Truer Words - A Journal

Why Won't You Be My Neighbor?

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 20:17:43 GMT

In Declining Your Friend Request, Apollo writes:

I’m on a large number of social networks. On some of them, people see my profile and add me out of the blue.

After receiving numerous such friend requests, particularly on new social networks, like Twitter and Pownce, I thought I’d put together a list [so you'll know why I declined your invitation].

I totally agree with Apollo. I'm only on a few social networks, but I receive a few too many requests "to be friends" from total strangers.

In fact, a few weeks ago one such request got me into some trouble. See if you can follow this: The potential "friend's" nickname sounded slightly familiar, so I followed the link to see who it was. The page was loading very slowly, and then Rich started talking to me in IM so I brought Adium to the front. One of his messages included a link, which (when clicked) opened in a new tab in Firefox. Time passed, and I forgot all about the page I'd been waiting for. Corinne sat down next to me, I showed her something, and then started shutting down the Mac for the night. As I closed my tabs in Firefox one-by-one (so I could be sure I wasn't leaving any unfinished work anywhere, as I've done many times), there was the link I'd followed from the "friend request": a page on Flickr with a model in all of her, uh... "natural beauty." NOT COOL.

Anyway, I don't care enough about the social networks to bother acknowledging most of the friend requests. I do feel the pressure to reciprocate with people I actually know, but mostly I just wish the networks would go away. How anti-social of me.

Working On Tools

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:17:03 GMT

Immediately after "retiring" from the Prototype Core Team, I became active (for the first time!) on the group and finally did what I was there to do in the first place. The next version of Prototype (1.6) will have custom events. The custom events code in 1.6 doesn't look much like the code I described in my essay a year ago, but it's built on the same idea: piggyback custom events on one of the browser's built-in events. (The custom events code in 1.6 was written by a number of people, not just me.)

Anyway, the real point here is that I use Prototype for nearly all of my web projects now, and I contribute to its development. That's working on my own tools.

Plus, immediately after finishing my side of Prototype's new events code, I realized that the next version of Prototype didn't look quite right in BBEdit's function popup. (Some objects were listed as [anonymous] when they should have had names, and some class methods were listed as though they weren't contained by anything.)

So, I updated BBEdit's JavaScript module to fix that problem.

I'm rather proud of the JavaScript support in BBEdit, but (again) the real point here is that I love being able to work on my own tools! (See the BBEdit Disclaimer...)

The same is true for Conversant, which currently runs on Frontier, and which runs my site (and lots of others).

Being a tool-builder makes me feel like a real craftsman.

Pudge on Gruber on Amoroso on Steve Jobs

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:31:16 GMT

Steve Jobs wrote an essay about why he thinks the music industry should drop DRM (the 'feature' that prevents you from using music you've purchased at the iTunes music store on more than a few machines).

This greedy clown at Macrovision, Fred Amoroso, responded.

John Gruber translated Macrovision's response from “PR speak" to English. John's a funny guy.

Now Pudge, on /., has translated John's story from "Pundit-speak" to English. It's funny enough to have me laughing out loud most of the way through it.

Macrovision has been in the content protection industry for more than 20 years, working closely with content owners of many types, including the major Hollywood studios, to help navigate the transition from physical to digital distribution.

We've been helping and encouraging the entertainment industry to annoy its paying customers for more than 20 years.

I have an amazing power to state the obvious.

Very funny stuff. I'm glad that John linked to it himself, too.

(There's a lot more if you follow the link, that quote is just one part.)

A Sense of Family

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:44:31 GMT

Jed moved in with us at the end of July, 2005. His bedroom was in the back corner of our finished basement, right off the incomplete kitchen. My office is down here also, at the other end of the house.

I've always worked long hours — being self employed makes that almost unavoidable — but having Jed down here changed something for me: I regained a sense of family that (I'm ashamed to admit) I'd lost at some point in the years since Corinne and I were first married.

It's not that there was any trouble in our marriage. Not even close. We still felt like a couple, and we've always been in love with each other. We just weren't a family. Maybe it was related to losing Shane, I don't know.

Children aren't a required element of a family: I believe you can be a family of two. Plenty of parents-and-children "units" aren't very family-like. So, to my mind, children aren't the key.

Having Jed around provided me, at least, with that sense of family. The moment he left (Dec 6th), I was instantly aware of the loss of that feeling. I felt family-less.

At the same time, I became keenly aware of Corinne, upstairs, going about her day. She's home more now that she's not working, and her “office” (the bird room) is still having the drywall repaired and repainted, so she spends most of her time in her “new” office (the livingroom right above my head), or in the kitchen which is just one room over. I hear her movements, puttering around the house, talking to the animals or on the phone (or to herself!)

So what of it? I've found my lost sense of family by doing the obvious: spending more time upstairs, with the person (and critters) that make my family unique. I've totally stopped watching TV (for a couple of weeks, now), too, so when I'm upstairs I'm able to pay more attention.

Aside

Related to this — though I'm not quite sure how — is another change. I've been going to bed earlier and getting up earlier, every single day. Going to bed by 11 and getting up by 7 when everyone else is still sleeping, then having my breakfast and doing the readings out on the deck as the sun comes up.

Nothing earth shattering, but it's weird that this happened without my making a conscious decision to do it. For months I had been going to sleep extremely late, and then was too tired to get up at any decent hour.

