In case anyone in the Democratic party is wondering why support disappeared in Massachusetts, perhaps examining the score card of the Obama administration will reveal why some people feel the behaviour of the executive is little different from the war criminal he replaced.

• Gave money to the banking executives and left the majority of victims of their predatory lending with no support. He should have just nationalised any bank going bust, sacked the executive boards, and established a means to renegotiate usury mortgages.
• Attacked a country (Pakistan) which had not attacked the U.S. in the first week of taking office. Even Bush took 9 months before he acted like Hitler.

To help the people of Haiti, I recommend donating to Partners in Health that already have offices in Haiti and a long history of provision of aid, without preconditions and excessive bureaucracy. I have donated to them during the flooding that occurred in 2004 and they do great work. They have already provided two trucks of medical equipment into Port-au-Prince from their office in another town.

Of course, if you choose another aid organisation, that's still great.

Via Jill, I learned of a documentary that is currently seeking funding, following the people of Carteret Island in the Pacific who are being displaced by rising waters. There are other climate refugees, such as people fleeing the conflict in Darfur, due ultimately to the evaporation of Lake Chad and loss of arable lands. However, the issue of impending loss of low lying islands due to erosion from sea level rise has been raised by many island nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives. The film illustrates the effect on the people of Carteret island of forced emigration to nearby Bougainville island as the first refugees solely due to climate change. The film is seeking funding online, which is in the form of pledges.

A Minuet in E major recorded as a double tracked duet by the Baroque composer Adam Falckenhagen.

mp3: 

Minuet.mp3

Dear Prime Minister,

I urge you to recognise Australia's obligations to the world in it's negotiations at the Copenhagen COP-15 summit. Australia heavily burdens the world with it's continued reliance on coal and natural gas export industries. This is a short-sighted economy which is extremely exposed to changes in production, demand and political influence from multinational corporations. While successive Australian governments have provided enormous taxpayer subsidies to these carbon intensive industries, we have invested relatively tiny amounts of money in renewable energy industries. This is holding back Australian research and development in knowledge intensive renewable technologies.

There is now a new release available of the MusicKit that will run on MacOS 10.4 through to 10.6 and GNUstep. Binaries for MacOS 10.6 Intel only are now also available. Versions of MacOS below 10.4 are no longer officially supported. Please refer to MusicKit_ChangeLog.txt for the official list of changes, but the highlights are:

• MacOS 10.6 is now supported.


• Vector hardware on MacOS X is supported for both PPC and Intel.


• Apple AudioUnits are now built as standard in the SndKit.

As an expat Aussie living in France and watching the climate debate in Canberra, it is with a sense of shame and disbelief to watch the Labour and Liberal parties obscure the real issues of climate change. Prime minister Rudd's concessions to the Liberal party climate deniers is simply enormous corporate welfare of $5.8 billion to be paid by taxpayers to keep the coal industry polluting. An emissions trading scheme is just permission to pollute by industries who's era is over. Europe has already demonstrated how ineffective an ETS is at reducing carbon, while leading to spiking electricity costs. Australia needs a flat carbon fee that is not able to be manipulated, to properly reflect the cost the country and our children will continue to pay into the future.

I had the wonderful opportunity to jam with Martha Sparks, an excellent alto saxophonist from Melbourne at my apartment in NYC, early 2001. This is an improvisation between Martha and me on sax and oud (Arabic lute) respectively.

mp3: 

Sax Oud Duo.mp3

A multitrack recording of GR-300 guitar synthesizer & fretless bass.

mp3: 

OpenEyes.mp3

I've just posted an updated 1.0.31 install file for SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp) to build on PowerPC Macintoshes using the fink package manager. This should eventually appear as part of the unstable section of fink for MacOS 10.5. MacOS 10.5.X is the end of the road for PPC Mac's (and I'm still running a 8 year old cannablised PowerBook G4 to build SBCL). There is another maintainer for the Intel build for SBCL, and the current 1.0.32 in development hopefully should build correctly on MacOS 10.6.