On Sunday July 11th, Gary, our friend Charlie, and I were hiking near Mount Baker in the North Cascades. We were hiking across an avalanche chute when we heard a loud crashing sound from above us. I looked up, and saw a huge log, eerily silhouetted against the sky, falling down from the cliffs above us. I remember thinking that I should run out of the way, and then realizing that I was already running. Charlie and I both ran up the trail and got out of the way, but Gary was behind us and had to take refuge behind a large fallen log. The falling log hit the log he was hiding behind, and both of the logs rolled over him and continued down the slope. The whole incident happened in slow motion; it was perhaps the longest few seconds of my life.

Log that fell from the cliff

Charlie and I immediately rushed to Gary to help him. The first few minutes were the scariest, blood was coming out of his mouth and each of his shallow breaths came out as a horrible moan. It was made worse by the fact that his eyes were glazed over and were moving erratically. We had seen a ranger with a radio earlier, and so Charlie immediately left to find him and summon help. There were two hikers behind us, Philip and David, who were both extremely helpful and supportive. It would have been much worse if I were alone. After a few minutes Gary calmed down immensely. His breathing slowed, and he was able to speak and focus his eyes. I did a quick survey of his injuries; I checked his pupils for concussion, and verified that he could move and feel his extremities.

At this point, Gary asked that we put all his warm clothes on him. This was surprising and reassuring. Here he was, severely injured and in pain, and he very calmly asked us to do exactly what they teach in a wilderness first aid course. We were able to strip off his cotton t-shirt and put all of his warm layers on his upper body. He wanted to be moved to a more comfortable position, but when we lifted him he complained of pain in his hip and so we attempted to make him as comfortable as possible on the hillside.

After about half an hour, Charlie returned with the ranger, a tough-looking guy named Ben Lehman. Not only was he able to call in help on his radio, but he also was a trained wilderness EMT. What a stroke of luck! Ben was amazingly helpful. He was calm and collected, and from what I remember from my limited training, he did all of the first-responder procedure by the book. He did a variety of diagnostic checks, everything from taking pulse to checking Gary’s entire neck and spine for possible fractures. Gary was calm and coherent this entire time, although he did cry out in pain when we moved him to check his spine. After he evaluated Gary, Ben pulled out a sleeping pad, and with the help of the two hikers we very carefully moved Gary up onto the trail.

The log that Gary hid behind

The accident had happened about two and a half miles from the trailhead, over relatively rough terrain. At this point, I ran to the trailhead, both to put the dog in the car and to ensure that the EMTs arriving on foot were able to find their way to the accident. It felt good to be moving, to be doing something that felt constructive. I met some EMTs from Skagit County at the trailhead, and headed back to the site of the accident. By the time I returned, two very competent EMTs from the Navy had been dropped from a helicopter and were preparing to strap Gary into a backboard to be airlifted out. We could tell Gary was in good hands, with both the Navy EMTs and the Skagit County EMTs, so Charlie and I said our goodbyes, and hiked out to the trailhead to race Gary to the hospital.

We worked out later that Gary had arrived at Harborview Medical Center before Charlie and I even reached the car. My predominate emotion at the time was not fear, but relief. We had done all we could for Gary; the rest was out of our hands. The drive back to Seattle was uneventful, and we arrived at the hospital shortly after midnight. We arrived to find that Gary was in stable condition, and had already been through a number of scans. He was hooked up to all manner of equipment, including tubes inserted into his chest to drain air that had escaped during the accident. He was conscious and glad to see us. We then found that almost all of his ribs had been fractured, and his pelvis was in several pieces. Thankfully, there appeared to be no major organ damage, and his head and spine were unharmed.

We were then told that he’d need to have surgery on his pelvis, and that it was possible he’d have to wait over a day for this to be done. At this point, Charlie and I were both exhausted, so we said goodbye and went home to sleep. The following morning I found out that they were able to get Gary into surgery early in the morning, and had re-aligned his pelvis, and installed a metal bar to keep it stabilized. The metal bar sticks out from his hips, and it looks like something you might hang a hand towel on.

Gary sleeping in the ICU

Gary has since been moved out of the ICU, and is doing quite well. He should be out of the hospital relatively soon. A full recovery is expected, although the hospital staff has been very reluctant to give specific numbers on recovery times. The one concrete number we’ve been given is that it’ll take at least six weeks for his pelvis to become “load-bearing”. The recovery process is going to be frustrating and painful, and he’ll need lots of assistance and rehabilitation.