Again, it changed when Jed left, but I think this is just one effect in a long chain of causes-and-effects.

I can't over-stress what a big deal this is for me. A lot of things in my life feel more “right,” now, than they have in a long time. And of course, this “sense of family” is stronger than it was when Jed was here (brother versus wife...). Plus, work has been more challenging and rewarding than it has been in years.

Questions

What will happen when the “bird room” is finished (possibly Friday, with a couple more days to move all the stuff back in there) and Corinne's office is no longer in the living room? There's no room for me to park in the bird room in the evenings, so it looks like we're going to replace Corinne's eMac with a used (or cheap and new) laptop so that we can BOTH be in the living room (or wherever).

If we're going to do it, I'm hoping we can pick it up before MacWorld SF. It'll be handy for her to have her own machine, so she can still check her email after mine is stolen from the show floor. ;-)

(Oh, hey, I hadn't yet mentioned that we're going to MacWorld...)
With all of these changes, all this new-found sense of family and rightness, will things get even better (or just “differenter?”) when we have the brand new baby girl here in the house?

(Oh, hey, I guess I hadn't mentioned that yet, either!)

How to Serve Compressed Data with mod_gzip and Apache 1.3 on Mac OS X

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:04:09 GMT

Some of us have recently been discussing the size of the Prototype library, my preferred library for DHTML/AJAX). Proponents of some of the other libraries play up their smaller file sizes, and it's true that this is a real issue for some people.

This little essay/how-to explains the basic ideas (the what, how, and why), and then walks you through setting up Apache on Mac OS X, to enable mod_gzip and serve compressed content. If you skip the editorial content and just follow the steps I've outlined, you should have everything up and running in fifteen minutes or less.

Creating Custom Events with JavaScript: Decoupling

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 19:50:36 GMT

Many "Web 2.0" applications suffer from too-tight-coupling between the various javascript objects used to model the data and control the interface. This has always been seen as a necessary evil because there seemed to be no good alternative.

One common solution in desktop applications is called "event driven programming." Not just user-supplied events like mouse clicks, hovers, and window scrolls (obviously, we do all of that in our javascript apps already), but actual data-driven or state-driven events such as "message selected" or "preference changed".

Truly custom events, when used correctly, allow you to decouple many of the JS objects in your application. This leads to better self-containment and much better maintainability.

It has generally been considered impossible — or at least too difficult — to create truly custom events in our applications. There is a W3C spec for custom events, but it's not supported by most of the browsers so is really of no use to us.

Read the full essay and together we'll examine the problem a little more closely, and consider my solution. (There may be others, but all I found was attempt after attempt to duplicate the features already provided by the browser.)

2006, Fore and Aft

seth@macrobyte.net — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 20:12:18 GMT

On the last day of 2004, I was happy to say goodbye to the worst year of my life. The best I could say about it was that it wasn't all bad. That's the year Shane died. The love of my life realized her worst nightmare. Literally, it was the worst possible thing she could ever imagine happening in the whole world. It happened at night, just fifteen miles from our home, without any warning. There was no prickly feeling on the backs of our necks, no goose bumps. None of the people in our life (myself included), who so often anticipate big events, had any freaking clue.

It just happened.

We still don't know why. We may never know why. I am inclined to believe there may not even be a 'why'.

It just happened, and it changed everything. And nothing. Corinne is still here. I'm still here. We're more in love than ever. We trust and understand each other in new ways, and rely on each other for different things. Some things in life matter more than they used to (more on that, in a bit), others matter less. Some of our friends proved themselves to be people of great compassion and empathy... and others not so much. But that's ok; it's only natural that our relationships would change as we do. And we are.

Does everything in life revolve around Shane, still, almost two years later? No. Yes. No. Well, ok, yes. You -- we -- can't possibly understand our lives without it. It plays as big a part as our faith, and in fact the two things have merged in many ways.

Does everything on planet earth really revolve around the sun? Yes, in some very literal ways... but it's not like that's all we think about, right? We don't all hide in our caves on rainy days, but humans sure love to talk about the weather.

For us -- and I know it's not exactly the same for the two of us, but I think it's similar -- there was a second... hmm, I almost want to say a second sun, but that's not right. Let me try that again.

If our life revolved (mostly) around our faith, then that faith was like the sun. When Shane died, that faith was dwarfed, for a time, by the gravity of that new thing. The faith was still there, but this new 'black hole' in our hearts threatened to eat it and us and everything. For a long while, we revolved around that, just trying to survive, trapped in its gravity. (Got that?)

In all the confusion of trying to grasp our new reality, there was a time when everything related to our faith took some blame. Blame the ecclesia, blame God, blame family, blame our marriage. Blame anyone who didn't do something exactly when they should or could have.

Slowly, the blame faded. The anger receded. The black hole moved a little further away, or we moved a little further from it. By the middle of 2005, life seemed to revolve around two forces.

Our faith (and how we live it) changed. That's what I see clearest about 2005, even though I don't yet understand how it happened. Somehow, a new emphasis on 'doing good' (and I mean that in a way that makes it grammatically correct!) has been added. Helping, comforting, feeding, exhorting, teaching, providing... all these things seem to matter more now than they did two years ago.

This isn't the first time I've tried to explain the changes in our lives -- not even close -- and I'm sure it won't be the last. Yet, I hope you don't understand it, and I hope you never do, even though I'll keep talking about it.

