Paradise Road: Ken’s Blog

As an open source advocate, I generally find it worth my time to donate time or money to Free (as in speech) projects and services.  Anything that serves for the benefit of the common good is worthwhile in my eyes.  Unfortunately, for the most part I can’t contribute programming skills to projects for the lack of free time on my part, but there is one project that requires low mental investment and delivers instant gratification to boot: OpenStreetmap.  Basically, OpenStreetmap is a wikipedia of maps.  Anyone can sign up for an account and edit a collective map that is instantly rolled out to millions of users.  Since OpenStreetmap only uses information in the public domain, data from commercial mapping services like Navteq cannot be used.  However, years ago the developers did a massive import from the TIGER dataset released by the U. S. Government.  In many places it was outdated, in most others it was innacurately placed.  Fortunately, Yahoo! released a set of satellite maps into the public domain that the OpenStreetmap developers quickly placed in their editing application

One can spend a near-infinite amount of time going through the locale and lining up the roads (ways) up with the satellite image, adding special use data, or tracing out uploaded GPS tracks to form brand new roads and subdivisions.  As a result of the work I’ve put into the Alexandria/Pineville area, the local area (at least in parts) is far more accurate than Google Maps or Bing Maps.

Some recent additions I’ve made to the area include adding the taxiways, aprons, and gates to Alexandria International Airport reflecting the layout of the new terminal and tower.  I’ve also added the golf resort at AEX.  I’ve also done the same for Pineville Municipal airport at Buhlow Lake.  Another thing that I’ve added is accurate railways for the area.  Instead of stopping at a single mainline headed through Alexandria, I’ve actually traced in all 21 tracks from the rail yard in Alexandria, making the map more complete than Google’s or Bing’s portrayal of the railroad system.  While a friend pointed out that this will only be a marvelous tool if he’s ever driving down the railroad tracks or if the train gets lost and needs GPS directions, I find it a source of pride to know that our Alexandria now has more complete crowdsourced maps than it once had.

I would highly encourage anyone who has even a small amount of spare time to get involved with the OpenStreetmap project.  As illustrated above, the scope of OSM isn’t just on roadways, though that is the most practical application, but also points of interest, hiking trails, locations of public facilities such as fire and police departments, libraries, and schools.  The list could go on indefinitely.

One side interest that my recent work with OSM has piqued, however, is that of local history.  I was looking through the old Camp Livingston area at how little remains of the original encampment since it was deactivated in 1945.  65 years of neglect has erased most everything of the original roadways, even though 500,000 troops trained their over the facility’s commission.  It’s almost something worth filming for an episode of Life After People.  It’s interesting to note that one of the very first Japanese prisoners of war, one of the men inhabiting a midget submarine that went aground at Pearl Harbor, were kept at Camp Livingston, and that there was a P.O.W. cemetery at Camp Livingston; the headstones were moved to a different location long ago, but the bodies remain in the graves, unmarked.

I find it intriguing to look at aerial photography, such as that provided by Microsoft’s Bing Maps, to look over the area and survey such remnants.  One thing that I found fascinating was the level of rail traffic that once came through Alexandria.  The Missouri Pacific Railroad expanded into Alexandria in 1892.  At some point, the path of the railway was changed through to a more indirect route into the city, roughly paralleling I49.  However, the original path of the railway can still be seen.  Most of it is overgrown with grass, though the path of the track is still uncovered by trees.  The rails still appear visible in many areas.  Other areas have seen the rails paved or redeveloped over.  Some parts of the original Missouri-Pacific rails still remained in the old TIGER data.  I’ve completed the missing segments of the railway from the Alexandria levee to west of Willow Glen where it would have joined with the still-used railway, and marked this area appropriately as abandoned rail.  What other interesting historical elements could be added to the map?

The main point is that it’s fascinating to see towns reinvent themselves, even small ones such as Alexandria.  In fact, I suspect it’s even more fascinating in said small towns, because small-scale reinvention often leaves behind visible evidence of the town’s history and the times and industries that it suffered through.

I find a sadly small amount of information about such things on the Internet.  I’m sure that Alexandria Daily Town Talk has much of these events in its archive.  It’s a shame that the paper, in its losing struggle to remain profitable in a New Media era, will likely never invest in digitizing its historical catalog.  If such a thing were to become a volunteer effort, I would gladly spend time transcribing the microfilm copies of the newspaper, which actually goes back to about 20 years after the Civil War, for online consumption.

So I’m reading my own goosebumps and tea leaves, here’s what my purely-conjecture product announcements for the holiday season will be:

In September Apple will announce an update to the Apple TV that will make it a full-fledged media server, available in the same 1TB / 2TB combos that we now see for Time Capsule, along with content agreements with Big Media to bring more television shows to the iTunes store.  Apple will position itself as Cable 2.0.  This would also be where we see a Netflix app debuted, if there is to be one.

