Immigration

There is a raging debate going on in the world about immigration. The conflict is quite simple: immigrants are economically valuable, but culturally distinct. They stretch the social and economic tolerance of local populations in receiving countries, who fear foreigners impede on their own cultures, and take away from their opportunities.

The Problem

Europe is on the verge of net population contraction. This is not merely a statistic: they will very soon start having fewer people. There are suburbs in German cities that lie abandoned, because nobody is there to live in them.

At the same time, old people are around much longer. Japan has tens of thousands of octogenarians, a number that is continuing to grow because of remarkably high life-expectancies.

Combined with very low birth-rates, these countries will very soon not have enough young people to support the economy.

The Fix

Immigration is a good fix: it brings in young people from poor countries, who are willing to work hard. They help the economy in the receiving country to grow, through greater production and consumption, and they help the usually third-world donor countries grow as well, through remittances. This is their economic value.

Not So Fast...

The liability, though, is that they are culturally different. Many don’t speak the language of the receiving country when they enter. In many cases, they come from ancient societies in decline: conservative Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Hindus of all shades, and in the past, Jews. They don’t understand that “Western culture” is now “king of the hill,” so they are baffled when local populations guffaw at concepts like “arranged marriages” and “joint families.”

In many cases, second- and third-generation immigrants see fit to preserve the culture of their parents. They speak their local tongue at home, embrace and extend the religions of their parents complete with dietary restrictions and dress code, they cook and eat their ethnic food, and marry within themselves.

Association with Islam

In Europe, this is seen as a crisis of integration: immigrants don’t belong here, because they’re not “one of [them].”

That can be understood, if not condoned, and is an attitude that may correct itself over time. But the worrying trend in Europe is that immigrants are being linked to Islam. A book has been written, called “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West” by an American author, Christopher Caldwell. In it, Mr. Caldwell summarily blames Islam for the failure of immigrants in Europe to assimilate. [I haven't read the book, only the review I am linking to.]

This is a bad thing for immigrants: they are being labelled, pigeon-holed, and isolated, giving them more reason to stay distinct, over and above their own cultural inertia. Many of these immigrants are actually not even Muslims to start with, so even if it was okay to target Muslims and Islam (which it isn't), broad-stroke stereotypes put all immigrants on the defensive, even the ones that aren’t Muslim.

None of the debate in Europe that involves the word “Islam” is beneficial.

It is emblematic of endemic xenophobia because Islam is a conveniently hate-able abstract noun. It doesn’t address the real social issues that immigrants face, and it doesn’t solve the fact that, well, the cat’s out of the bag, and there are already a lot of immigrants in these countries. Even if you stopped all immigration today, what are you going to do with the ones that have already legally made the jump? And why is it that these same immigrants have easier times in other parts of the world, but have so much trouble integrating with you?

A Hijacked Debate

The debate needs to be taken back from the right-wing extremists that make all dark-skinned people look like Muslim extremists, and try to integrate them by first insulting them, and then forcibly assimilating them.

It's really important that this be done, because the disservice that this causes is not going to be calculable now, but only later.

Look and learn. The Americans are now paying the price for buying into Bush's hollow rhetoric about a "War on Terror."

Look how they lost out: 8 years on, 3 years longer than World War 2, the Taliban are still in business, and the war rages on while nearly 10 civilians die, for every foreign and local combatant in both theaters, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nobody wins, and everybody loses in ideological, cosmic wars.

Good infrastructure, and high per-capita incomes do not a developed nation make. There is a certain amount of maturity of thought that can be expected from the decisions made by the governments of developed nations.

Freedom

In the war of abstract nouns, freedom wins by knockout. For all his demagoguery and mutilation of the English language, it remains one of the few things George W. Bush did right in his time. He said it aptly at the APEC summit before he left office to the jubilation of the planet: “free trade, free markets, and free people.”

Freedom of expression, and freedom of religion (or lack thereof) are fundamental enough that exceptions need not be made, and on the long term, will succeed.

Those Darned Head-Scarfs

The counter-argument to this would be the school in Antwerp. A school in this Belgian city tried to experiment with "freedom of religion" by allowing Muslim girls to wear head-scarves. Very soon, the school became a ghetto for socially conservative immigrants, who, getting a taste of having their way, started asking for segregated parent-teacher meetings and started questioning certain lessons.

What nobody wants to understand, is that the only reason the school became a ghetto for conservative Muslims, is because they gravitated toward it: it was the only school that allowed them to be what they wanted to be.

It’s like putting poor people inside a city, and then wondering why they insist on living in only the cheap places.

Just like you can’t be a “little pregnant,” you can’t be a “little free.” Either you are, or you aren’t. If all schools were equally free, the head-scarf wearing demographic wouldn’t be so lop-sided in this one school to have to end the social experiment. It became unviable, the social conservative Muslims went out of hand by imposing their restrictions on others.

That's the main crux about "nipping this at the bud." If we allow the head-scarf, what's next? Chopping off hands?

