Les said, the better II

i’m not voting for nader. i dunno if i’m voting for kerry.

My script isn’t in great shape, but it appears to be working now, so I’m posting it for your perusal. The first part of it uses a bit of perl to look for the </html> tag and add above it an <address> section which links back to my blog. I could use all sorts of pattern matching to change the HTML pages generated by iphoto, but I mostly want a link. there doesn’t seem to be a way to modify the template that iphoto uses. The next part of the script creates the XML feed. The script takes as an argument the number of the first new photo. If you add new photos starting from 1036, then it will create a link to that photo, whose number you supplied as an argument. Iphoto counts from zero, so 1 is subtracted from your argument. That number is also used to generate a unique ID tage. You’ll note that a whole bunch of stuff points to blogger. I dunno what that stuff does. I’m just a hacker.

If you want to use this script, you will need to edit it with your URLs instead of mine. also, before you run it the first time:

echo "</feed>" > old_atom.xml

so that the closing tag you need is there. So here is the script and the header. This is provided as-is with no warranty. It might not work for you. It works for me. Feel free to do whatever you want with it.

Some anonymous commenter posted that “[Kerry] can’t get every liberal because if he differs on one issue, [Progressives are] off and running to the Green Party and thus useless, politically.” One issue? excuse me?
I want to explain what issues (note the plural) are important to me, why they’re personally important to me and what Kerry said about them, vs what Greens and Bush think about them.

Women’s Rights

Some people think that women and men are already equal in this country. In fact, women now earn $0.44 per dollar earned by men. When I was a senior in high school, that number was higher than $0.70 per men’s dollar. Women are not doing as well as men and, in fact, we’re slipping. In my industries, the number of women engineers falls every year. There are fewer than three women conductors of major orchestras in the US (the women’s phil just shut down), most grad students in composition are men, most composers programmed at festivals are men, and generally, work by women composers stops being played once they’re dead. This does happen so much to men. Women are also consistently written out of music history. Pauline Oliveros was one of the founders of the San Francisco Tape Music Center. I picked up a book recently that said it was founded by Morton Subotnic and some other guy, but they allowed unkown composers like Oliveros to use the facilities. She’s not dead and she’s already being erased.

Kerry Says

My mother was the rock of our family as so many mothers are. She stayed up late to help me do my homework. She sat by my bed when I was sick . . .. And by the power of her example, she showed me that we can and must finish the march toward full equality for all women in our country.

My dad did the things that a boy remembers. He gave me my first model airplane, my first baseball mitt and my first bicycle.

I think women should have equal rights, but I’m not a fag. Also, my family followed normal gender roles. There is no lack of heteronormativity here. Model airplanes, baseball mitts and bikes are boy toys. Those things aren’t important to girls. Also, I’m not a fag.
This was the first point in which Kerry gave and then Kerry took away. Almost every strong statement he made was immediately softened or negated. I don’t think his asserting his masculinity is necessarily problematic and I understand that he is using cultural biases without thinking about them or endorsing them, but this pattern of advance then retreat is repeated throughout the speech

Bush

I will reach out to all anti-choice women. I will pay lip service to the idea of women’s rights.

Greens

Full equality for women

Queer Rights

I came out in 1992. I was 16 and attending Catholic Highschool. Before I came out, I was the subject of rumors and harassment. I was harassed and hit in the locker room for my PE class. After I came out, things actually got much better. However, kids would attempt to harass me by chant “dyke dyke dyke” at me as I walked by, but gave up when I didn’t react. I had to threaten to sue my school in order to take my girlfriend to prom in 1994. I still try to get in and out of locker rooms and bathrooms as fast as possible, because I fear getting beat up.
Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which means that my marriage to Christi is/was not recognized by the federal government, which affected my taxes for 2003. Californians passed a proposition against gay marriage rights, which also affected my taxes. I spent time arguing with my insurance company about whether I should qualify for a married rate and they said no because of the CA law. In short, I’ve been financially discriminated against. the same year that DOMA passed, ENDA didn’t and still hasn’t. companies in many many states are still free to fire queer employees for being queer. Anti-gay violence continues. Violence against trans people is extremely high. I’m often read as trans, which is part of the reason I have bathroom angst.

Kerry says

let’s never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.

A clear reference to the anti gay marriage amendment. But he never said so specifically. He never said anything about queers. Obama said something about having gay friends in red states. Kerry wouldn’t go that far. Kerry has stated that he’s against gay marriage. Like Clinton, he wants to deny me full equality. He wants me to be a second class citizen. He also wants to remind all of us that he’s not a fag.

Bush

god doesn’t like fags. Let’s ammend the constitution against fags. Isn’t there a way we can make gay bashing legal? I will attempt to appeal to gay conservatives.