To coincide with an Apple Media Server, the iTunes program and store will be rebranded to reflect the ubiquity of what iTunes does nowadays.  It’s so far away from music now, playing movies, syncing mobile devices, managing and distributing Apps from the App store… it should have been renamed a long time ago.  I don’t know what that would be, but I can’t see Apple releasing an iTunes Media Server.

The artist-formerly-known-as-iTunes will get a makeover to interoperate better with multiple devices in the home.  It’ll be more optimized for server/client operations.  Mac computers would get instant access across wifi to the AppleTV Media Server, with the option to sync selectively or entirely to the computer (essentially turning the Mac into a giant iPod) or, if the user is a Mobile Me member, access the media across the Internet.

Updates to the iMac lines in October maybe to bring them up to speed with i5 processors and Unibody enclosures.

The iTablet will surface, being powerful enough to run a suite of productivity apps, including iWork, as well as have carrier-neutral 3G Internet access, a stylus to allow the user to take notes on the device, be optimized to display textual content (eBooks), and play true HD video.  It may re-invent the brand by being labeled “iBook.”  Probably not, though, since Apple tends to look forward and not backward.  It’ll run iPhone apps and will heavily focus on developers tying the device into third party hardware.  Apple will use an app developer that has been secretly working on a home automation system to showcase the environment in a demo on stage.  The highlight will be pressing a button to turn down the lights in the house, kick the air conditioning up a notch, turn on the television, and, using the Tablet as a glorified remote, begin a movie playing.  Plus lots of other industry-redefining stuff that Apple tends to do and nobody sees coming.

MobileMe will get a significant capacity bump and will gain the ability to sync only the changed parts of a file, rather than the entire file.  It’ll be promoted heavily with the iTablet/iBook/Tablet Mac as a solution to keep one’s computing environment consistent across the entire spectrum from the living room to the office.

Early next year, Apple will introduce updated notebooks with 3G internet connectivity to catch them up with the Tablet, and add more powerful i5 processors.

Sometime between April and June, updated iLife and iWork editions will emerge and fully 64 bit solutions that take advantage of the Snow Leopard features.  Seeking to increase the validity of iWork in a mixed office environment, Apple will either make OOXML the default format (as much as I’d like them to go ODF instead, it wouldn’t make much market sense for them to do that) or will release a version of iWork for Windows.  The gauntlet will fully be thrown against the costlier Microsoft Office on Microsoft’s home turf.

Finally, in 2012 Apple will reveal what it’s been working on with the billions it’s had in the coffers: a spherical space station the size of a small moon, called the iBall, that it will use to quash the rebel alliance once and for all.  It will destroy the earth on December 21 of that year.

It seems as though most of the initial furor surrounding Ogg Theora has died down quite a bit since the release of Firefox 3.5, which includes Theora support along with a heaping spoonful of political grandstanding in Theora’s favor, out of the box.  Some things have helped to derail the Theora momentum.  Microsoft has announced Silverlight 3 which will play superior-competing-standard H.264 out of the box, Adobe has open sourced the media framework surrounding its Flash player, and, most significantly, Apple has submitted a new standard for MPEG4/H.264 HTTP Live Streaming to the W3C which will provide huge benefits to video viewers, especially on a mobile network.  Lastly, the author and maintainer of the HTML5 spec that defines the <video> tag itself has capitulated and said that there will be no official codec in HTML5 for video for the foreseeable future.

So why does this interest me?  I’m a pretty big advocate of open source software, after all.  And I agree with the two biggest points that open source folks are using to triumph Theora’s benefits (that it’s “good enough” to be used at Youtube quality on the Internet, and that it’s patent- and royalty-free).  But I’m also a fan of reality, and the reality is that Ogg Theora isn’t better than H.264.  Being better, not being good enough, is what ultimately drives adoption.  Internet Explorer began losing ground to Firefox for the fact that Firefox was demonstrably better.  There was a benefit for people to use Firefox instead.  Not so with Theora.

What I don’t understand, and what irks me so badly, is why H.264 is demonized so badly by the FLOSS community.  It’s not a single-vendor solution trying to lock in a particular market to a particular player.  It’s a very good video codec with massive market adoption and widespread implementations created by a collaboration of some 250 academic institutions that have invested a lot of money into it.  And yet, FLOSS advocates, particularly those from Mozilla, are saying that H.264 is extremely expensive, that it locks away innovation, and that it puts control of the web into the hands of a minority.  The expense argument is what irritates me the most.  I won’t use the argument that it’s free until 2011, but I will use the argument that MPEG-LA hasn’t even decided on the pricing for the licensing.  Nobody knows how expensive it will be, or who will have to pay the cost.  MPEG-LA has a lot of big players in the form of Apple and Google who stand to gain from HTML5’s acceptance likely lobbying them at this very moment to make licensing reasonable for H.264, lest we delve into another GIF fiasco.  But even where things are currently headed, I think the cost to stream video is free up until something like 100,000 views, which is pretty generous in most cases.  And the expense of an encoder for the bleeding hearts and the artists?  It’s like half the price of that PS3 game they went out and bought last weekend.  Let’s talk about innovation.  Well, I’ll let the web explain that one for me, which has also been proposed to the W3C for inclusion in HTML5.  Come on people, get with the program.