The risk of liberalism allowing "creeping influences" and thus being a harbinger of the end of "Western civilization" is fake. It's as fake as the argument that "if you let gay people marry, what's stopping someone from marrying a turtle?" It's hyperbole: nobody's any closer to the pre-modern precepts of corporal punishment in Shari'ah Law by allowing girls to put a cloth over their head, and nobody really wants to legally marry a turtle.

What it represents is laziness. "You'll all be asleep, and one day, you'll wake up to the Islamic Republic of Holland." If you were asleep, and whoever was awake took over, who exactly is to blame?

It's a risk if people are too lazy to ask themselves the difficult questions, answer them, make a decision, and then take responsibility for it.

Is it too much if a teacher covers her face during class? Honestly, if I was a student, I'd find it a bit jarring, yes. I think essential information is conveyed in facial expressions, and it's actually a bit too much. Allow the debate and the dialogue, take a stand, take responsibility.

To a non-Muslim who is not familiar with these moral precepts, yes, the headscarf can be a little odd. To me, the Sikh turban and copious facial hair is a little odd. So are markings of orange and white on the foreheads of Hindus. So are Jewish skull-caps and locks of hair.

But at which point did these differences start becoming show-stoppers in being civil to one another? "Wow, that's interesting, why do you do that? Oh, really? That's fascinating. So, I love pizza, what about you?"

Blanket bans on innocuous methods of self-expression, in my opinion, represent intellectual torpor. Whether it's the Ayatollah banning the Satanic Verses, or Europeans banning head-scarfs.

Agressive Secularism

I do not understand the apologies I hear from social progressives about the head-scarf ban in France. I have read this both on the BBC and in the Economist: banning the head-scarf is only possible in France where they are “aggressively secular.” I guess it’s okay to be aggressive about something, so long as it is arbitrarily deemed “a good thing.”

By that argument, “aggressive love” would be a good thing, something you can impose on people, like secularism.

Unfortunately, they have a word for “aggressive love”: it’s called rape. And it’s not sex. It’s violence.

What makes freedom sustainable is that if it’s good, it will stick. If it’s bad, it won’t. Knowing this should put a lot of people at ease. Your culture is there, and nobody is stealing from it. It's there so long as you're there, what are you so worried about? Very few civilizations have lasted the test of time after they became insular.

The United States of America

A case-in-point. The United States takes in 1.1 million immigrants every year, the highest of any immigrant-taking developed country in the world.

The average Muslim (the “problem child” of the Immigrant Question) in the United States has an annual income slightly more than the average American. Almost a third of Silicon Valley is Indian. Their president is the son of a Kenyan immigrant.

If anyone needed an example that immigration can be beneficial, they need look no further.

And yes, America is not perfect, not by a long shot. But their ideals are. From the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Economic Argument

The economic benefits of immigration are supported by empirical evidence. Some economists argue that the Doha round of Free Trade talks is actually going to achieve less in terms of real economic benefit in the long term, than a hypothetical round of Free Labor Mobility talks.

Immigrants generate increased consumption in both the recipient nation and the donor nation, which increases both imports and exports in both countries. Executed correctly, it is a quadruple whammy like very few other macroeconomic policies can be.

Also immigrants are usually driven, ambitious individuals that want to make a better life for them and their own, and are willing to work hard for it. Immigration, in essence, is a targeted approach to give driven individuals the tools they need to succeed.

So none of this is about immigration for immigration’s sake, but for tangible benefits.

The Social Argument

A robust and tolerant society that is accepting of differences among others will be more accepting of differences within themselves. Bigotry and communalism are ugly monsters that hide deep within homogenous societies, and once these fires begin, they become difficult to douse.

On the other side of this, it is understandable that people from the receiving country are a little jittery about seeing foreigners come over and start doing things they simply don't understand. Especially when they have themselves nurtured this impression that because they were born richer and more well-off, they're also probably right. That's why Mark Twain said:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

This sentiment is as applicable to immigrants as much as to the people in the receiving countries.

The Moral Argument

With the social inequities of the past, with imperialism and colonialism that have established and perpetuated economic injustices, where people are born in parts of the world poor as dirt through no fault of their own, giving them the opportunity to pursue happiness is something we should strive for. As people who have either been born into wealth, or have succeeded to achieve economic prosperity through opportunities given to us, it is our moral imperative.

Variety is the Spice of Life

It would be a very boring world if everyone agreed with each other, looked and thought the same, and stayed among people they agreed with. It would be a world, I think, that wouldn’t last very long, and a world I wouldn’t want to live in. An argument for immigration is an argument for equity, diversity, and opportunity.

Sharing is caring. There’s more than enough for everyone.

Snow Leopard and the Beginning of an Era

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is out!

I don't remember the last time I was so excited about an operating system release. From my pre-Apple years, it would have to be Windows 98. Indeed, that was the last non-Mac operating system that I was last genuinely excited about getting to use.

Right-click menus would slide now, and there was this weird thing called "Screen Font Smoothing" (from Plus! 98) which made me just want to fire up MS Word and type things into it for no reason.

It was everything I knew and loved before, but that little bit cooler. Old things felt new. That is such a cool feeling. Incremental updates.

Car-makers work by incremental improvements. Facebook works that way. GMail works that way. It makes sense: stand on your previous achievements.

