Ian Murdock (of Debian Linux fame) has joined Sun to head up “operating system platform strategy.” Nice hire for Sun. He describes what is an almost universal experience with Sun hardware among geeks of a certain generation:

Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers; I even had my own for a while, after I joined the University of Arizona computer science department in 1997. But within a year, the Suns were starting to disappear, replaced by Pentiums running Red Hat Linux. More and more people coming through university computer science programs were cutting their teeth on Linux, much as I had on Sun. Pretty soon, Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as “closed”. To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch.

I do think that Sun is well on the way to rebuilding its image. I certainly have a more positive image of Sun than I did two or three years ago.

Donald Knuth, the perfectionist computer science professor and author, writes to his former Stanford boss, Condi Rice, on the subject of the war on terror. The content of the letter isn’t particularly interesting, but the fact that reasonable, otherwise occupied people find themselves in Knuth’s state of mind, is.

Greg Beeman’s Heroes blog had an interview with writer Chris Zatta called “Living the Dream.” Zatta has worked as a writers assistant on the show this season, and wound up getting a writing credit for episode 18 of the show, which is apparently quite unusual. He broke in, as many do in the television and film industry, as a production assistant. Here’s how he describes the work:

Photocopying. Getting lunches for the producers. Getting coffee. Getting breakfast for the cast. Delivering scripts to people’s homes at night.

And what does the writers assistant do?

There’s a big table. Eleven writers. And they all come in every day, around ten. And they stay in there all day until about six. They are just talking about the show. About the stories. About all the characters. Very fast, with lots of ideas coming and going and changing all the time. Basically, I’m a stenographer. I’m taking notes on everything. I take notes all day, and then at night I have to type them all up.

This is a common pattern in many professions. If you want to be a plumber, or a carpenter, or an electrician, you generally have to go through an apprenticeship where you do lots of mindless manual labor, get coffee, and generally pay your dues and learn by osmosis until you’ve gotten to a point where the experienced people want to teach you anything.

What I find interesting is how the software business breaks from this sort of approach. Most software developers start out at their first real job developing software. They may not get to do much design or work on the most interesting problems, but even that’s not always the case. There are other areas where entry level programmers start out (like quality assurance), but by and large from day one programmers are applying the skills of their profession to solve real problems. Certainly there’s no real concept of “dues paying” in software development.

I can’t help but wonder why that is. Is it that as a profession, software development isn’t interesting to enough people that we can afford to mistreat newcomers in hope of weeding out the people who aren’t really devoted?

Jason Kottke posts about a recent study that shows that when presented with a picture of a baseball player at bat, men check out the guy’s crotch. Women do not. Let a thousand jokes bloom.

The Washington Post has an infographic that explains how the subprime mortgage industry works, but it doesn’t explain why it’s failing right now. It worked fine as long as the people who subprime mortgages were being sold to could keep making their mortgage payments, but suddenly many of those customers are getting behind. The real driver in this industry has been selling people houses they can’t afford through the use of tricky mortgages with low monthly payments and no money down. Common forms include interest only mortgages, where you don’t pay any of the principle of the mortgage, or payment option mortgages where you don’t even pay all of your interest every month, and the part you don’t pay gets added to the principle of the loan. That’s how people with modest incomes have been able to buy homes in overheated markets in places like Los Angeles.

The catch with payment option loans is that once you get far enough behind, the bank raises your interest rate and starts demanding very high payments. You can’t keep growing the principle on your loan forever. Homeowners in this situation had been saved by appreciation. They made their payments for a couple of years, and then refinanced, using the equity gained through appreciation to cover the interest and principle they hadn’t been paying. When homes stopped appreciating enough to save these people, the bottom fell out and killed the entire subprime sector.

Now, with the number of foreclosures going up and the pool of possible home buyers shrinking to people who can prove they can afford a traditional mortgage, it sure doesn’t look like recovery is right around the corner for the real estate market.

