Facebook rant++: Open Letter to Speaker John Boehner

Speaker Boehner:

Do your job. You need to call for a vote on a "clean" budget bill IMMEDIATELY or resign. If you refuse to do so and continue your anti-government, un-Constitutional tactics to the point that the United States of America defaults on our debt, you should be tried for seditious conspiracy (18 U.S.C. § 2384), and I do not level this charge lightly. You are not only actively destroying the credibility of the US government, you stand to destroy the credit-worthiness of the United States of America and a significant portion of the amassed wealth of its citizens.

You refuse to call for a vote on a budget bill that will re-open the government based on your claims that it lacks the votes to pass. There are MANY sources that disagree with your math on this (see Doing the Math, below), but "your math" shouldn't matter. The government is shutdown due to lack of a viable budget bill being presented for a vote, and you, Speaker Boehner, are the one that can call for this vote. If there aren't the votes to pass this bill, fine, but give your fellow legislators a chance to do their job. This is obstructionism at its absolute worst.

I'll concede that I'm no Constitutional scholar, and since neither of us are attorneys, we'll each have our own layman's understanding of how it's supposed to work. But even so, the Constitution provides that any bills that involve "raising revenue" (such as a "budget bill") originate in the House of Representatives (Article 1, Section 7), which you control. Further, the Constitution also expressly burdens Congress with the duty "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States" (Article 1, Section 8). I don't think it's a huge stretch to think that if the Framers went to the trouble to think through both who's responsible for "raising revenues" and paying our debts that they considered that something that's relatively important. And is a government that is shut down (offering only critical services) yet costing taxpayers MORE in the process really contributing to the "general Welfare of the United States"?

Instead of doing your job, you choose to ignore the Constitution and resort to extortionist tactics to expand your powers beyond those bestowed upon your office by the Constitution. In so doing, you defiantly trample on the intentions of the Constitution and its Framers. You've chosen to turn your office and the execution of your duties into a political lever to claim a personal veto power over existing legislation. This incredible over-reach asserts a power that the Constitution affords NO ONE -- not even the President.  As I said, I'm no Constitutional scholar, but I just can't imagine that somewhere in the Great Beyond the Framers of the Constitution are watching this debacle you've created and thinking, "Yeah. That's it. THAT'S how this is supposed to work." I'd suppose, instead, that they're with the rest of us and probably lining up behind your latest 11% Congressional approval rating, which is statistically a tie with the WORST APPROVAL RATING EVER FOR ANY CONGRESS. You must be proud.

As citizens of this great country with a vested interest in an operational government and sound economy, we must constantly measure the performance of our elected officials. And truthfully, your latest assessment doesn't look very good (the 11% approval rating aside, I'm specifically talking about your PERSONAL performance). Your refusal to call for a vote suggests that either:

a) the vote won't go the way you want it to, so you've decided to take the US (and possibly global) economy hostage to impose your will over the will of the people, or,
b) you are incapable or unwilling to execute the duties of your office.

I will happily give you the benefit of the doubt; I don't believe that the good people of southwestern Ohio managed to elect a total moron to 12 terms in the House of Representatives. But that, unfortunately, leaves us to assess your recent actions as incompetence, intransigence, or seditious conspiracy, which is defined by the U.S. Code, in part, as when "...two or more persons...conspire to...prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States". Of course, as a member of Congress, you are also exempted from arrest, save Treason, Felony or Breach of the Peace (Article 1, Section 6), but seditious conspiracy is a felony. This would qualify you and your Tea Party co-conspirators for fines and up to 20 years in prison. Honestly, that sounds about right, especially when these behaviors come from those sworn by oath to uphold the Constitution.

