Graham Glass, etc.

A New Constitution, Part 16

This is part 16 of a series; part 15 is here.

In part 9 of this series, I described a mechanism for making charity more efficient, thereby enabling people to fund education and healthcare directly without any government intervention.

One reader expressed concern that some parents might neglect their children and not make an effort to get them basic education and healthcare.

My response is that I think it's reasonable to have a law that prosecutes any parent/guardian that does not take reasonable steps to get their children basic education and healthcare. If anyone knew a child that was being neglected in these areas by their guardians, they would be able to report them and the police would follow up on the leads.

In other words, I support a law that punishes parents for neglecting their children in the areas of health and education, but I do not support government-funded education as part of the solution to this problem.

The next part of this series is here.

EDU 2.0 Web Site Design, Part 2

We hit another small milestone today; the first working CSS + HTML version of our home page. Within a couple of days this code will be integrated into a live Rails program, and then the translation of the rest of the site will begin.

EDU 2.0 Web Site Design

We've been making good progress on the new web site design for EDU 2.0. Below is an almost-finished version; any feedback is most welcome!

Startup opportunity for Ruby on Rails Engineer

A good friend of mine is about to launch a startup, and the previews have convinced me they're onto a good thing. They're currently looking for a Ruby on Rails engineer; experience in video technology and/or event-driven architecture is a plus. The company is located in San Francisco, and it's a good opportunity to join a company as one of the first engineers. If you're interested, please send an email to [email protected].

Cycling without a helmet

I love to cycle, but I don't like wearing a helmet. The main reason is that I love the feeling of freedom and the wind in my hair. However, my cautious side usually wins and I end up wearing the annoying contraption just in case. So I was particularly interested to read this article which claims that wearing a helmet makes it more likely you'll get hit. Apparently drivers that see you're wearing a helmet assume you're a good cyclist and then drive closer to you than they would otherwise.

James Bond Trailer

Check out the new trailer for the upcoming James Bond movie Casino Royale. It confirms my belief that Daniel Craig may be the best Bond ever!

Microsoft School

This article describes a joint effort between Microsoft and Philadelphia to create a modern school. It's not just about the technology; they are trying to hard to improve the ways that kids learn. For example, they're using an "education competency wheel" to guide the various knowledge and skills that children are taught. Overall, it sounds very promising.

Moving from Windows to Hosted Linux

We've spent the last two days selecting a web hosting company and then migrating an early version of our EDU 2.0 software. It hasn't been much fun.

We chose GoDaddy as the hosting company, and settled on Linux (Fedora 4) machines with 3 GHz Pentium processors and 2 GB RAM. So far, so good.

Getting the environment configured has been the tough part. First I had to learn putty (remote console), pscp (remote copy), rpm (linux packager), yum (advanced packager), as well as remembering all the various UNIX utilities like the vi editor.

Then the nightmare began as I slogged through the list of the packages we use: mysql 5, ruby, rubygems, rails, imagemagick, rmagick, gruff and mongrel. Each of these packages has its own quirks, special incantations and configuration settings. The fact that the system does anything at all is a minor miracle.

After two days of hard work, EDU 2.0 is running on GoDaddy, but significantly slower than on our Windows box which has less power. This means there's something odd going on. I estimate at least another two days to analyze the system and figure out how to improve its performance. This is definitely not a fun part of launching a product!

EDU 2.0 Logo

We have a good candidate for the EDU 2.0 logo ready; any feedback is most welcome! The next step is the web design concept, which I'm really looking forward to.

What is an American?

I grew up in the UK with a little exposure to the US via various media sources. I traveled to the US for the first time when I was 17 and visited Los Angeles. I finally moved to the US when I was 20 and lived in Dallas.

My main impression of the US, based on everything from the Moon Landing to my personal experiences in LA and Dallas, was that an American is someone with a "can-do" attitude. As a newly-minted US citizen, this is certainly something that I intend to exhibit to my dying day.