Greens

Full equality for queers

Healthcare

I have health insurance now, cuz I’m in school, but I didn’t have it for two or three years. I talked to my insurance agent about it (the same one who said that I should just drop Christi from my car insurance, no they wouldn’t consider her my spouse.) and he quoted me a price of hundreds of dollars a month. I decided that the chances of me having a catostrophic health event were low enough that it wasn’t worth paying in. The only thing that would make the high price worth it would be a catostrophic event. I am young and healthy and not particularly high risk for anything and the cost was insanely high. For many people, it would be completely out of reach. However, I’m lucky I even had the option to pay an arm and a leg for it. I talked to some folks with diabetes who could not get health insurance at all. Companies simply refused to insure them. They paid all of their health costs out of pocket and hoped somethign worse didn’t happen to them. The US is the only first world country on earth which does not have socialized medicine. Europeans are horrified by these stories. Canadians are horrified by these stories. If a Canadian gets sick, they can go to the doctor. If it’s time for a European to have a checkup, they call and make an appointment. Their healthcare costs are lower than the US because there are not for-profit institutions taking a cut. Candian medicine is cheaper because they have price controls. We could have those too if we wanted them. Implementing a Canadian-style health insurance program would lessen the cost of doing buisiness, because companies would not have to pay health costs anymore. Having people wait until they need to go to an emergency room before they get help is tremendously expensive. It costs taxpayers more. And people who don’t have health insurance tend to be in poorer health when they’re older, regardless of income level. Because they don’t get checkups. We pay more to give people less. People die because of our lack of healthcare in this country.
The biggest issue I have with healthcare, however, is what happened to my mother. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor and went to a Tennant-owned hospital for brain surgery. That hospital, like all Tennant hospitals, was double-billing insurance companies for care. Her insurance company paid double for her surgery. (Outside the ICU there was a crooked sign ona a plastic pillar and it explained that cutting costs was a “pillar” of how that hospital was run. Not very confidence inspriring. Cut costs plus charging twice as much equals huge profits. But for who and at whose expense? How ethical could it possibly be to make a profit off of a brain tumor?)
the reccomended follow up treatment included physical therapy, occupational therapy (that’s where you re-learn to function in daily life) and speech therapy. It also included chemo therapy and radiation treatment. the insurance company paid for occupational and phyisical therapists because being able to talk without falling was a safety issue. They refused to cover speech therapy. The other two therapies were clearly helping improve her quality of life. But her speech did not improve. She was muted. Sometimes, you cannot pay for services out of pocket because systems are not in place to allow it and this was one of those times.
they similarly refused to cover chemo or readiation therapy. We went back and forth. Lawyers got involved. finally, the day the brain surgeon said was the last possible date, the insurance comapny approved. The radiologist was freaking out about how long the process took. She had my mom come in that afternoon. Not having insurance approval meant that she hadn’t been able to start working on a treatment plan. Radiation is usually direct targetted at cancerous areas to kill tumors but hurt the rest of the brain as alittle as possible. For the next two or three days, the radiologists irradiated my mother’s entire head, because she didn’t have a plan yet and something needed to happen immediately
My mom was over 65 and qualified for medicare, but there’s a lag after signing up and the hospital couldn’t figure out how to switch insurance at that point. My dad tried to pay out of pocket, put it on a credit card, whatever and the billing office said they could only deal with insurance companies. People talk about how the rich get better healthcare. Being rich in that case doesn’t just mean being able to pay for it, it means being able to buy the hospital. Only the upper 1% get anythig like adequate health coverage.
Sometimes I wonder if my mom would still be alive if her insurance company hadn’t tried to save some money by denying her care. The insurance company isn’t still alive. Smarting from Tennant price gouging and other problems, they filed for bankruptcy and were taken over by the state while my mom was in hospice care.
People have all sorts of speculation about how government health might be terrible. It’s not the experience of Canada. It’s not the experience of Europe. And whetever we had, it could not be as bad as what happened to my mom.

Kerry Says

And we value health care that’s affordable and accessible for all Americans.

Since 2000, four million people have lost their health insurance. Millions more are struggling to afford it.

You know what’s happening. Your premiums, your co-payments, your deductibles have all gone through the roof.

Our health care plan for a stronger America cracks down on the waste, greed, and abuse in our health care system and will save families up to $1,000 a year on their premiums. You’ll get to pick your own doctor – and patients and doctors, not insurance company bureaucrats, will make medical decisions. Under our plan, Medicare will negotiate lower drug prices for seniors. And all Americans will be able to buy less expensive prescription drugs from countries like Canada.

The story of people struggling for health care is the story of so many Americans. But you know what, it’s not the story of senators and members of Congress. Because we give ourselves great health care and you get the bill. Well, I’m here to say, your family’s health care is just as important as any politician’s in Washington, D.C.

And when I’m President, America will stop being the only advanced nation in the world which fails to understand that health care is not a privilege for the wealthy, the connected, and the elected – it is a right for all Americans.

Great. We can buy health insurance. Just like my mom bought health insurance. We can cut down on waste and greed, but the profit motive will still exist because we will still not have nationalized healthcare. All of us, whetehr we have diabetes or not, will be able to pay hundreds of dollars a month for healthcare that will refuse to cover basic services like speech therapy or raditaiton therapy. I’m so inspried. Oh, and no price caps on medicine. We’ll do Canadian imports rather than ever ever ever regulate drug company profiteering. Nationalized healthcare would be cheaper and more effective and save americans (the middle class, you know) oodles of money and allow for a higher standard of lving, but the insurance companies must be able to make a profit. Otherwise, how can they write checks for campaign contributions?

Bush says

Sure, I can agree with that. Drug coverage for seniors, sure! Health insurance *snicker* reforms, no problem! They’ll look almost identical to Kerrys. Canadian imports tho, they must be stopped. That’s a huge campaign issue. We can campaign on Candian imports. And we’ll never ever ever regulate drug company profiteering.

Green Party

Nationalized healthcare

International Organizations

My cousin was a WHO scientist. She got funds from the federal government and the UN to fight preventable parasite-bourne diseases. Her work has had direct applications. Who knows how many lives have been saves as a result of her work. The UN is a cooperative institution where nations try to work together to find joint strategies to solve world problems. They do a lot of good in the world. I support them. they also provide a forum for countries to peacefully settle their disputes, thus sometimes preventing wars. Going to the UN means acting cooperatively with other nations to solve problems for the good of everyone. what a nifty idea.

Kerry says

I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security. And I will build a stronger American military.

Bush agrees

I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security. And I will build a stronger American military.

Green Party

We need to pay the dues we owe to the UN. We need to use them to resolve disputes. We need to obey international law.

War

I am privledged not to have a personal story about war. I protested the war in Iraq. The US has bombed scads of countries since World War II. We’re at war with the entire world, especially the third world. We bombed medicine factories in Africa under Clinton (which we did not rebuild. People and livestock are still dying without medicine.). We bombed Iraq under Bush, Clinton and Bush. We bombed Yugoslavia under Clinton. We bombed. We bombed. We bombed. We have troops all over the world, occupying the phillipines, keeping the Korean war going, geatting involved in local conflicts. We also have mercenaires, recruited from Special Forces all over the damn place, including in Columbia where we are directly involved in a decades-long civil war. We’re killing peasants because they might be marxist. We’ve invaded Hati and Panama how many times now? Our institution at Fornt Benning, formerly called The School of the Americas continues to train south american death squads in torture techniques. The CIA continues to provide countries with american-made electrical shocking streips that you can put between people’s teeth. We continue to make and supply our applies with handcuff which will rip up the captive’s wrists if they try to escape. We continue to make, sell and use landmines. We continue also to fight the anti-landmine treaties. They keep killing people decades after the war is over. So what? the victims are never people who matter. We are the number one rogue and terrorist stae in the world, by our own definitions of terroism.