I won’t really say anything that hasn’t been said about the risk of patents on Theora, other than to note that while yes, H.264 does suffer from a degree of patent risk, it is much more complete and better documented, from my understanding, making it easier to find such risks.

Mozilla is fighting a massive uphill battle by trying to convince users that H.264 carries with great licensing burden when the codec already ships for free with most operating systems or is freely downloadable in the form of Flash or Silverlight.  And fight they are: Mozilla is engaging in political grandstanding to get its own dark horse to win the race by attempting to force Ogg into the HTML5 spec instead of letting the market decide.  This serves to create an unstable, unwanted variable in getting everybody on board behind a common set of codecs.  What’s more, we’re dealing with hardware.  A hardware industry that for a decade now has been getting behind H.264 as the next-generation video standard. There’s no incentive for hardware makers to build support for a 10 year old, obsolete codec onto their chips when they can just pay the minimal per-decoder fee to have H.264 installed.  The result of which will not be a win for Mozilla, open source, or HTML5, but for Flash, Quicktime, and Silverlight.

It’s frustrating.  Somehow I think even Mozilla realizes this, stating that they’d have to “make compromises” should the web adopt H.264 instead of its dark horse, which is probably closer than anyone realizes considering that Google is playing with using H.264 videos (that they’ve already invested in) in an HTML5 video implementation.

What I think will actually happen is that there will not be a base codec specified for HTML5, nor should there be… after all, we didn’t need base image formats and we don’t need them for video.  The market will decide which one is actually better–which I believe will be H.264–and the world will move on.  I’m sure that Theora and H.264 will coexist for different purposes just as JPEG and PNG do.  But Mozilla will eventually be forced to capitulate and either use some of that Google money to license the decoder or build in backend support to play what’s allowed on the host platform.  Everybody else is already on board with H.264, folks just have to wait out Mozilla’s grandstanding.

Wow, this is actually my 100th blog post.  As little as I blog these days, I’m surprised I made this milestone.  I was hoping to avoid a long diatribe on this topic, but it looks like this became just that.

I knew that eventually I would run into an ideological disagreement with the church that my family and I have been attending for the last few weeks.  I was waiting for it.  Fueled by the conservative patriotism that Independence Day brings, this past Sunday’s message did just that.  I somehow suspected that it would happen when we walked in the door to see color guard members dressed in full military uniform.  Following the invocation, the color guard presented the state and national flags and played a video proclaiming America to being founded, endorsed, and sanctioned by God.  I’m okay with this.  I understand that churches often recognize secular holidays.  I understand that patriotism is certainly due to the country that grants her citizens the freedom to worship as they please.  I also understand that since the 1960’s the Republican party has sought out a strategy to align itself with organized religious institutions as a primary support base and that said religious institutions feel some loyalty to the GOP for this.  Finally, I understand that the majority of the people in this area are conservative Republicans.  Unlike most people in that conservative Republican sect, I’m able to express some tolerance for the grandstanding of ideals contrary to my own here or a jab at the Democratic party there.

The sermon was laudable through the theme of, “We have been truly blessed when we look and recognize that the rest of the world is not like us.  We really come to an understanding of the grace that God has given.”  America is indeed a great nation for the freedoms that she grants.  The freedom to worship as one wishes and not having a state-sponsored religion being chief amongst them.  The message continued to play upon the importance of the responsibility that comes with privilege.  This is another ideal that I strongly agree with: that freedom, religious or otherwise, is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for socially irresponsible behavior.  What good is freedom if we aren’t good stewards to it, if we aren’t contributing to the betterment of Earth and the human race?

As the message progressed, I was becoming a little perturbed with the developing subtext of “as long as it’s the Christian way of thinking and no other.” The pastor quoted the full text of Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me Liberty or give me Death” speech, which does include a strong endorsement of God (again, this in itself is not a bad thing–I prefer the thought that members of the government have religious conviction when they make decisions that affect the nation and the world), but preceded it by implying that “history” is an ominous entity trying to remove God from our daily lives, “You see, history wants to pull out a bunch of stuff, just give you some little tidbits.  They don’t want to hear the truth.”

The message then rapidly declined, “I’m concerned right now because America seems to be going down the path right now, and not just right now but over the last years, that Israel did.  Here we are living in a land that has legalized abortion.  We live in a land that protects immoral behavior.  We live in a land where the Bible and prayer have been taken out of the schools and what’s being brought in is guns, ya know, and drugs are taking our kids‘ lives.  We live in a land right now that has a big problem.  I have a problem right now with our President, Barack Obama.  He has stated that America is no longer a Christian nation.”  Following that statement, the pastor promptly led into a House floor video of a very partisan, but inconsequential, clip of Congressman Randy Forbes of Virginia deriding Obama’s stance.

