aaron evans

We are living in a remarkable time when leaders of the world face problems of immense scale and pundits have a diversity of opinion regarding the appropriate course of action to take. When the present becomes past we will likely forget this debate and simply accept the present as it is with its own set of problems. Remember the debate about a ‘crash landing’ versus ’soft landing’ in the housing sector? Remember the debate about whether Apple could successfully enter the cellphone market?

I find it unfortunate that we forget these debates when their outcomes are no longer uncertain. I think a consequence is that we don’t ever improve at identifying “real” debates in society or even understanding what debates are the right debates to be having. If we seek to become better at public discourse then we should certainly look at our experience with past debates as informative of present debates.

Having said that, I’ll take a stab at outlining some of the current debates regarding the economy:

• the DOW is at 6500; can the DOW go to 5000 or are we nearing in on a bottom?
• deflation or inflation? some say we’re headed toward a deflationary cycle while others say we’ll see high inflation in 2010 or thereabouts
• recovery in 2009, 2010 or later? The Obama administration expects a recovery in the second half of 2009; other say 2010, others say later
• let the banks/insurers fail? The Obama administration followed the Bush administration’s lead and continued to give money to AIG, Citibank, and other banks while Republicans argue for letting some of the banks fail.

For some of these questions, the future may not shed any light on what the right course of action is. Others may prove more interesting (I’m curious about inflation and deflation).

I have no training in economics so please take my statements about the economy with a grain of salt. The market is re-testing its lows with the DOW nearing the 7300 mark. The big banks saw ~20% losses during trading on Friday as investors seemed to acknoweldge that these banks are likely to be nationalized.

With the DOW down 45% from its high it would seem that we’re nearing in on some sort of bottom. Unfortunately, I’m not so optimistic. I came across two charts that paint a gloomy picture of where a bottom is in the market.

The first shows the SP 500 since 1960:

If you take a swag at fitting a linear curve to that graph it seems pretty reasonable to see the SP 500 as low as 500 (it’s 770 as I write this).

A similar chart compares the DOW/Gold ratio since 1980:

The ratio today is about 7 and I’ve heard predictions of it dropping to as low as 2 less. Consider DOW 5400 and gold at $2700/ounce. Seems as absurd as a 7200 DOW sounded a year ago.

I just setup our family timeline project. We finished this year’s photos this morning and I put together a page. This year was the first year where I think we now have enough content to make a slightly interesting webpage.

The original idea for the project came from Diego Godlberg’s The Arrow of Time.

I recently purchased a Google Apps account so I could use GMail with my non-GMail address. In the process, I did the following:

• created a Google Apps account for my domain (aarone.org),
• configured my domain host (GoDaddy) to send mail for my domain to GMail,
• transferred all messages from my old GMail account to the new GMail account,
• transferred all messages stored on my computer to the new GMail account.

None of this is very hard or exciting but this blog has nothing better going on so why not document the process?

I have a fairly large archive of mail that takes me back to about 2001. This totals about 20,000 personal emails. I currently store this email in Mail.app and back up my mail to my Time Capsule.

In addition to this email, I also have a GMail account that I primarily use as a destination for mailing lists. I have about 200,000 messages from mailing lists at my GMail account along with a few thousand personal emails. GMail tells me I’m using 1115 GB (15%) of my 7265 GB. I have IMAP access setup to GMail and use Mail.app to view most of this mail.

This setup for mail has some limitations:

• to check my email at my @aarone.org address, I need my laptop and Mail.app,
• i’m in responsible for backing up my data,
• i have multiple accounts for different purposes (personal email and lists)

I decided to create a new GMail account for my aarone.org address and move all mail I have to this account. Google Apps is a great service that is targeted toward organizations who need basic ‘productivity apps’ (hate that term) like email, calendaring (i hate that term too), messaging, etc. For $50 a user, your organization can have Google host services using your organization’s domain. In my case, my organization is one person and the only service I’m really interested in is email.

Domain Configuration

After I created my Apps account, I needed to configure my domain host to update the MX record for my domain to point to Google. This was kind of non-intuitive because the instructions on Google’s site for my domain host (GoDaddy) assumed that you were hosting your site (not just your domain) with GoDaddy. The instructions refer to the ‘Total DNS’ feature in GoDaddy that is not available if you don’t use GoDaddy’s name servers.

At that point, I configured GoDaddy as the host for my domain. I had some credits that allowed me to do so for free which was surprising (GoDaddy attempts to charge you for just about anything). Then, using the ‘Total DNS’ feature I manually configured an MX record (mail) for Google and an A record (primary) for my web host (in my case Joyent).

You should now be able to test your DNS settings using a tool like dig. In my case, the authoritative nameserver for my domains is NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM. I can check the A record for my domain using dig as follows:

dig @NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM aarone.org

which should print a response like:

;; ANSWER SECTION: aarone.org. 3600 IN A 8.17.170.107

indicating that the IP 8.17.170.107 should be used for aarone.org.

To see where mail goes for your domain, you can do the following:

dig @NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM aarone.org MX

which should display an answer section with the Google mail servers you entered if you followed Google’s instructions.

Configuring Mail Clients

At this point, mail sent to my aarone.org address was directed to my Google Apps mail account. I setup my old GMail account to forward all mail to my new GMail account and setup my new GMail account to filter my lists to the appropriate labels. I also configured Mail.app to show the new account using IMAP which left me with three email accounts in Mail.app. In a little while, I’ll only have one.

Transferring Mail Between GMail Accounts

I now wanted to move all the message from my old GMail account (my @gmail.com address) to my new GMail account (my @aarone.org address). I could have probably done this transfer with IMAP using Mail.app but I chose to use Google’s Mail Fetcher feature of GMail. I turned on POP access on my old GMail account and setup Mail Fetcher to fetch mail from the old account into my new account.