Kerry says

(skip to comments)

And as I thank them, we all join together to thank that whole generation for making America strong, for winning World War II, winning the Cold War, and for the great gift of service . . .
And then I reached across the aisle to work with John McCain, to find the truth about our POW’s and missing in action, and to finally make peace with Vietnam.

I will be a commander in chief who will never mislead us into war. . ..
My fellow Americans, this is the most important election of our lifetime. The stakes are high. We are a nation at war – a global war on terror against an enemy unlike any we have ever known before. . ..
. . . on behalf of the middle class who deserve a champion, and those struggling to join it who deserve a fair shot – for the brave men and women in uniform who risk their lives every day and the families who pray for their return – for all those who believe our best days are ahead of us – for all of you – with great faith in the American people, I accept your nomination for President of the United States. . ..
And in this journey, I am accompanied by an extraordinary band of brothers led by that American hero, a patriot named Max Cleland. Our band of brothers doesn’t march together because of who we are as veterans, but because of what we learned as soldiers. We fought for this nation because we loved it and we came back with the deep belief that every day is extra. We may be a little older now, we may be a little grayer, but we still know how to fight for our country. . ..
Remember the hours after September 11th, when we came together as one to answer the attack against our homeland. We drew strength when our firefighters ran up the stairs and risked their lives, so that others might live. When rescuers rushed into smoke and fire at the Pentagon. When the men and women of Flight 93 sacrificed themselves to save our nation’s Capitol. When flags were hanging from front porches all across America, and strangers became friends. It was the worst day we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us.

I am proud that after September 11th all our people rallied to President Bush’s call for unity to meet the danger. There were no Democrats. There were no Republicans. There were only Americans. How we wish it had stayed that way.

Now I know there are those who criticise me for seeing complexities – and I do – because some issues just aren’t all that simple. Saying there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq doesn’t make it so. Saying we can fight a war on the cheap doesn’t make it so. And proclaiming mission accomplished certainly doesn’t make it so.

As President, I will ask hard questions and demand hard evidence. I will immediately reform the intelligence system – so policy is guided by facts, and facts are never distorted by politics. And as President, I will bring back this nation’s time-honoured tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to.

I know what kids go through when they are carrying an M-16 in a dangerous place and they can’t tell friend from foe. I know what they go through when they’re out on patrol at night and they don’t know what’s coming around the next bend. I know what it’s like to write letters home telling your family that everything’s all right when you’re not sure that’s true.

As President, I will wage this war with the lessons I learned in war. Before you go to battle, you have to be able to look a parent in the eye and truthfully say: “I tried everything possible to avoid sending your son or daughter into harm’s way. But we had no choice. We had to protect the American people, fundamental American values from a threat that was real and imminent.” So lesson one, this is the only justification for going to war.

And on my first day in office, I will send a message to every man and woman in our armed forces: You will never be asked to fight a war without a plan to win the peace.

I know what we have to do in Iraq. We need a President who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers. That’s the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home.

Here is the reality: that won’t happen until we have a president who restores America’s respect and leadership — so we don’t have to go it alone in the world.

And we need to rebuild our alliances, so we can get the terrorists before they get us.

I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as President. Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security. And I will build a stronger American military.

We will add 40,000 active duty troops – not in Iraq, but to strengthen American forces that are now overstretched, overextended, and under pressure. We will double our special forces to conduct terrorist operations. uh, to conduct anti-terrorist operations. We will provide our troops with the newest weapons and technology to save their lives – and win the battle. And we will end the backdoor draft of National Guard and reservists.

To all who serve in our armed forces today, I say, help is on the way.

As President, I will fight a smarter, more effective war on terror. We will deploy every tool in our arsenal: our economic as well as our military might; our principles as well as our firepower.

In these dangerous days there is a right way and a wrong way to be strong. Strength is more than tough words. After decades of experience in national security, I know the reach of our power and I know the power of our ideals.

We need to make America once again a beacon in the world. We need to be looked up to and not just feared.

We need to lead a global effort against nuclear proliferation – to keep the most dangerous weapons in the world out of the most dangerous hands in the world.

We need a strong military and we need to lead strong alliances. And then, with confidence and determination, we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose and we will win. The future doesn’t belong to fear; it belongs to freedom.

And the front lines of this battle are not just far away – they’re right here on our shores, at our airports, and potentially in any town or city. Today, our national security begins with homeland security. The 9-11 Commission has given us a path to follow, endorsed by Democrats, Republicans, and the 9-11 families. As President, I will not evade or equivocate; I will immediately implement the recommendations of that commission. We shouldn’t be letting ninety-five per cent of container ships come into our ports without ever being physically inspected. We shouldn’t be leaving our nuclear and chemical plants without enough protection. And we shouldn’t be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in the United States of America. . ..
You see that flag up there. We call her Old Glory. The stars and stripes forever. I fought under that flag, as did so many of you here and all across our country. That flag flew from the gun turret right behind my head. It was shot through and through and tattered, but it never ceased to wave in the wind. It draped the caskets of men I served with and friends I grew up with. . ..
You don’t value families if you force them to take up a collection to buy body armour for a son or daughter in the service, if you deny veterans health care . . .
I learned a lot about these values on that gunboat patrolling the Mekong Delta . . .