The ironic thing to note here is that just last week during the sermon the pastor was advocating to his congregation that it’s always better to seek out the truth in facts rather than take someone else’s word, but that seems to be exactly the mistake that the pastor has made in preparation for his sermon.  It’s an old political tactic to take one sentence or sound bite, remove the perspective from it, and build a case behind it that is totally incongruous with the big picture from which it was taken.  (Or, as it were, to feed people little tidbits instead of the whole truth, as the pastor implied with his Patrick Henry example).  The specific speech that the Congressman and the pastor were referring to was Obama’s speech to the Muslim world in Ankara, Turkey on April 6, 2009.  The speech sought to reach out to Muslim countries to find common ground to combat extremism and violence in the world.  The President did not by any stretch of the imagination say that America was no longer a Christian nation, but instead praised Turkey for their progress in granting freedom to its own people.  “Freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state, which is why steps like reopening the Halki Seminary will send such an important signal inside Turkey and beyond,” the President said.  In closing his speech, the President said, “We will listen carefully, bridge misunderstanding, and seek common ground. We will be respectful, even when we do not agree.  And we will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over so many centuries to shape the world for the better – including my own country.”  At no point did the President say that America was no longer a Christian nation.  At no point did the President say that America was not founded on Judeo-Christian principles.  What the President did do was allude to the shared cultures between the two nations as an example of American diversity and the age-old principle that we work better with one another than against.  The last time I checked, loving one’s global neighbors and treating others as we would like to be treated were principles strongly advocated in Christianity.

I could go on debating the pastor’s arguments on the grounds of how the intolerance of other peoples’ lifestyles, but I will avoid the digression other than to say that it’s sick to extol the virtues of freedom in virtually the same breath that one advocates that it should be taken away. The main takeaway point should be this: the church is no place for politics or political grandstanding.  The only accomplishment of that message was to sew the seeds of dissent using misrepresented claims against the same government that was earlier praised for the freedom which she gives to her citizens.  Regardless of the political beliefs of the pastor or the congregation, the church is not a place for C-SPAN.  It’s difficult to understand the love/hate relationship that organized religion has with the government in this nation.  On the one hand, the government is praised for the freedom it grants, but on the other hand a general gloom is conveyed to the congregation that a hostile secularism is reducing the ranks of Christians and that the government is slowly pulling away from the particular religious sect of Christianity.  It’s almost as if the government, which has an obligation to many religions, doesn’t need the Christian Church to survive, but the Church, which has an obligation to one government, feels compelled to be dependent upon that government for survival.  Wouldn’t it make for a much stronger Church to attend to the spiritual needs of Its people rather than try to make itself relevant to government?  It would seem to benefit the Church more to stand apart from the government, and let the politicians be guided by their respective individual faiths.  “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”

The fathers created this country upon the very foundation of separation of church and state.  The absence of a state-sponsored religion was the very reason that disparate bands of people escaped to found the Colonies.  It was one of the cornerstones of the Constitution, the very first amendment to which explicitly forbids the United States from creating any law that recognizes any religious establishment.  The concept of God is rightly used in context by America’s founding fathers as it assumes that there is a greater power, and not the government itself, to which we are all universally accountable.  This respectful reverence is commendable then as it is today, but the founders also actively sought not to endorse any specific religion.  All held a belief of religious tolerance above religious endorsement.  Many of the founders were Deists and Unitarians who held a more general belief in some form of impersonal Providence rather than a Holy Trinity.  The phrase “In God We Trust,” although I believe it to be a perfectly commendable phrase to use in government, wasn’t attributed to the fathers at all, but rather came into use as the divisive Civil War raged in 1864.  It wasn’t made a national motto until nearly a century later in 1956.

Finally, one of the last forays of the sermon was that only nations that are based upon Christian principles are truly free.  Other nations, those founded upon the principles of Allah, are not free and suffer persecution and oppression.  First, to address the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that is spread against Islam: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are all Abrahamic religions; they have the same history at least until the point that the text is continued from Abraham’s children.  Ergo, Allah, God, and Yahweh are all one and the same deity.  This is not a progressive reinterpretation of history; this is what is taught by scholars in religion classes.  It is important to note that in the past, Christianity and Islam have enjoyed as great a degree of friendship and tolerance as Christianity and Judaism enjoy today (for an example, see Cordova, Spain in the middle ages).  Nor is the vocal minority of extremism in the Islamic world indicative of widespread violence and repression against its people.  To imply this stereotype is as careless and irresponsible of an act to do with freedom as violent fundamentalism is with power.  During medieval times, Islamic nations experienced a golden era of advancement of art and science that helped to jump-start the European Renaissance.