There was more to say, but my boiler is running out of steam. Let's wrap this up...

So what of 2006, this promising new year? I'll finish with some personal resolutions. I resolve...

to help you smile, and to smile back.
to focus a little more on doing Good, even when it's hard. "More do, less be." Yes, I recognize the irony.
to spend more effort on what's important, and truly put the urgent distractions in their proper place.

That's our life (some of Corinne's, a lot of mine, and a whole lot of 'little us'), looking fore and aft on the first day of 2006.

I hope we all have a Happy New Year!

Hilarious Quote from "The Free Lunch Is Over..."

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 16:41:06 GMT

This morning, after rediscovering Levi's 'other' blog, I read two essays to which he linked. The first was Software and the Concurrency Revolution, by Herb Sutter and James Larus. That builds on the second one I read, The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software, also by Herb Sutter. Both excellent reads, written by leaders in the field.

The latter essay produced the quote that elicited a roar of laughter from yours truly:

Despite this, I will speculate that todays single-threaded applications as actually used in the field could actually see a performance boost for most users by going to a dual-core chip, not because the extra core is actually doing anything useful, but because it is running the adware and spyware that infest many users systems and are otherwise slowing down the single CPU that user has today. I leave it up to you to decide whether adding a CPU to run your spyware is the best solution to that problem.

I'll assume neither the humor (nor the sarcasm) therein requires any illumination.

Better is Better: Improving Productivity through Better Programming Languages

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 01:24:56 GMT

Brian and I were discussing Lisp yesterday. As a follow up, today he pointed me to an essay which he says "represents his views." The essay is Better is better: improving productivity through programming languages by Bill de Hora.

It's an interesting read on the past, present, and future of the programming industry. He covers everything from where we've been, to where (he thinks) we're going, and what our problems are. He even ends on a somewhat positive note.

I agree with a lot of what he says, but his concluding statements seemed a little weak. Mainly, I'm not sure I understand how he thinks the marketplace is going to move to these better languages. As he says, there's a huge system in place right now to support the VB / .NET / JAVA drones, and a market expectation of purchasing programming skills as a commodity. He claims that the market will move away from that towards better, more flexible/malleable languages (either cutting edge scripting languages like Ruby, or ancient languages like LISP, or both), but in the end his assertions seem to rely on his faith that things will work out for the best.

I don't mean that as a harsh criticism. He's done a very good job of tackling a huge subject, and breaking it down in a sensible way. However, looking at the history of our industry, it seems like his faith that the market will change its momentum is misplaced. As others have pointed out, we tend to go in circles rather than make a lot of progress (examples: node-centric vs network-centric architectures, or terminal/text interfaces to GUI apps to the web).

It could happen, I'm not saying it couldn't. But I can't see it happening as a directed effort. The managers who guide their little corners of the market are not the smartest people in the business (if you read the essay, you know what I'm talking about), so they're not going to get there on their own. If it's going to happen, if the market is going to move away from inefficient languages like C++ and Java, it's going to have to be done on a self-organizing vector similar to how the web came about.

Broken Windows

seth@macrobyte.net — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 20:53:24 GMT

Excellent little article/essay on Mindspill about the philosophy/problem of Broken Windows in software development. (Nothing to do with the Windows operating system.)

As he points out, the idea is as applicable to the rest of life as it is to software.

Dave Winer's Software, Users, and Fiftieth Birthday

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 30 Apr 2005 23:13:17 GMT

Years ago, some of us on the old Frontier mailing lists would complain that Dave Winer wrote his software to work for him, specifically. It did exactly what he wanted, how he wanted to do it. Frontier. The Website Framework (Frontier's original static web CMS). Manila. Radio. Some feature requests would make it into the software, but anything more than an inch to either side of Dave's focus had no chance. You had to write it yourself.

Support for using the existing features in ways he didn't anticipate usually got the same lack of interest, or confusion, or even, occasionally, hostility. ("Why would you want to use it that way!?")

That drove me nuts, at the time. It's like we were all being allowed to play with Dave's toys, but only so long as we played with them his way.

Some of you are nodding your heads, remembering those days. Some of you are probably also shaking your heads (at the same time?), thinking this is an attack on Dave. It's not. Keep reading, you'll see this is about users, and even my own education.

Over the years, I've come to see things in a slightly different way. Dave loves the users -- I truly believe that -- just not necessarily *his* users. When Dave has an idea, a vision, he pushes his software in that direction with single-minded ferocity and the force of a hurricane. His users -- meaning, those using his software -- either go with him or blow away. (Consider the transition from Frontier as a Mac scripting system to Frontier as a web development platform.)

His software is just that: his. It's how he expresses his ideas. Dave is -- or at the very least, he thinks of himself as -- the software industry's Uncle Dave. His users aren't those people using his software. His users are those people using his ideas. XML-RPC. Weblogs for everybody. RSS everywhere.

He isn't always right, his ideas aren't always the best, and his implementations almost never are. They are often inspiring, though. Programmers look at what he's done and are inspired to write something better, faster, more scalable, more thorough. But they don't get it. *I didn't get it.* Dave's output isn't his software. His software is just an example, the implementation of whatever idea he was focused on.

