheap loans and blind faith that everything always appreciates without fail.

Further, it’s not the Fed, it’s Bush’s terrible economic policies finally catching up with us. Huge tax cuts, even bigger spending increases, a bad war… The deficit is more than double what it was when Clinton took office, and Bush’s spending exceeds even Reagan’s excessive deficit-laden budgets. At least Reagan knew that eventually all that debt had to be paid off. Bush doesn’t seem to know that, or maybe he just doesn’t care.

And it was Greenspan’s fault that the real estate market didn’t correct several years ago, during the dot com crash he dropped rates too much to keep people from feeling too much pain. That was a correction, too many people buying into thin business plans based on selling a $5 of dog food via the internet but forgetting people won’t pay $20 to ship that dog food when they can get the bag for the same price at the grocery store. He kept dropping rates too far too fast. That just allowed people to take their bad dotcom investments and shift them into bad real estate investments on borrowed money.

This is another correction. The entire world economy is an interdependent system. The system is very complex. No single player makes all the decisions, no single player can go down the tubes without causing a world of pain for the other players. Everyone feels some pain sometimes. Right now, this is out time to feel the pain. Ten years ago it was Japan. Ten years from now it might be China or India or Europe. It happens. The only way to survive it is to remain calm. We’re all in this together.

[ music | Foo Fighters – Disenchanted Lullaby ]

Recently someone ran over to WordPress and started a blog about Mozilla stuff. Now, I might have linked to that blog a while ago, but the latest post (as of this date) is nothing more than a personal screed against Mitchell. I never met her personally, but I’ve hung around long enough to feel comfortable enough to say that I doubt she has any significant personal ambitions of wealth here. If she did she’d have left long ago. Have you read this woman’s bio?

But he (or she) did make a few good points, but never got down to the root problems. Mozilla is full of brilliant people. sure, there are some rotten apples, but find me a single organization without them. No one at the top got there by being stupid. However, I think one issue still plaguing Mozilla to this day is management. But there’s another old saying that comes into play here, never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

Mozilla was founded by some people who had less than stellar social skills to start with, and they came from Netscape. Netscape was the golden child for a long time. Then MS came along and abused their position and ground Netscape down to nothing more than a sticker on the wall. A lot of the spirit of NS survived though, and that’s mostly good. But one thing I think that came along that shouldn’t have, and has survived like a virus, is an idea that once a decision has been made, it’s the right one. Arrogance, that used to be called. It is a phenomenon I am somewhat acquainted with. Humility doesn’t always seem to be in sufficient supply at Lizard Central.

Worse, this arrogance had a tendency to make Mozilla look aloof and smug to the community that supports it. The way Seamonkey was handled is a good example. Regardless of how the upper echelon actually felt, they came across as seeing Seamonkey as a bane, a ball and chain, an annoyance best shot and buried. I don’t actually think this is what they intended, but that’s how many people received the news. the Firebird name fiasco is an even clearer example. It wouldn’t have broken anyone’s back to say, “Hey, you know what, you’re right, we made a mistake, and while we can’t change it today, we assure you all that we’re working on the issue and it WILL be resolved within a few months.” The recent transition of Thunderbird was another example, although was handled a little better. But it was still handled poorly enough to give more fodder to trolls like Truthboy over at his WordPress blog.

However, I think there’s a glimmer of hope. They realized, were convinced, or planned all along and just really don’t know how to manage public relations, that Thunderbird is a very valuable property for both Mozilla and the world at large. A property with a lot of promise and potential if handled right. And they’re making some really good moves to help give that promise a chance to come true. I’m not sure this kind of thing would have happened 5 years ago. It shows that the success of Firefox, both in users, visibility, respect, and maybe even financially, has had a positive effect on the culture inside Mozilla.

So, what’s the real truth about Mozilla? They need more education about managing people, not developers. Some good old fashioned person-to-person human interaction across the board. I think that’s really the biggest issue anymore. Now, I know some will say, “Hey, anyone can speak their minds here.” The ability to do so, and feeling like one can are two different things. And I think they need someone to help temper some of the language in communications with the community. A little diplomacy goes a long way, internally and externally.