The fact remains: the Christian principles that this pastor speaks about, by his own admission in his sermon, are the universal principals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Those universal human rights are found in many countries throughout the world, some with a Christian religious majority, some with a Muslim majority, others with another religious majority or none at all.  The nations that do not enjoy personal freedoms are those that generally employ… wait for it… a state-sponsored religion.

It is my hope that we are entering an age of tolerance and enlightenment rather than one of spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt.  This hope seems to be finding firm footing.  Never before have we seen such interest in a two-state Israel/Palestine, nor have we seen such a global extending of hands to those who will take them in kind.  During the same weekend that this pastor gave his sermon, Christian mega-pastor Rick Warren keynoted an event held to spread interfaith awareness and cooperation, where he encouraged Christian and Muslim alike to speak out against stereotyping of any group and to respect one another even while disagreeing.  Fortunately, attitudes like the pastor at this country church appear to be fading in the light of a more tolerant, more open-minded and productive world.  I just wish there wasn’t such a lack of progressive churches for people who are both progressive and spiritual around here.

I thought that I’d blow a little of the dust off of this blog to write a slightly-longer-than-tweetable rant about the state of the open web, and more specifically about the state of HTML 5 and open video.

For those that aren’t technology enthusiasts like myself and really spend time keeping up with this stuff, some absolutely amazing things are being done on the Internet today.  Thanks to improvements in the way JavaScript is processed, the day when our applications reside exclusively in the cloud seems a lot closer.

One of the buzzword standards that browser makers are tripping over one another to support presently is HTML5’s support for <video> and <audio> tags in web pages, which aims to make planting and viewing rich media on the Internet as easy as it is to drop an <img> on the page.  The goal is to get away from plugins like the resource-hogging Flash, and make videos scriptable.  Mozilla and Webkit have both made some amazingly impressive demos using the technology.  Browsers will one day soon support the native display of video just as easy as it is do view a jpeg, png, or gif image.  Ah, but there’s the rub… which video format should browsers be able to play?

H.264 is the gold standard of video compression format baked into pretty much everything.  Hardware acceleration on video cards?  Got it.  iPhone?  Got it (in fact, H.264 is pretty much all it’ll play.)  Bluray?  Got it.  Google Chrome?  Got it.  Apple Safari?  Got it.  DivX 7?  Got it.  Windows 7?  Got it.  Mac OS X?  Got it.  Quicktime X?  It’s practically the house built upon the foundation of H.264.  Even the White House uses H.264 MP4 files.  The catch is that H.264 has been carefully marketed by a group of patent holders over the better part of the last decade to increase market adoption, and adopt it did.  However, in 2011 the grace period on both encoder and decoder expires and licensing fees will need to be paid to the MPEG-LA group.  That makes it a lot less attractive for those advocating an open, free, and standard Internet.

On the other hand, there’s a format called Ogg Theora, which is a little like the red-headed step child that lost the video race in the late 1990’s and was forgotten about.  Although there are no guarantees against submarine patents, Theora claims to be patent, license, and royalty free.  The problem is that the format is, although improving, very poor in quality, has virtually no support for hardware acceleration, and isn’t widely implemented.  It’s so inefficient, in fact, that it’s been argued that the excess bandwidth cost from Theora video would outweigh the cost of licensing H.264.  By nature of it being free and open, however, it has been chosen by Mozilla as practically the second coming, who has even invested $100,000 to improve the codec quality and distribution.

Although it’s unclear what will happen to the state of H.264 encoders and decoders come 2011, what seems likely is that even the free and open source solutions like x264/ffmpeg will no longer be able to legally be distributed in the United States.  But, as nice as the patent-free and license-free concept around Theora is, without hardware and major vendor support it’s going to be stuck in geek enthusiast circles.

So, instead of this wonderful world where developers can drop a video into a web page in a single format and be confident that it will work, we’re back in the 1990’s and Flash Video looks like it’ll never go away.  In order to realistically support HTML5 video, developers are still stuck wondering what codec to use or waste valuable computer cycles and bandwidth to support both.

There will always be a need for fallbacks, since Microsoft is a lumbering buffoon and isn’t likely to support <video> any time soon.  But the thing is, even Flash plays H.264 video.  Were Mozilla to have elected to do the logical thing and license an H.264 decoder, a web developer could have a single video file encoded in H.264 which would play in all modern browsers, iPhone included, and then, as detailed here, simply load that same H.264 file into an Adobe Flash player as a fallback.

Unfortunately, all the other browser makers that implement H.264 combined don’t add up to Mozilla’s market share.  Ultimately, though, what will decide what format gets accepted as the baseline standard for HTML5 video will probably depend on two things: Youtube, which carries the vast weight of Internet video on its back, and mobiles (phones+netbooks).  Mobiles will need hardware acceleration in order to efficiently play the video on limited battery life, which doesn’t exist for Theora.  And guess what?  Youtube has been experimenting with HTML5 video as of late, and guess what codec they’re using?  Yep.  H.264.