The Atom folks think that with Google behind them, they'll beat Dave because his format (RSS) isn't as good. The spec isn't as well written, the format isn't as flexible, and there is no tightly-coupled API (atom is both a format and a publication API). They're probably right about the facts.

But! If, ten years from now, there are one hundred million or a billion Atom feeds and RSS has gone the way of HTML 3.2 (not likely), who has "won?" Would there be an Atom if Dave hadn't worked with Netscape on RSS, or pushed back so hard against the insanity that was RSS 1.0?

Certainly not.

Nor would there be a Conversant without Frontier's original Mainresponder-based discussion groups. "They suck," said I, and Macrobyte (at the time, Brian Andresen, Art Peña and myself) believed we could do better. Conversant has been evolving ever since. (That's a terrible over-simplification, but this isn't a history of Conversant.)

Seen that way, we look like nothing more than a swirly little storm that spun off the side of Hurricane Dave. (As does the current Userland, actually, and a few other companies and applications.) There would be no Conversant without Dave and his annoying, unscalable, made-to-run-his-way software. The expression of Dave's needs, Dave's ideas.

Dave turns fifty on Monday. This is Dave the man, not Dave the hurricane. Dave the man that's missing his Uncle Vavavoom, and is surely thinking about his own mortality.

So, I just want to say, "Thank you, Dave!", and let you know that while others may appreciate you for your abrasive clarity, I prefer the hurricane of ideas and the constant focus on us, your idea-users.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Dave.

The Unpublished Hack: UDDI in Mozilla

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 15:31:57 GMT

This is one of the five 'hacks' that I wrote for the book, Firefox Hacks. It wasn't included in the book because it's too geeky even for most advanced web developers, and Firefox's support for UDDI is incomplete. Still, if you need to work with UDDI, then Firefox could make an excellent test-bed because it's so easy to rapidly develop a user interface, and the missing pieces are easy to download and install.

This guide is just intended to help you start working with UDDI in Firefox. It's not comprehensive, by any means. If you know nothing about UDDI, the best you'll get here is a link for learning more somewhere else.

Note that everything mentioned in this 'hack' applies equally to Firefox and the Mozilla Application Suite (a.k.a. Seamonkey).

Read Hacking on UDDI in Mozilla or Firefox.

My Contributions to O'Reilly's Firefox Hacks

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:12:48 GMT

During the final quarter of 2004, I spent about eighty hours writing five hacks for O'Reilly's new book, Firefox Hacks. (Nigel McFarlane wrote the bulk of it.)

This story, which is both a journal of my work on the hacks and a review of what I wrote, is a little too long for the home page. You can read the whole thing at Articles -> Mozilla -> Firefox Hacks.

Peggy Noonan on Weblogs: Out-of-the-Park Home Run

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 15:34:55 GMT

Yesterday I was told that a close friend thinks "it's creepy to be on the internet," and that "blogs are creepy."

Yes, fine, sure, there are lots of people that still don't get it. There are also lots of people at another point along the wheel who almost understand weblogs but are running scared. Much of the mainstream media fits that category: they're constantly attacking "blogs" and "bloggers" (oh how I hate those words!), but it always comes down to the same thing: they're scared.

Peggy Noonon wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that sums up weblogs brilliantly. She'll tell you why they're important, and what they mean. She doesn't cover every detail, nor every angle: I said it was perfect, not exhaustive.

Go, read and be inspired.

(Thanks for the link, Dave.)

The Little Old Man With Good Teeth and Shaky Hands: Puzzling Logic

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 10:05:00 GMT

Guidelines:

Yes, this is a puzzle.
No, there is no prize for getting it right, other than a bit of satisfaction and perhaps even a new way of looking at the world (no joke).
If you have questions or think you know the answer, post them in a reply and I will respond as I see fit.
PLEASE put "solution" in the message subject if you are posting a solution.
If nobody gets it soon, I'll post the solution.
If I've already talked to you about a puzzle similar to this, then please don't spoil it for anybody else.

A little old man with good teeth but shaky hands stops you in the street and shows you a game. He tells you that for five dollars...

Read the whole puzzle.

More About Morality in the Election

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 10:26:43 GMT

I'm seeing a lot of comments around the web about the morality issue in the election. Most of the comments are from Democrats... which is not really a surprise, since I'm seeing the comments on the web. ;-)

What's bothering me about some of these comments is the idea that the Republicans used fear and proclamations of good and evil to convince the electorate that they were the more moral choice.

Consider Brent's comments:

Now, I voted for Kerry for moral reasons as well as practical. Freedom and civil rights are moral issues. The differences between Kerrys and Bushs foreign and economic policies are, in many cases, moral differences.

(And I think that winning an election by scaring people with gays is immoral. Its cynical, manipulative, panderingand its highly effective.)

Brent considers freedom, civil rights, and Federal fiscal policy to be moral issues. Generally, though, I think people consider those to be, well, civil issues.

Lots of people still believe in the "old fashioned" sense of right and wrong. Bad fiscal policy is stupid, but it's not "sinful." The Patriot Act is disturbing and restrictive and overarching, but it's not shameful or scandalous.

This knee-jerk reaction that the Republicans only got the "morality vote" because they scared people is just plain wrong, and is preventing people from seeing what may have actually happened here. That is, the "left" and the "right" seem to have developed entirely different senses of right and wrong.

