First and foremost my parents just shared their 44th wedding anniversary this past week. The influence my folks have had on my life goes far beyond mere existence.

I can remember the day I scratched some Earth with a golden shovel at the ground breaking ceremony of my school districts new high school. I was just a kid, but a few years later I was going full time to a brand new school (no more split sessions). My mom was on the school board and pushed strongly for the project, thanks mom!

My father gave me the courage and freedom to find my own path in life. I’ll never find enough moments to soak up his teachings both philosophical and practical. He gave me an essential nudge when lounging in grad school to start my first career. Thanks Pop, I’ll always appreciate that!

Which leads me to the second wonder of May, I landed a full time job with a brilliant and energetic startup in Manhattan, Fast Society. I’ve taken on the role and responsibility as chief of research and development. What it means now is refactoring the illustrious image processing library aptly named Bob Ross, and helping optimize the throughput of our system of servers. Tip of the hat to the warm welcome from the team and sharp architecture design by Mark Armendariz (True Professional). I’ll share more about the team, our product and platform over the coming months, likely on an official company blog.

The next wonder of May is my brother Ron’s birthday. This week he turns a monolithic 43. His year of understanding all the secrets of the universe is over, and it’s time for him to share the spoils of his wisdom. Ron has had a huge impact on opening my mathematical mind to the bizarre, the far out, and the fantastic. Congratulations to Ron on his new housemate this year, his adopted pet cat who’s quickly become family.

A week after Ron’s birthday comes my own. On May 22nd I’ll reach 152 seasons since my arrival. I like to celebrate my birthday for weeks, months, and sometimes years, a habit I picked up from my little brother Benjamin who’s mastered that mysterious art. That’s right, each time you enjoy your own birthday, you’re also celebrating mine. Likewise, each birthday moment of mine, is a celebration of all your birthdays too. Happy birthday to us all!

May’s wonders have forever been compounded by my own anniversary to my beloved wife Michelle. We were wed May 30th 2010 (who’s sum is the prime number 11 or 1&1 – coincidence . Michelle is not just my better, brighter, sharper, and FAR prettier half, she is my guide and compass in times both bright and stormy. Happy anniversary hun, a life shared with you is my most sacred super power .

Happy May!

I got a chance to clean up my aging html5 resume today (click through the image above). The original style was based on Google’s slide format, while the current version is utilizing a gorgeous slide show tool reveal.js.

Special thanks and format credit Hakim El Hattab (@hakimel), Michael Mahemoff for showing it off, and Paul Kinlan for Google plusing my attention to it.

The design will consist of pictures, pseudo code blocks, descriptions, and comments. A wiki or github repo with markdown will serve as the best drawing board for this effort.

Any and all participation will be welcome after I construct a rough draft to serve as a skeleton. The design will include fictional fault tolerant persistence as well. I figure if I’m going to fantasize, I might as well do so at the highest level possible with balloon strings down to practical logical constructs. The concepts will be implementable in a variety of host languages, but I’ll leave that effort up to folks who are eager to do so.

A design goal is to limit interaction between functional components to strictly defined interfaces. The dream is many loosely coupled simple components which are nearly self documenting.

1) install the gem.

2) place the hook. Enter “debugger” where ever you want your debugging session to begin.

3) navigate the code

h is for help, what can you do
l is for list, where are you in the code
n is for next line, step over
s is for step in
fin is for finish / step out
p is for print, p

That’s it.

There’s more to it, but that should be enough to understand and evaluate the state of your code.

While diving in to the post and comments I was reminded of a recent dinner conversation I shared with a financial wizard. When asked by yours truly about the rationale for complex rules on (mid sized) businesses he was kind enough to explain the exploitation of bad asset swaps by shell companies, and why careful regulations are needed to prevent repeats of stories like Enron.

Here Dan breaks it down in laymen’s terms:

The shenanigans come from Section 404 of SOX, and the SEC rule 33-9142.

Section 404 is basically that the dudes at the top cannot claim negligence to financial shenanigans (as in “I’m not crooked, i’m just dumb”). Thats how they pulled the Enron stuff, and how just about everyone walked away without jail time.

http://www.sarbanes-oxley-101.com/SOX-404.htm

SEC rule 33-9142 exempts loads of businesses from Section 404.

http://taft.law.uc.edu/CCL/34ActRls/rule12b-2.html

The problem is that giving companies 5 years to be SOX compliant sounds very nice on paper, you are also giving some dirty mo-fos a 5 year head start. And give the SEC adjustment (passed Sep 2010, right before the election…) you can setup tiered shell companies that all fall under the exempt heading. You have to make sure to keep them in business for over a year, and keep them in line with certain incomes, but as long as you cascade them, you can shuffle forever.