Give it up, Mozilla. Just license the darned decoder instead of making a political statement.

So maybe I’m just odd, but the only thing that I find that really interests and concerns me in the Oracle takeover of Sun is that OpenOffice.org’s future is seriously in question.  I was hoping that in the time between the announcement and now more talk would have been generated about OpenOffice.org, but it seems there are some little projects called Java, MySQL, and Solaris that people would prefer to talk about.  What concerns me most isn’t that OpenOffice might fall into obsolescence and go away, but rather that the OpenDocument Format might share the same fate.

OpenDocument is, at its heart, a noble goal to do for productivity suites what HTML did for the Internet: serve as a vendor-neutral, ubiquitous file format providing for consistent presentation and editing across all platforms and all programs that adhere to the standard.  Ideally, there would be no worrying about whether or not a file is in Word, WordPerfect, Pages, or {insert your text editor here}.  With this issue, it’s not about championing an open source cause or being anti-Microsoft, it’s about interoperability and universal access.

But, though OpenDocument achieved ratification as an ISO standard way back in 2006, it has failed to live up to that purpose.  Progress has been made, mind you.  Many governments have adopted OpenDocument as their standard of choice citing that they don’t want to be locked into a single-company vendor, and the latest Service Pack for Microsoft Office 2007 brings native OpenDocument support.  But, there are relatively few programs that support it outside of OpenOffice.org.  Sure, NeoOffice, Lotus Symphony, and Go-OO do, but they’re all derivatives of OpenOffice.org.  But even between them, much less non-OpenOffice derived software, OpenDocument files appear differently.  Bullets are different sizes, text is kerned and wrapped at different locations, drawings and figures overlaid on top of one another shift.  Sometimes, document presentation changes between saves even in the same program.

That’s because at its heart OpenOffice.org is an obsoleted piece of software that’s been hanging around since the late 1990’s and waiting to die.  There, I said it.  It’s frustrating to use and has an arcane user interface at best.  But, it’s only slightly more frustrating than Microsoft Word, which is why the open source world settled upon it as being a cornerstone of their offerings.  Unfortunately, without strong corporate support from Oracle or the spinning off of OpenOffice.org into an independent foundation (AND strong corporate support), it looks like OpenOffice.org will continue to atrophy leaving no real open source competitor to Microsoft’s Office suite until the day when cloud computing produces a viable alternative.

I really like Apple’s iWork software.  It’s document management done right, focusing on and promoting the proper use of Paragraph Styles and Character Styles.  But, unfortunately, Apple elected to make its own XML-based file format for the documents, which is compatible with neither Microsoft Office or OpenOffice.org.  iWork can export to the old Microsoft binary file format, but not OpenDocument, and you can only save natively to the iWork file formats, and on top of that it’s a Mac-only program so I’m not likely to get the others in my office on board with it.

iWork ‘09 was released in January, and since Apple has pulled out of MacWorld for 2009 I see the iWork falling into more of an annual May/June release schedule.  But once again I’m not hedging any bets that Apple is working on native interoperability with any format but its own.  And maybe for practical reasons that’s not a bad thing since Apple probably couldn’t have released a program with such innovative concepts if they had to adhere to a document standard that has its origins in the last millennium.  At this point though, I really don’t care if everybody settles on ODF, OOXML, or iWork XML… as long as everybody settles on something.  I’m starting to be of the opinion that open standards are great for advocating freedom of choice, but in many cases poor for practicality.

If I sound frustrated it’s because I am.  I spent the better part of the last year slowly converting our business documents to OpenDocument format.  The sudden uncertain future of the reference implementation of the format has me a little miffed.

I have been a Mac user for years, but have continued to play Microsoft Flight Simulator on my old PC from time to time.  Flight Simulator was one of the first titles that I invested in when I first got a PC in 1997, and grew to enjoy being an armchair pilot.

Now, I’m reading reports as well as an official confirmation that Microsoft’s Aces studio, the development team responsible for Flight Simulator as well as global environmental simulations based on that engine, has been completely axed as a result of Microsoft’s recent layoffs.  All that remains are six staff members to archive the code and maintain contractual obligations.  These efforts are anticipated to last about six months.  This means that Train Simulator 2 will likely never see the light of day and, more importantly, the future of the MS Flight Simulator franchise itself has been thrown into doubt.  This is very surprising to me, since Flight Simulator has been published by Microsoft since 1982.

However, if there is any good to come out of it is the opportunity for smaller developers to make new, (hopefully) Mac compatible cross platform flight simulators to pick up the baton.  Several civilian and commercial flight simulators have cropped up over the years, the Fly! and Flight Unlimited series, but none was able to make significant market penetration into Microsoft’s 500-pound-gorilla franchise.  The only exception to this has been X-Plane, which has continued to see constant improvement over the years, but lacks the marketing polish and training/documentation for real mass market adoption.  Let’s hope that the dedicated community surrounding civilian and commercial flight simulators pull together to carry on a tradition.