Even fast-food outlets work that way! You like the McDonalds' Filet-O-Fish? Well, here's the Double Filet-O-Fish! They have those in Singapore now; I haven't tried them. But "[they're] lovin' it!"

My core point: revolutions should only be made when they're absolutely necessary. Revolutions for the sake of it is, frankly, too much democracy.

It's like that cardinal rule of movie remakes: never remake a good movie, no matter how old it is. Nobody is ever going to remake of Lawrence of Arabia, or Terminator 2.

Snow Leopard is an incremental update. A lot of PC users wonder why the Mac community gets so excited about "service packs." Well, a service pack isn't some fundamental law of the universe, friends, it's just a phrase coined by Microsoft which arbitrarily means possibly a speed-bump, better security, bugfixes, and minor feature updates.

Well, OS X updates are arguably not service packs for a few reasons. It is true, OS X updates represent very few significant user-land updates. Off the top of my head, the only headline grabbers were Expose (introduced in OS X 10.3 Panther), Dashboard (introduced in OS X 10.4 Tiger), and Time Machine and Spaces (introduced in OS X 10.5 Leopard). Apart from that, the biennial "300+" features is mostly marketing fluff.

But despite relatively few user-land updates OS X changes extensively under-the-hood between releases. New APIs and frameworks, much of which had been very fluid up until OS X 10.4 Tiger, have been the real changes in OS X updates. An operating system is only as good as the software that is developed for it, so Apple has been targeting the developer market very aggressively since OS X debuted, and you can plot the quality of third-party software for OS X with each subsequent release.

OS X, at 10 years old, is still a fairly young operating system and only really matured at the user and developer level OS X 10.4 Tiger. Not unlike how KDE 4.0, 4.1, and 4.2 are memories I'm trying to block, and how Microsoft is trying to forget Vista ever happened, the transition to the point of Snow Leopard's maturity has been a long one.

Snow Leopard marks the beginning of an era, even though it is, from the user perspective, a service pack. And Mac-lovers will gladly pay, while PC people think its mass-hysteria. But it's not, really. It's not.

You know there's something wrong with your theory when it implies multitudes of people are crazy. Between you being right about everyone being mad and you being wrong because you missed something, statistically, chances are you've missed something.

The explanation is simple: Apple maintains a momentum in its release cycle, and doesn't charge an arm and a leg for it, which is why people gladly pay them for these kinds of upgrades.

At USD 499 (Vista Ultimate's original price), you darn right better not be paying for service packs. Apple charges less per release (steady at USD 129, Snow Leopard has been their first release to break that pattern at USD 29), and releases it more frequently.

It's the community, stupid!

It's a once-in-two-years event now, the operating system release. It's something users have now come to expect. It is a steady, incremental, predictable release cycle, which doesn't reinvent the wheel, or throw users off-balance every time. Once every two years, the Mac community wakes up from its torpor and everyone is abuzz about their "paid service pack."

Microsoft, however, is anything but steady. I don't say this with contempt, but with sadness: I wish they didn't drop the ball so badly. I waited till the cows came home for Longhorn after the disappointment that was Windows XP.

For all the love Windows XP gets now, let's not forget that Windows XP was a disappointment until SP2. The only thing it was, was stable, and that's only relative to their previous releases which is setting the bar quite low (and arguably what they did to make everyone fawn over Windows 7, including myself).

XP was insecure and slow, and came with those awful message pop-ups that made life very difficult for an everyday user out of the box. After using commodity hardware to "locally assemble" my own machines to consistently horrible results, they started losing my mindshare by that point.

By the time SP2 came out and things started settling down to some semblance of sanity, I had moved into the loving arms of OS X 10.2 Jaguar. An operating system which also happened to be border-line unusable, but in my books was a step-up from Windows XP pre-service packs. Not because it was stable, because Windows XP was actually quite stable, despite being slow as molasses. No, not because it was fast, because it wasn't all that much faster than XP.

OS X 10.2 Jaguar had one killer feature: it wasn't Windows.

I hated the PC world so much at that point, I'd have settled with an abacus.

I had lost all faith in computers by that point. I think to this day, I never quite figured out how to install a modem driver in Windows 9x properly. Yes, I might be an idiot, but I’m an otherwise functioning adult who could install other drivers, so why not this one?! I had to take my PC to the workshop for them to take a look at my himem.sys to make my Transport Tycoon work. Randomly failing commodity parts was the bane of my existence, and was touted as the most compelling feature of the PC “ecosystem.”

You can keep your ecosystem.

When I came to the National University of Singapore in June of 2003, and I went to the laptop fair, I made a beeline to the Apple store, and didn't look any other way. I bought a 13.1" iBook G3 at 900 MHz: an underpowered, over-priced machine that only ideologues and die-hard fans would buy, but a machine I loved to bits and used for a good 4 and a half years.

I was just glad to be rid of that damned "Personal Computer."

It was only with the introduction to Linux in 2004, and a steady observation of its internals that I slowly started regaining some faith in the world of computing. I think it was only until very recently that I've started thinking (once again) hey! Computers are kinda cool!