This bad thing about Mail Fetcher is that it chooses to periodically transfer 200 messages between accounts and then waits around idle for a anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. At this rate, it will take a long time to transfer all my mail but I’m not too concerned about that. The transfer occurs entirely on the server side so it will simply progress over the next few days (or weeks or months) until all my mail is transferred.

Transferring Mail Between Old IMAP and New GMail

The last step will be to move all my mail from my local machine to my new GMail account. I plan to simply use IMAP and Mail.app to move the messages.

One of the cool things about GMail on Google Apps versus the free GMail account is that IMAP doesn’t flake out quite as easily. Copying many messages using IMAP on my free GMail account always crapped out in mid-transfer, presumably to keep resource usage under control at the Google. Copying thousands of messages from my local machine to GMail via IMAP just works.

Conclusions

So far this transition has gone smoothly. The transfer of all messages is going to take a while but will eventually will end. Having a single place for my mail and having that sync’d with my mail client will make my life easier. If some radically awesome email provider appears or GMail becomes undesirable, I can always use POP or IMAP to suck all my messages off of GMail and put them somewhere else.

It’s a bit optimistic:

In a little more than a week we’ll elect a new President and Congress and unless the Democratic candidates do something horribly inept or the Republican election officials do something horribly corrupt we’re likely to see a President Obama and large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. This represents an opportunity as well as a risk for the country.

To the Democrats of the next Congress, please understand that you have an opportunity to reverse the long-standing sentiment that says you cannot govern responsibly. Please show us how responsible you are by focusing on serious issues like health care, the economy, and immigration. Please look to experts in respective fields when drafting legislation and not to lobbyists.

Also realize that if you are new then you got here because you are 1) riding on the coattails of the popularity of Senator Obama, and 2) the fear that the American people justifiably have in the state of the economy. The American people haven’t elected you because of your ideology but rather because they are scared shitless and have no faith in the other guys right now; you’re the only other choice.

To Senator Obama, you have an opportunity to fundamentally change politics or to become the next President Carter. As you used to say a lot more than you do now, the politics of Washington have been corrupted by lobbyists and that the only way to fix our system is to remove special interests from the process. You know that when elected officials are indebted to a specific interest they become inflexible and unwilling to compromise. The opposite is true when elected officials are indebted to the American people. Senator Obama, please make this problem an immediate focus when you take office as it is a prerequisite for true change.

The other major change of the past 15 years that has corrupted the political system is redistricting which has lead to a House where many of the seats are completely safe for a particular party. Redistricting caused the Congress to become more partisan and less open to compromise than ever before. Senator Obama, please undo the redistricting that has fractured the Congress and causes a negative tone in politics.

There are more issues that matter and more advice to give but we should start with these two issues. Please move quickly when you take office and fix the two problems that have corrupted our process: remove the influence of lobbyists and undo Congressional redistricting. The former is a prerequisite for near-term change and the latter a prerequisite for the longer term change in politics you seek.

Yesterday I found myself frustrated by my physical inability to select new glasses. The problem is that my prescription is rather strong (-5.75 diopters in each eye) and when I try on a a pair of frames with fake lenses I am unable to see what I look like in a mirror. In order to see anything I had to move to within a few inches of a mirror which distorted my perspective of how the frames looked on my face. I did this over and over again with dozens of frames. I eventually submitted and selected a frame.

Did I end up putting way too much faith in the salesperson’s opinion of how the frames looked? Should I have brought along a helper to select my frames? Should I have just worn contacts and avoided this problem? Did I buy lady’s frames?

I think there’s a simple way to modify this process and I’m hoping some eyeglasses store has done or will do the following:

1. buy a Mac with an iSight camera
2. start PhotoBooth
3. let customers take potential glasses to the Mac and collect photos of themselves trying on frames
4. review photos while wearing your old glasses

I think this process would be beneficial even if your vision is good enough to see yourself in the mirror. It’s nice to be able to quickly compare different frames in succession without having a pile of frames in front of you and swapping back and forth between frames.

There is also an opportunity to build a piece of software that would be a bit more specific than PhotoBooth and allow notes to be associated with photos (such as the model of the frame) and to organize photos by customer. I’ll put this idea on my list of software that seems interesting but will never be built.

Next time I buy glasses I think I’ll take along my laptop.

I met Tim Bray today! He’s a really nice guy and offered lots of great insight about a variety of topics.

One interesting thing that he mentioned was how innovative technologies can be derived by simplifying existing technologies. This was the case in the derivation of XML from SGML. SGML predates the rise of the Internet but SGML was not widely adopted as a general markup language for the Internet due to its complexity. XML was created as a simple profile of SGML and its simplicity caused it to become so prolific.

This immediately reminded me of an ACM article I read by former Googler Adam Bosworth. He mentioned the problems of scaling traditional databases:

1. Have databases enabled people to harness Moore’s law in parallel? This would mean that databases could scale more or less linearly to handle both the volume of the requests coming in and even the complexity. The answer is no. Things like ORDER BY, joins, subqueries, and many others make it almost impossible to push the query logic down to an arbitrary number of leaf nodes and simply sort/merge/aggregate the results. The easier way to limit queries to avoid this would be to limit all predicates to ones that can be computed against a single row at a time, at least where efficiency and scale are paramount.

As I consider all of the available alternatives to relational databases (CouchDB, SimpleDB, BigTable/AppEngine, HBase, Cassandra) I’m struck by how we could benefit from a simplified SQL dialect that would be more suitable for scaling across multiple machines (ie ‘horizontal scaling’). I’m hoping a standards body takes this on in the near future but I fear that the problem will get worse before that happens.