We're experiencing a somewhat gloomy 4th of July, cloudy with occasional rain. The U.S. economic and political situation looks gloomy as well, but some optimists are looking forward to the restoration of the republic. Jerry Pournelle has a nice piece by Isaac Asimov on our National Anthem.

Happy Independence Day!

The Left/Right division in politics has always struck me as inaccurate and misleading. As a libertarian, I never fit, was I "left" or "right", and relative to what? The Pournelle Political Axes provide a more useful two dimensional political classification schema.

After 15 years of development, the Programming Languages Team (PLT) has decided to rename their development system, PLT Scheme, to Racket with version 5.0 to emphasize the differences. Only time will tell if this is a good marketing move, but the system itself is impressive.

Racket is a modern Lisp with a modern development environment that combines the classic simplicity of Scheme with a well designed module system, an extensive collection of third party extensions (batteries included), and a good balance between research and pragmatism. If you're a programmer, I think you'll find Racket interesting and inspiring. If you're not, but are interested in programming, you couldn't find a better place to start.

Freedom isn't free. On the this memorial it's important to remember those who have paid the price. Richard Fernandez explains why. So why is our president AWOL?

I attended a church leadership workshop today hosted by St. Stephen's with attendees from similar sized churches. The focus was coping with change in the 21st century. As technology and society are changing, churches must adapt to be relevant.

Mother Nature didn't cooperate for this year's Iron Thistle. We made do with just the Sheaf Toss, the Braemar Stone and a Braemar Tire Toss. At least we got bragging rights and a T-shirt.

We had our first DenHUG meeting yesterday. It was just Ben Atkin and myself, but we had a good chat about Haskell and why we're interested in it. We're taking different approaches to learning Haskell, Ben is downloading and studying applications written in Haskell, while I'm reading Real World Haskell, and we're both experimenting as we explore the Haskell ecosystem.

Ben asked me what my expectations were for the DenHUG meetup group. I told him that it was an experiment to see if it would help me learn Haskell. This got me to thinking that I should probably have better defined goals for the group. Here's a rough cut:

• Learn Haskell and explore it's potential.
• Meet others interested in Haskell, and more generally, Functional Programming.
• Determine where Functional Programming works better then other programming paradigms and where it is a poor fit.
• Find out why one would choose Haskell over functional languages like Erlang, Ocaml, or Scheme.

Things are getting very busy at work, with travel that conflicts with PyCon 2010, and I've had to cancel my talk there. I was looking forward to it. Maybe next year.

I've begun playing with Haskell a bit and thought it might be worth while to meet others interested in Haskell and Functional Programming. When searching for a local user group failed to turn anything up, I decided to be proactive. I started a meetup for DenHUG, the Denver Area Haskell Users Group. We'll see how it goes.

Wishing everyone peace, prosperity, and freedom in 2010.

On the day before Christmas, we had a snow storm and the Senate put a lump of coal in our stockings. We can hope that they'll fail to reach an accomodation with the House on Health care, but I'm not optimistic. We'll probably be living with this abominable piece of legislation for some time. More positively, we attended the Christmas Eve candlelight service at St. Stephen's with my wife playing bells and myself standing in as usher. We also opened Christmas presents.

On the first day of Christmas, while it was quite white and gray,

we were nice and cozy,

and had a splendid Christmas feast.

"Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that we lie here true, even to the death to our Spartan way of life." -- Simonides

This epitath at the pass of Thermopylae comes to mind when I think of the Spartans, the Highland Scots, or the Vikings. We've gained a lot from modern civilization, but we've lost something too.

The Libertarian party is 38 years old today. Happy Birthday!

Orson Scott Card published an essay a couple of months ago on Why Union Leaders Are Trying to Destroy Themselves. He's a union member who gratefully recognizes the good that has come from the union movement, but is concerned that overreaching union leaders and their political allies will cause a backlash that destroys some of the gains that have been made.

The unions won decades ago but the leadership has kept pushing to maintain and extend their power, often at the expense of the workers they are supposed to represent. Organizations tend to take on a life of their own and attract leaders who like running the organization. After the original objectives are accomplished the leaders tend to keep pushing the movement to justify their positions of privilege and power. The "Card Check" bill may be the last straw with its blatant attempt to take away workers' freedom of choice. A backlash could reverse the good work that the unions have accomplished.

Can the overreaching by successful movements and subsequent backlash be avoided? The founders of the United States set up various checks and balances to limit overreach by one part of government, separating the national government into the three branches and leaving the states and citizens with considerable autonomy. This system has been compromised somewhat over the years, but still works pretty well. Is there a way to provide checks and balances to prevent successful movements from going too far, or are they doomed to be victims of their own success?

Went on a toy run for children of Colorado National Guard troops deployed to Iraq. There was too much ice and snow on the roads here to ride the bike, so I drove the S2000, top down despite the snow. It's the next best thing to a motorcycle. After the run from Frederick to Longmont, we had lunch at the Armory provided by the American Legion. All in all, a good time for a good cause.

Tonight we had our annual Lyons holiday fireworks display. It's beginning to feel like Christmas.

Some thoughts from Armed Liberal on what it means to be a patriot. Patriots come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Being human, they've made mistakes, but they've left us a legacy of peace, prosperity, and freedom. We should honor their memory today, forgive their mistakes, and do our best to enrich their legacy and pass it on to those who follow us.

I received my acceptance note from the program committee, and I'll be speaking on "Agent Based Modeling and Simulation in Python" at PyCon 2010 in Atlanta next February. I've got a half hour session and will probably set up an open space meeting as well. From the reviewer feedback, I should focus more on the "why Python" section and the example.

Yesterday Buell riders from all around the country made one last ride to the Buell factory in East Troy, Wisconsin to pay tribute to a unique marque as it nears its end. The last Buell is scheduled to roll off the assembly line Friday and 180 workers will be out of a job on December 18th. Hat tip to Black on Bad Web.

Job loss from the current recession has been in the news for a year, but this animated graph hits harder than anything I've seen. Via Hacker News.

I participated in the Front Range Pythoneers Unconference today. Having sat in on a couple of open sessions at PyCon 2007 I had some idea about what to expect, but was still pleasantly surprised by the wealth of useful information. I'd definitely do one of these again.

I presented my rather embryonic talk on "Agent Based Programming in Python". I was unsure of attracting any participants, but get three who provided good feedback. Here's my presentation in it's current state on Google Docs: http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dc5vvs9p_0fp7hzmcm