Everything was so neat and clean in the Linux world, it really made an impression on me. Directories for configuration files, clean scripts with consistent interfaces to start and stop services, different ways of interacting with the computer (the CLI or the GUI), solutions to operating system problems which aren't "do a reinstall." What a breath of fresh air! This stuff actually works.

And Linux didn't (and doesn't, to this day) do everything. But whatever it claimed it did, it did well. The rules were simple and elegant, and the philosophy facilitated the process, it didn't get in the way.

So, no thanks to Microsoft for that.

But that's okay. Let by-gones be by-gones. I switched loyalties, Longhorn became Vista, which crashed and burned spectacularly, Apple has been massively successful since, Firefox nudged IE out of cryonic hibernation, and Google has woken Microsoft up from its dominance-induced coma, and Windows 7 is coming about, and it's something even I'm a bit excited about.

And yes, Windows 7 is Vista SP2 and with ripped off ideas from the Mac OS X. And that’s perfectly fine.

I don't mind that OS X steals from Windows or that Window steals from OS X. That's what this is all about, it's a discourse, it’s competition, it’s an arms race. Going “me too!” is not only perfectly fine, but encouraged. Microsoft in the 2000s was so technically inept that Apple had the chance to implement a feature they announced as MBA-driven marketing hype before Microsoft themselves could do it (fast desktop search, now called Spotlight, released first in OS X 10.4 Tiger, well ahead of Vista's release).

I'd probably buy Windows 7 it if it was priced a bit cheaper. It's still too expensive after what they charged customers for Vista. Hopefully they'll slash prices, but I'm glad Microsoft is about to come back in the game again. Nothing is set in stone yet, we have to wait till the fat lady sings on this one, and its classic Microsoft to set the bar so low that even a whiff of “not-a-massive-failure” gets people excited, but the outlook is favourable.

The late 90s and most of the 2000s has been a period of stagnation in the computer world with Microsoft's unchallenged domination, which its competitors are to blame as much as Microsoft's predatory market practices.

Now, with competition returning in the browser world with the Phoenix-like comeback of Firefox from the ashes of Netscape, the second-coming of Apple thanks entirely to Steve Jobs, Google's steadily increasing boldness and earthy common sense, and Microsoft's (still-hyped and as of yet unsubstantiated) comeback with (the incremental update that is) Windows 7, we, the customer, have everything to gain. Competition is returning, and users clinging on to 9-year-old operating systems will hopefully be a thing of the past.

Interesting times are ahead.

Perl as Glue, and the Ebbing of Mindshare

People have lovely things to say about Perl, and one of the first things you'll hear is that it's great glue. It's good for stringing things together, and making them work.

The problem with glue is that it doesn't constitute a "good solution" in the mind. We know of glue as something we apply on our shoe when it comes apart, just as a stop gap until we can finally get a new one. The Tata Nano is held together with glue to cut costs. Make no mistake, this is a technical achievement and an innovation, but we all know what people would rather have used: steel rivets, like what they use on the space shuttle.

Well, that's what the rich people get. Poor people get glue.

This is, of course, technically inaccurate: industrial strength glue holds everything from our iPods to our vehicles together. But the crisis has always been one of perception, not of reality.

Perl is a lot more than "handyman glue". It's like saying steel is good for nails and that's all it's good for. No, you can make ships out of steel as well.

This perception of Perl as that special, weird-looking wrench which fits into corners other wrenches can't fit into is what's holding it back as a serious language. People will only use it when their "normal" tools don't work, so they don't appreciate it's greater applicability.

But it's a difficult problem to solve. Because Perl is great glue. It's Soviet-gymnast-like flexibility is what makes it so powerful, as nails that holds your chair together, and as the stuff that makes up the hull of the USS Enterprise.

Perl has a long, varied, and continuing history in web applications, so it's really quite sad to see it having lost so much of its mindshare after having come so far. It's "sad" for me, because I'm only now at the cusp of my career as a web application developer; I wasn't around for the first 2 acts. So I have very little idea of what "mistakes" Perl must have committed in the past to now be relegated to the rusty toolbox of the IT world, but I'm sure there must have been some.

The company I work at is now seriously reconsidering continuing with Perl. We want to move to Java, and partly, even I'm convinced that a solution in Java is a more sustainable one. In fact, my only argument for sticking with Perl is a not exactly a shining vindication of Perl (although it is ultimately correct): we have too much momentum and expertise in Perl to drop it like a bad habit just yet. If we're going to do it, we have to plot a methodical and gradual migration away from it.

But in this current round of technical naval-gazing within my organization, even if I get everything I ask for, the next few years will see the end of Perl in yet another enterprise environment as we slowly transition to the suited and booted Java Enterprise Edition.

Recursive Dependency on CPAN

Trouble's a-brewin':

Recursive dependency detected:
Bundle::CPAN
=> Test::Harness
=> A/AN/ANDYA/Test-Harness-3.17.tar.gz
=> File::Spec
=> S/SM/SMUELLER/PathTools-3.30.tar.gz
=> Scalar::Util
=> G/GB/GBARR/Scalar-List-Utils-1.21.tar.gz
=> Test::More
=> M/MS/MSCHWERN/Test-Simple-0.88.tar.gz
=> Test::Harness.