In other news, Countrywide has stopped offering no money down mortgages. Stated income loans (where the mortgage company takes you at your word on your income rather than demanding documentation) are also on the way out. It turns out that these were opportunities for fraud:

Three months later, Mapula, whose take-home pay was $3,400 a month, and Plata, a homemaker and mother of two, bought a half-million dollar home on Burdick Way, paying only a $5,000 escrow deposit. Originally from Sonora, Mexico, Mapula moved to San Jose six years ago.

Mapula qualified for the loans through a stated-income process, which offers less-rigorous verification of income than conventional loans, his attorney said. Though Mapula signed the loan application that was submitted to Long Beach Mortgage, his lawsuit says he learned later that it falsely claimed he was making almost $100,000 a year from two jobs and receiving an additional $16,800 a year in rental income. The application also said he had $19,700 in the bank, owned a $22,000 Acura and had $28,000 in furniture and personal property. Mapula said none of that was correct.

It’ll be interesting (and probably depressing) to see what happens next.

Everybody’s talking about Twitter, so I’m giving it another shot. Feel free to add me to your friends list if you like, as I think the best way to get a feel for this sort of thing is to see how other people are using it.

To be honest, I’m still not exactly sure how much of my presence I want to advertise with others, but I imagine it’s useful for other things as well.

My Twitter username is “rafeco”, same as it is pretty much everywhere else.

Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine Peace not Apartheid has to have entered the hall of fame of books most discussed by people who have not read them. I’ve discussed the book with several people myself and haven’t read it. That discussion mainly focuses on his characterization of the current situation in the Palestinian territories as apartheid. If you need more fodder for the discussion, and still don’t want to read the book, I’d recommend Joseph Lelyveld’s new piece in the New York Review of Books that discusses the aptness of the use of the word apartheid in depth. Here’s a taste:

Two uses of “apartheid” are in play when attempts are made to attach the word to Israel: the Durban usage, citing Israel as an “apartheid state”; and, more commonly, the application of the term to the occupation in the territories, which has now gone on for all but nineteen of the nearly fifty-nine years of Israel’s existence, through different phases as Jewish settlements took root and expanded on the West Bank along with the heavy military presence that guards them, supplemented now by a network of roads for the exclusive use of the settlers and the Israel Defense Forces. The settlements, roads, barriers and military presence have effectively divided the West Bank into security zones or enclaves, severely limiting Palestinian passage from one zone to the next. The crushing impact on Palestinian lives and families is clear enough. The debate on whether it amounts to “apartheid” turns on whether it’s to be seen as a legitimate and reversible response to the threat of terrorism across the border in Israel, or whether it’s meant to be as permanent as it looks.

It all stated with Talking Points Memo noting the unusual firing of the US Attorney for Arkansas. It has since grown into something much bigger. Next we learned that 8 US Attorneys had been fired, then we learned that Congressional Republicans had unethically leaned on some of them to convict Democrats. Now two professors have done the math and found that US Attorneys have investigated five times as many Democratic politicians as Republicans since President Bush came to power. Ugly.

Last week I left my Motorola PEBL in the pocket of my pants and laundered it in the washing machine. I took the battery out and left the whole thing out to dry for a few days, and when I turned it on this morning, everything actually worked, including the camera. I’m not sure what to say about that, other than “Go Motorola!” It kind of makes me want to launder phones from competing brands and see how they hold up.

I’m wondering if it survived because we use HE (low sudsing) soap. I also suspect that the battery door came off early in the cycle and that the phone powered off. I don’t think it would have survived had the power stayed on for long.

It’s interesting to note that this Yahoo Answers entry suggests that all is lost. This ArsTechnica thread reports mixed results. I’m going to look for any signs of degradation over the next few weeks, that’s for sure.

Denver Westword has a huge article about World of Warcraft celebrity Leeroy Jenkins, the foolhardy adventurer with the infamous battle cry. The first time I saw the video A Rough Go, I thought it was the epitome of humor. I kind of still do.