whoah. way to get your war on. Look at the sheer amount of war topics and war imagry. He wants a bigger military. He wants to kill the terrorists. And forget resolving disputes in the UN, cuz they don’t get veto power over our national security. Four years of Kerry means four more years of dropping bombs all over the world. the perpetual “war on terror,” will continue. and you know, this isn’t a war “against an enemy unlike any we have ever known before.” We had a war on terror in the 80’s. Under Regan. All the same guys were in it as are in it right now. Back then, the “war on terror” meant genocide in Guatemala. It meant bombing Nicurauga. It meant supporting Hussein in his war with Iran. We’re going to find out that this “war on terror” means all the same things. Fighting against peasants who want to improve their lives in favor of monied interests and punishing countries who dare to defy those same omnied interests. Our war on terror is interlinked with our war on drugs. We brought crack into poor neighborhoods to finance our terror war in the 80’s. Now we are at perpetual war with the poor at home and abroad. One is the domestic front (i’m sorry, i meant to say “homeland”) and the other is the international front. Oh, and Kerry voted for the Partiot act. Our homeland will get more and mroe secure. Just like there are no drugs in innercity neighborhoods. And all with the help of giving up all of our rights to fight an unwinnable pseudo-war. The war on terror means attacking any defenseless country or any site in any defenseless country at will. that pharmicutical plant destroyed by Clinton? We said it was an al Qaeda bioweapons plant. This isn’t new. It’s just more out in the open. It means sending Special Forces to conduct terrorist operations instead of sending mercenaries. Is having a giant army all over the world making us safer? will it ever make us safer? no, it’s just goign to give people reason to fight assymetric warfare against us. If we weren’t in the middle east, people from the middle east would not care about us and our immoral ways. international terrorists do not care about our domestic policy, they care about our foreign policy. And for Kerry, our foreign policy is war, war, war and more war. That’s it. Oh, and not giving international organizations veto power over our wars. And we’re going to get our allies to come into Iraq and assume some financial responcibility for the mess we made, but only under our command, cuz we can’t give any body else veto power. (Does that plan sound familiar to you? oh yeah, it’s Bush’s plan! how odd! and our allies weren’t going for it. i wonder why not…)

Bush sez

Well, Bush got out of Vietnam, so he can’t talk about carrying an M16, but he is a “war president.” Yeah, he pissed everybody off getting into a war in Iraq. Clinton was smarter. He backed off from the Iraq war he nearly started in 1998. But Bush’s plan for Iraq is, um, the same. And Bush likes perpetual war. And you know, Kerry voted for Bush’s war. And, um, the difference here seems to be mainly that Kerry can tell nifty war stories and otherwise completely agrees with Bush as far as future plans. He doesn’t agree that the mission is accomplished. And he says now that we shouldn’t have gone to war, yet there he voted for it. sounds like Kerry only disagrees with Bush in terms of style and words, not in any concrete way. In fact, Kerry said, “My fellow citizens, elections are about choices. And choices are about values. In the end, it’s not just policies and programs that matter; the president who sits at that desk must be guided by principle.” Right there during his speech, he said that words and style matter more than actions. My goodness.

Greens

Bring out troops home now

Only one issue

So my anonymous commenter posted that “[Kerry] can’t get every liberal because if he differs on one issue, [Progressives are] off and running to the Green Party and thus useless, politically.” Seems like I’ve got a lot of disagreements with Kerry. Liberals aren’t idiots. I don;t agree with everything Barbara Lee does, but I vote for her anyway. I didn’t agree with everything Obama said, but it’s clear that he represents his constitutients with thier best interests in mind, even if that means compromising. Because compromising is the essence of politics. We understand that nobody is perfect. But the democratic party has a natural base. Those are unions, blue collar workers, minorities, folks who aren’t rich, academics, queers: the majority of the country. If they can get the base to show up and vote, they win. But they ignore their base to chase after mythical swing voters. And when Kerry agrees with Bush about the war and both say nice things about women’s rights and both have a healthcare plan with only a few policy differences, well, then those swing voters are deciding on the basis of abortion. Or they’re deciding on whether they think there should be a constitutional amendment against gay marriage (cuz Kerry and Bush agree about denying queers some rights and granting them others). Or they’re deciding based on the minutae of differing healthcare plans, both of which leave private companies to profiteer. The swing voters are deciding based on one issue and they’re off to the Republican party. Gosh, how disloyal of them!
Voting Kerry means voting against my own best interests. It means voting for my own second class citizenship. It means voting for more war.
On Saturday, I signed a petition to get Nader/Camejo on the California ballot.

I’ve now got an XML Feed of my photo library updates. You can also add it to your Live Jounral Friends Page. I wrote the script to generate the XML. It’s having some issues, but I feel like it should work the next time the news aggregator looks for an update. Camino is cool because it gives you error statements and is helpful for debugging XML

I would like to say that iPhoto’s export feature /ought/ to be able to only export changed files, to be able to publish them (via scp) to my server, to keep track of an XML feed and to allow me to modify the HTML template it uses for publishing. Instead, I’ve got a mess of bash scripting and some perl and end up copying a bunch of files by hand. bah.

On Friday, I attended the OSC Conference at UC Berkeley held by CNMAT. The location is at the top of a very steep hill and I had to lie on the ground and pant for a while before I could drag myself into the auditorium. I hate that hill. Anyway, so I showed up part way through the first talk, which was on OSC Application Areas and was an exceedingly brief introduction to OSC. Matt Wright talked a bit about wrapping other Protocols in OSC, for example, MIDI over OSC. He also talked a bit about gesture controllers, which I think will be the Next Big Thing and other things you can find out about by reading his paper on OSC Application Areas.

Keynote

The Keynote Address was by Marc Canter, the founder of Macrominds, the company which became MacroMedia. He talked about Digital Lifestyle Aggregation. This was one of those hand-wavy “in the future, everything will work” talks. DLA is a fuzzy idea about user experience that folks have a hard time explaining, however, many people are hard at work on DLA tools. One example of a DLA tool that I can think of is GMail. Email is not ordered hierarchically. Instead, it’s all stored in a database and allows the user to look at different view of it with powerful searching tools. You can put labels on email and view all messages with a particular label, but the messages themselves are not stored hierarchically, like they are in pine. Any message can have many labels or no label. The speaker mentioned a desktop environment under development which uses this model, called Chandler.
He said the three things to remember are Integration, Aggregation and Customization. He then gave the example of RSS Feeds. Let’s say you use Live Journal. You publish your content of your blog and your friends on Live Journal read it. But they don’t go to your blog to read it. The have a friends page (really an RSS aggregator) which they use to view all of their friends blogs. They can use tools provided by LiveJournal to change what that page looks like. Canter suggests taking all of this further so that any data can be represented in any format the user would like. Everything would be dumped together but searchable, much like gmail. He suggests that this would be a way for musicians to take content directly to the masses, bypassing record labels, etc. Therefore everything could be shared and open. You, the music publisher, would get to decide what things you wanted to be freely available and what things might require an interaction with paypal.
this is probably the future of the end-user experience. Somehow, OSC will fit into this brave new future vision.