Cannot continue.

This is the output from a CPAN shell. This is a fresh install of perl on Ubuntu Hardy Heron (LTS). The CPAN that comes built-in is obsolete, and an install Bundle::CPAN is in order at the CPAN shell after you've initialized it at the first run.

This problem can be fixed by manually installed the "offending" module, which in this case is Test::Harness. It needs to be installed but needs itself to install itself, which makes no sense (even for perl).

Exit CPAN, and go into your cpan directory:

cd ~/.cpan/Build/
cd Test-Harness[tab]*
perl Makefile.PL
make test
make install

Manually installing the module will break the recursive dependency. So fire up CPAN and breathe normally.

Hopefully this will come in handy to someone.

* CPAN distributes modules with the version number appended after the module name. So the build directory for Test::Harness v3.17 is called Test-Harness-3.17/. Sometimes it appends random strings at the end, so that a more recent download of the same Test::Harness v3.17 doesn't overwrite the old download. So press tab to let your shell take care of the details. Tab completion is your friend.

Perl Is Coming Back

You read it here first.

Okay, if you did read it here first, you need to read this as well (it's a bit lengthy). No rush, when you get a moment.

Perl?!

Yes, Perl!

Perl is the oldest of the web scripting languages. Perl 1.0 was released in 1987, which makes Perl 22 years old today, with 4 major releases since then. Perl 5, the latest version, is a good 15 years old now with 10 major releases of its own. It is older than PHP (1995), Visual Basic (1991), Python (1991), or Ruby (1995) all of which were heavily influenced by Perl.

Google uses it. FedEx uses it. The BBC uses it, and they're by and large one of the largest, most pervasive web presences on the internet today (thanks to Firefox and excellent content). Amazon uses it, and by extension, IMDb uses it.

The company I work for uses a custom Perl framework written in the early 2000s, from the dot-com era (and I blame my receding hairline on it; we're moving away from it now).

Everyone uses Perl, just nobody talks about it.

It's mature, it's pervasive, it's user-friendly (how many programming languages can you use that word on?) and it can be a pleasure to write.

It can be hell to read, but flexibility is a double-edged sword. If you're out to cut things, two edges is better than one, so long as you know how to use it.

A few sites that are doing some really good work with regards to Perl as of this writing:

Modern Perl Books

This is a blog by a gentleman aliased "chromatic." This guy sounds like he's been around for ever and he speaks a lot of sense. I'm officially a fan, and this is my Friday afternoon leisure reading.

It's fun to read even if you don't have a clue as to what he's saying. Some of the things he says are just general wisdoms. Plenty of insight available here.

Catalyst Framework

Catalyst is a Perl framework for rapid web application development. It's modeled against Ruby-on-Rails, while maintaining a sense of aplomb about it all, giving the user a tremendous amount of flexibility to leverage the tremendous power (and potential quality) of the CPAN to your advantage.

Non-Perl people will have no idea what I just said. But if you're a non-Perl person, you probably haven't read this far either.

So in case you do know what I'm talking about: wicked, isn't it? And if you don't know what I'm talking about, just know this: Catalyst is cool.

Perl Is Alive!

I was once on irc.freenode.net/#perl and I asked if Perl was dead. Someone directed me to isperldead.com, jokingly.

Well, looks like someone caught on and made a little website called perlisalive.org.

This site is a lot about "raising awareness." A certain Matt Trout, author and maintainer of the very excellent DBIC tools in Perl insists we needn't bandy words, it's "marketing."

Yes, it is about marketing (some of it not very good), so I find it largely a boring and insubstantial resource, but it has an excellent interview with Tom Doran on Catalyst 5.8.

It's like when you see a really great song by an artiste, and you really love it, you buy an album of his (or hers) and then find out that was the only good song in it? That's kind of how I feel about perlisalive.org so far.

But the Tom Doran interview was fascinating enough that I still check back here.

Perl Monks

Perl Monks is one ugly website. Mmm-mmm, my breakfast quickly reconsiders coming out for some air when I fire up this site. It looks like it was designed in the 90s and never got updated, and I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened.

And yet, it is quite an excellent resource. These guys do some very good work, and their bad-marketing-but-depth-of-substance is somewhat emblematic of the humble competency that is endemic within the silent majority of users of Perl.

Moose

"Moose" is the new object system in Perl.

The current object system in Perl is hacky and bolted on, but Moose makes it all pretty and neat.

What exactly is so cool about it? I really don't have a clue, I haven't seriously started using it yet. But "chromatic" (mentioned above) talks about it to no end. He calls it the "state of the art" in object orientation. Now I haven't heard that phrase used in a long time, and it's certainly a toy I want to get my hands on soon.

Catalyst (also mentioned above) uses Moose extensively now.

So Watch Out...

From the depths of irrelevance and quick-hack sysadmin scripts, Perl is undergoing a renaissance.

Microsoft's "embrace, extend, exterminate" attitude toward standards is slowly petering out. The IT market today is getting more and more heterogenous, and that is good. It makes infrastructure more resilient, and encourages standards-compliance.

