For turkey day we went over to Jason and Kim’s house for a nice meal. Among the foods served were the usuals: turkey, cranberry, salads, mashed potatoes, baked sweet potatoes, pumpin, cherry and apple pies. Less common things included: an interesting oyster stuffing, a very good wild rice with sausage dish, Tracy’s black bottom pie, and a variety of knishes. All in all an excellent dinner made better by the fact that we didn’t have to clean up. Today Tracy made some very good mac and cheese from scratch.

Lucas’ school had a fundraiser selling cookie dough from Otis Spunkmeyer, damn that stuff is good. We have a chocolate, chocolate chip and nut kind of thing and it’s tasty right out of the tub in perfect bite sized scoops. Tracy hasn’t even tried baking them and we’re probably 1/4 of the way through the 2 or 3 lb tub.

Good game OSU. We held them close and it was a great game, actually closer than I thought it would be. There is some small chance that we will get a rematch and get a shot at a national title, but I have my doubts.

I’m very surprised that Sun chose the GPL as the open source license instead of an Apache/BSD license. For the uninitiated, the Gnu Public License more or less says that any changes you make to the source must also be given away as open source. The BSD license is more flexible and boils down to you can do anything you want with the source code like give it away, make changes, package it with your application. The only thing you cannot do under the BSD license is claim that you wrote the code.

The major complaint about the GPL is its viral nature. If you make a change to the source code, you have to give away all your changes and it taints your code such that it should all be licensed under the GPL. It’s more complex than that, but that is sort of how it works. Businesses like to keep their changes internally for intellectual property and security reasons. Businesses prefer BSD licenses because it puts very few restrictions on what you can do with the code. While Linux uses the GPL, I am more of a fan of the BSD way. I think in the end BSD just does a better job of attracting users because business users freely adopt BSD licensed source code because they don’t have to be so concerned about giving away security and intellectual property secrets.

I’m curious why Sun is giving away Java as GPL. I think it does help them insulate from forks in the Java code, but I still question whether that’s a good enough reason. All the Apache projects seems to do just fine with BSD.

The new beta blogger has some issues. It sucks in new and pretty extraordinary ways. I can’t seem to repost my entire blog with all the tags I just added. And the documentation isn’t very great, but I’m willing to ignore that part for now. As a beta user, I expect this sort of thing, but it’s still pretty disappointing. I hope it improves, otherwise I’ll continue to be sad. I’m pretty lazy and also kind of locked into blogger.com, so it’ll take some more annoyances for me to actually switch software, but my annoyance level is already kind of high.

Well I finally signed up for the new upgraded Blogger.com beta. They have some new features that I’ve been asking for, tagging is the big one. Google always calls them labels, but everyone else calls them tags. You’ll notice my last post was tagged with “UM” and “College Football”, I’ll be tagging my posts from now on, but I’m not sure if I have the motivation required to go back and tag all my old posts. It’d probably make the site more useful so if it’s easy I ‘ll go back and do it.

The other major features are easier, better tools for changing layouts and permissions so that you can specify users who can view your blog. These aren’t really much good for me, so I’m not too excited about anything besides the tagging features.

All in all, the changes are nice, but it sure has taken them a long time.

Next Saturday is the most heavily hyped regular season college football game seen in several years. Our #2 ranked Michigan Wolverines will be travelling to play the #1 ranked Ohio State in a one of the biggest traditional rivalries. ESPN has been running a countdown of the number of minutes until the game for about a month now.

Tracy and I are having a party of course. If anyone is interested in coming you are welcome to, but please tell me. Ohio State fans will of course have to endure significant ridicule after they lose.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I tried one of the newfangled electronic voting machines. I hesitated for a second, but the polling official assured me that there was a paper trail. The interface was a bit odd, but overall it was pretty painless.

The interface consisted of a scrollwheel, an “Enter” button, a “Next Page” button and a “Previous Page” button. Each page would have a a couple of different seats and propositions. You could use the scrollwheel to move through the candidates and propositions. You could scroll to the next/previous page or use the scrollwheel the whole way through. When you were done, it’d print out to a small, closed printer on the side and you could see your final choices before you confirm it.

Well it looks like the Democrats have at least taken control of the House. It’d be pretty depressing if it hadn’t.

I’m pretty convinced that as a country we make the most progress when one party controls the executive branch and the other controls the legislative branches. It just makes it difficult to get laws enacted so that means the few laws that do get enacted are actually worthwhile.

It seems odd for so many people like myself to see the Clinton years as the pinnacle of the Democratic party in my lifetime.

Honestly I don’t think America is ready for Hillary in 2008. I think 2012 would be a better idea, but the problem is who would you put up for one just term? So I’m guessing we’ll see Hillary in 2008. I think the Clinton/Obama ticket I’m hearing about is a long shot. If people are going to elect a female President, the party will almost certainly put a white man as the VP.