Now don't get me wrong -- I'm all for smaller government, but there are Constitutionally-provided mechanisms to achieve these goals. You cannot undo the collective work of government expansionists (like Reagan and G. W. Bush) overnight -- and you shouldn't try. Even if the will of the people was on your side, this is not the right course of action to accomplish your goals. Propose legislation that amends the current legislation you want to change and follow the process. Oh, and "following the process" also implies that you must live with the outcome. It seems you're not happy with the results of your MANY failed attempts to defund, delay, or otherwise undermine the Affordable Care Act, or we wouldn't be in this situation. Did you learn nothing from Newt Gingrich's GOP-led government shutdown(s) in 1995 (which you were party to), the resulting public backlash, and Gingrich's own acknowledgement that shutting down the government was his "single most avoidable mistake"? And seriously, there can't be anything enjoyable in letting political opportunists like Ted Cruz call the shots.

It's incomprehensible to me that you've learned nothing from history and shut down the government for purely political reasons. Then, coincidentally, that shut down puts us squarely on a trajectory that forces the world to wonder if the United States of America is about to default on its debts. You show no respect for this country, our Constitution, due process, or our international reputation, which, prior to now, I didn't think could be any worse. Your actions are counter to the interests of the United States and have squarely crossed into the territory of "high crimes and misdemeanors". 

THIS. MUST. STOP. NOW.

You are the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States of America. This is a leadership role -- one that has responsibilities beyond political boundaries and party lines. It's time to start LEADING. Your country is depending on you to do so. This has gone too far and you're the one empowered to end it. Stop the political infighting, step up, and get busy doing something to earn your $223K+ salary. You were the one that wanted this job -- now you need to do it. #doyourjob

Sincerely -

Shane O.


Doing the Math: 217 votes are required to pass a budget bill in the House of Representatives. 195 members of Congress have signed a document indicating they would support a "clean" budget bill, and 25 more have indicated verbally that they would support it as well. This means there are 220 votes to support it, 3 more than necessary to pass. You indicate that there aren't enough votes to pass, but offer no details or numbers.

Playing with new toys...

I'm a fan of Google Apps.  I was a fan of OpenOffice back in the day, but then ended up working at a couple of Microsoft-centric companies and fell back into my Microsoft Office ways.  And to be fair, Microsoft Office is a simply amazing suite of office productivity applications.  To a package, Microsoft still probably has at least 50% more features/capabilities than the corresponding Google App.  However, I typically only need a simply functional suite of office applications and rarely do I need amazing.

What's cool, though, is the ability to extend Google Apps -- relatively easily -- with Google Apps Script.

So today, I was working on compiling some survey responses from a SurveyMonkey poll I put together.  It was important to us to see not only the IP address of the respondent, but to learn what we could about them from that information.  I Googled around and quickly came to the conclusion that the protected "sandbox" that Google allows you to build your scripts/functions/formulae in is simply too constrained to be able to do what I needed.  So, I figured I'd need to reach out to another system to do the lower-level work for me.

SurveyMonkey gives you the option to download your survey responses in a spreadsheet-friendly format.  I downloaded mine in Excel (.xls) format and imported them into a Google Spreadsheet.

Amongst the fields that SurveyMonkey shares is a standard one:  "IP Address".  What I needed was a quick way to do a reverse DNS lookup (PTR record) on the IP and stuff that into a cell.  Unfortunately, Google spreadsheet doesn't provide a gethostbyaddr() function by default, so I had to build one.

This amounted to two key things:

• Get familiar with Google Apps Script
• Use my freshly honed PHP-fu to finish the job

Google makes it pretty easy to get familiar with Google Apps Script (courtesy their tutorials) and using their training wheels (templates and sample code), I was able to knock out a quick and dirty solution in nothing flat.

Following their "Add a Custom Function to a Spreadsheet" guidance, I threw together a function (in Javascript) that looks like this (with the URL hostname changed to protect the innocent):

function getHostByAddr(addr) {

  var addr = addr;

  var baseUrl = "http://foo.com/utils/ptr.php?ip=";

  var url = baseUrl + addr;

  var result = UrlFetchApp.fetch(url);

  var content = result.getContentText();

  return content;

}

Now by simply adding a function into a spreadsheet cell, a la:

     =getHostByAddr(F2)

I end up grabbing the response HTML document from the URL request and stuffing it into the cell containing the function call/"formula".  Note:  In the formula example above, "F2" refers to the cell containing the IP address.