Combined with Perl's internal renaissance, Perl has everything to gain from this trend.

We're on our way back.

On Running

From experience, I have learned that the best students don't always make the best teachers. Someone who is a little slow in the uptake appreciates the finer points a little more than someone who just "gets it."

I've been running since I can honestly remember. And I have never ever been good at it. According to Google Earth's distance calculator, the first distance I can honestly remember running was a whopping 200 metres. I think I was about 10 or 11 years old.

So although I was never good at it, I did do it a whole lot, and over a very long time (if my 11 years old estimate is correct, a good 14 years on and off at the time of this writing). So that, at least, gives me the right to offer a pedestrian perspective.

First, though, I need to clear out a few well-spread misconceptions about "exercise."

Everybody thinks:

1. Exercise is good for you

2. Exercise makes you burn calories

Exercise is Good for you

Actually, no. In the short term, exercise is fundamentally damage, and nothing more. Good exercise is merely controlled damage.

The only thing that makes exercise "good" is the healthy body's capacity to heal from the damage, over time.

The karate masters who break blocks of wood with their fists develop stronger bones with gradual practice. Their bones incur microfractures, small hairline cracks. When they heal, they come back stronger.

The human body is a self-healing machine, and it's the process of recovery after exercise that makes it so good for you.

Exercise Makes you Burn Calories

Actually, no. Well, yes, it does, but it doesn't really matter all that much when you look at the big picture. The number of calories exercise burns is really just a fraction of the number of calories you burn throughout the day, just to stay alive and functioning.

The body burns calories even while sleeping: the heart still has to pump blood a good 1-point-something metres around the body, which is no mean feat. The lungs still have to continue pumping air in and out. The liver still has to detoxify that McDonalds you just had for dinner, and goodness knows the kidneys are still filtering our blood.

For the body, there's always work to do. And that work requires energy.

Where exercise really helps is raising your metabolism, the amount of energy your body burns just to keep itself going. And when that rate goes up, it goes up 24/7, which really adds up over time.

Unlike the human mind, the human body will never invest in something it doesn't need. If it doesn't need muscle (which is a huge, energy-consuming machine that requires resources to not only build, but to maintain day to day), it won't keep it. It will slowly be eaten away (and is excreted through the urine, as it so happens), until it reaches equilibrium at the point at which you utilize it.

So it's the overall level of activity that dictates how much muscle your body has invested in.

Now, Back to Running...

From what I've seen (and painfully felt), running depends on three things: solids, liquids, and gases. Bones (solids), muscles (liquids)**, and breath (gases).

During an honest run, either of these three things will give way before you have to stop. The chain is only as strong as it's weakest link. When the weakest link breaks, it doesn't matter how much stronger the other links were. There's no A for effort here, this is the real world.

Whichever one you push to the limit, will probably not hurt as much the next time you go back out, provided you've given yourself enough time to heal.

And that's really all I wanted to say on the matter. I've discovered this through personal experience: bones can hurt quite badly the first time you start running. I started running as a child, and I remember my legs used to keep me awake at nights when I first started out.

Muscle pains are more easily manageable, especially the muscles in the legs, which are big and can take the hit.

Breathing is also quite painful, but less so in sheer magnitude. It is just as debilitating, though, which is what we're measuring here. The diaphragm, the muscle-controlled pull-valve that expands the lungs forcing air in, has a big role to play in it. It needs to be strong to be able to continuously push and pull air in and out so the lungs can quickly oxygenate the blood and get pumped back around the body.

Running is Hard

Well, nobody said it was going to be easy. In most of the things that are really worth having, there are no shortcuts.

Humans are optimized for running, though. Over generations, we have evolved to be very efficient runners.

Of all terrestrial mammals, humans run the longest distances voluntarily. We can outrun even horses, who will never go as far unless pushed. Cheetahs and big cats will overheat very quickly because of their fur and lack of sweat glands. After a certain point, they simply will not run. And although they run very fast, they can't stay that fast for long, so they don't get too far.

Humans on the other hand, are relatively hairless, and sweaty, so we can cool down more easily. We have a fleshy bottom, which is connected via thick muscles to long legs which gives them power. We have a tendon that goes from our heels up our legs that we don't seem to really need for walking, but helps add spring to a run by allowing us to powerfully push our feet. We have a chord (called the nuchal chord) that runs down the back of our heads, which allows us to keep our heads upright while we run, a feature shared only by running mammals. Since humans are upright, we have a smaller base area, which makes it easier to topple over if the centre of gravity shifts during long strides (Why does a bottle turned upside down topple over more easily than one standing on the base? The area of contact with the surface decreases when it is upside down). To cope for that, we have independent shoulder motion relative to the head, so we can adjust our centre of gravity and keep our balance when making long strides. This is something no other primate has, and something that makes humans an order of magnitude more mobile.

And so it is! So lets get to it. Like Darth Vader said... it is... our destiny.

** Muscles are technically not liquid. They are what physicist Eric Drexler calls "machine-phase," neither solid nor liquid, but still a cohesive, functioning unit. But lets not split hairs.

Who Speaks for Islam?