Years ago we had a long discussion about right and wrong, morality, and atheism. The current issue goes right back to what I was trying to understand (and the point I was trying to make) back then: what is your source of morality? What is your moral compass?

On one side of this election, the compass was apparently one's own sense of what does or does not harm another (humanism, generally, and I only use that term because that's what others have used). On the other side of the election, the compass seems to be based more on a learned morality, mostly from the Bible but probably also from a shared sense of what it says (especially as there is no way that all those voters are actually "religious").

Perhaps it would be better to try to understand why Bush would win the moral vote, why people might see him as the more moral of the two, without chalking it up to stupidyt, fear, or intimidation, and without attempting to psycho-analyze millions of people.

(Please note that I didn't vote, and I was bound to be disappointed no matter who won. I personally don't think either choice was a particularly moral character. This post is about understanding what happened, not promoting either viewpoint.)

Choose Your High Ground

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 17:23:49 GMT

A complaint I often see about "the right," especially the "religious right," is that they always try to take the moral high ground.

But doesn't the left tend to claim the "intellectual high ground" as their territory? Today Brent made numerous references to the Democrats being the result of America's roots in Enlightenment, and basing everything on Reason. Since this was in contrast to the "other side," doesn't that imply that they are both unreasonable and unenlightened?

Brian Carnell made the point quite well in a reply to the message that started this topic. He said:

... the problem is that the media portrays opponents of gay marraige as a bunch of redneck bigots and the current strategy for instituting gay marriage is to bypass legislatures and go to the courts. Nobody should be surprised that when you tell a sizable part of the population that they're a bunch of bigoted morons whose opinion won't matter...

The "left" seems to believe that the "right" just needs more education, as though the reason they disagree is simply that one side doesn't understand the issues clearly enough, and those "educated few" on the right who still disagree are either bigoted (obviously that doesn't apply to all the issues), naturally unintelligent, or have some personal stake in or history with the issue which prevents them from seeing clearly.

The "right," however, tends to act like the "left" are a bunch of evil, baby-killing, gay heathen who have lost their way. With no built-in moral guidance of their own, laws are needed to protect them from theselves and to prevent them from corrupting America.

What a mess. Were this a negotiation of some sort, both sides would need a cooling off period.

Personally, I think the US is at its best when it's swimming the channel between the two banks, recognizing that individual rights and freedoms are wonderful and essential things, and tempering that recognition with an understanding that some things really do Matter, that some things can be Right or Wrong based on nothing more than principle.

Moral Values in the Election

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 10:46:45 GMT

Exit polls -- for whatever they're worth -- showed that the biggest concern among voters this year was not Iraq, the economy, or terror. It was moral values.

Iraq was second among voter issues, and Kerry drew 75 percent of those voters. But more Florida voters listed moral values as their main concern than Kerry's campaign issues of the economy or health care. Seventy-nine percent of the "moral values" voters went for Bush. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel]

The 2004 election produced more than a few surprises. Exit polls revealed that moral values trumped Iraq and the economy as a top voter concern. [NPR Morning Edition]

The economy and moral values were the top issues for young voters, with about one-fifth of those surveyed choosing each. Young people concerned about moral values strongly supported Bush, while those interested in the economy and jobs chose Kerry. [azcentral.com Arizona's Home Page]

One voter in five said moral values were the most important issue driving the vote, and almost eight out of 10 backed Bush. Terrorism was almost as high in importance, and 85 percent of voters citing it also supported the president. Kerry found his strongest support -- more than 80 percent -- among those who named the economy, jobs and the war in Iraq as their most important concerns. [Washington Post]

Might this have anything to do with the overwhelming support for constitutional amendments defining marriage as between a man and a woman, on the ballots in eleven different states? Isn't anybody else going to make this connection?

I understand why so many webloggers came out so strongly against Bush. (Personally, as I told Corinne, I was going to be deeply disappointed no matter who won.) Still, it's interesting to see much of the country make a connection here that none of the pundits really expected.

The media may or may not be mostly-liberal, and the weblogging community most definitely does track strongly to the left, but that doesn't mean the country follows. Agree or disagree with what they've chosen, I find it quite refreshing that the people made a choice contrary to the expectations and wishes of the bias all around them.

XUL Templates with Multiple Rules

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 18:44:49 GMT

XUL Templates with Multiple Rules

I spent two days last week banging my head against an XUL template with multiple rules. My goal was a tree view which showed folders, nested folders (to any depth), and files within those folders.

Summary:

Looking for a quick answer? Ok: all the rules in a multi-rule template must use the same variables, no matter what they're matching. You can't add new variables after the first rule.

As I explained in a follow-up to this article, the real problem is that this fact is (apparently) undocumented.

Update:

Neil Deakin posted a reply in the discussion area, with a slight correction to my 'discovery'.

There was no problem grounding the 'folders' from the RDF datasource. That was functioning correctly before I even started.

In the RDF, an element representing a folder could have two types of child node (two different types of assertion): "RKM:folders" (which would point to a Seq listing that folder's sub-folders) and "RKM:files" (which would point to a Seq listing the files in that folder).

The tree would show a "folder" as a container if it had a "RKM:folders" assertion (outward pointing arc), or if it had a "RKM:files" assertion, or both. (To show something as a container means it would include the flippy triangle to expand the item. Folders without subfolders or files would not have the flippy triangle because they're empty.)