Now, I just need something to do the actual reverse DNS lookup for me.  Here's where the quickest and dirtiest PHP script ever came into play.  At the URL listed above in the function code, I laid down ptr.php, which contains nothing more than:

<?php

/* This grabs the value of "ip" from the URL parms, does a reverse DNS lookup, then prints it and exits */

$hostname = gethostbyaddr($_GET["ip"]);

echo $hostname;

?>

Now I said this was quick and dirty.  The anal-compulsive amongst you might notice that the output of this script will actually be a well-formed HTML document, complete with , , and tags.  Fortunately, for my current purposes, this is OK, since the spreadsheet basically strips those tags and displays just the content, which is just what I wanted.  If I wanted to invest more time in this, I could parse the returning HTML and grab the data I want, or get even more complicated and return JSON, but for my needs for now, this works just fine.

And by now, I've already spent more than twice as long writing this blog post than I did the two scripts combined (including ramp-up time).

DevOps - in comments, tweets, and rants...

A friend shared an article today:

        http://www.grahamlea.com/2013/02/what-is-devops-in-bullet-points-quotes-and-tweets/

For me, I don't think that DevOps is as much a "cultural movement" as it is a logical response to changes in the market, so here are my bullets:

• "Shrink-wrap Software" left engineering groups believing that software needs to be damn near perfect before you can ship it. 
• "Perfect" software has always been as mythical as unicorns and leprechauns, and chasing it has always been a fallacy. 
• It's known that buggy, crappy software doesn't sell (without massive marketing efforts).
• SaaS has changed the way engineers can think about the "perfection" level of their software. 
• It's easier to fix bugs, apply security updates, add features, etc., if your software is running on machines you control and not buried behind firewalls in the inner sanctum of an enterprise data center. 
• Most engineers cannot be trusted to have unfettered access to change software, once deployed into production.  No offense intended, but if you're offended, I was probably talking about you.  
• Even if "most" were "some" or even "occasionally", you still can't identify which ones can be trusted and which ones can't, so you have to build process and access firewalls to protect your operational service platforms. 
• You need people with the "operations mentality": 
• motivated by successful delivery of a service
• enchanted with thoughts of high availability and service resilience in the face of every variable that could change
• paranoid that anything that could go wrong, will 
• Things in data centers (or the cloud) tend to go wrong when humans are responsible for changing things. 
• Classic "operations" techs/engineers have been more focused on infrastructure, networks, physical security, server hardware, etc. -- all of which you now inherit or are no longer material as services move to "the cloud". 
• Agile development practices are shifting teams away from building "products" and toward building "service features". This more modular approach means you have the option to consider releasing features independently of "product releases". 
• Some companies are releasing changes to their services multiple times a day. Whether you use it or not, having the ability to do multiple releases a day is VERY VALUABLE!
• Consider only the bug fix scenario — VERY VALUABLE! 
• All of these changes in IT, development practices, market expectations, and product delivery combine to force companies to reconsider how they deliver their software-based products and/or services 
• Reconsidering is necessary only for the existing, transitioning company. Start-ups are viewing this brave new world as a massive removal of barriers to entry in even the biggest and most complex marketplaces. 
• Start-ups are looking at this new world order not as "How do my staffing needs change?" but rather as "What minimal functions do I need in my organization to guarantee that my customers can get to their service in almost any situation?" 
• DevOps largely incorporates those minimal functions into a role. 
• What are the responsibilities of a real DevOps team?
• Procedurally keep the developers from making arbitrary changes whenever they feel like it.
• Understand how "servers" get deployed in the infrastructure that you're using (e.g., Amazon cloud, Rackspace cloud, physical hardware in a hosted data center, virtual machines in a VMware virtual center, etc.), know that server deployment is part of the job, and figure out how to make it as easy and repeatable as possible. 
• Understand how applications get deployed on servers deployed in the infrastructure and know that you have to do this a lot.  Work with development to get a comprehensive understanding of the app and figure out how to make it as easy and repeatable as possible.
• Know enough about system administration, network administration and application administration to be able to configure your infrastructure appropriately — and troubleshoot typical problems 
• Know the application(s), its dependencies, its features, its idiosyncrasies, its performance, its behavior and how to make it sing 
• Know how to monitor the application — while running — and the infrastructure it's dependent on to be able to detect anomalies quickly and ultimately, to detect impending problems before they happen (using predictive indicators — it ain't magic, it's science).
• And most importantly, embrace the fact that you've been given an application that's been built and blessed by development, tested and blessed by QA, and accepted by you and your peers as the new basis for the service that you are responsible for running 7x24x365 at 99.999% availability (and note: The .001% downtime must be scheduled.)

Another Facebook Rant: Reforming Marijuana Legislation

Here, in the post-election days of November 2012, politics are still front and center for many of us. Republicans are afraid the sky will fall under Obama's second term (I think we've thoroughly debunked the Mayans agreement with this, although they weren't concerned with the election results). Obama supporters are still reveling in their post-win after-glow. And those supporting the reform of marijuana laws are wondering what the hell is going to come next, now that Colorado and Washington voters have legalized marijuana for personal use (note, not "medical" use, but outright "personal use") in their respective states.

Personally, I don't care what you choose to do -- smoke pot, don't smoke pot -- that's none of my business. However, I do care that my government doesn't infringe upon the personal rights of its citizens, and I think that's at the heart of this issue.

So with no further adieu, I give you my Sunday morning rant on legalizing marijuana:

I can find very few (if any) issues where the government has gotten an issue so wrong for so long. I also think that we're just getting to the point where the combination of a new generation of voters and a desperate need for reduced costs and new revenue streams at all layers of government gives marijuana re-legalization a fighting chance. I'm also a strong advocate of personal freedoms, and I see marijuana consumption as the ultimate victimless crime. In fact, the only "crime" in the marijuana industry today is the crime that the government facilitates by continuing to treat it as a Schedule 1 narcotic and thereby necessitating that an organized crime structure form around its growth/distribution.

The US proved during the Prohibition years (1920-1933) that you cannot preclude a substance from being made available if the demand is great enough. Prohibition also proved that if you create that scenario, you also create the perfect breeding ground for things like today's mafia. Some historians have also made the case that alcohol consumption, per capita, didn't change at all during the Prohibition years. Prohibition was also largely considered to be an attempt by rural Protestants to limit the freedoms of Catholics and urbanites. And ultimately, Prohibition was repealed because it never really had broad support and while everybody was still drinking, it was only the working-class poor who were being arrested for it. Estimates at the time say that 80% of the legislators that passed the Prohibition amendment were still avid drinkers during the Prohibition years. I cannot begin to describe the number of parallels between the failures of Prohibition and the current failures of the insane "War on Drugs" and current marijuana legislation.

Early anti-marijuana laws were fueled heavily by racism against Mexicans in the west and against blacks in the east. Compare that now to who is getting arrested for marijuana use today. I may be cynical here, but rarely do we see laws made for the general good of the public -- more typically, we see new laws made because they are financially beneficial to someone or some group, and only then do they get "spun" as being in the best interest of the general public. Along the way to marijuana criminalization, the forestry industry (who wanted hemp out of the way of their new-found lock on the paper industry), Dupont Chemical (who had patents on creating plastics out of oil/petroleum, but not hemp), the oil industry (in league with Dupont), the cotton industry (out of fear of having competition from a 'better' fiber), and pharmaceutical companies (who have little control and far lower margins on organic-based drugs) have provided significant funding (read: lobbying dollars and campaign contributions) to keep hemp illegal. Note: hemp is the male of the "cannabis" genus and has only trace amounts of the psycho-active element (THC) that's found in abundance in the female plants. Merely by having the marijuana laws be non-specific about the sex of the plants, lawmakers and lobbyists have been able to outlaw hemp and protect their financial interests along the way.