The procession of fireworks crackling in the distance this evening reminds me that 2009 is unavoidably approaching and that we will crash into it in just a few hours. Since Wes is supposed to be writing has written an annual post for the end of the year, I suppose that I’ll do the same.

It was a productive year, primarily marked by my becoming a father and adjusting to the life of a new parent.  Our boy is 9 months old and flourishing.  He’s got four teeth, jabbers “mama”, “dada”, and, more recently, “good,” and is starting to take his first unsteady steps.  I’ve lost a lot of the uncertainty that I initially had about parenthood and have fairly well come to terms with the loss of personal freedom that comes with parenthood.

I also established myself with a new employer where I re-invigorated my interest in web development, recoded large portions of our flagship product to make it work more efficiently for our specific needs, dug into video editing, converted a lot of our material to a vendor-neutral open standard (OpenDocument), and finally wrapped up the year by actually making some progress in learning Blender 3D.

What’s that leave for next year?  I hope to continue the process of learning new development techniques and 3D modeling.  I would love to learn either Python/Django or Ruby/Rails (I’m leaning toward Python since it’s more ubiquitous than Ruby is) and begin working on a 2.0 of our product based on one of those frameworks.

I would also like to continue to ensure that all work (personal and professional) is in open standard formats where possible, but I’m coming to recognize that I am a much stronger supporter of open standards than I am of open source.  At least for now.

Open source and Linux seem to be excellent tools for personal freedom on the surface, but I am now aware that nearly 75% of the contributions to Linux comes from corporate interests funding development of lower level functions for enterprise usage.  That’s fine enough, but that kind of focus tends to detract from the desktop experience, which is all about getting things done as effectively as possible.  In order for a project to be successful, it has to be fairly tightly controlled by a person or group of people entrusted to make commits to a project in the best interest of the project.  And people don’t really like change, so in many cases the tight-knight group of project owners (or owner) disregards changes that might be beneficial to make the software more usable.  After all, software developers tend to make awful user experience gurus.  The recent retirement of desktop-focused kernel contributer Con Kolivas seems to be a good case in point.

So for now I’ll maintain that the strength of open source remains the lower level frameworks that it produces, and the weakness remains everything on top of that.  After all, what offers better freedom (for someone who has a finite amount of time on their hands): a program where a company has hired usability experts to make the software intuitive, useful, productive, and uses an open standard file format, or a program where the source code is available for all to see but where no such feature exists or is mired in complexity?  I’ll probably continue to use OS X for the near to moderate future, even if Steve Jobs does bite the big one, because it is designed for the user, with user experience and productivity at the forefront, more so than Windows and certainly more so than desktop Linux.  Of course I’ll still use and support open source software.  And hopefully we’ll see a point where communities do agree on a consistent, strict, and intuitive HIG in Linux, but I don’t see everyone adhering to it, and rightfully, I suppose they shouldn’t.  But if anybody can achieve such a task, it’s Mark Shuttleworth.  Canonical is, as far as I can tell, the exception to the rule.  They’re small, nimble, desktop-focused and committed to bringing intuitiveness that’s actually useful to the desktop (as nifty as it looks, there’s arguably nothing productive about wiggly windows, flaming window closes, or rotating cubes).

On a more personal level, I would love to complete the document that I’ve started where I outline the doubts, concerns, and questions about spiritual matters.  With that as a tool, I would hope to provide that to theologians and laypeople more knowledgeable than myself in such matters for constructive feedback.  The ultimate goal is to address the largest of my concerns to the point where doubts about spirituality hold me back from embracing it as a mind set.  I would also like to discuss spiritual matters on personal, scientific, historic, and above all philosophical levels with peers. So many in the Bible belt use religion as a crutch to put life in a pretty package, maintaining the status quo by rejecting progressive ideals and refusing to accept the complex, chaotic, beautiful world in which we live.  Life is a bazaar, not a cathedral.  A spiritual mindset should always be intended to challenge its adherents to promote social responsibility in oneself and in the world.

Today is a good day.  Today is the first day in a new America.  People across the world are waking up with a renewed optimism, realizing that we will soon be rid of a one-man axis of evil.  Today is the first step to reigniting the American people to solve some of the greatest challenges in our nation’s history.

It’s time to restore habeas corpus and shut down the abomination that is Guantanamo Bay, to make the government transparent so that all those whom she governs can take equal part in participation, to become responsible in dealing with the threat of climate change, to address the paradox of unaffordable healthcare in our rich society, to challenge worldwide Anti-Americanism and re-earn the respect of our global brothers.

Today is a day that we begin to realize that polarizing the world in arrogant unilateralism is counterproductive, and that the United States shares a responsibility as a member of a commonwealth of nations.

A new wind begins to course its way through the world today.  Today is a good day.