Implementations of OSC

Open Sound World

Amar Chaudhary talked about Open Sound World a very interesting music programming language, which I will very shortly download and compile. (There’s a new release out, but Mac Binaries are not yet available for it.) OSW looks like MAX and more or less acts like MAX, however it has OSC fundamentally integrated into the language. Objects in OSW are called “transforms.” A patcher window full of transforms is, itself a transform. All programs are fundamentally hierarchical. User-defined transforms are re-usable. This gives me the impression that OSW is more flexible than MAX. Every inlet or outlet of every transform has an OSC address. The hierarchy of the transforms automatically creates the OSC address. It is therefore possible, via OSC commands, to get data to any inlet. This means that if you want to mock something up quickly and then want to, say, write a supercollider script, that script can send data directly to your OSW program. However, OSW has a scripting language built-in. You can have your transform and then put it in a for-loop. It supports a plethora of data-types. It looks, after seeing the demo, that it’s what I wish MAX could have been.
The OSC integration allows for multiple font ends, like our hypothetical SuperCollider script. OSW also extends OSW with a query protocol. This means that you could write a script to discover what transforms were available and play them and reconnect them. Chaudhary demonstrated a Python script which discovered a copy of OSW on another computer via Rendezvous, created a patch on the other computer and then ran it. This means that any front end can be attached to the OSW engine. I found the OSC messages required to be very readable and not cryptic as they are in SuperCollider. It reminded me of calling methods on Java Objects.
Open Sound World is free and open source and deserves a good look.

SuperCollider

James McCartney talked about the use of OSC in SuperCollider. His view of how to address things is very different. He described the SC Server as a Virtual Machine for audio and described the tree structure, which all of students who took the SuperCollider tutorial at Wesleyan last semester are certainly already familiar with. Briefly, the objects on the server are stored in a tree. Some nodes may have sub-nodes. Those are called groups. Some nodes must be leaves. Those are called synths. A synth is a program which contains unit generators, which are little pre-defined bits of code to process audio. The three is evaluated in a depth-first search, left to right. The functional units in the VM are the tree, an array of buffers (either audio files or control data) and busses.
OSC in supercollider is designed for speed, speed and more speed. He has only a single-level name space. (as opposed to the OSW hierarchical namespace “/mypatch/sampler/int1/” ) Every addressable node is given a number. This means that, unlike OSW, sending a message to a node at the very bottom of the tree takes the same amount of time as a node at the top of the tree and does not require any pattern matching. The OSC messages also pack a very dense amount of information into a single message. SC Server does not support discovery due to the high speed of changes. A grain-playing synth may only last for 50 milliseconds or less. Trying to find all of those grains would eat up a lot of processor power and not give much benefit.
Interestingly, SC obeys the time-stamp part of the OSC message protocol. This means that you can compensate for possible lag or jitter (this is where the tempo is scooting around a bit (apparently it is detectable by the human ear even if it’s only a few nanoseconds according to a conversation I was eavesdropping on) by sending OSC messages programmed to execute at some future time. The VM takes care of running them at the correct time.
McCartney suggested a few changes to the OSC standard. One was to drop nested bundles. He explained how they added overhead without adding functionality. I suspect this change will be adopted. Another was to add a dictionary type, using parenthesis and name, value pairs. finally, he suggested some sort of authentication scheme for OSC, because right now it allows open access to a high priority thread on the user’s machine.

FLOSC

Ben Chun wrote and talked about Flash OSC. This is a Java program that translates OSC to XML so that it can be played in Flash Movies. He demonstrated a program where he had written some SuperCollider synthdefs and loaded them. Then he played a flash movie in which the SC synthdefs had inlets and outlets. He connected them together and sound came out from the SC synth server.
The important thing to get from this (and the OSW discussion) is that when you have OSC you can write any front end. Any program can tale to any other program. Your program can span five different languages, all sending OSC messages to each other. It can span five different computers. You can use any language you want to play the SC synth.
FLOSC is also a full Java Implementation of OSC. Which means that if, like me, you loooove Java, you can write java programs to define synths for the SC server and little programs in Java to play those synths. FLOSC is worth checking out for that reason alone.

OSC Device Design Space

Folks gave demonstrations of prohibitively expensive hardware. Gesture controllers are in.
Say you have a bunch of sensors. Your sensors are actually just variable resistors, like potentiometers (knobs), light sensors, bend sensors, etc. All of these are analog resistors that alter their resistance based on bending them, or light or knob position or whatever. You can use these to attach them to dancers or performers. Then you can use gestures to create interesting musical sounds.
As far as I know, aside from the P5 Glove, the cheapest way to get such data into your computer without homebrewing hardware is the I Cube X. As far as I know (meaning I don’t) that still only speaks MIDI. Newer input devices speak MIDI and OSC. They also cost thousands of dollars. But some of them are network-able and wireless. CCRMA uses some prototype boards for development of gestural controllers. Those look very interesting. When students finish mocking up the devices and finally build them, the cost of the controller is about $20 in parts. Much more affordable, however, you have to do embedded programming stuff.
All of the commercial solutions use Xylinks chips.