So we outlaw marijuana while we continue to support tobacco (which kills 443,000 in the US every year) and alcohol (responsible for over 40,000 deaths per year in the US, EXCLUDING traffic-related fatalities). One must also note that marijuana has no known deaths related to cannabis consumption. That's ZERO. So we legally control and regulate two known substances that kill almost half a million people a year while another -- with no effective means of killing anyone -- we spend BILLIONS to keep illegal, arresting those who choose to use it, and incarcerating others for growing/possessing/selling this Schedule 1 narcotic. At this point, I'm going to avoid a seething rant on Reagan's minimum-mandatory sentencing policies/legislation and their associated costs/limited benefits for fear of digressing from my main point...

There's not much in this whole history of marijuana criminalization that we can be proud of:

• racism started public support for anti-marijuana laws
• Crony-ism made the anti-marijuana laws federal (a disgusting story in itself)
• big money funded the expansion and maintenance of anti-marijuana laws
• these insane laws are enforced in ways that adversely impact minorities
• farmers are prevented from growing a crop with numerous industrial uses, yet encouraged and subsidized to grow corn (do we really need more corn?!?!?)
• people who could benefit from the medical uses of marijuana are forced to suffer without it (or must turn to alternatives which are less effective or have significant side effects)

Inevitably, the "marijuana is a gateway drug" argument comes up as well. And in fairness, this is a reasonable argument, and would be even more reasonable if there were solid scientific studies to prove it. In fact, there are none. There have been plenty of studies done, including the massively-flawed and largely-discredited one that Nancy Reagan hung her hat on. At best, the studies suggest there is correlation and that there COULD BE causation, but most of them suggest that the "gateway" effect has more to do with the willingness to try something that's illegal. One study in Amsterdam showed that less than a fourth (22%) of those who had smoked marijuana had ever even tried anything harder, while in the US the percentage is greater than 33%. So even if there are any "gateway" effects, are they related to marijuana itself or our criminalization of marijuana? It certainly seems like the latter.

Don't get me wrong here -- I'm not advocating that everybody should run out and light up, even if it were a legal option. Rather, I'm a big fan of personal freedoms -- the personal freedoms that marijuana growers (and probable smokers) like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had in mind for us. I think we should have the right to do what we want -- to worship how we want, to behave how we want, to love how we want, to raise our kids how we want, to treat our bodies how we want, to read what we want, to listen to what we want, and ultimately to consume what we want -- so long as it doesn't preclude others from enjoying those same freedoms or cause us to inflict some undue burden on the rest of society. I don't believe that legalizing marijuana violates either of those conditions.

So finally, I'd like to see my government focused on protecting my rights and getting its financial house in order. I believe that legalizing marijuana with controls, regulation, and taxation not only serves both of those goals, but it renounces a sketchy history by which those laws came to be -- and it just makes sense.

A Pre-Election Rant on "Love of Country" vs. protecting freedoms

I posted this earlier today as a Facebook status.  As statuses go, I got a little carried away. I'm re-posting this here as I wanted to save this in a place I could easily find it in the future...and I'll let Google find it here as well.  ;-)

****************************************

While I'm ranting on politics, one of the reasons I personally value the separation of church and state is that it helps -- or should help -- to keep any one religion from legislating its positions as law. 

It's usually easy for any of us as individuals to assess a situation and determine the "right" course of action, given our sense of morality, ethics, and concern for our fellow man. However, it's often difficult for us to determine if that common "right" course of action is so obvious, so fundamental, that it should be made a law and that we all are forced to behave that way. It's appealing to our senses of morality and ethics, our psyches, and even our egos to say, "Yes, that should be a law. This is common sense. This is right." We don't have that same self-indulgent pull to say, "No. This should be up to the individual. I may disagree with how you exercise your choice, but you deserve the right to choose."