The first rule in my template was already there and functioning properly, to display the folders and subfolders. Here's how the whole tree started out (this is simplified a little from what I was actually using, but it's close enough):

<tree id="sample.sidebar.tree_groups"
   datasources="sampledata.rdf" ref="urn:sample:root"
   containment="http:\//www.mozilla.org/sample-rdf#groups"
   rows="6" flex="1" seltype="single"
   hidecolumnpicker="true" enableColumnDrag="false">
   
<treecols>
      
<treecol flex="1" id="group_name" label="groups" primary="true"/>
      
<treecol id="group_id" label="ID" collapsed="true"/>
      
<treecol id="datatype" labe="Type" collapsed="true"/>
   </treecols>
   <template>
      <rule>
         <conditions>
            <content uri="?uri" />
            
<triple subject="?uri"
                    predicate="http:\//www.mozilla.org/sample-rdf#groups"
                    object="?groups"/>
            <member container="?groups" child="?group"/>
            
<triple subject="?group"
                    predicate="http:\//www.mozilla.org/sample-rdf#label"
                    object="?text"/>
            
<triple subject="?group"
                    predicate="group:\//www.mozilla.org/sample-rdf#id"
                    object="?groupid"/>
         </conditions>
         <action>
            
<treechildren flex="1">
               
<treeitem uri="?group">
                  
<treerow>
                     
<treecell label="?text"/>
                     
<treecell label="?groupid"/>
                     
<treecell label="group"/>
                  </treerow>
               </treeitem>
            </treechildren>
         </action>
      </rule>
   </template>
</tree>

The important part, of course, is the conditions element in the rule. From the starting point, it looks for a groups assertion, and (if one is found) assigns it to the ?groups variable. Then, it's told to treat the element at the end of that arc as a container (seq, bag, or alt... it doesn't care), and the rest of the conditions apply to each element it finds in the container (a Seq, in my case): the member of the container must have a "label" and an "id", which are then assigned to variables.

The second rule seemed like it should be very simple! I wanted to do basically the same thing as for the first rule, but this time it would be matching files instead of groups. A copy-and-paste with a quick edit produced this:

      <rule>
         <conditions>
            <content uri="?uri" />
            
<triple subject="?uri"
                    predicate="http:\//www.mozilla.org/sample-rdf#files"
                    object="?files"/>
            <member container="?files" child="?file"/>
            
<triple subject="?file"
                    predicate="http:\//www.mozilla.org/sample-rdf#title"
                    object="?title"/>
         </conditions>
         <action>
            
<treechildren flex="1">
               
<treeitem uri="?file">
                  
<treerow>
                     
<treecell label="?title" properties="File"/>
                     
<treecell label="?file"/>
                     
<treecell label="page"/>
                  </treerow>
               </treeitem>
            </treechildren>
         </action>
      </rule>

Simple enough, right? Yeah, except it didn't work.

I eventually figured out that I had to update the containment attribute in the tree tag, to specify that the predicate "http:\//www.mozilla.org/sample-rdf#files" should be treated as a container, so that when the groups rule matched the row would have the flippy triangle for exansion. (Just add a space at the end of that attribute, and type in the second predicate right after the first one.)

Reload the XUL file and... nuts. Now I get the flippy triangle, but the files still aren't being listed.

Let's make a long story a little shorter. I tried a zillion combinations, and eventually discovered that the template renderer will only use variables in the second rule that were also used in the first rule. New variable names are ignored. So, even though the second rule is matching files, and the predicates can be changed (as above), the rule's variables still have to look like you're matching groups.

Yes, I think that's ridiculous.

Here, finally, is the rule that works. Compare it with the rule that didn't work, just above, and the rule for matching groups above that (which did work).

      <rule>
         <conditions>
            <content uri="?uri" />
            
<triple subject="?uri"
                    predicate="http:\//www.mozilla.org/sample-rdf#files"
                    object="?groups"/>
            <member container="?groups" child="?group"/>
            
<triple subject="?group"
                    predicate="http:\//www.mozilla.org/sample-rdf#title"
                    object="?text"/>
         </conditions>
         <action>
            
<treechildren flex="1">
               
<treeitem uri="?group">
                  
<treerow>
                     
<treecell label="?text" properties="File"/>
                     
<treecell label="?group"/>
                     
<treecell label="page"/>
                  </treerow>
               </treeitem>
            </treechildren>
         </action>
      </rule>

I wrote to Nigel to tell him what I'd discovered. He was surprised, amused, impressed, and or disgusted enough to suggest I write it up. (Which, if you know me, you know I was going to do anyway.)

Read "Liberating a Nation"

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 06:34:38 GMT

Wow, go read Liberating a Nation. (You'll have to scroll up a little on that page to see the top of the essay.)

If you didn't "get" the Red Sox / New England "thing" before, you will after reading it.

(I wonder if I could ever write like that...)

Ok, I think I'm done talking about the Sox this year. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Does the Rest of the Country Understand?

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:58:58 GMT

I have to wonder if the rest of the country has any real idea what a big deal it's going to be if the Red Sox win this game tonight (or any of the three games that could come after it).

Not that it will affect the whole country that much... and that's really the point. New England's losing streak in baseball isn't just legendary across the country, it's part of our six-state culture.

Last week I mentioned that there's no such thing as a Red Sox fan who isn't a die-hard fan. That wasn't true. What's true is that there's no such thing as a Red Sox fan from New England who isn't die hard.