I know who doesn't speak for Islam. Saudi Arabia.

So who does?

If you ask me: nobody. And everybody.

Nobody

As a "divinely inspired" religion, Islam needs no followers. Fundamentally, followers need it. Muslims believe in an omniscient, omnipotent God that needs nothing.

So, if nobody in the world followed Islam, nothing would have changed.

But of course, religion doesn't exist in a vacuum: the sacred laws set forth were done so to enrich our lives.

But mankind is imperfect, and God (and by extension, His religion), by Muslim reckoning, is perfect. Using an imperfect metric to measure something perfect will, at best, be merely indicative, but ultimately incorrect.

Everybody

But the problem with that answer is that it evades the question.

So the nuance that I like to add to the response is that although nobody can really speak for Islam, in reality, everybody does.

In all corners of the world, Muslims have integrated Islam into a massive tapestry of colours, flavours and interpretations. From the Shiites and the Sunnies from Europe to Asia, and even Native American Muslims who are on record when European settlers first moved to the Americas.

As a proselytizing religion, Islam has done a good a job (or bad a job, depending on who you ask) as Christianity to spread its word far and wide to the world.

And that word has been adopted, and mutated, and watered down, and concentrated, and beautified, and mutilated in every possible way imaginable. What results, in effect, is representative of the faith.

It is, and always will be, inextricably bound to the human condition which it was sent to enrich.

I'll Get Down From My Soapbox Now...

I just want people to step away from the idea that Saudi Arabia, in any way, speaks for Islam. Just because it houses the Two Holy Shrines in Mecca and Madinah doesn't mean it's a standard-bearer of 1.5 billion people from almost every nationality and language conceivable.

It's a subliminal conclusion drawn way too easily.

Saudi Arabia speaks for Saudi Arabia. Nobody can truly "represent" Islam. But ultimately, we all do.

Muslims are religious, and irreligious. We are liberal and conservative, left-leaning or right-leaning. We are black, white, brown and yellow. We are ignorant, educated and illiterate, mean-spirited, friendly, helpful, racist, and egalitarian. We are deluded and informed, we lie and we steal and we are helpful and we smile, for even a smile is charity. We love, we hate, we hurt, we bleed, we kill, and we die.

In that sense Muslims, and by extension Islam, are not very different from any of the other peoples and faiths.

We occupy this world among equals.

Now Wait Just A Second...

Oh, so you noticed: all that is a very complex non-answer.

But the question is really a non-question. "Islam" is not a tangible entity, and even by abstract standards, it is amorphous to the extent that you couldn't put an abstract finger on it. My Islam is different from someone else's Islam, based on economic situation, geographical location, personal disposition, age, outlook, etc. So when you ask it questions, you'll wonder whose Islam is actually answering the question?

But that's not really the point. Does anybody ever ask, "Who speaks for Christianity?"

I didn't think so.

This Is Where I Draw The Line

I realize there is a lot of negative backlash against Islam and Muslims because of the pervasive terrorism we tend to breed.

But I'm done apologizing for Muslim terrorists. I am no more associated to Islamic extremists than a Jew in New York is associated to an Israeli soldier sniping an old woman in the Gaza Strip.

I don't need to apologize for them to dissociate myself from them. I am separate from them by definition, from the get-go: I am a law-abiding, peaceful person, and their grievances are political, veiled very thinly with religiosity. And this veil is very easily seen through now that George W. Bush is no longer the leader of the free world, and its moral compass.

"Fixing Islam"

I grow weary of articles and books on "How to Fix Islam," many of which are written by non-Muslims. As if the religion needs an oil change (and that by someone who is not a mechanic).

The discourse that actually matters in Islam, will always remain among the learned Muslims, who will, through the gradual evolution of thought, adapt it, localize it and contextualize it as Muslims have been doing for the millenium and a half past.

In this, Muslims can probably help by encouraging discourse through allowing freedom of expression and not stigmatize dissent with accusations of heresy, violent suppression, and summary judgement. We need to be more tolerant amongst ourselves, something we have never excelled at.

Which is why you can "fix Islam" all you like, but without actually changing cultures, attitudes, and outlooks, all the religious legislation/interpretation in the world won't change a single thing.

Islam doesn't speak, and you can't fix Islam while evading deep prejudices within yourself. It's always easy to look outward when you think something is wrong, not inward.

So, really. Islam doesn't have much to say. If there is anything to say, Muslims will say it, and hopefully it will be through actions and not just words.

Geert Wilders' Fitna: Much Ado About Nothing

In 2008, Geert Wilders, an unkown MP from the Netherlands, released a short film called Fitna.

Fitna is the Arabic word for "trial" or "tribulation," and it is suggestive of both the larger perils a nation or a people may face, like strife, natural disasters, or decline, as well as smaller, individual problems, like losing one’s faith, or personal loss.

In this short film, he puts images of horrific radical Muslim terrorism side by side with strong-worded verses of the Quran.

He doesn't tell you what the link is, leaving your sub-conscious to make the association. At the end of the clip, he cuts to an Arabic Quran with a person leafing its pages gently, at which point the screen fades out to black, and you hear a page tearing.

