We know the Joe Barton reported to work yesterday, ready serve his special interests, to read the conservative think-tank talking points emailed to him overnight into the record, and struggled all day to understand that he had done wrong.

The ridiculous political theater, not only of apologizing the the most reviled man ever to use a British accent in an American television commercial, but the kicking back with the Investor’s Business Daily in a petulant display of disdain. Someone pulled him aside at the recess and told him, we’re not doing that today, and he returns to attempt to issue the non-apology to those that might misconstrue his words, “I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown. ”

In my anger with the man, I imagine him a spaniel, doing what it has been trained to do, expecting belly rubs, but instead squatting and piddling all throughout the day as everyone scolds him. At no point did he exhibit an ability to think for himself.

Only one more day until Boxing Day. I’m counting the minutes.

Emotional two days spent with CNN learning about the terror attacks in Mumbai. No less lighter, but much more uplifting were the  CNN Hero awards, which I hope becomes an annual event.

Watching Louis C.K. talk about technical progress and the grating air of entitlement that comes with customer service culture was especially funny today.

Synapse is peer-to-peer micro-sharing.

It is a micro-sharing network, an network where users share short messages, measured in characters, not words, with other users.

Rather than sending messages to a group, a person publishes there message, other people subscribe to those messages. As you subscribe to other users, you begin to see them appear in a stream, a reverse chronological display, with the most recent message from any of the people you follow at top.

Additionally, people can track topics through a real time search of all messages posted by anybody. They can search based on search terms, the sender, people mentioned in the message, and the components of any shared URLs.

I use Twitter. I’ve get notifications from my FriendFeed account. I have an account with Pownce and identi.ca. Micro-sharing web sites are springing up like mushrooms, especially in the enterprise arena, especially in the enterprise arena, where the problems of revenue model and scalability are closer to being solved.

Synapse is a peer-to-peer micro-sharing network. It does not require a web server. People will run a client on their computer. The computer will participate in a distributed database of everyone’s tweets. As people begin to follow each other, and follow each other back, their Synapse instances will connect and share resources, forming a database.

Synapse builds on the implied trust network and makes it explicit; resources are shared based on trust that is enforced by public/private key encryption.

Synapse will give anyone who has the desire to launch a micro-sharing network, in their organization, or open to all comers on the Internet, simply by starting up Synapse on their personal computer, creating a network, and inviting people to join.

Update: So many git bookmarks since then, it looks like any other delicious stream, so I’ve created a curated tag, as in http://delicious.com/alan/git+curated, to gather subjects where I’m adding considered comments.

I asked him what open source license he favored. He said BSD. His was the GPL restricts usage take on GPL. GPL supporters might disagree, or rather, argue that if it is not GPL, the source is not truly open.

I am familiar with the different open source licenses and what they mean. I am familiar with the politics behind GPL and Apache, both are licenses that attempt to exchange a license for a behavior. Apache 2.0 seeks indemnity from patent litigation. GPL seeks indemnity from patent litigation and seeks to perpetuate source distribution.

Thus, I waver between Apache 2.0 and MIT. BSD used to have an advertising clause, saying you must give credit to the author, but that has been dropped, since the advertising clause created a snowball of credits.

I’m not concerned about enforcing billing in credits, however.

Ed Vielmetti says via Twitter “best open source license is the Berkeley license ’share, enjoy, give us credit’ propagates your name best w/fewest entanglements.” Not sure if Andrew and Ed know that the “give us credit” bit has been removed, making the BSD license appear indistinguishable from the MIT license.

If I where not going to choose the MIT license, it is because someone stepped in and asked me to attach the Apache 2.0 license to further the cursade against software patents, and did so without boring me to tears.

This is a pivot of the traditional open source project website. A pivot from project to programmer.

I love the pivot.

GitHub gives me my own place to play. It lets me share my code the way I share photos on Flickr, the same way I share bookmarks on del.icio.us. Here’s something I found useful, for what it’s worth.

Naming a project is simple. I can give my project a name of my choosing. It is not a tedious affair akin to choosing a domain name, a dozen little stabs of disappointment, to land upon some hyphenated moniker.

Best of all, I’m not told that, before I start my project, I should go look for a similar project to join, before I set out on my own. I’ve always loathed this particular bit of pedantry.

I’ve got an idea, I’d like to try it out. As I work on it, I’d like to share it, to see if anyone is interested. I’d like to offer it to you, for what it’s worth.

Moreover, I’m sharing my code, for what it’s worth to me to share my code.

I am sharing my code. I am not launching an open source project. I am not beginning a search for like minded developers to avoid duplication of efforts. I am not showing up at someone else’s door hat in hand, asking for commit access. I am not looking to do battle with Brook’s Law at the outset of my brainstorm.

GitHub is code sharing with out the obligition of politicking born of centralized repository access.