There is now just four days until the historic 2008 Presidential election.  To my delight, it looks as though my favored candidate, Barack Obama, is well ahead in the polls and unless something goes terribly wrong will become the 44th President of the United States.  This is due in no small part to the economic crisis currently surrounding the country as people look to leadership beyond the tired old Republican principles that we’ve had for eight years.  Under that administration, we’ve seen the country through many ills, all of which are widely documented and discussed so I will not repeat the talking points here.  But the fact remains that the American people appear ready for a change, ready for openness and accountability in the government, ready for economic policies that actually help the middle and lower classes, and ready for a sense of sanity about when to go to war with other nations.  I am convicted to believe that Barack Obama possesses those qualities, and am hopeful that he will bring back a sense that the United States knows where she’s going.  Most of the time that I have had any interest at all in politics, I’ve felt as though Washington was simply filled with drifters looking to make a quick buck before they pack it in, without a clear, and certainly not a noble, direction for the United States.

Even with the failures of the past eight years Mr. Obama has only since mid-September pulled significantly ahead of his opponent, John McCain.  As much as it seems like it would not be an issue, race appears to be one of the major reasons that he hasn’t had a more sustained lead.  In my own mind, I never saw Mr. Obama as a black man or Mr. McCain as a white man; I looked at their qualifications and what their platforms proposed.  I incorrectly assumed that others would do the same.  To do otherwise seems foolish and against the best interests of our nation.  However, certainly in my local area and beyond, I have seen nothing but fear, uncertainty, and doubt being spread about the Democratic nominee.

Some of my family members responded to my suggestion that Mr. Obama would be an effective President with a condescending look, as though I had said something that should exclude me from some elite club, never mind the fact that they are the ones who would benefit most from an Obama/Biden administration.  “I’ll never vote for someone that isn’t a Christian,” he told me after confidently stating that Barack Obama was a Muslim.  I tried to find out where he got such information to challenge its validity, but he provided none.  But even if Mr. Obama were a Muslim, it should not matter.  The religion of Islam teaches peace and harmony as well as violence and aggression, just as the Christian religion does.  It stands to reason that any intelligent person seeking the approval of the American people to lead them should be well rounded and understand the balance of those forces.  However, since we are in the midst of an ideological struggle with our Muslim brothers, racism against religions seems patriotic.  With that in mind, neither Barack Obama nor his wife or children have ever been observed participating in any Muslim religious ceremony or holiday.  Other family members say, “I don’t know, I hear that he’s going to raise taxes,” or “I don’t know, I’ve heard that he’s working for…” insert whoever is an ideological enemy here, be it the Middle East, China, or Fidel Castro.  I’ve even heard a casual suggestion that Mr. Obama will be the Anti-Christ.  Around me, these statements are mostly quieted “well I’ve heard…” types because I dispute them.  These are terrible misconceptions that are never addressed amongst people with these types of attitudes.  To do so would be blasphemy, anti-Christian, and ultimately anti-American.  That said, I believe that people can’t address these issues because in their hearts they can’t honestly believe such nonsense.

One encouraged anther to get out and vote, “because we’ve got to keep these n*****s out of government or else they’ll run all over us.”  I was utterly awed at the sheer closed-mindedness of the statement.  How could someone make such a paranoid, contemptuous claim against a people?  If I could respond to that without drawing divisive lines within the family (I’ve done enough of that already lately), I would tell her this:  the African American people are not some overwhelming, sinister organization of people seeking to overthrow the government and the white supremest way of life, they are in fact a small minority of people in this nation that are just as American and just as human as anyone else in the country.  They are a race that has to a large degree been oppressed until just half a century ago, and that repression has led them to live in a much lower class of economic prosperity.  How can it even be suggested that a minority people, the majority of which are living largely disconnected in economic destitution, be plotting to “take over?”

Lower economic classes, whatever color in whatever nation that encompasses, have a worldview of feeling repressed and unjustly treated.  These classes have less ambition to rise above what they see immediately surrounding them.  In their minds, this is all that they will ever be.  If anything, the United States government has done a horrendous job of managing racial equality, focusing on giving handouts, freebies, and forced opportunity to the lower class, which they have in turn come to expect.  While in turn those in a higher class view the lower class as having gamed the system, which serves only to increase the resentment between the two rather than solve problems. Instead, we as a country should have been investing in programs to instill a sense of pride, hard work, and encouragement in the lower classes to rise above their economic conundrum.  What people white, brown, red, and yellow alike must come to realize is that we should not be focusing on a war against racism; we should be focused on a war against classism and for sustainability.  To do otherwise only sets us back in our quest to build a better human society.  I applaud the efforts of people like Barack Obama, Bill Cosby, and Oprah Winfrey, just as strongly as I hiss at the efforts of people like Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton.  The latter of which only seem to want to continue with the status quo.

Unfortunately, it appears that racism against color, culture, and religion is still strong with us today.  But there are those with good ideas beginning to rise above such issues.  With luck, one will soon be President of the United States.  It fills me with a sense of hope for the human race.