Take it from me. I’ve never said anything that could be construed as offensive or arrogant.

[ music | Radiohead – Karma Police ]

When I checked my Post Office Box on Monday, I found a lovely photocopied letter amongst my mail. This is a large scan of the letter, and this is a smaller scan. The only edit I performed was to erase my PO Box number that had been hand written above where it says “ID only”. The “ID only” part was also handwritten, but is part of the photocopy, while my individual copy had my number written on it. I’ve also retyped the letter in it’s entirety letter for letter below so you can more easily read it.

Notice how this starts out as asking you for identification. That seems reasonable enough. However, when you read the entire document, you see it’s not really interested in your identity, it’s interested in your physical address. It’s quite specific about what they will accept as ID also, excluding documents many of us would reach for first. I asked the desk clerk about it, airing my dissatisfaction, and she said it’s all related to the PATRIOT Act, saying they all have to “jump through lots of silly hoops since 9/11.” Once again, the PATRIOT Act is being used as a crowbar for the gov’t to pry further into our lives. If a terrorist is using a post office box for illegal purposes, that alone is more than enough for USPS Investigators to be called in, and even to bring in the Feds. Further, if these “evildoers” need to be tracked to their base camp, asking them isn’t likely to provide truthful results. If these guys can get fake IDs and visas and whatnot, they can use those fake documents to fake out the USPS.

This is nothing but further encroachment of legitimate citizens’ rights that does nothing to stop terrorism or illegal activities whatsoever. I can’t imagine that this kind of security theater makes anyone feel safe, and I’m sickened that this kind of crap goes on still.

[ music | The Bangles – Manic Monday ]

Politicians do it, every one of them. Generals do it, CEOs and Chairmen of the Board too. And frankly, once in a while I know you wished you could have done it too. What am I talking about? Ghost writing. Why am I talking about it? Well, a good friend of mine runs a ghost writing company called GoodTermPaper.

While him being one of my best friends might bias me, I think Larry’s a brilliant writer. he always was. He started ghostwriting several years ago and has grown it into a full fledged business competing with other, somewhat dodgy companies who offer stock papers that will get you nailed for plagarism faster than a copy/paste from Wikipedia. Larry and his team of writers at GoodTermPaper actually create every project to spec for each customer, no recycled crap. I’ve seen where some of their customers come from, too. Top notch universities around the country, Ivy League even. Most are repeat customers, too, so that speaks to the quality of the work. Their customers come back again and again.

Recently their website was redone, as well, with a more updated and cleaner look. I must say a fantastic job was done, as well. 😉

So next time you have been given a really crappy assignment, or forgot your project is due in two days, don’t panic. Call the pros, and make your professors wonder when you got so smart.

[ music | Black Eyed Peas – Let’s Get Retarded ]

Ok, this is getting really stupid. One might classify it as retarded. In this Gobuntu non-free package list wiki page, Mozilla’s trademark policy is called “draconian”. I should point out to the Ubuntu crowd that Ubuntu’s trademark policy is incredibly similar, with nearly identical restrictions. And in a major blow to Debian fans, Debian has a trademark policy too. Both boil down to the following ideas:

• The organization owns exclusive rights to the name in question with respect to computer software/operating systems (depending on how broadly they enforce the name, and how narrowly a court may restrict them).
• You can make minor changes to the product and still call it by the trademarked name.
• You may not in any way use that name for commercial purposes that could cause confusion. Forget about opening “Ubuntu In-Home PC Repair” or “Debian Computers Inc.”
• If you’re not sure if you’re within these rules, ask.
• If you break these rules, or your use of their name could start to cause confusion in the market, they can and will tell you to alter your practices or even cease using the name.

Why do they need these rules? Because a trademark is IDENTITY. These organizations, just like you and me, need to protect their names and reputations. If I start hawking “Debian Web Browser” that contains spyware, I am damaging Debian’s reputation. If I start giving away “Ubuntu OS” for free, and it’s just FreeDOS with Ubuntu branding, that’s trading on Ubuntu’s good name and can make people think I’m REALLY giving out Ubuntu, when I’m not.