How can you be a fan of a team that you really believe is NOT going to win, no matter how good it looks, without being die hard? How can you watch them come so close to success so many times, only to have it snatched (or thrown!) away, without being die hard?

I'm not exaggerating this. Boston's Dirt Dogs, that bunch of idiots that have never failed to let us down by never failing to fail, could change everything by winning.

Can we still love them, if they do?

MetaWeblog.getRecentPosts: Conflict and Confusion

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 09:18:58 GMT

MetaWeblog.getRecentPosts: Conflict and Confusion

I'm trying to fix an apparent bug in Conversant's support for the MetaWeblog and mt (movable type) api's. Conversant's Weblog II plugin can be used as a mt-compatible weblog, or a MetaWeblog-compatible weblog, or even just a blogger-compatible weblog.

In fact, all three of those api's build on each other. Blogger is the most basicc. MetaWeblog "embraces and extends" it. The mt api does the same to metaweblog. That's important to understanding the apparent conflict I've run into.

The MetaWeblog RFC has an entry point called MetaWeblog.getCategories. You tell it what weblog you want to know about, and who you are, and it returns the information about that weblog's categories. Specifically, the api documentation says:

metaWeblog.getCategories

metaWeblog.getCategories (blogid, username, password) returns struct

The struct returned contains one struct for each category, containing the following elements: description, htmlUrl and rssUrl.

This entry-point allows editing tools to offer category-routing as a feature.

So it's clearly supposed to return a struct of structs, as it says, "the struct returned contains one struct for each category..."

Yet, it seems like everybody else has implemented metaWeblog.getCategories to return an array of structs, rather than a struct of structs. Examples: XMLRPCNET and xoops.

What am I supposed to do? It wouldn't matter to me what other server software has done, since I'm not trying to interoperate with other servers, but I do need (Conversant) to work with the client software... which, of course, has been written to work with the other server software.

The metaweblog spec was written by Dave Winer, so it's safe to say that Radio (as a client app) implements the spec he wrote... yet it looks like most other applications (both client and server) have gone the other way. Ecto for Windows, for example, expects the result of metaWeblog.getCategories to be an array of structs. (However, ecto uses the XMLRPC.NET framework, so this isn't entirely Ecto's fault.)

Is there any way I can handle this to be compatible with both camps? A client app could accept either type of result (like NetNewsWire's editor probably does, if I know Brent), but most of them don't do that. Since Conversant is a server app, what should I do: follow the original spec, or follow the more common spec? The purist in me suggests the former, but the realist (the one who wants to make the customers happy) says the latter.

What a mess. Simon Fell calls this the problem of slightly uniform interfaces.

More Efficient Weight Loss ?

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 09:39:39 GMT

A few weeks ago, right after the PMC, I started thinking about how the body gains and loses fat. My understanding of the process was very basic, and could be summed up as, "Sugars that aren't needed to fuel the body right now are converted and stored in the fat cells. When the body needs more sugars, the organs release what sugars they have stored first, and then the fat cells start releasing their contents back into the bloodstream, which is when weight is lost. So increased exercise without an increase in diet typically results in more fat converted to fuel, and therefore a loss of fat-weight."

That's the "basics," in the extreme, but is essentially correct (I've read a lot more about it since then).

What I specifically became curious about was the process of converting stored fat back into fuel for the body, and how this process might be made more efficient for someone who is already doing significant exercise (like, uh... me). Assuming I have ample "stored energy reserves," is there anything I could do or some food I could eat which would cause my body to convert more stored fat into energy than it would otherwise, during exercise?

That last part of the question is perhaps the most important. I'm not looking for a miracle. I'm already doing significant exercise (my training rides are almost fifty miles long), what I would like is a way to make the fat-burning side of that exercise more efficient. What made me think about this is that when I'm on a long ride, I still have to supplement my energy reserves with Gu, PowerGel, fruit or whatever. If I don't, I bonk and can barely finish. This is in spite of the fact that I still have plenty of fat reserves to burn. So, if there were some food I could eat (or drink) which would cause the body to burn fat even a little bit more quickly, I wouldn't have to eat as much while riding and would lose weight a little bit faster.

I'd be happy with an improvement of just 2 or 3%, anything better would be "gravy."

I mentioned the idea to Corinne, and then to my dad and Art (my brother-in-law). None of them knew any more about the metabolic process than I did, but they all understood what I was suggesting and agreed that it seemed like a good idea. "You're already doing the work, and the fat is there as a stored energy reserve, so it would be great if you could use more of that stored energy while exercising."

A few days later, I mentioned it to Brian Andresen. He knew a little more about metabolism than I did, and, perhaps more importantly, suggested a couple web pages as good starting points to learn more about it for myself. The first link is the one he suggested, followed by some I found for myself (one of them is also advertising some product or another... just ignore that and consider the facts they present):

Now I have a slightly less basic understanding of at least the specific metabolic processes I've been thinking about: Insulin and glucagon (two hormones with some fairly obvious mnemonics to help remember their functions) control the storage and release, respectively, of fatty acids and glycerol.

Insulin is a hormone released by the pancreas when blood sugars are high, and causes the adipose tissues to store more fatty acids and sugars. Thus the first mnemonic: insulin "expands your fat cells," and as more fat makes you feel warmer, so "insulin insulates." (Hey, it works for me.)

