Gush 1.3 Gush 1.3. It's finally out. Yes, it's taken way too long, but that's what happens when you get distracted with side projects, moving servers, and finding wonderful, new TV shows like 24. The latest version of Gush has lots of changes under the hood, but most importantly it includes 's group chat functionality. The performance improvements mentioned earlier are now complete. Gush will probably still not run well on a Pentium II, but on more "modern" machines it should be fine.

Now I just have to knuckle down and get the Linux version up to date as well.

You think the carpet pissers did this? You're Entering a World of Lebowski is a well written New York Times article by David Edelstein who "gets it" because he obviously listened to the Dude's story. The article gets bonus points for the following paragraph:

The Coens turned down requests to be interviewed about the cult of "The Big Lebowski," which is frankly infuriating: I did not watch my buddies die facedown in the muck to be blown off by too-cool, insular, press-shunning elitists.

(via Andy)

Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle As Police Use of Tasers Rises, Questions Over Safety Increase.

Highlights from the article:

A 1989 Canadian study found that stun guns induced heart attacks in pigs with pacemakers.

In recent incidents, police officers have shocked a 9-year-old girl in Arizona and a 66-year-old woman in Kansas City.

Taser did not test the older gun because "we believed that the M26's safety record and prior testing speaks for itself"

Mark Shuttle and Tuttle SVC Our fellow Rhode Islander, Tom Hoffman, landed himself a gig working as the project lead for the SchoolTool project. From what Tom has told me in the past, SchoolTool is a pretty ambitious effort sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth to develop an Open Source administration system that could be used by schools around the world. Congratulations to Tom, and to SchoolTool for bringing him on board.

Double Standard
United Corporations of America. Sounds kind of funny, doesn't it? Let's just say that in many ways the laws of the land treat corporations as first class citizens, and it's actual citizens like the drooling consumers we've become.

Take some New York Times headlines that have been in the news in the past week:

Pfizer to Pay $420 Million in Illegal Marketing Case
U.S. Discloses Wal-Mart Fine of $3.1 Million [ Clean Air Act violations ]
Record Labels Must Pay Shortchanged Performers

I guess all these companies / organizations have learned their lesson, right? Sure they have. The crime fits the punishment.

Then there's Martha Stewart who was convicted for 4 felonies.There's possible jail time, and unless all the counts are over turned, Martha won't be voting in the next presidential election. Justice is served.

So let me gets this right. Martha is unable to vote in the next election because she sold 200,000 shares illegally netting her practically nothing in comparison to her real wealth. On the other hand, Pfizer, who defrauded Americans and the Medicaid program of billions of dollars, is fined $420 million dollars, a tiny fraction of their yearly revenues of 49 billion, and no jail time (of course, they're a company). Pfizer can still lobby to their heart's content.

Can we really believe what Pfizer has to say about cheaper drugs coming from Canada, eh?

How about the two DMCA amendments before Congress trying to wrestle back some of the fundamental rights U.S. citizens ought to have for content they've rightfully purchased? The RIAA is still allowed to lobby politicians despite not paying the artists they're claiming to represent? I'm sure they have our best interest at heart now, like the time they price fixed CD sales in the late 90s.

To be honest, I hate lobbying. It's a sickening practice that misinforms people in power for the gain of a few. I'm sure there are others who would disagree, but I can hardly see the case for letting corporations lobby that are known to be headed by executives that wantonly break laws.

My suggestion for leveling the playing field is to introduce "free lobbying zones." We can put them right next to the free speech zones.

Subversion
We've been using Subversion on and off for a while. Since the 1.0 release, we've used it as our primary source code control solution. It works with well with my other favorite pieces of software: Python and Apache.

O'Reilly has a really nice introduction to Subversion by the authors of Subversion. The O'Reilly Subversion book is also really handy, thorough, and free.

Subversion comes as both a client and a server portion. The client is a command line based which is fine for some, but on Windows I certainly prefer something a little more integrated. Thankfully, there's TortoiseSVN which allows you to do all the source code management by right-clicking on Windows folders.

At this point SVN is already a great solution, but you can get more bang for your buck by installing Trac. Trac is a web-based service that allows developers to collaborate on Wikis, track change sets in your SVN repositories, and do bug reporting / ticket requests. To boot, it has a really nice interface and of course it's written in Python. My only complaint with Trac is that it doesn't allow me to just view all the changes at once for a single file. You can only view the diffs for all the files in a change set. Anyway, it's only at version 0.6.1 so there's plenty of time to get things polished. Here are some nice looking Trac screenshots:

An author's dream come true Actionscript.com is now opening it's doors to contributors, and the best part is, you can earn some extra cash. They are using Google's Adsense, which can now track individual pages. So the more popular or more often you write, the more you can earn. Details here if you're interested.