This has been a major traumatic event, but I’ve been quite impressed with how well everyone has handled it. Gary has been very strong, and that has been greatly reassuring to Charlie and I. Starting with Ben Lehman, all of the medical staff we’ve dealt with have been very helpful and supportive. I would like to thank the ranger Ben Lehman, our friend Charlie Madden, the Skagit Country EMTs, the Naval EMTs, the excellent staff at Harborview Medical Center, and everyone else who has been involved in ensuring Gary’s safe recovery.

Gary’s recovery is going to be a long and arduous process. He’s going to need all the support we can give him. I’m sure he’ll appreciate any phone calls and letters you can send his way. We’re not sure how long he’ll be at the hospital, so you can send any cards and letters to my house and I’ll make sure he gets them.

As a child, you grow up believing that your father is invincible. This accident has only confirmed that hypothesis. For such an unfortunate incident, it’s been amazing how fortunate we have been. I’m very lucky to have Gary as a father, and my fear of losing him has been overshadowed by my belief that in a few years this difficult time will be little more than a memory.

For more information, see this article in the Helena Independent Record.

I’ve been working with a group of people known as qworky making some cool meeting software for all y’all. A few people on the team aren’t too familiar with distributed version control systems, so I wrote up a little tutorial on git for them, and since I’m such a kind and generous guy, I’ve decided to share it with the internets. Enjoy.

basic commands

Before we begin, I recommend printing out a copy of this cheat sheet and putting it somehere handy. Also, if any of this makes your brain hurt, try spending some time looking at the git community book.

First, let’s get our very own copy of the ‘qworky-kickstart’ repository.

git clone git://github.com/billputer/qworky-kickstart.git

Now, you should have a folder called qworky-kickstart. Let’s check it out.

cd qworky-kickstart
git status

You should see the following output.

# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

That’s good, it means we’ve got a clean slate. Let’s look a bit at the previous changes.

git log

Interesting stuff, eh? Now, let’s set aside a our own portion of the slate to work on.

git checkout -b bill

This creates a local branch, our own version of history that we can trample all over without worrying about the main timeline of changes. Go ahead, make some changes. Delete some stuff, change all occurences of the word ‘config’ to the word ‘convention’, whatever. Once you’ve done that, try using git status and git diff. See all your changes? Good. However, we don’t want those changes, let’s erase them.

git reset --hard

Reset makes sense, right? You’ve made some changes, but you want to reset to the previous commited version (known as HEAD). But what does the --hard mean? Let’s RTFM.

--hard
Matches the working tree and index to that of the tree being switched to. Any changes to tracked files in the working tree since <commit> are lost.

Working tree? Index? These are two important terms in git. Working tree refers to the actual files and directories that we’re using. If you modify a file in your git repository, you’re almost certainly making a change to the working tree. The index is the grey area between changes to the filesystem and changes commited to the repository. How so? Let me show you an example.

Make more changes to a file. Nothing silly, something you actually want to keep. Comment some code, do something useful. Okay, now you’ve changed the working tree. Good job! Now try the command git status. Okay, it shows that some files are Changed but not updated. Let’s add those to the index. Type git add <filename>. Try git status again. Ahah! Now that the file is in the index, it’s listed under Changes to be committed. Now that we’ve done that, let’s take the plunge and commit something.

git commit -m "Very important changes"

Try git status and git log again. See your commit? Good work, you’ve now made a commit to your local repository. What? You still don’t know what the index is!? Let me explain. The index is where you put changes that you’re about to commit. Why would you want this seemingly extra step? Well, the index is there in case you only want to commit one or two of your changes. The git commit -m only commits files in the index, so you only have to git add the files that you want to commit. Still doesn’t make sense? Just remember that commiting a change is a two-step process, first you git add, then you git commit. The brave can combine those two with git commit -a, which commits all of the Changed but not updated files.

git for collaboration

So now we’ve made some changes to the bill branch of our local repository. That’s great, but we’re using git because we want to collaborate. We want our changes to magically appear back on the master branch of the original repsitory we cloned (the origin, in git parlance). This generally involves two steps, merging our changes into the master branch of our local repository, and then pushing our changes up to the origin at github.