Glucagon is a hormone released by the pancreas when blood sugars are low, causing the adipose tissues to release fatty acids and glycerol back into the bloodstream for use as fuel by the rest of the body. Thus the second mnemonic: glucagon is released when "glucose is gone."

So there are two processes I'm interested in: the release of glucagon by the pancreas and subsequent reception by the adipose tissues which triggers the release of fatty acids and glycerol for fuel, and the conversion of fatty acids and glycerol into energy by the muscle cells during heavy exertion such as my long bike rides.

That's where I'm at so far. What I don't yet understand is which process I want to be more efficient. Do I want my pancreas to release more glucagon during the same amount of exercise, which would therefore trigger a stronger reaction in the adipose tissues? Do I want the hormone receptors in the adipose tissues to be more reactive to the same level of glucagon? Perhaps the fatty acids secreted back into the blood stream by the adipose tissues are not the most efficient fuels during heavy exertion, and what I need is some way to improve my usage of this fuel?

Remember, my goal here is to find some way to use my own "stored fat" as an efficient fuel during exercise, so that I need less supplementation.

Still researching, but if you happen to know anything about this topic I'd love some input. (I know there's at least one doctor reading...)

I meant to start writing about this a week ago, but a visit to Daniel's page revealed that he had just started writing about something very similar! That sort of took the wind out of my sails for a little while, especially as it's not the first time this has happened (for example, he posted his first thoughts on RSD just as I was thinking about ways client applications could auto-configure themselves to work with Conversant sites and weblogs).

Bounty

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 10:52:26 GMT

This is my favorite really, my only holiday of the year. It's not sponsored by a greeting card company, it's almost completely non-commercial. There are no stupid songs to sing. There's no false hopes attached to it, either: people don't dream of that "perfect Thanksgiving" like they do a perfect Christmas. There's no false religious basis for it: it's not a pagan fertility celebration gussied up to look like something Christian, it's not worship of the sun god.

Thanksgiving is, to me, clean, simple, and honest. It requires a little work, too. Anybody can have a Turkey Day, but to celebrate Thanksgiving you have to force yourself to think about those things you'd miss most if they were gone, and...

Thank God.

For my wife, and a relationship that makes everybody around us smile (or even blush). For my ecclesia, for my family. For my knowledge of scripture, and the faith it inspired. For my brains. For the strength to endure years of serious financial hardship, and not having to endure it alone. For family and friends who have always lent their helping hands when they were most needed. For finally having some steady, very challenging work.

Even for all those things I've under appreciated but know I'd miss. For my niece, who's growing up so fast, and the parents that are raising her. For Mark, who's finally found true love. For Jed, who's following a spiritual path in a way that so few of us are able (or choose to).

For all these things, and for everything else in my life, big and small, this holiday is this simple.

Thank God.

Why Iraq?

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 17:46:24 GMT

A thread over on Joggle's forums (of all places) seems to have set me off, a little.

They were talking about the fact that the US is still searching for WMD's in Iraq, so far without any luck. Someone suggested that this is like trying to find cigarettes in your kid's room, after warning him for six months that you were going to search his room for them.

I'll probably regret posting this here, as someone is bound to sTroll in and take a shot at me, but here's my response. (This is not meant to be pro or anti US, it's just an explanation of how I see the situation.)

Quoting usausa:

Should you refrain from disciplining your child because of what he might do if you do discipline him?

Since when is the USA the parent?

There's no evidence that he had weapons of mass destruction during the last few years before the war. None. Remember, the inspectors were there off and on for years before the war, and never found anything.

People keep saying that it takes a long time to find these weapons in such a big country, but it'll take a lot longer to prove they're not there: how do you prove something isn't there, without literally searching every square foot/meter/yard of the entire country?

Hussein was a bad guy, there's no doubt about that. Probably the worst in the region. The US had very good reasons for going into Iraq and deposing Hussein, but there's no evidence the WMDs were one of those reasons.

One good reason to go into Iraq is that the entire middle east is a hot-bed for state-sponsored terrorism. Again, there's no evidence that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11, nor even that they had any significant connections with Al Qaeda, but Iraq is right in the middle of everything.

Strategically, there's no better country the US could have invaded. Now that they're in place, the military can start putting real pressure on the other nations to stop supporting terrorism or risk paying a price they know they can't afford.

The US needed a base of operations in the Middle East to "project power" into the region. Where else could they have gone? Kuwait's the only country that would have allowed them to increase their presence without an invasion, but it's not strategic enough for the rest of the region, and is way too small.

Consider everything the US government does, especially militarily, through the lense of counter-terrorism. The current "war" in Iraq isn't a war at all, it's just one front in the global war (at least, as the US seems to see it).

Anyway, I'm not making all this stuff up myself. There are lots of intelligence-analysis services (NOT news services) that publish freely-available reports on a regular basis. My favorite is Stratfor.

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 02 Jul 2003 16:05:39 GMT

Greg was right. Clay Shirky's keynote, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, is worth reading if you're a developer or core-user of social software (groupware, weblogs-in-communities, mailing lists, etc.).

I especially appreciate his conclusions, which he describes as three things you must accept about social software:

You cannot completely separate technical and social issues.
Members are different than users. (Users come and go, members care a bit more about the existence and welfare of the group as an entity.)
The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations.