The personal home page of Ryan Park of Seattle, Washington, USA.

Gov. Sarah Palin’s speech to the Republican convention yesterday was focused on the promise of ethics reform. Never mind that the Republicans have been at the center of nearly all of the ethical lapses in Washington. In the last 8 years, the GOP has featured such distinguished congressmen as David Vitter, who admitted to soliciting a prostitute while in office; Sen. Larry Craig, who pled guilty to solicitation last year; Tom DeLay, indicted on campaign finance improprieties; and Bob Ney and Sen. Ted Stevens, respectively convicted and indicted of accepting bribes and lying about it. Vitter and DeLay even had the nerve to show up in Saint Paul this week!

But these issues are minor compared to the larger ethical issues facing our executive branch. George W. Bush spearheaded the invasion a sovereign nation and his top officials made 935 false statements in the process — is that not a lapse in ethical judgment? Bush authorized and encouraged the U.S. military to torture its prisoners, and John McCain has repeatedly endorsed Bush’s use of torture. In February, McCain even encouraged Bush to veto legislation which would have prohibited waterboarding. When the executive branch sanctions prisoner abuse, isn’t that an ethical issue too?

Sen. Barack Obama’s ethics record stands in stark contrast to John McCain and the GOP. Obama worked to pass significant ethics reform in early 2007 and worked hard to keep it from being watered down by the rest of the Senate. Last year Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus said that Obama “leads the pack” in his record on lobbying reform. And Obama has a four-pronged plan to restore ethical integrity to the executive branch.

If Sarah Palin was serious about restoring good judgment to the White House, she would know that a vote for John McCain is an endorsement of the ethical judgment we’ve seen from the GOP over the last 8 years. Barack Obama stands up for his ethical principles and has true credentials as an ethical reformer. If Sarah Palin truly wanted to promote ethics reform, this is what she would have told the Republican convention.

Last weekend I travelled to Yosemite National Park here in northern California. It was stunningly beautiful — just amazing, really. My photos from the trip don’t really do it justice, because they don’t really capture the magnificent scale of the landscapes, but they’re still great photos. Enjoy!

Very insightful post from why the lucky stiff about the challenges and successes he found when attempting to translate Ruby bytecode to Python bytecode. Money quote:

What amazes me is how close Ruby 1.9 bytecode and Python 2.5 bytecode are. Some things translate almost directly. It is completely obvious that Koichi took his cues from Python. Storing argcount, nlocals, stacksize first. Marshalling bytecodes. Storing classes and methods as nested bytecode fragments.

And, really, if that’s true (and I vouch that it is truly, truly true,) then how are Python and Ruby still on separate runtimes? All of these bogus scaling wars and indented code battles are a huge waste of time.

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Neither of us stands a chance against Javascript. Why persist with this pitiful feud?

Congrats to Adam and Matt for getting featured in the New York Times!

Yesterday I made a short day trip to Pebble Beach, Carmel, Monterey, and Santa Cruz. I wanted to see some of the Pacific coast before I move to Seattle in June.

All of the cities were pretty, but 17 Mile Drive was especially beautiful. It’s a private road in Pebble Beach — it costs $9.25 to use the road — but the views are amazing. There are great views of the Pacific coast, the Pebble Beach golf courses, and some spectacular homes. Here are some photos from the trip!

I was reviewing some old outgoing email this morning, and I found a message I sent last month, regarding a book I had listed for sale on Amazon Marketplace. A few weeks ago, a man named Hiroshi Ishii attempted to place an order for one of my listings, but there was an error processing his payment. He emailed me asking if I could take PayPal, but as a diligent seller, I said we had to complete the transaction on Amazon. He never did, and I eventually sold the book to someone else.

At the time, the name “Hiroshi Ishii” meant nothing to me.

I now know Hiroshi Ishii is a professor at the MIT Media Lab and the author of a seminal paper in Human-Computer Interaction. He’s coming to speak to my Research Topics in HCI class in a couple of weeks.

I should have just sent him the book for free.

There is a ton of chatter on the Internet about Amazon SimpleDB, Apache CouchDB, Google App Engine’s Datastore API, and other distributed key-value data stores. Their biggest perceived advantage is scalability: they can help eliminate the bottleneck imposed by single-server databases.

But the hype around these new databases is growing frantic. This morning I read an article by Todd Hoff which fawned over SimpleDB’s unconventional rules to such an extent that I thought it might be satire. There are some significant drawbacks to developing in this new database paradigm. In fact, many of Mr. Hoff’s supposed advantages are actually serious disadvantages to the paradigm. Before designing your architecture around a database engine like SimpleDB, it’s important to consider the reasons not to do so.

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This is just an incredible recording: all a cappella, no instruments. The link should auto-play the song in your browser.

“We plan on setting the record for the most people participating in a 3-legged race.”

I’ve started to publish my calendar on my website so that everyone can see when I’m busy or free. It may not be terribly useful, but it was pretty easy to do, and a fun little programming exercise. Read on to learn how I did it.
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