There are several ways of moving our changes from the bill branch to the master branch. We could simply make the same changes on the master branch and then commit them, but that’d be silly, since we already have made those commits on the bill branch. Let’s checkout the master branch, and then merge it with the bill branch.

git checkout master
git merge bill

Now we have a local master branch with our changes, and now we want to give those to our colleagues on github. First, let’s make sure we’ve got the most recent copy of the repository so we can resolve any conflicts ourselves.

git pull

This will pull down any changes in our origin repository that have happened since we cloned it, and attempt to merge them with our local changes. This can get messy, and I’ll walk you through the process in a later tutorial. For now we’ll assume that everything went fine and dandy. Let’s finish this.

git push

Assuming you have the proper permissions, this will push your commits back to origin at github, and all your friends will be free to git fetch or git pull them. Good work!

It’s coming whether you know it or not.  The Portland-based conference with the logo that is simultaneously bridge, brain, and circuit-board is happening this week.  Here are four reasons why I’m spending my time at Open Source Bridge.

1. The tech is tight. Seriously, take a look at the session list.  Agile Javascript testing, Command-Line Kung-Fu, Scala for recovering Java developers: there’s a plethora of cool talks going down.  The difficulty won’t be finding something interesting, it’ll be deciding whether I want to learn how to have fun in n-dimensions or how to develop on Google’s Android platform.
2. The brains are big. I don’t know about you, but I’m don’t exactly spend every day rubbing elbows with the hottest developers in open-source.  Core members of many great open-source projects are speaking, not to mention the many others who are just there for the ride.  I’ll have to check my drool at the door, because my jaw will be slack when I’m being schooled on the Linux kernel by core developers.
3. The openness of it all. Open Source Bridge is 100% volunteer-run.  Friday is an all-day unconference.  Have an idea about what to do with an extra exhibit hall?  Post it on the wiki.  Want to run a code sprint?  Schedule one.  Revel in the glory of a conference with the perfect mix of top-down planning and open community.
4. The beer is flowing. Portland has the most breweries per capita in the country.  You can drink them in the 24-hour hacker lounge, or you can just attend a session like CodeIgniter As Drinking Game.  Your choice.

In a world in which technology begs all of us to create and spread creative work differently from how it was created and spread before, what kind of moral platform will sustain our kids, when their ordinary behavior is deemed criminal? Who will they become? What other crimes will to them seem natural?

In that world, should we continue our ritual sacrifice of some kid caught downloading content? Should we continue the expulsions from universities? The threat of  multimillion- dollar civil judgments? Should we increase the vigor with which we wage war against these “terrorists”? Should we sacrifice ten or a hundred to a federal prison (for their actions under current law are felonies), so that others learn to stop what today they do with ever-increasing frequency?

In my view, the solution to an unwinnable war is not to wage war more vigorously. At least when the war is not about survival, the solution to an unwinnable war is to sue for peace, and then to find ways to achieve without war the ends that the war sought. Criminalizing an entire generation is too high a price to pay for almost any end. It is certainly too high a price to pay for a copyright system crafted more than a generation ago.

A society free to borrow and build upon the past is culturally richer than a controlled one.

Surprisingly enough (or not) that quote is attributed to one of my favorite public figures, the intellectual property lawyer and Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig.  His book “Free Culture” is one of my first recommendations for anyone interested in intellectual property and attempts to control cultural freedom.  However, the speaker in the song was not Lessig, but someone else entirely.  After a little more digging, I found that the voice was that of artist and writer Nate Harrison and is from his art installation titled “Can I get an Amen?”.  The piece, shown below, consists of a record player with Nate illuminating the history of a single six-second clip of a drum-beat known as the Amen break.  What I found most interesting is not the history of the clip itself, but the conclusions that Nate Harrison draws from it.

Why do I bring any of this up?  What is significant about the Amen Break?  I’m talking about it here because I think it’s story is a good example illustrating the rise and subsequent problematic of digital sampling in relation to today’s increasingly stringent copyright and trademark laws.  To trace the history of the Amen Break is to trace the history of a brief period of time when it seemed digital tools offered a potentially unlimited amount of new forms of expression.  Where cultural production, at least musically, was full of possibilities by virtue of being able to freely appropriate from the musical past, to make new combinations, and thus new meanings.  The story demonstrates that a society, ‘free to borrow and build upon the past is culturally richer than a controlled one.’

If that quote sparks your interest I heavily recommend taking the twenty minutes and watching the following video.

I think it’s entirely appropriate that Wax Tailor chose to sample from this video, and I’m quite pleased with the result.  Most music that relies heavily on samples embraces remix culture implicitly, by either simply by the fact that it appropriates from past work, or by making purposeful references to our common cultural consciousness (à la Girl Talk).  Here in Once Upon A Past we have a direct endorsement of the reuse of our cultural roots.  How very apt that the endorsement itself is re-contextualized from another work entirely.

The first place I looked was the source code of my feed from Facebook.  RSS 2.0 feeds are simple XML, essentially just a list of <item> elements, each representing my posted links on Facebook.  Each <item> element has a <link> element, which is the one that redirects to Facebook and not the link I initially shared.  Fortunately, Facebook retains a copy of the original link inside the <description> element, so all I needed to do was replace the <link> element with the actual link that I posted.  However, that seems rather tedious to do by hand, so I wanted an automated solution.  I wrote an XSLT script to accomplish this, but I kept thinking that this kind of task should be much easier.  Enter Yahoo Pipes.

Yahoo describes their Pipes tool as “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web”.  It’s a remarkable tool that allows you to use graphical widgets to combine and manipulate all sorts of feed data, and it makes it really easy to solve the kind of problems I was having above.  I’ll spare you the details, but essentially I used a widget to loop through each item and fix the link, and then had it spit out the modified feed.  You can try it out here.  Simply input a Facebook Posts feed, and it will strip out the links to Facebook for each item.

This example only grazes the surface of what Pipes is capable of.  Next I’m going take my twitter feed, find all the posts that include links, and then merge it into my Facebook feed to create a super-mutant feed.  I’ll keep you posted.

wordle of text from billwiens.com blogposts

What I found most amazing was the sheer amount of options there are.  After entering your text, you can spend hours adjusting the layout, the font and size of the words, the color scheme, etc.  I could talk about it more, but the real magic is seeing a piece of text that you’ve written come to life in such a similar, yet distinct medium.  Please, do yourself a favor and spend some time at www.wordle.net.

Right now I’m on the verge of a new chapter in my story and it has dawned on me that I’ve lost sight of the plot.  There are times when an author will sit and put his thoughts to the page in a steady stream of consciousness.  That can be beautiful, but it can also be completely incoherent.  It seems to me that since I returned from Sweden my life has been just that, an incoherent stream of thought, words written without intention or introspection.  That way of living is not necessarily bad or good, at times it has been beautiful but right now I need to step back and look at the structure and form of the story I’ve been writing in my life and the lives of others.

These cobbled streets and statuesque buildings form an area known as Old Town. This area is surrounded by a ring of parks which is where I am sitting at this very moment. Right behind me are hundreds of yellow flowers that are so numerous that the ground is a living carpet of yellow and green. The birds in the trees above me are intent on making their voices heard over the dull roar of traffic from neighboring streets.

In front of me stands an ornate brick and stone cathedral which after I get up to go look I find is called “Arcybiskopie Seminarium Duchowne”. At least that’s what the sign on the front says, I’m always a bit confused in countries where I don’t know a word of the language. For all I know it could mean “the brothel is closed until further notice”. Now that I think of it, it’s probably not a cathedral. I have a tendency to call any of these huge beautiful buildings cathedrals because anything so pretty and also adorned with crosses must be one.

The most impressive thing that I can see from this bench is the fortifications of Castle Wawel, an impressive series of structures perched high on a hill between Old Town and the river Vistula. Visitors to this city in centuries past must have been in awe of this collection of buildings surrounded by tall brick walls. Even now, living in an age with tanks, planes, and bombs, I can still feel the power and security such a castle offers. Walking along it’s ramparts and looking down on the river and town below gives me a sense of dominion over the outlying lands.

I’ve said enough about the old buildings that form a background for the scene around me. Spring has arrived and you can feel it in the air and see it in the steps of everyone who walks by. A few benches away two young lovers nuzzle each other while one bench closer an old man sits and, like me, watches people as they walk by. “Where would I rather be?” I ask myself as I sit here writing in my little black notebook. At the moment my imagination fails me and thus I sit rooted here watching the world go by.

I think now I’m going to put my pen away and enjoy these last few hours before the sun begins to set. I only have a few days until I return home to Sweden and I will then be forced to fill my head with the inner workings of machines that, despite all my efforts, still fail to live, breath, walk, and love on this beautiful spring day.