2012 – start companies A, B, C, D, E. A-E reports a minimal loss.
2013 – start companies F, G, H, I , J. A-E buys all of F-J bad assets, F-J reports a minimal loss, A-E shows massive “investments”
2014 – start companies K, L, M, N, O. A-E buys all of K-O bad asssets, F-J buys all of A-E bad assets, K-O reports a minimal loss, A-J show massive “investments”
2015 – same shenanigans, just add 5 more
2016 – same shenanigans, just add 5 more

Now your reporting shows that A-E made significant investments over the past 5 years. You hold an IPO, at a moderate price, given your “investments”. The sale happens, the bubble bursts, the price plummets, and everyone but you get screwed. The SEC comes calling, but since you have numerous small shells that all fall under the SEC exemption, you are not responsible to be SOX compliant. If they press the issue, you claim “I’m an idiot” and they can’t pursue you, as per the SEC exemption. You walk away clean.

The above example is identical to what those guys did in 2002 that caused a need to create SOX in the first place. Problem is, everyone forgot about that, and now shenanigans are about to happen again. We just need a few years.

Granted, the intention of the laws and regulations are there. And I 100% understand the thought process. The problem is, when you allow for this kind of crap to happen, it’s going to. Much like people taking advantage of welfare, unemployment, etc. The theory is good in a vacuum, but in reality it needs fixing really badly.

I was thinking about how to best setup a project this morning. It will be composed of a couchDB editor app, a visual editor/GUI, and backbone hooks to the couch.

The editor is Dale Harvey’s inception (freaking slick), and I was thinking of making that a git submodule to my fork of the tool. I was going to do the same for GUI/backbone app.

But couchapps require a very specific folder setup to deploy properly. Should I keep them as separate couch apps, and combine in a third app which utilizes them, or should I bring all the source together for one larger couchapp. Any and all all suggestions welcome.


#!/bin/sh

git filter-branch --env-filter '
if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME" = "unknown" ];
then
export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="user";
export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="user@email.com";
fi
if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" = "unknown" ];
then
export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="user";
export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="user@email.com";
fi'


Thanks to StackOverflow for leading me to a solution to the historical commit username swap.

If you mess up your git_rename.sh don’t forget this panic button:
git reset –hard refs/original/refs/heads/master

Autonomy Moves to the Edges of Networks

The folks I share a world view with believe in equal opportunity, not equal wealth. Work, strive, and be judged. As long as we thoughtlessly perpetuate a hierarchical system, we erode the opportunity for growth that our predecessors will no doubt inherit. This is less a rallying cry, and more of a message. The shift in value is in plain sight for those willing to see.

Why the Web is part of the Old Kingdom

As an active digital explorer and participant in evolutionary web development, I’ve delved deeply into protocols, web scripting languages, frameworks, and RESTful interfaces. Time and again I slam into the limitations of client side code, and the requirement for server hosting. The insidious requirement for servers is built into every layer of web stacks.

Need a server? No problem for the fluent

Although the technology surrounding self hosting has made it drastically cheaper and easier to setup a web server, there continues to be a barrier to entry for non developers. For example my wife doesn’t deploy Rails servers, not even on Heroku. Why isn’t each and every access point a fully functional network citizen? What’s stopping users from clicking their way into their own read/write node without going through gatekeepers? Satisfactory nodes enable pushing and pulling updates to and from friends, and subscribing to preferred news and media sources.

The default response is “it’s too hard for non geeks to setup and maintain a server”, but that argument holds as much water as a raised aquarium platform shoe (very little).

With the rise of technologies like CouchDB we’ll see the expansion of servers to mass market consumers. Admittedly there is a layer of UI polish that’s required for each application, yet it comes as no surprise that mobile devices are upgrading to servers. The issue of local access to a recognizable url like https://marksmobile.ln/OneSweetApp without global domain name registration is as simple as modifying a temporary hosts file. Security IT specialists will shoot me for mentioning such a hack, but there are authentication methods that could make this work (using an extension like .ln to signify a local name).