Daily Archives: October 25, 2009

White House moves to Drupal for its website

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Tim O’Reilly has some interesting comments on the news that the Obama team has gone for the Open Source CMS to run the White House site. Excerpts:

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.

This move is obviously a big win for open source. As John Scott of Open Source for America (a group advocating open source adoption by government, to which I am an advisor) noted in an email to me: “This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. The White House’s adoption of community-based software provides a great example for the rest of the government to follow.”

John is right. While open source is already widespread throughout the government, its adoption by the White House will almost certainly give permission for much wider uptake.

Particularly telling are the reasons that the White House made the switch. According to the AP article:

White House officials described the change as similar to rebuilding the foundation of a building without changing the street-level appearance of the facade. It was expected to make the White House site more secure – and the same could be true for other administration sites in the future….

Having the public write code may seem like a security risk, but it’s just the opposite, experts inside and outside the government argued. Because programmers collaborate to find errors or opportunities to exploit Web code, the final product is therefore more secure.

More than just security, though, the White House saw the opportunity to increase their flexibility. Drupal has a huge library of user-contributed modules that will provide functionality the White House can use to expand its social media capabilities, with everything from super-scalable live chats to multi-lingual support.

Particularly interesting is the fact that the team cites greater security as one of the reasons for moving. this suggests a pretty sophisticated — for policymakers, anyway — understanding of the argument that proprietary software is, paradoxically, likely to be less secure than open software.

Somehow, I can’t see the UK government getting that. Brown & Co still think Microsoft is cutting edge.

So which was the bigger scam — balloon boy or the Collateralised Debt fraud?

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Terrific NYT column by Frank Rich comparing the “balloon boy” scam with those perpetrated by Bush/Cheney in invading Iraq and by Wall Street in fuelling the banking collapse, and putting things nicely in context. Excerpts:

Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the “balloon boy” and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The Chamber of Commerce stunt was a blip of a business news hoax next to the constant parade of carnival barkers who flogged empty stocks on cable during the speculative Wall Street orgies of the dot-com and housing booms.

[…]

Richard Heene [the father in the “balloon boy” incident] is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled and the warp-speed imperatives of cable-Internet competition allow no time for fact checking. Norman Lear, about the only prominent American to express any empathy for little Falcon’s father, vented on The Huffington Post, calling out CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS alike for their role in “creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news.” This climate, he argued, “all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are — even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax — entitled to their 15 minutes.”

[…]

If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits. The press hyped both scams, and the public eagerly bought both. But between the bogus balloon and the banks’ bubble, there’s no contest as to which did the most damage to the country. The ultimate joke is that Heene, unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars.

Great stuff. Worth reading in full.

Full disclosure

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This lovely photograph from the terrific Red Mum photoblog reminded me of a shameful episode from my childhood. Note the qualifications of the pharmacist on the shop-front, which signify that J.H. Bowden is a Member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland (MPSI). When we were kids, we had a more scabrous interpretation of the letters, and we would sometimes go into the local pharmacist’s and shout “Monkey’s Piss Sold Inside” before scarpering, closely pursued by a stout, irate proprietor.

Disgraceful, I know. I should be ashamed of myself. Well, of my younger self, anyway.

UPDATE: Red Mum has moved to WordPress. New blog here.

Google Chrome for Mac OS X

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Following a tweet from Stephen Fry (who else?) saying “now running Chrome on OS X” I went looking and found (and downloaded) the build created by Codeweavers. Now running it — though not as a default browser because it’s not a stable version. The relevant Google page is here.

The myth of teenage omnipotence

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This morning’s Observer column.

THE OLD SAYING that “if you’re not thoroughly confused you don’t fully understand the situation” applies with a vengeance to our new media ecosystem. Take the strange case of teenagers, whose brains are being scrambled and rewired by nature to make them fit for adult life. Until the 1960s, “teens” as they are called in the US barely existed as an interesting social category. Like sex in Philip Larkin’s poem, Annus Mirabilis, one might say they were “invented in nineteen sixty-three/… Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”.

Then they acquired spending power and became interesting to retailers and advertisers – and therefore to the mass media – to the point where our society is now obsessed with them. This obsession is particularly neurotic whenever cyberspace is mentioned, and leads adults to project on to the younger generation all kinds of fears and fantasies…

Ingres with a Leica

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The New Yorker carried an elegant tribute to Irving Penn by Adam Gopnik.

In the postwar years, America was unduly blessed by its art dealers, who offered an open door to the avant-garde, and by its fashion magazines, in which a handful of photographers managed to turn fashion pictures into another kind of high art. Chief among them was Irving Penn, who died last week, at the age of ninety-two. There are many instinctive romantics among popular artists, the Gershwins and the Chaplins who, through force of spirit and originality of style, take by storm the balcony and the boxes alike. Penn was something rarer, an instinctive popular classicist, with a magical gift for visual rhythm, for making something insignificant—a pattern of cigarettes and ashes, each ash miraculously in its one best place—look as formally inevitable as an eighteenthcentury still-life. If Richard Avedon, his great rival and competitor, was a snapshot Delacroix, all fire and figures, Penn was Ingres with a Leica, all ravishing edges and perfect composition and a quality of deep color that was the envy of every other photographer.