The Effects of Latency on Networked Musical Performance

Stanford researchers did an experiment in testing acceptable latency times. The got two subjects and put them in nearby acoustically separated rooms. They had rhythms to clap. They were wearing headphones and clapping into a microphone. One of them would be chosen randomly to start. That person would hear a metronome counting off. The metronome would cease and that person would clap their half of the pattern. The other person would then start to clap. The signal from person A, clapping into a microphone would go through a linux box which would add some amount of delay to the signal before person B heard it, and vice versa. This researched discovered that the optimum amount of latency is 11 milliseconds. Below that delay and people tended to speed up. Above that delay and they tend to slow down. After about 50 millisecond (or 70), performances tended to completely fall apart.

Clock Synchronization for Interactive Music Systems

Roger Danneberg talked about Clock synching in what was perhaps the most technically heavy of all the talks. If you don’t have any significant latency, then you don’t need to worry about clock synching. Otherwise, if you want to send packets ahead of time (to compensate for latency), your computers need to agree on what time it is, to a precision great enough to be finer than the latency and the jitter that you’re trying to avoid. Computer clocks are a might bit inaccurate, but this doesn’t usually pose a problem.
As you know, macs can get the time via network time protocol from an Apple server. However, you’re not always online, except in your performing sub-net. Therefore, you need a scheme where a small set of computers can agree on the time. NTP servers are generally all in hardware and prohibitively expensive and not very giggable. Having a single master computer time clock can also be a problem because if that computer is also performing and it crashes, then the whole network doesn’t know the time anymore, so a cooperative system may be best.
How time stuff often works is that a client asks the server what time it is and then waits for a reply. It takes the reply and adds to it one half the time it spent waiting. If it takes the server too long to reply, the reply is ignored.
this wasn’t part of the talk, but packets can take different routes on the sending trip and the return trip, so half of the total time may be wrong. Also, cable modems go way faster downstream than upstream, so it may take the packet longer to get to the time server than to get back, in a large networked performance.

Towards a more effective OSC Time Tag Scheme

Adrian Freed talked about possible changes to OSC Time Tags. I learned that the very popular P5 Glove samples at 60 Hz. And time Tags are good. You can synch across different nodes, you can compensate for latency and jitter. It makes creating sequencers much easier and you can record when things happened.
This talk was predicated on a better knowledge of OSC than I posses and so my notes aren’t good, so I don’t know if this was addressed, but it seems to me that it might be good to have both absolute time tags and relative time tags. You would use the absolute ones in real-time performances. You would use relative ones in playback. (One second after playing that note, play this next note)

Setting up OSC sessions using Voice-over-IP protocols

John Lazzaro, who serves on standards bodies and just spent five years on the RFC for MIDI over RTP, talked about integrating OSC into VOIP. Voice over IP is the conferencing protocols used by iChat AV and net2phone and a bunch of other systems. It’s using the IP network for telephony and video-conferencing. There’s two parts to these protocols. The first is SIP. This is everything that happens before you connect to the other person. It’s the handshake where the actual communication protocol (RTP) is agreed upon. There are some advantages to using SIP to set up OSC connections. It would take about 2 years to get an official RFC for this. However, he suggested that putting OSC over RTP would be too much work for not much payoff.

Discovering OSC services with ZeroConf

ZeroConf is another name for Rendezvous. Apple has an open source implementation of this. It is possible to find and connect to OSC with rendezvous. SuperCollider supports this right now.

Type 	-osc.-udp.
Name 	SuperCollider
Port 	57110
Domain 	local.

Your program must first register, then it can discover other OSCs. This is very interesting. hopefully, I or somebody else can dig up some sample code. Maybe soon we can control installations with our cell phones? How is rendezvous related to bluetooth?

What folks are doing with OSC

• UC Santa Barbara is building a building of DOOM. A sphere filled with gadgets that speak OSC. It will open in 2006.
• Stanford has nifty prototype boards for students to design gestural controllers
• UCLA is doing a VR project which sits on top of MAX. The project is under development and so there’s a lot of fudging going on, but they’ve successfully given some concerts.
• Quintet.net, developed at HfMT Hamburg is a distributed performance environment which seems to do a whole of unusual things. It’s designed for up to five players separated by great distances
• SonART is a multimedia collaboration tool that will soon have all the features of photoshop but be networked
• David Wessel suggests that it’s possible to imrpove MAX/MSP programming practice with OSC. this is apparently not a lost cause.

Draft Proposals

Bidirectional XML mapping

This proposed standard would allow users to map from OSC to XML and vice versa. This could be useful because XML is human readable and editable whereas a binary file format (such as the one used in SuperCollider) is not. Also, going back to Digital Lifestyle Aggregation, XML is syndicatable content. Meaning you could publish your synthdefs like you publish your blog posts. I think this could be a very exciting thing to do. I am interested in programming a aggregator of XML OSC (in my copious free time). Ideally, a synthesis engine like the SC VM would be integrated into the OSX operating system. I talked to James McCartney about this (he’s working for Apple on Core Audio). His objection was that it would no longer be free. But Apple has an open source license, so there may be a way to build the engine into the OS without making it Apple proprietary. Ideally, this would be an open standard, so your synthdefs would work on any compliant OS. This could certainly be integrated into Linux without compromising the GPL-ness of the SC project. then electronic music content could be syndicated and played by remote users. Obviously, authentication would need to be implemented before anyone would make this a major part of their operating system. I feel, however, that there are definitely interesting possibilities with OSC, XML (or RDF) and DLA.

Queries for OSC

Being able to extend OSC to allow queries would allow diverse applications to share a common interface. It would get documentation, find out about requested types, etc. The speaker noted that the OSW use of OSC and the SC use of OSC represent two different models of using OSC. It may be that they become frozen as schema. There’s no reason to re-do the same work over and over. So your query could discover which schema you were using, find out appropriate information and allow your script to make sounds with somebody else’s OSC-enabled program. Anything can talk to anything else. Potentially very very powerful.

CNMAT wishes for work groups

You could be on a small 3 or 4 person committee to design something and write some code for it. then you’d be cool.