Freedom is a difficult beast. It's something we're blessed with as Americans, it's something we most defend (from internal as well as external threats), it causes us plenty of problems, and it comes with responsibility. As Americans, we often don't do well with responsibility, so it's no wonder we don't do well with protecting our freedoms from a government that would take them away.

Mitt Romney angers me. In these final throws of the election, he's wrapped himself in the flag and proclaims that a vote for him is a vote for loving your country. I'm sorry, Mitt, but I don't know how you can make that leap. I hear you tell us what you believe in, but that seems to change with your audience. I hear you say that we can't afford another 4 years of Obama, but you give me no plan as to how your 4 might look any different, save the legislative pandering to the far right you brag about. And you tell me that a vote for you is a vote for love of country? We must be talking about different things.

I love my country for its freedoms and its opportunities. I don't like it when anyone -- let alone Mitt Romney -- is OK revoking the freedoms of others. If you're a woman, you lose freedoms in a Romney administration. If you're gay, you lose freedoms in a Romney administration. If you're middle class or poor, you lose tax dollars and federal programs (read: "opportunity") in a Romney administration. What do you gain under Romney? Inevitable tax increases, trillions more in spending in a national defense that is already funded at 5x the spending of the nearest rival, a continuation of the NONSENSICAL "war on drugs", and far fewer freedoms. Limiting the freedoms of my fellow Americans does NOT equate to "love of country" in my book. No how. No way.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm no huge fan of Obama. I think he had tremendous political capital that he squandered. But he inherited a steaming pile of economic problems, too. The economic precipice that George Bush led us up to was pretty steep and Obama ultimately prevented us from going over the edge. The bail-out was a painful step, but deep down, I believe it was necessary in some form. In the end, I think the bad economy that Obama faced was a reality for any President to have to contend with, regardless of party. But Obama's presidency wasn't solely about the economy.

Obama eventually saw his way clear to support gay marriage, and you can choose to hold your own opinions about the "morality" of being gay, but as Americans, our freedoms MUST come first. Your religion and your morality are your business -- the only thing I ask of you is to allow me to have mine and for others to have theirs. The same argument holds for a woman's right to her own body. And for a Muslim that wants to build a mosque. And for a cancer patient that wants to smoke a joint. And that right must even be afforded to Fox News. As an American, you are entitled to your freedoms and you are responsible for protecting those freedoms -- for you and for your fellow Americans as well. You are not obligated to agree with how anyone else exercises their freedoms, but you are responsible to protect our freedoms when we meet in person as well as when you step behind the curtain of the voting booth. You cannot vote for "love of country" if that vote is depriving Americans of freedoms. This must be fundamental in our selection of a leader.

Could Obama have done better? Absolutely. Is Obama the best president we've had? Absolutely not. Is he the better of the options afforded us tomorrow? Yes. And it's not about his record or his promises or his capabilities or his charming wife. It's about freedom.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Innovation Leaders

Here's an article that I wish my current company would read...

OpenSource.com's The 7 Deadly Sins of Innovation Leaders

Another Unnecessary Project!

I've always been fascinated by doing things because I can, not always because I should.  I think I've stumbled onto another one of these projects.  First, though, some back story...

I'm a drummer...again.  I played drums starting in 5th grade through college, then focused on bass guitar (because of the band I was in) and got out of the drumming business.  However, I never quite lost the bug and as of about 3 years ago, I got back into it, buying a couple of kits and joining a band (which has morphed into another, different band, but I digress...)

A friend, let's call him James (since that's his name), recently bought a set of electronic drums.  I'd previously had a set in the late 80s and they were pretty horrible, so my opinion had been pretty well set against electronic options.  That was until recently.  James got me thinking and then I had a chance to talk with a local musician who has been playing "silently" for years.  The motivation for their band was eliminating the need for monitors allows them to have in-ear monitors that represent the full mix, eliminating the need for a sound man (read: more money for the band) and having players that are in tune with what the audience is actually hearing.  No monitors also means no surprising feedback loops.

But a step beyond going without monitors is the quest for the "zero stage volume" band.  That means that drums are somehow silent (with electronic drums or triggers installed on acoustic drums w/ mesh heads) and no guitar amplifiers.  If a drummer can get comfortable with an electronic set, surely a guitarist can forego his amp, can't he?  This is a more difficult thing to overcome than you might think.

Guitarists are on an eternal quest for tone.  This is equated to what sounds you hear when the guitar is played, and it's the sum of the guitar, the guitar's pickups, and signal processing that's happening in the guitar, the effects that are used (i.e., foot pedals, integrated effects units, rackmount effects, etc.), and the amplifier.  The amplifier is a pretty important part of this signal path, since it typically includes a tube-based pre-amp, a tube-based post-amp, and speakers that are finally responsible for actually producing the sound.  While the amplifier is important, it's an oddity in the amplifier market that causes amps to not just be part of the signal path, but also to be part of the problem.

You see, most guitarists seeking "tone" are using all-tube amps, and they're looking for that "warm" tone from overdriven tubes, which means that the signal going into the tubes is slightly more than the tube can handle cleanly and it causes the signal to be distorted, but distorted in a way that adds harmonic frequency overtones to the signal.  It ends up making the signal sound bigger, "warmer", and gives it a little bit of attitude.  The problem comes in that you really need to be pushing the tubes to their max to get this kind of effect, and most tube amps are built to handle so much power that the amp really needs to be BLASTING sound in order to "warm" up the tone, which means that it's going to be really loud on stage.  Contrary to most guitarists theory on the topic, this is not a good thing.

There are three options to get guitars to "zero stage volume":

• Plugging in direct to the PA and foregoing the amp
• Attenuators
• Isolator boxes

Personally, I like the first option.  I believe that in most cases, the tone that most guitarists strive for is generally lost before it gets to the audience by virtue of running through a lesser microphone (generally placed in front of the guitar amp), a lesser solid-state amp in the PA, and PA speakers which aren't optimized for guitar tones.  However, there's something to be said for keeping the guitarists happy and feeling like they are getting a great tone (regardless of what the audience is actually hearing).

The second option is a funky one, but interesting nonetheless.  Basically, it places additional load between the amp and the speaker and absorbs the signal that would otherwise be really LOUD at the speaker and reduces it to a more sane volume.  The downsides to this approach are that these almost universally impact the tone in some way, guitarists who like loud will be disappointed, and it usually means modifying the output path of the amp in a way that makes it difficult (or at least inconvenient) to switch back and forth between using the attenuator and not.

Finally, the isolator box.  This approach just basically says "hey, you are a guitar player and you need to play loud to sound good, so play loud and we'll contain the volume in this box".  The upside is that nothing is really modified, but the downside is that you have to carry another box to the gig.

Again, I like option 1.

Anyway, I was mentioning my new project.  I recently purchased the Roland TD-4S, an electronic kit that is intended to be small, compact and portable.  Part of its portability trades off the system's expandability.  Where most electronic drum modules take 16 or more trigger in puts, the TD-4 has a DB-25 which connects to a hard-wired cable harness that connects to each of the triggers.  I kind of like the appeal of the "more trigger ports" option, although the TD-4 only supports the triggers that are wired.  So here's my project:  build a DB-25 breakout panel that exposes each of the triggers as a 1/4" jack input.  That would allow me to eliminate the wiring harness and use standard mono and balanced 1/4" cables.  

"But, Shane", you say, "your wiring harness works fine and your DB-25 interface is going to disallow any expansion, so why would you do this?".  Because I can, my friend.  Because I can.

And also because I already found the pin-out diagram online:

Wish me luck, or sanity...or both.