And what about their permission to use it with minor changes? If I change the default bookmarks to my website, and give that away in Ubuntu, that’s nothing major. If I change the default wallpaper, and add my awesome new band’s music to the desktop, and add my really cool “Catapult” game that I wrote. That’s pretty minor. However, if I make the default wallpaper Tubgirl, change the bookmarks to porn sites, remove all networking, and make it turn on the PC speaker at top volume all the time, that’s going too far because I could make people think this is what these distributions are really like. Don’t you think Microsoft would love to be able to get away with trashing user expectations this way?

Well, Mozilla has the same rules. Debian went further than Mozilla was willing to allow, however. So, Mozilla said, “Let us look at your changes and we’ll think about it.” Debian handed the changes over in one giant monolithic patch, which is very difficult for one person to go over, because they have to reorganize it all themselves to really see what’s going on. Debian didn’t want to split it out into separate patches. Mozilla was willing to look at Debian’s changes, Debian wasn’t willing to meet Mozilla half way by making the changes easy to understand. An impasse arose. So Mozilla asked Debian to just stop using the Mozilla trademarks if they insisted on doing things their way. Mozilla can’t and wouldn’t try to stop Debian from redistributing their code changes, that’s what open source software is all about. Debian was well within their rights to keep their changes.

Luckily, for a long time the Mozilla code has had a simple compile time switch that enables you to turn off the trademarked branding and either use the generic branding, or your very own custom branding. It’s incredibly simple. The Debian devs had broken that option in all their changes. Let me repeat that. They broke that switch. The very thing that would make this dead simple THEY BROKE. This was the REAL CAUSE of the Debian outrage. They fucked up the branding switch, and it was hard to fix because they fucked it really well and it was going to be a fair bit of work to either fix it, or manually remove the branding.

Let me make my personal opinion of this clear. BOO-FUCKING-HOO. I guarantee you if I was distributing my own respin of Debian in which I broke Apache, Perl, bash, and set X to only run desktops rotated 180 degrees, Debian would pitch a royal fit, justifiably so. They tell me to stop calling it Debian. “Oh, well, that’s hard because I went through and hardcoded the name ‘Debian’ into all the places you see it now.” Debian wouldn’t care.

Trademarks are not copyrights. Trademarks don’t cover source code. You can build a 100% OSI-compliant build of Firefox from the public sources, and you can even pick to use the GPL, LGPL, or the MPL as your license of choice if you want to use and redistribute the code. But you can’t break stuff and call it Firefox. That’s someone else’s identity, and they’re not going to let you make it look bad.

And honestly, it’s not even a choice. It’s the law. Trademark law states that trademark holders must enforce their trademarks or they risk losing them forever. Ever ridden on an escalator, gone to a laundromat, or purchased anything made of nylon? Those were once trademarked terms, but they became so generic in use the holders lost their trademarks. Xerox very nearly lost their trademark, as have Kleenex, and Band-Aid. Adobe urges people not to say “photoshopped” and Google asks you to “search using Google” but not “to google”. Having your trademark become a verb is even worse than becoming a generic noun.

So the next time you want to freak out because an organization is protecting their trademark, try to remember that the code is still open source, they’re just protecting their identity. You wouldn’t like it if someone passed themselves off with your name, would you?

Yours truly, Asa Dotzler.

[ music | Pixies – Here Comes Your Man ]

This is a headline I’d love to see in eWeek or InfoWorld next week. I also predict a certain someone will be working remotely from an undisclosed location for a few weeks.

[ music | 12 – Duran Duran – To Whom It May Concern ]

Today I sent out an email to the WWW-Style Mailing List. I’m sure most Mozillians don’t read it, however, so I’m reposting it here for comments, opinions, etc. Please leave your thoughts in the comments as I’m interested in everyone’s opinion on this.

[ music | R.E.M – Try Not to Breathe ]

Well, crisis averted, the world moves on. The bleeding was minimal, stopped fast, and by Sunday night, the only lasting effect was some decreased use of her right hand. The musculature is just as strong, she can squeeze her fingers just as well as ever, but opening her hand doesn’t seem to work, so she’s going to need some rehab for that. Other than that, there’s no slurred speech, no muscle tone loss, no drooping of the facial muscles on the right side, zip.