• Binary File Format – allows the persistent storage of OSC. This is already used by SC, I presume in saved synthdefs.
• Time Tags and Synch
• Schemas – covering address space and semantics. OSW and SC have done a lot of work in this direction.
• OSC Hardware Kit this would be cool, but it’s beyond me
• Regular Expressions and Pattern Matching
• Queries already underway
• OSC Web Site sure, it’s not as glorious as writing a query system, but somebody needs to keep up with what folks are doing with OSC and become a clearinghouse for OSC information. The website could be a lot more useful than it is.
• Possible data-type workgroup You’ve got a favorite data type, like hashtables that you love and can’t live without. But OSC doesn’t support it yet. You could make it happen.

Closing

David Wessel gave a very strong push to the idea of interactive music. the major experimental idea of the 20th century was tape music. But now that’s the major direction of music. Most people’s experiences of music are pre-recorded. OSC and gestural controllers could re-integrate the listener into the musical experience, so they can really hear stuff in a way that the passivity of tape music does not encourage.
He also talked about Future directions for OSC

As a flow of stage directions and logical statements:

[nodding solemnly] A.
[pointing forcefully] But not A.
[Shaking his head in a presidential manner] B.
[Thundering] But not B!
[highly concerned] C.
[with great enthusiasm] But not C
[hand gestures] D
[happily]But not D

. . .

As Ideas

Not exactly like Bush.
Just like Bush
Bush-light
Yay Bush ideas!
Same ideas as Bush but minutely differnt implementation
If you like Bush, you’ll love me
I differ from Bush in terms of style
I have a better vocabulary than Bush
Let’s give a bit more thought to these great Bush ideas
I like heteronormativity, war and surface changes as much as Bush does
Bushy Bush Bush! Go Bushism!

Foreign Policy

guns guns guns!
war war war
more war
I like war
I fought wat
everyone should fight war
we need a bigger army
We need more special forces to go commit terrorism (actual freudian slip
Fuck you UN!
Fuck you allies! by the way, want to pay for the costs of reconstructing Iraq?

Domestic Issues

I promise to sell our country out not only to corporations who are run by members of my administration, but to every corporation.
Middle class middle class middle class (the poor can fuck themselves)
Hey, swing voters, look at me! Want more of same but a little different? Look at me! Look at me!
Family values! Heteronormativity! I’m a butchy boy! Masculine as hell! Look at my manliness! I could bench press Edwards!
If you’re not a swing voter, and specifically a white, middle class and perhaps male swing voter, then I don’t give two shits about you. stay home for all I care. Who are you going to vote for besides me or Bush? Nader? Hahaha! Then you’ll just have 4 more years of Bush. You don’t want that. You’ll vote for me anyway. so fuck off. Who cares about my base. it’s not like they have a choice. the corporate system will fuck you forever! hahahaha! I will dance on the graves of your grandparents you liberal assholes!

And, on to the FOX news reporter on the convention floor

. . . what this convention is really about is hate: Hate for George Bush

Is it a sign of the end times when I agree with a FOX News reporter?

Can we just nominate Obama now? Screw Kerry? What about Kucinich? What about Hillary? Hell, why don’t we cross-nominate Bush? I mean, I think he’ll have less military stuff in his speech
I am Not switching my registration.
To win this election, all the Democrats need, as Cola points out, is to win all the states we won last time plus one other state. Not Florida. Any other state. A tiny one. It doesn’t matter.
this is a numbers game. the more of the Democratic base come out to vote, the more likely Kerry is to win. the Democratic base is enough to carry the election. What does Kerry do to encourage his base? Nothing! He doesn’t give a shit about his base. Who the fuck cares about his base. Cola notes that the repbulican party didn’t care about their base either . . . until Perot acted as a spoiler and let the Democrats elect the most popular president in modern times. Oh yeah, Perot fucked the Republicans big time. And the Republicans had to take a minute and realize that they needed to do what registered Republicans wanted or they were going to loose. They rediscovered their base because of a spoiler.
So who are going to vote for? Right wing nutjob? Or right wing nutjob-light? Or are you going to remind the democrats that they do have a natural base?
when Nixon wanted to “expand” the reach of the Republican party, he reached out to angry white southern males. Whenerver anyone wants to make their party bigger, better stronger (how many times did Kerry say “stronger” last night? How many fucking bombs does he want to build? Or does he just want us to all take steriods?) Memo to folks in charge: there are fewer white folks every year. There are way less men than women. the suburban, unhappy, conservative, heterosexual, white males that you so desperately crave with the whole of your soul, those SUV driving desk job workers, they don’t fucking matter. If you energize your base, you win. If you reach out to Bush-lovers, if you let republicans define the game, if you try to out-Bush, Bush, your suppoerters are not energized. Why vote at all if those are my choices?
I’m voting Green. Kerry can have all the middle class family values that he wants. that’s not me. If he doesn’t want me, well, I don’t want him.
And that’s why the FOX reporter was right. Cuz there’s no way those delegates were energized by that message. They’re excited cuz they think they’re getting Bush out. what a pathetic party.

Almost 60% of Arab Muslims living in the US fear for the future of their families. And why wouldn’t they when “over 40% of the general population would support the detention of Arabs and Muslims without the evidence to prosecute them?”

