The Ruby community, in my view, should welcome and include everyone who shares the hacker spirit. It should also continue, in the hacker spirit, to be edgy, playful, anti-corporate, and always in favor of freedom.

All of us being human, sometimes we’ll be edgy in ways, like the now-infamous CouchDB presentation, that make some members or would-be members of the community feel starkly unwelcome. When that happens, those of us who notice it should absolutely call it out, and I, like Nick, pledge myself to do so. Those of us who make the mistakes should learn from them, and I think Matt Aimonetti is doing so. (I’m not sure that DHH gets it yet.)

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        <p>I won't summarize or analyze the specific issue with Matt's slides (Martin Fowler has <a href="http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html">done a good job of that already</a>, q.v., and quoted below), except to say this: the <strong>effect</strong> was that the pictures used, in the context of a room full of a hundred or more men and six women, reinforced some really icky cultural norms about power dynamics between men and women. <strong>It wasn't intentional,</strong> but it was real. From an anti-sexual-violence perspective, those are the same norms that, in the minds of some, make rape <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/opinion/30kristof.html">not a serious enough crime to bother processing the evidence</a>.</p>

I say that to underscore the seriousness of the matter. I don’t say it to demonize Matt Aimonetti (or DHH). Any of us could have misjudged the interaction of imagery and context as Matt did, and the effect could’ve been racist, classist, homophobic or any number of other things instead of sexist (the effect, not the presenter). How we handle it as fellow members of a community sets the tone going forward:

How about a community where women are valued for their ability to program and not by the thickness of their skin? How about a community that edgily pushes new boundaries without reinforcing long running evils? Perhaps even a community where women reach equal numbers? —Martin Fowler

Although the presentation in question makes me sad, I’m frankly thrilled at the discussion that it’s sparked and how it’s been conducted. I’m glad to see other men in the community listening to what women are saying about it, understanding, and responding. (Incidentally, why don’t I regularly read any women Rubyists’ blogs?) Most of the dialog across Twitter and blogs has been pretty constructive. Some conflict and defensiveness notwithstanding, as a self-identified feminist, I’m pretty proud of the Ruby community.

But even in the midst of the excitement tonight, my attention turns towards the coming administration. No matter who wins, there’s a lot of work to do after the election to put the country back together. Let us pray, and work, and apply political pressure, to make sure it happens.

Well, actually, it hasn’t. While I have no truck with Scott McClellan blaming the media for letting the administration start a war about which my views have been clear since before it started, neither should the media be so quick to congratulate themselves for their coverage:

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        <blockquote>
<p>A majority of Democrats in the House voted against the authorization of force... There were also huge antiwar demonstrations, which received stunningly little coverage.</p>

Some of which I helped organize in my admittedly tiny little college town. It’s not ultimately the media’s fault we invaded Iraq—rarely is the media fully to blame for anything we try to push off on them—but as usual, they bear the responsibility for giving a louder voice to those in power and ignoring all others.

Below the fold: our garden, companion planting, locavores and kitchen gardeners

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        <p>We also have our own garden going, a 5 x 20 ft. plot that I started a couple years ago. This year is the first time we've managed to get the thing planted in time to have some real success with it. The long, cold spring helped us in that regard&mdash;it gave us more time to buy seeds and plants and get them into the ground. Currently planted:</p>

• Three mounds with corn, to be joined by beans and squash
• Six tomato plants, companion-planted with two Thai basil plants
• One half-row each of butterhead lettuce and spinach
• One row of onions (though I’m pretty sure these won’t work)

This evening I’ll be planting the other half-row each of spinach and lettuce, so that I can harvest them incrementally. I’ll also be planting the beans and squash to join the corn.

Meanwhile, I’m following the pursuits of similar-minded folks around the country via the Locavore Nation blogs. I’ve also been regularly reading the Kitchen Gardeners International site for tips, and by the end of the summer we’d like to be able to can our extra produce.

For the past several months, my lovely partner and I have been planning a trip to Haiti. Our parish has a partnership with a parish there, and we’re part of the group that works on the partnership. We’re meant to leave on Saturday, but as you might have (but probably haven’t) heard in the news last week, people are in the streets protesting and, in some instances, rioting.

Funny thing, what happens when people are starving. Eighty percent—four-fifths—of the people in Haiti live on less than US$2 per day, and many of those are in so-called abject poverty, living on less than US$1 per day. The cost of food in developing countries worldwide has as much as doubled in the past year, and in Haiti, many people are literally subsisting on cookies made of dirt.