They were unable to find the cause of the clot, however. They did CT scans and an MRI with contrast, a body scan to look for tumors, did an echo cardiogram, blood work, nothing abnormal showed up. During the MRI, they were looking for aneurysms, and found none, but they did find four older small clots. Before now no one had determined the physical cause of her dementia, so there’s some speculation these may have been at least a partial cause. It’s odd because there were never any symptoms of stroke, so both the unknown origin of these clots and when they occurred are mysteries. But they put her on heparin in the hospital, and she’s on a long term blood thinning agent. She’s back at the home and doing quite well now.

One of these days I’m going to get a little rest, too. 🙂

[ music | I’m not playing any music… ]

My mom’s now had a stroke, with some bleeding in the brain.

She had recovered somewhat from the incident a couple weeks ago, but not fully. She was markedly worse than before, and there were progressions of her disease that made it impossible for me to continue to care for her at home any longer. I was receiving great help from the UPMC Northwest social worker, and we were working on placing her in a nearby nursing home that has a special dementia unit, but they didn’t have any openings yet. We were going to have to move her Friday the 20th. We were going to have to temporarily place her in a facility about 25 miles away until the nearby home had an opening. Thursday night, a resident passed away, opening up a bed. This meant mom could go directly to the near facility where she was going to end up sooner or later anyway. to the family of the woman who passed, my condolences. That woman didn’t linger long, thankfully, she took a bad turn just a few days prior, and wasn’t conscious during that time. She died quickly and painlessly, with her loved ones near. It also allowed for the best possible care for my mother to happen, prevent a temporary stay far away, and two transports that could provide for emotional stress to a dementia patient.

I visited her yesterday. She was already doing better than she had been in the hospital, being calmer and easier to talk with. She even managed to get a good night’s sleep last night. She was eater better too.

Today, about 2pm, I got a call from the home. She was being helped into the bathroom, and collapsed. “She seemed to pass out.” They got her back to her bed, but she seemed to be having weakness on the right side, and didn’t seem to be able to squeeze the nurse’s fingers. There was some concern it might be a stroke. I agreed and they sent her back to the hospital ER. It was a stroke, and it had started to bleed. A combination of an ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke. She’s been flown by med-evac helicopter to Pittsburgh.

She’s not in the ICU, so she’s not imminently critical. She’s in the neurological unit while they run a gamut of tests such as a CT angiogram on her head to determine exactly what is going on with the brain blood vessels. I have no idea what else is happening, won’t find out till later and tomorrow. In the meantime I have to figure out when, and more importantly how to get down there. My car’s undergoing a transmission transplant and while it was nonfunctional I let the insurance go, I need to get insurance again. This was all going to happen at the beginning of next month with some paychecks coming in. Nothing like extra stress to keep you on your toes.

P.S. I just turned 29 in March. She’s only 63. This isn’t the kind of thing you expect at these ages. Not that anyone ever expects it…

[ music | John Cage – 4’33” ]

Today we had a hearing at the hospital. On Thursday, since my mother was not in a condition to admit herself, I had to make an involuntary commitment. Today’s hearing was to determine if there was cause to continue the involuntary commitment for up to another 20 days. There was a court appointed attorney to represent her. His job was to strenuously argue her case. The social worked from the hospital said that this attorney was quite good at it, and had several times successfully convinced the court clerk (who reports to a judge) to release a person against the doctors’ advice. After speaking with my mother for a few moments, the only thing he asked the doctor during his “cross examination” was what happens if she needs to stay past 20 days. There are contingencies for that the doctor explained. The attorney put up no argument against keeping my mother at the hospital. She’s extremely incoherent.

During the next 20 days the hospital social workers are helping me place her in a care facility nearby. There are two excellent facilities with ten miles of me, luckily.

What this means is my mom left home Thursday, and isn’t coming back. I miss my mom. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. It wasn’t supposed to happen so fast.