Peter Saint-Andre

stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, language, music, et al.

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5 hours 43 min ago

November 17, 2009

23:04
One of my favorite novels has long been Anthem by Ayn Rand; indeed it was the first public-domain text that I posted at the Monadnock Press website. Unfortunately, the Project Gutenberg etexts of Anthem contain numerous errors, only some of which are corrected in other online versions such as that by Richard Lawrence. Recently I [...]

November 15, 2009

19:26
Here’s what I’m reading right now: J.J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception Alexandra Horowitz, Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics Book reports might be forthcoming on a [...]

November 9, 2009

17:34
Periodically I like to make short lists of books and recordings that I would not want to do without. It helps to focus the mind. Lately I’ve been thinking about the 25 albums (not individual songs or pieces) that I would want on a desert island. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order by performer: Abbey [...]
15:36
Last night I got my first taste of the local specialty in Hiroshima: okonomiyaki. (Did I mention that I’m in Japan right now? :) The best I can describe it is that it’s kind of like a noodle frittata or cabbage-stuffed pancake. You sit down at this huge griddle and they cook it up right [...]

November 8, 2009

15:30
I’m getting a bit tired of all the unsupported allegations from people like Anil Dash and Adam Fisk that XMPP is bloated or impossible to deploy. Now maybe I’m just a bit snarky at the moment because it’s 5:30 AM where I am in Hiroshima Japan and I got 3 hours of sleep last night, [...]

November 3, 2009

08:37
Back in 2004, a controversy erupted in the XMPP developer community regarding the RhymBox instant messaging client. Through a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, the parties to an agreement regarding further development of that client went their separate ways in a rather public fashion, resulting in a cloud over the RhymBox name and the emergence of [...]

October 23, 2009

22:18
I’m really starting to like small books. Yes, I recently wrote a book that’s 320 pages long, but in my own reading I’ve taken to books of under 200 (and preferably 100) pages. Oxford’s series of Very Short Introductions is a good example. Another might be the original 1855, 92-page edition of Whitman’s Leaves of [...]

October 13, 2009

23:41
As mentioned, I’ve been reading intensively about personal finance since early May. While that doesn’t make me an expert (far from it!), I have drawn a number of tentative conclusions: When it comes to money, no one has your best interests at heart. Financial advisers, bankers, brokers, mutual fund managers, and the like are in the [...]

October 8, 2009

12:58
An instant classic from Perry de Havilland: The notion that the US blogosphere is going to allow the US state to require it to register certain content is something that has me wondering if some cunning conspiracy was not at work by a shadowy cabal of Good Guys (who inexplicably did not let me in on [...]

October 4, 2009

20:35
It seems that every six months or so I have a relapse into wrist problems caused by too much keyboarding (the last time was back in April). To help remedy the problem this time I’m going to work offline more (editing on paper with a red pen), take more keyboard breaks, use more shortcuts as [...]

September 27, 2009

21:01
The great language maven William Safire died today. Despite the fact that he called himself a libertarian conservative, I never read much of his political commentary, preferring instead his writings on what Mencken called the American language. Indeed, as previously mentioned, a letter that I wrote to him circa 1982 was published in his book [...]
20:48
I heard today that Alicia De Larrocha, one of my favorite pianists, has died. I listen regularly to her recordings of Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados, whose music I adore. One of my prize CDs is her long-out-of-print recording of the Seis piezas sobre cantos populares españoles and Escenas románticas, but my favorite is her [...]

September 21, 2009

11:04
We can have no better illustration of the deeply systemic nature of America’s continued and inexorable fall from Constitutional innocence than the nearly immediate capture of Barack Obama, supposed agent of change, by the powers-that-be (I do say supposed, because I never possessed a whit of confidence that he would make any changes conducive to [...]

September 10, 2009

16:00
As just posted to the members@xmpp.org discussion list, I have decided not to stand for election to the XMPP Council this year. Although I have served on the Council for many years, I think it is time for me to open up a place on the Council for some of the strong technical minds on [...]

September 1, 2009

11:17
The term REST is often used to describe the architecture of the World Wide Web, following chapter 5 of Roy Fielding’s dissertation. Because this architectural style has a catchy name, it tends to receive quite a bit of attention. Indeed, some people seem to think that REST is the only legitimate architectural style for the [...]

August 30, 2009

19:15
My father passed away ten years ago this weekend. I still remember.

August 21, 2009

21:36
While on vacation this week high in the mountains of Colorado, I found time to read The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which I discovered via a recent essay by Daniel Galland. Strauss & Howe provide the kind of historical context I referred to not long ago in my call for reasoned [...]

August 15, 2009

20:29
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, published a fine essay in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday about some private, voluntary alternatives to the health care reform proposals emerging from the swamps along the Potomac. Unsurprisingly, some fair-weather customers of Whole Foods are now threatening to boycott the store. For myself, I must say that [...]

August 12, 2009

23:16
Over the last few months I’ve seen a lot of out-of-state license plates in the Denver area. The preponderance seem to be from four of the most failed states in America: California, Oregon, Michigan, and Illinois (we’d probably see a bunch from New Jersey if it weren’t so far to drive). You have to wonder [...]
23:01
In my copious spare time (not!) I’ve been paying attention of late to some prognostications about the near future. It surprises me that even geopolitically sophisticated thinkers like George Friedman of STRATFOR (author of The Next 100 Years) never question the continued geographical cohesion of the United States of America. As I’ve argued before, the [...]