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        If you're a praying sort, please include the people of Haiti in your prayers. If you're an activist type, call your congresspeople at the state and national levels. Here's some further reading to help you raise awareness:

Google News search for Haiti HAITI: Economy forces poor to eat dirt IMF warns rising food prices may spark more riots like Haiti Biofuels a factor as global food riots spread to Haiti

If you’re a charitable sort, consider donating to the UN World Food Programme mission in Haiti. It would take US$96 million to fully fund the WFP in Haiti, of which they have only received 13 percent.

That’s all for now. If we go, I’ll blog from the island if possible (there is at least e-mail access there).

Apple goes to great lengths — usually through its digital rights management technologies (what I call C.R.A.P.) — to tightly control the relationship between its software, its hardware, and, in the case of the iPhone, the relationship of both to carriers and the Internet (God forbid you should attempt to acquire new audio online for your iPhone — music, ringtones, etc — through anything but the iTunes Music Store).

Just the latest in a long string of Apple hatred (and now litigation) based on their “FairPlay” DRM system. Apple can’t be exonerated of their complicity in the foisting of DRM on us consumers, but let’s review the facts.

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        <ol>

I happily use an iPod and iTunes (and a Mac). I have never paid money for a single DRM-encumbered track from the iTunes Store (though I do own a few such tracks via gift cards and Pepsi caps). I’ve been an eMusic subscriber since their plans included unlimited downloads. I find it unconscionable that the RIAA could sue a family into oblivion for simply depriving them of potential (that means neither real nor certain) revenue to which they (and the courts) think they have a right.

But why is it suddenly cool to hate Apple for using DRM (based on utter fabrications), and not actually support ditching it entirely?

And if you hated Bush before it was cool, see here.

The monthly Critical Mass ride in Minneapolis has been going on for a while now, and I don’t think they’ve had any trouble from police on this scale before. Twenty people were arrested, by excessive force. The police claim that one of the riders deliberately veered into a police car, and they expect that to be satisfactory explanation for their actions: pulling people off their bikes, spraying mace indiscriminately into the crowd (and hitting bystanders), and punching riders. Some witnesses are also saying that at least one squad car was deliberately driven into cyclists.

But of course, a bicycle is much less danger to a squad car than the other way around, so—and I cannot stress this enough, because Americans and some of my previous commenters can’t quite seem to get it—in no way were the police actions justified. Even if a cyclist did in fact drive into a squad car, there is no call for punching people and spraying mace in their faces.

As a final note, if the officers’ goal was to promote traffic safety, why would they be riding at speed down Nicollet Avenue like this?

photo from http://www.tonywebster.com/criticalmass/, © Tony Webster. Creative Commons license.

Does that mean we should be taught in elementary school to be ‘good taxpayers’? Should we strip out civics classes in favor of economics? Will the DAR publish manuals for ‘taxpayership’? (Or would they leave that to the Taxpayers League?)

The terminology is especially strange given that most people’s objective seems to be to avoid paying taxes.

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        <p>There can be absolutely no excuse made for this kind of police behavior. The officer's actions were wrong from the very beginning of the incident. Stopping a cyclist in a potentially dangerous traffic situation is perfectly acceptable; stopping any vehicle by shouting out through the squad car window is dubious at best.</p>

Stopping a cyclist by shouting through the window of a moving squad car, a much larger vehicle, is an improper action. Cars are much larger and heavier than cyclists, and thus a danger, particularly when the operator is (or appears to be) operating from frustration and anger. The officer should have pulled into the lane behind Mr. Orsak and used the squad car’s megaphone, or spoken calmly through the window to instruct him to pull over. Or he could have simply turned on the lights and momentarily hit the siren.

As it was, it seems perfectly sensible to me that Mr. Orsak would seek to end as quickly as possible an exchange that started badly and degraded from there. Police abuses are too common an occurrence to simply follow instructions and wait until “you can take it up with some higher authority”. If an officer is already “abrupt and abrasive”, as D.Q. puts it, at the beginning of the stop, I as the cyclist being stopped am already at high risk, and would want to escape the situation as quickly as possible.

That risk, unfortunately, turned into direct harm when the officer used a weapon on Mr. Orsak. D.Q. also acknowledges that this was uncalled for, but I’m disconcerted that he* seems to make allowances for the officers’ behavior leading to the use of the taser. The assumption in his two postings seems to be that when one is stopped by the police, one should simply obey, no matter what the officer commands.

It simply is not sensible nor self-protective to yield unconditionally to a police officer who has stopped you. This incident is evident proof of that fact. As both a resident of Saint Paul and a regular bicycle commuter, I was disturbed by the story (and how little press it’s gotten), and by the normalization of the notion that we should unquestioningly acquiesce to police power.