Postcards from the Bleeding Edge
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
A psalm to comfort the non-mormon/non-christian
After seeing the rise of Mike Huckabee, and wading through Mitt Romney's speech, which basically declares agnostics and atheists and members of other faiths (like Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, etc) as un-american sinners doomed to hell, I got a little worried about my status in the afterlife and in this life if either of those two got elected.Ed Skinner's interpretation of the Bible came to my rescue. From Romans 2:13-16:
- 13For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous in God's sight, but the doers of the law who will be justified. 14When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. 15They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them 16on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all.
- New Revised Standard Version (The New Oxford Annotated Bible)
From Ed:
- I've seen individuals and families around the world, good people and bad, good parents and bad and, through their similarities and their differences, I've learned things about myself, about others. And after a lot of chewing on the ideas, talking with others and lots and lots of reading about God and about life, about why we are here, animate and with the ability to think, choose and do, I'm convinced of a couple of things.
- 1. Life is Holy.
2. It is a gift.
3. We are granted Free Will.
Some take that Free Will and go in one direction. We are, indeed, permitted to waste our lives, to destroy ourselves and to poison future generations, even to exterminate all life on our planet. It is permitted.
But that is not what is hoped.
Instead, I am utterly convinced that God hopes we will cherish life, encourage it, embellish it.
Life is to be lived, and enjoyed, and in ways that promote it.
But we do have to choose to make it that way.
Labels: election 2008, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney
¶ 7:18 PM 1 comments
Sunday, December 09, 2007
The Supply of candidate news vs demand
 | mitt romney |  | ron paul |  | hillary clinton |  | barack obama |  | mike huckabee |
Labels: Barack Obama, election 2008, hillary clinton, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul
¶ 8:31 AM 0 comments
Presidental politics and the LAMP stack
I was curious as to what software was powering the presidential campaigns this year, so I did a brief tour of the top websites with LWP's http HEAD command.It's kind of neat that Romney's otherwise wealthy campaign is using Linux, and no wonder that Fred's technologically clueless one is using IIs, and perhaps I could draw an inference that Hillary's campaign is so uncool because it's not run on a Mac? (Why don't any of the campaigns use a Mac as a web server?) Obama's running on a Personal Web Server, whatever that is.
Democrats
www.hillaryclinton.com Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
www.barackobama.com Server: PWS/1.1.29
www.richardsonforpresident.com/ Server: Zope/(Zope 2.7.8-final, python 2.3.6, linux2) ZServer/1.1
www.dennis4president.comServer: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
johnedwards.com Server: Apache
joebiden.com Server: Zope/(Zope 2.7.8-final, python 2.3.5, linux2) ZServer/1.1
Republicans
www.mikehuckabee.com Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
www.mittromney.com Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
www.joinrudy08.com Server: Apache/2.2.4 (Unix) PHP/5.2.0
www.ronpaul2008.com Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
www.johnmccain.com Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
www.fred08.com Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
The final tally: Of the top 6 Republican campaigns, half use a redhat derived Linux, half use IIS. Of the top 6 Democratic campaigns, 1 uses IIS, another uses PWS (Microsoft I think), the other 4 use Linux, or at least, Apache.
I could draw two conclusions from this. Either: Open source is a clear win in the presidential arena for all candidates - or: there is a marked preference for Microsoft in the top-ranked-by-the MSM contenders.
Now, of all the campaigns running, Ron Paul's is the most interactive and untinged by broadcast mediathink. Rudy Guilani's web page has, first on the page, "watch our new ad", and "get your Rudy bumper sticker, only 9.95", while Paul's has a flash message that circulates between donate, supporter messages, discover and imagine, who is Ron Paul, and pointers to videos, and even a supporter spotlight.
Ron Paul's campaign and supporters are almost entirely powered by at least three parts of LAMP - Linux, Apache, and PHP. I can't easily determine from here what the database back ends are, but I would assume it's either postgres or mysql on that side, too.
www.ronpaul2008.com Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
www.teaparty07.com: Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
www.ronpaulblimp.com Server: Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)
www.ronpaulgraphs.com Server: Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)
www.ronpaulforums.com Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Red Hat)
Now, if I wanted to be truly fair and journalistic and geeky this morning, I'd survey a few other candidate's supporters' websites, and talk about how google news, myspace and youtube and technorati actually work to bring you the news you are looking for, but I have a few other things to write, and some Blimp handlers to find so I'll leave this at this for now.
Labels: Barack Obama, election 2008, Fred Thompson, hillary clinton, joe biden, John Mccain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rudy Giulliani
¶ 6:56 AM 0 comments