He then reveals in scrolling text, that the sound of the page tearing was actually that of a phonebook. And it's up to Muslims to decide which pages of the Quran they want to tear out.

Most people hadn’t heard of Geert Wilders until his movie, and most probably never would have.

He's the leader of "The Party for Freedom", a now only 3-year-old political party he founded in the Netherlands, that commands all of 1 seat in the 150-seat lower house. He is a hardline, xenophobic, right-wing politician, that caters to the bigotry of a growing few extreme elements within the Dutch electorate.

For his fame, Mr. Wilders has only the Muslims to thank.

Our "collective outrage" at a select few pinprick offenses gives these people a voice they would have never have had otherwise.

“Fitna” takes snuff films released by terrorists, editing them so you can only hear the innocent man being beheaded rather than see him, followed by verses from the Quran.

It’s gut-wrenching, and most people choose to simply forget the fact that such horrible things happen in our world, and are thankful that it’s only a select few that perpetrate such crimes. To put that into a short film for mass consumption, and pass it off as merely a video appealing to the intellect of Muslims to rewire their thinking, is both crude, and transparently insincere.

The movie, along with Mr. Wilders, would have fallen out of the public psyche of its own merits, or decided lack thereof.

There’s no such thing as bad publicity, and Muslims are, in general, very generous with publicity. Death threats, riots that kill none other than Muslims themselves only give ammunition to the hardliners in the “West,” and sideline the moderates.

The Prophet Mohammed (and by extension, the faith he preached) remains either wildly loved, or reviled among the academic circle, and this has been the case for most of history. Very few academics remain distantly apathetic about the man or his teachings, it seems, and there has been literature attacking him or apologizing for him since the very beginning.

Islam, like most other expansionist world religions, has been the subject of debate, propaganda (both black and white), and criticism both among the Arabs initially, and later among the wider world (and now by “Westerners”) for a very long time. Anybody who has read Shakespeare would know this revulsion goes back a long time, and is, I believe, somewhat representative of a greater xenophobia endemic to Europe (at the receiving end of which was, famously, the Jews, among others) which only post-World War 2 has, I think, shown signs of finally breaking down.

So attacking the faith, its followers, and its founder, whether truly or falsely, deserved or undeserved, is nothing new.

So it is indeed strange that we should react so unseemingly to otherwise innocuous attacks. “Strange” in that it is ill-advised, not in that it is an aberration. Because potentially violent Muslim “outrage” is starting to become the rule, and not the exception.

This is a problem.

Mr. Wilders has been barred from entry into the United Kingdom, as reported by the BBC earlier this week. This is not because he made a bad movie; lots of very bad filmmakers get visas to the United Kingdom every year. It is because he poses a security threat, and they simply don’t want a foreign diplomat attacked, or dying on their soil.

That’s simply hooliganism. For whatever reasons elements of British Muslims have had trouble integrating with the greater population, the threat of violence is not one a civilized society should either accept, or capitulate to.

The UK, in this case, is choosing the least undesirable course of action. They could bring him in on a matter of principle, and spend lots of government money they don’t have to protect a foreigner, or simply ask him to stay away for a while, while they get their own house in order.

You have to choose your battles, and I think, on the whole, it is a reasonable decision that has been made.

But most Muslims will think this a repudiation of Mr. Wilder’s bad taste. That is simply not so, and shouldn’t be so. His right to speak his mind, no matter how bigoted or stupid he may be, remains, and he remains responsible for the things he says.

He is being challenged in court in the Netherlands for inciting racial hatred. If that is indeed true, then the court will find him guilty through due process, and mete out punishment that is appropriate. If, indeed, he didn’t incite racial hatred, then what he did was fine, within the confines of the law.

There is, however, no such thing as unlimited freedom. My freedom to commit murder impedes on another’s freedom to live.

There are restrictions on freedom of speech in many countries on other topics. The Germans have a problem with the Nazis, and Americans have a problem with racial epithets. These represent deeply dividing and bad times in these countries’ past that they are trying to heal from, and Islam, in my opinion, doesn’t deserve that kind of special attention.

It’s very easy to distinguish between a cogent argument and one that has no merit, and Muslims need to grow accustomed to criticisms, and be able to respond to them through civilized discourse.

We need to start having a more inclusive attitude. We need to be the change we would like to see in the world.

We are a piece of the greater puzzle of this world. We share it with other peoples, and other nations, with hopes and aspirations of their own. The Muslim today, as a pan-ethnic, pan-national identity, has much to be proud of. Our contributions to the world are many and lasting. We are intrinsically and inextricably part of the family of humanity, and though people like Mr. Wilders and others like him seek to dehumanize us as “the other,” belittle our grievances, and seek to exclude us from pursuing happiness like everyone else, we should know better.

What we must not do, though, is be violently intolerant of people with bad attitudes, like Mr. Wilders. Save your chagrin and disgust for a more reasoned, thoughtful approach.

Mr. Wilders was not the first, and he most certainly will not be the last, to disparage Muslims. What we do with our Quran is our own business; we don’t need cues from a hate-monger.

But we already know this, so there’s really nothing to get worked up about.