It’s time to talk strategies. Aside from the moral rightness or wrongness of this approach, let’s look at whether or not it would work. Helpfully, MIT publishied a study where they explain a terrorist technique called the Carnival Booth Algorithm. This study applies to airplanes, but it has broader applications.
Let’s say that you do extra scrutiny on every Arab immigrant and hassle all sorts of people who just look Muslim. Great, then, since we’ve got that uner control, we can let our gaurd down. Well, no we cannot. There are American-born folks from AMrin County who look just like everybody else who will be happy to commit terrorist acts. Detaining arabs would not have prevented to Oaklahoma City Bombing. If the terrorists can tell ahead of time who is likely to be detained, they will deploy people who are unlikely to be detained. And, as there are only so many resources for fighting crime (even Batman has to sleep), the chances that somebody who does not fit the terrorist profile gets stopped goes down. If we harass people who “look like” terrorists, we make it easier for terrorists who don’t look the part to commit terrorist acts.
there is an additional problem of why people become terrorists. The number of actual terrorists is very small. the number of potential terrorists is higher. Potential terrorists have not committed any crimes and may never commit crimes. Let’s say that we detain 1K arabs, because one of them might be a terrorist. Some of those people will become very angry. some of them may become terrorists. Because there are so few terrorirsts out there, we’re much more likely, through random race-based detentions, to create terrorist sympathy and potential terrorists, some of whom will become actual terrorists. humiliating people based on their race, unsurprisingly, makes us less safe. Think of the Rodney King Riots here. A class of people became violently angry because of routine mistreatment by law enforcement. What 40% of Americans support would actually be worse. Cuz if cops can arrest Arabs without cause, then arabs are a criminal class. whenever a group becomes a criminal class, cops treat them differently. When people are presumed to be guilty, cops will mistreat them. Random dententions of arabs would, unquestionably, lead to police beatings, jail beatings, etc. All that and held without charges too. The victims of this, the class of people who identitfy wiht it, would become angry. some of them would become violently angry. It seems like, rather than creating additonal terrorists so that we could kill them, we might want to cut down on the numbers of people who become terrorists, potential terrorists or terrorist sympathisers.
and finally, most violent crime in the US is committed by white men. More people die from that that from terrorist actions. So, to be logical, let’s detain all white men until they can prove they’re not violent criminals. Cuz if it makes sense to detain Muslims without evidence, it makes more sense to detain white guys. Cuz white guys kill a lot more people every year. What? Not in favor? I wonder why.

Is center-right the best the party has to offer?

Plenty of Democrats are liberals. And when I say “Democrats,” I mean folks registered Democrat. I mean the people in front of the Grand Lake Theatre with the voting registration table. I mean people running for city counsils and school boards and small local offices. I mean the people lining up to vote at my local polling place. I mean bloggers. I mean you and I might mean me.

Third Parties

A while back, there were independant ideologically driven parties on the right. They were fed up with the Republicans looking identical to the Deomcrats on all the issues they cared about. George Bush Sr. was giving money to Planned Parenthood. Nobody cared about prayer in schools. Reagan appointed a woman to the Supreme Court. None of their issues were addressed by this absolutely corrupt, beholden ot corporate profits party. the right felt their party had abandonded them, and so they abandoned their party.
They started magazines and organizations to spread their views. They got commentators. They got on the radio. they got their message out. And then, the dfeining issue of the Republican party, anti-communism, wasn’t so compelling anymore. People in the party started to take notice. Here was this huge, angry, untapped base on the right. They grabbed the right populists and got them on board. They changed their platform. the party became a vehicle for the kind of social change that the right once dispaired of ever seeing the Republicans address.
Organized, vocal right wingers motivated people and got control of the Republican party and pulled it in the direction that they wanted it to go.

Liberals

We are fed up with the right-wingness of Democratic leadership. Our party has abandoned us. We’ve got our commentators and bloggers. We’ve got our organizations, like MoveOn. We can and must pull the Democrats in the direction we want to go. We are populists. the majority of Americans want single-payer health insurance. The majority of americans want nuclear disarmnament. The majority of Americans want us out of Iraq. Informed Americans do not support the war on terror. Informed Americans do not support the Patriot Act. Informed Americans are not in favor of extra-constitution detentions or torture or no bid contracts or any of the vile misdeeds of the Bush administration. Do I say “informed” to be elitist? No, I say “informed” because news organizations are not doing their job. And they are not because we are not. Right wing people write letters when they don’t like what they see on the news. They write letters to the broadcasters. They write letters to the advertisers. They write letters to the FCC.
We must learn from the tactics of the right. Not the dirty tricks or the smear campaigns, but the grass root mobilization. We won’t need to lie or to smear because progressiveism means people voting for their own best interests, where right-ism means voting for corporate interests. Right wing lies require a media machine to prop up mythology and to spread disinformation. All of this is disarmed with truth.
The way to change the Democratic party is to stand up and demand the change. No, Kerry will not pull out of Iraq unless we demand it. If we are in the streets. If we are writing letters. If we are blogging it, the troops will come home. The Democrats are the party of Joe Lieberman, but they are also the party of Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama and Barbara Lee. If we want tehir to be a progressive voice in the Democratic Party, we have to be that progressive voice. We have to support our progressive leaders already in the party. We have to organize and demand that our ideas find their way into the platform. We have to take action on a local level. Run for office, organize protests, volunteer for organizations trying to enact political change. We must rebuild the insitutions whihc make the Democratic party strong. We don’t just need strongs PACs, we need strong unions.
We need to be a “big tent.” There needs to be room in the democratic party for the left-wing version of Ann Coulter. We need to broaden our ideas of what it means to be a Democrat. We need to reach out to leftists by giving them something worth grabbing on to. Any poltical party is made up of people. We need to be the party we want.
I’m switching my registration.

Biography in the New Yorker

Remeber Afghanistan? things are going badly. How badly? Doctors Without Borders is leaving. They’ve been there for 24 years. They were there during the war with the USSR. they were there under the Taliban. They go to all sorts of dangerous, hostile, war-torn places. But Afghanistan has gotten too unsafe.

[Doctors Without Borders] accused US-led forces in Afghanistan of using humanitarian aid for “military and political motives”. The US military rejected the claims.

And it’s our fault. We put them in harms way. We politicized helping the sick and dying. We used humanitarian aid as a weapon.
Hey, what about our Afghan exit strategy? When are we going to let the UN take over and get the hell out and let them rebuild their country with the help of NGOs and aid groups? What about that other dirty Bush war? How many people in Afghanistan have to die so we can get rid of a “brutal regeime” that we used to back and gave money and arms to? It seems like an auful lot of thugs are our current or former allies. and there’s a reason for that. Human rights violations are directly linked to US Foreign aid. The more you abuse, the more money you’re likely to get.
There’s a lot that’s similar betwen Afghanistan and Iraq. And Afghanistan has the largest number of refugees living outside it’s borders. More pople have fled Afghanistan than any other country. And that trend is nto stopping. Maybe, after a few years of our presence in Iraq, Iraqis can give them a run for their money. How much devestation is enough? When will we leave?