The prank phonecall genre, at its essence, relies on the generosity of the person on the other end of the line. It preys on someone's willingness to do their job to the best of their ability, or it preys on the victim's willingness to give the perpetrator the benefit of the doubt. So in essence, what it's trying to say is “People being good-natured are funny, and it's fine to laugh at someone who has to be nice to you whatever you say, because it's their job.” That, to me, is not funny.

It's just cruelty.

Now don't get me wrong, a lot of humour is cruel. I even agree with Stranger in a Strange Land (Sorry about the spoiler, Danna) that cruelty is the essence of humour¹. To me, however, cruelty can only be funny if the victim is deserving or complicit, when they bring it upon themselves. That's why the best sitcoms are populated by flawed people², because really good comedy is about bad things happening to people, and bad things happening to nice people aren't nearly as funny as people who bring misfortune on themselves.

It's why a good scam is entertaining—all good scams target the greed of their victims. But prank phone-calls? No thankyou.

¹ Puns are the exception to the rule, although you could argue that puns are cruel, just to the listener.

² Basil and Cybil Fawlty were cruel. Manuel was incompetent. Polly was nice, notice how she escaped most episodes largely unscathed? Lister, Rimmer, Cat, Kryten and Holly. The vanity and selfishness of the cast of Seinfeld. Each Simpsons character, defined by a character flaw. Even outside sitcoms: the interview victims of Norman Gunston or Ali G invite ridicule through the hubris of their celebrity. The audience of Dame Edna knows that it's risking her barbs by buying a ticket.

Well, I'm off up the coast for four days. I'm not sure how I'll survive four days without net access. Can you get Internet patches? Or maybe one of those plastic Internet inhaler things...

Joe: To edit or not to edit?

Should you edit old entries to correct mistakes or should leave it as a snapshot. If a blog is form of a time capsule, each entry should be considered sealed for prosperity. If a blog is consider a living resource, it makes sense to trim and prune it much like you would care for a garden.

If I'm just fixing typos or punctuation, I'll do it silently and not worry. If I add anything that substantively changes the meaning of a post, I'll label it. I try never to delete anything substantive. Attempting to un-say something by deleting it is really just a case of hiding the evidence. I'd much rather correct myself out in the open than pretend I was never wrong in the first place.

Today, we installed JIRA on an NT server for a client. It turned out the NT server was running into swap because of a bunch of other stuff running on it and the app ran too slowly, so David suggested, “Why don't we stick it on the AS/400?”

So we did. Now from Mike's reaction we're the first person to try this. It worked first time. In fact, it took less time to get running than it did to poke a hole in the firewall so people could see it.

Next time someone tells me Write Once Run Anywhere is pointless, or just a myth, I shall beat them with my clue-stick.

Russell Beattie:

It's surprising to me how most bloggers could care less about their domain name. It would drive me absolutely batty to have a number as the sole identifier of my weblog.

Yes, it bugs the hell out of me. The Radio weblog was just a bit of a weird hobby I never really expected anyone to read, but then one day I started getting links and readers, and I was somewhat stuck with it. Now I've got enough link-cred that Google notices what I'm saying, and that's a drug that's hard to give up.

I don't particularly like Radio either. I was planning to just stick MT or Roller on www.pastiche.org and be done with it, but then my hosting provider jacked up the prices by 33% and I had to move the server back onto the wrong side of my 56k modem.

Oh well, at least 190 is a low number.

How about this for the worst product name in the Java space? Javaanal: Java documentation analysis utility![rebelutionary]

<rant>It does quite suit the application, though.

• It's for examining Javadoc coverage, but it's written in Visual Basic, and hence single-platform.
• It works by looking at the generated HTML instead of the source, so if you've got a non-standard doclet, it'll fall over and die.
• It presumes to recommend word counts for Javadoc—from 200 words per interface definition to 10 words for each instance variable. This just reinforces my belief that Javadoc coverage tools don't encourage better documentation, they just encourage more documentation.
• From the disclaimer: “HCi Consulting Pty Ltd would like to warn potential users that this product may provide misleading, dangerous, and just plain silly results if not used by our staff experts.” In other words, “If you're stupid enough to use this tool, you'll probably want to pay us for consulting, too.”</rant>

Edit: Ah. They're an ISO9000 consultancy, suddenly everything is clear. When I lived in Perth, I worked for an ISP. The owner ran an ISO9000 consultancy out of the same office. Whenever you added a new user, they had to be entered in four different places: the Unix passwd file, the contacts database, the accounting software and a paper file. This procedure led to the four sources of data never agreeing with each other, and obviously much hilarity ensuing therein.

The thing about ISO9000, though, is that any procedure is a good procedure, so long as it's documented. You could say “all new customers must be entered into the database using only your left hand, while standing on your head in a vat of cow dung”, and so long as that was written down on a sheet of paper and photocopied a thousand times, you'd still qualify for “Quality Management” If you've got a nice cover-sheet where you tick the boxes for each place you have to enter the information, the inconsistency becomes the fault of the employee, not of the overly complex steps he has to take.

Bleah.

I mentioned the bad state of affairs to my boss when I started, told him it'd probably take six months to write a replacement system (since I'd basically have to have done most of it myself), and that he'd better start now because the more the company grew, the harder it'd be to replace the broken system and transition to the new.

Needless to say, twelve months passed, the user-base grew by about a third and the number of different services being offered doubled. Then I was told to drop everything and start on the replacement system. Number one priority. I was also asked if I could have it done by the end of the month. Oh, and I couldn't really drop everything because I was also having to spend the next few weeks filling in for the system administrator who was on holiday, so I'd just have to do overtime to get it done.

It's about then that I started applying for jobs elsewhere.

Mike:

Why don't people understand that opening windows for me is a bad idea? It's one of the original usability sins.

Erik:

I spawn new windows, and I like it. So stop your whining.

Charles:

I'm on Mike's side.

1. Spawning new windows is annoying. I use tabbed browsing. If you're spawning new windows, you're breaking out of my carefully organised tabs.
2. Spawning new windows is bad accessability
3. Spawning new windows is presumptive. It's saying that your style of browsing is better suited to my needs than my own.
4. Spawning new windows is arrogant. It's saying “I know my site is more important than the site I'm linking to, so I'm making sure you have to come back!” Rubbish. That's my decision, not yours.

I generally browse by opening up three quarters of links in new tabs, but even then that's my decision. I certainly wouldn't presume to force it on anyone else.

Name: Error Codes

Context:

You need to provide a stable platform for clients to interpret errors occurring in a networked application (for example a web service)

Forces:

• You want to make it as easy as possible for a client writer to inform the user of abnormal conditions. The easier it is to write a client, the more likely your service will be quickly adopted.
• You want to make it possible to write an advanced client that intercepts errors and handles them internally. For example, the client may wish to present messages in another language, or perform some action other than reporting the error to the user.
• Clients should not break if a service's human-readable error codes are changed.

Therefore:

Present error messages both as an easily machine-parsed code, and as a textual description. Client writers may choose to pass the description straight to the user, to interpret the code and take some other action, or some combination of both.

Examples of use:

SMTP, NNTP, FTP, HTTP, etc...

Notably absent from:

Pretty much every web-service designed by amateurs.

I'm sorry, but this is simply not true. It is like saying that because you can assume it is legal to walk into a shop with an unlocked door, all unlocked doors are fair game. WiFi is not WWW, and a WiFi network is just as likely to be private as it is public even if it's not properly secured. If someone forgets to lock their door, that still isn't legally an invitation to wander through their house, even if someone's graffiti'd “Come Inside!” on the steps.

firewall-wizards moderator, Paul Robertson, put it like this:

While I realize that there are people who advertise their own networks, I think that the potential for damage for folks with large networks and angry people who've “moved on to persue other opportunities” makes the whole idea bad. Couple that with people who deploy networks and don't understand the technology and it gets worse. IMO, the folks wishing to provide open access should have chosen a common SSID and perhaps even a common WEP key. People who conciously choose to make their nets open shouldn't have a problem doing that- taking the insecure default, or worse-yet having to manage keychanges and SSID changes over a large enterprise because the intern in the mail room is pissed at his boss and things it'd be cool to publish your WEP keys and SSIDs in midtown Manhattan is a bad thing. Someone's pissed off kid chalking the home “behind the VPN” access point is a bad thing. The default of attackable and exploitable until made otherwise is a bad thing, some people will take advantage of this and worse-yet will encourage others to (perhaps inadvertantly) trespass on networks that don't belong to them.

The last thing we need is some poor innocent being prosecuted for hacking because they saw a chalk with the WEP key and SSID and thought it was made by the network operator, but it was really put there by the receptionist's ex-husband.

The best thing the warchalking community can do right now is to follow Robertson's advice. Pick a standard naming scheme for open networks, and publicise it as widely as warchalking. Otherwise, it'll all end in tears, and protestations that you thought you weren't doing anything wrong are going to be soundly, and deservedly ignored.

Mike Writes:

The biggest problem I have with almost all frameworks is the findAll() curse that actually ends up loading too many objects. You have the EJB approach (findAll() just returns primary keys, and then the objects are lazy loaded), or the OFBiz approach (findAll() loads the whole record set in a single query) - but ne'er the twain do meet. - rebelutionary

I hate to sound like a broken record, but hibernate allows both approaches. sess.find() will return you a List of pre-loaded objects, while sess.iterate() returns you an Iterator that will lazily load each object when you call next().

Bugger that for a game of soldiers. The longer you hold onto a grudge, the more harm it does to you and the less harm it does to its target. As the man said, let go.

Read the rest of this entry…

Too much of the marketing of development environments seems to ignore the fact that the thing coders spend the majority of their time doing is either writing code, or thinking about writing code. “Just fill in this wizard, and you've deployed your very own web service” does not impress me much when all the service does is say “Hello World”

So long as you follow the advice of the Pragmatic Programmers and automate everything you're likely to do more than once, it's pretty easy to get around the absence of specialised tools for things like EJB development, application deployment and so on. All the development environment needs to do in that situation is stay out of the way (which some do better than others). On the other hand, you're unlikely to want (or have time) to write a fully-featured editor or code-navigation tools, and these are the two things that help you write code, and think about writing code.

The reason Intellij IDEA is so cool is that they started with the plan “let's write an environment for writing code, and thinking about writing code”. With that and the hooks to Ant, JUnit and CVS, there really wasn't much you couldn't make it do. A guy from Sun was giving us a sales demo for SunONE Studio on Friday, and all the questions that sprung to mind about it were a checklist of IDEA editor features. Does it have smart templates? Refactoring support? Java context-aware searches?

Amongst all the things SunONE Studio could do with EJBs, web services, web applications and so on, refactoring turned out to be a third-party plugin. To me, this is like shipping a car with air-conditioning, mag wheels and a turbocharger, but it's stuck permanently in first gear until you buy Rational Gearbox™

Maybe us bloggers should band together and buy Howard a certificate for Ekit? I wonder if that would solve the Ekit copy-and-paste problem? [Blogging Roller]

Maybe us bloggers could come up with a co-operative code-signing certificate scheme that bypasses Veri$ign completely? How easy/difficult is it to add a new trusted root certificate to a Java installation?

When the plate has been sitting unwashed in the sink for over six months, it's time to let go.

I started wondering on Friday how many people respond to something I write, but I never see them because Userland wipe my referrer logs at 5pm AEST every day—If I don't check them while I'm still at work, I'll never see who's linking to me. They're stored on the server somewhere, I seem to recall, but I can't remember the URL.

A good weblog post doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's either a contribution to an ongoing conversation or it's an attempt to initiate a new conversation. Even when a post is just a link to an article, there's an implicit “what do you guys think?” there. What I would love to see is an easy, efficient way to graph and follow these conversations.

The web solution to this are services like blogdex or protocols like trackback, which graft relationships between blog entries onto the web pages. These are nice enough, but they require some work to follow, and the more a conversation branches, the more work it is for someone trying to follow it.

My initial, really vague idea was this. Think of it in terms of Instant Messaging. You are a member of a cloud. When you post a blog entry it gets intercepted, and for each URL you have linked to in your post, you join a ‘channel’ devoted to that URL. The channel is notified of the contribution you have just made to the conversation about that URL. Thus, as the conversation progresses, each contributor can follow the activity in the channels. Close, but needs polish.

Then, I suddenly realised. Wow, I've finally found an interesting application for Javaspaces. Create a Tuple Space. Every time you post a blog entry, you put it into the space, along with a bunch of linking objects that point to any other URL you referenced in your post. Clients could traverse the conversations in the space, ask for event notifications if a new reference is made to a post, et. al. Leasing would ensure the space culled conversations that nobody was referring to any more.

I wish I wasn't so damn busy over the next few weeks...

Over the weekend, I thought to myself, “Wow, the Java blogging guys have been really quiet lately, haven't heard a peep from them for days.” It wasn't until Monday I realised the reason for this was I had accidentally deleted the entire Java folder from NetNewsWire Lite, and not noticed. (Mike, an OPML version of the java.blogs list would make it much easier to import all of them into NetNewsWire at once.)

Meanwhile, the blog.meetup is at the Zanzibar tonight. I'll be there, because it's only two blocks from my apartment, and if nobody turns up I'm sure I'll be able to get a game of pool anyway.

Quote of the day, from Kevin Burton:

Hacking Mozilla is like dating a beautiful but crazy woman. Sure she is hot, and sure the sex is great, but the constant attention she demands and the way she freaks out at a seemingly ordinary request just get old after a while.

They were the men and women of the Capitol's Flag Office - a little-known department of the Government whose sole duty is to raise and lower US flags over the roof of the US parliament building, so that senators and representatives can distribute to their constituents flags that have officially flown over the Capitol.

...

The discretion is understandable. Most recipients - party donors, supporters, cronies and good causes, as well as ordinary constituents who have paid $US30 (about $54) to have a flag flown for them - fondly imagine that they are getting a flag that has flown all day.

In fact the Flag Office uses special short flagpoles, near the small dome over the House of Representatives. For rainy days, there are three poles under the lip of the dome, and for September11 a dozen extra poles were erected. Each flag is typically hoisted for just a few seconds.

The flags flown on September11 were a little slower, as they had to be flown at half mast, said Reynell Bennett, a supervisor.

"It takes a little longer to raise them to half mast. They have to go up to the top, then come back down and stop halfway. They said the average was about 30 seconds."

It's just quintessential capitalism, isn't it?

Richard Stallman is a grade-A nutbar, but sometimes he hits the nail right on the head:

The purpose of a company is profit, but profit can be made in various ways. Some methods respect the freedom and well-being of others, while some trample other people's rights and lives. When the executives of a company have no principles or scruples to restrain them, it is only natural that they will try the latter methods. It is natural, but that is not an excuse. To accept selfishness as an all-purpose excuse for mistreating others is to reject the whole idea of right and wrong. (from The Register)

The purpose of a company is profit, but profit can be made in various ways. Some methods respect the freedom and well-being of others, while some trample other people's rights and lives. When the executives of a company have no principles or scruples to restrain them, it is only natural that they will try the latter methods. It is natural, but that is not an excuse. To accept selfishness as an all-purpose excuse for mistreating others is to reject the whole idea of right and wrong. (from The Register)

Update: I would like to apologise for besmirching Targaff's good name. That video was possibly the most amazing feat of skill I have ever seen. It verges on superhuman.

1. The water must have only just boiled the second before you pour it. The hotter the water, the better taste you get from the tea. If the kettle's sat even a moment since boiling, boil it again.
2. Don't put any milk in until after the tea has finished brewing². Adding milk changes the consistency of the water, and cools it down, so the tea can't brew properly, and tastes wrong.
3. Tea wants to be strong. Don't rush it while it steeps. Let it wait long enough.
4. Don't add more than a small splash of milk, or you'll drown the tea. The tea should be a white-ish brown, not a brown-ish white.
5. Start drinking the tea while it's still too hot to take a full gulp. You can take bigger mouthfulls later into the cup, but the feeling of the really hot tea sliding down your throat is what this whole experience is all about.

¹ Purists would say it can't be the "perfect" cup because I use teabags. You'll have to excuse my heathen ways
² Many tea purists have argued bitterly over whether the milk should go in the cup before, or after the tea, but this debate comes from those days when tea was brewed in a pot, and then poured into the cup. You shouldn't put the milk in first when you're brewing the tea in the cup.

In an amusing piece of comic timing, there's an article on Slashdot containing the line “Is this possibly the worst fit for an actor in a superhero role since Michael Keaton in Batman?”

I protest. lonita and I were talking about this just last night, (hence the comic timing). It's stupid casting Batman like you're casting an action movie, because as soon as the big rubber suit goes on, he could be anyone. Keaton was a very good Batman, precisely because he was not cast to play Batman, he was cast to play Bruce Wayne.

Of course, Kilmer and Clooney weren't the only reasons that post-Keaton Batman movies sucked. But they're a pretty big contributing factor.

Charles, the referrer-log obsessive, discovers something neat. Today, I got a link from someone doing a google search for "xul+australia". That wasn't the amusing part. What amused me was the link to Mike below me, and the way google had truncated the text to show both search terms...

If you are walking across someone's path (i.e. you are walking along, and someone else is walking towards you from a 90 degree angle), the correct thing to do is to either keep the same pace, or walk faster. Under no circumstances are you to slow down or stop.

If you keep walking, the person walking towards you can adjust his pace slightly, and aim just behind where you are likely to be when he reaches you. By the time he reaches you, you will no longer be in that space. If, in the meantime, you walk a little faster, you'll ensure he misses you by more. This is an approach you really can't go wrong with, and it requires the least effort on the part of both parties.

If you slow down, he will have to readjust to react to your new speed, and go further out of his way to walk around you. This is annoying.

If you stop entirely, you'll end up with him walking straight at you, and you'll be left in that stupid "do I go left or right" dance that people end up in when they meet face to face. This is even more annoying.

This public service announcement was brought to you care of some stupid git on Erskineville road.

A great article by Neil Gaiman about the gender of books, and how American Gods got itself written.

I've been very good in my avoiding all coverage of the anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks so far, even to the point of turning off the TV in the corner of the pub last night because they were showing footage. This, however, was different. Exhibit 13 is a video-clip by Blue Man Group, although the blue men themselves don't make an appearance. Instead, the video stars pieces of paper that blew into Brooklyn after the collapse of the towers.

This is what a memorial should be. It's understated and poetic, where everything else has been massively hyped, and about as subtle as a punch in the face. It offers peace, where the news wants you to revisit horror. Most importantly, it invites you to sit for three and a half minutes and think for yourself, instead of telling you what you should be thinking.

I've been very good in my avoiding all coverage of the anniversary of the World Trade Centre attacks so far, even to the point of turning off the TV in the corner of the pub last night because they were showing footage. This, however, was different. Exhibit 13 is a video-clip by Blue Man Group, although the blue men themselves don't make an appearance. Instead, the video stars pieces of paper that blew into Brooklyn after the collapse of the towers.

This is what a memorial should be. It's understated and poetic, where everything else has been massively hyped, and about as subtle as a punch in the face. It offers peace, where the news wants you to revisit horror. Most importantly, it invites you to sit for three and a half minutes and think for yourself, instead of telling you what you should be thinking.

What the President has Learned Since 9-11

Could somebody please FUCKING KILL ADAM SANDLER NOW?

Thankyou. Goodnight.

Whenever anyone asked him about Zen, the great master Gutei would quietly raise one finger into the air. A boy in the village began to imitate this behavior. Whenever he heard people talking about Gutei's teachings, he would interrupt the discussion and raise his finger. Gutei heard about the boy's mischief. When he saw him in the street, he seized him and cut off his finger. The boy cried and began to run off, but Gutei called out to him. When the boy turned to look, Gutei raised his finger into the air. At that moment the boy became enlightened.

(PS Like Charles, a free beer to anyone who can tell me without Google where this blog posts title comes from - "He'll never be an ol' man river...") [rebelutionary]

That one's easy.

Edit: Ever have one of those posts you had to publish five times, because you kept making stupid typing mistakes? This is one of them.

I recently educated myself on the correct HTML way to do ‘single’ and “double” curly quotes, as well as em and en dashes: (‘—’ and ‘–’). I think I can even remember the rules about which dash goes where (a good explanation can be found in this A List Apart article, although it recommends using the numerical entities I can never remember). I doubt the character entities I'm using work in all browsers. On the other hand, I don't really care that much. This is my journal, cross-browser compatibility be damned.

There are a number of people who are saying that moving to XHTML now is a good idea.

Thus, it's refreshing to hear Ian Hickson, Mozilla's web-standards guy, saying that we should stick with HTML4 for now.

(This story was also posted to Kuro5hin)

One of the User Interface trends that emerged in the 1990's was ‘skinnability’: the ability to customise the appearance of an application right down to its controls and window decorations. Skinning continues to be a big hit amongst computer users who can now make their entire computer look like their favourite cartoon, but it presents a challenge to User Interface designers.

Paradoxically, skinnability reduces the expressiveness of a user-interface. It does so by restricting the vocabulary of the interface to those things that can be expressed compatibly with all existing skins (or even all potential skins). This is a minor problem for applications, and a huge problem for platforms.

Read the rest of this entry…

I was reminded of this by a few other posts flying around this evening.

The Nomic Game was invented by Peter Suber, and first published in a column by Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame).

Like every game, it has rules. Amongst other things, the rules tell you how you earn points, and how many points you need to score to win. One of the rules prescribes the procedure for voting in changes to the rules. You see, it's a self-modifying game. Every rule can be changed, if you follow the right procedure, and the right procedure is defined by the rules.

Sounds a bit weird? Why? That's how most democracies work.

The very first rule says you have to obey the rules. That one could be changed too, but it would make the game very difficult for anyone to win.

It'd be interesting to play.

Apple have posted a new batch of Switch ads, including the destined-to-be-parodied-to-death, “My name is Janie Porche, and I saved Christmas.”. Amusingly enough, pretty much all the old ads have been banished from the page, except the stoner's favourite switcher, Ellen Feiss.

It was a really good paper.

In a fit of, well, inspired insanity, I wrote a Nick Cave song. Now excuse me while I go murder someone in a dark alley while complaining that all women are evil.

James McMurry wins the ten points. “Babble out in simile” is a line from Babble, by The Cure, although he remembers it as being the second song on the Fascination Street CD single, whereas I remember it as being the b-side of Lullaby on vinyl. (lyrics to all these songs can be found here)

The Associated Press has compiled a handy list of fundamental rights that Americans have given up to the government in the last year. For people too lazy to click the link, the rights that have been disposed of are: Freedom of association, freedom of information, freedom of speech, the right to legal representation, freedom from unreasonable searches, the right to a speedy and public trial, and the right to liberty.

Right on! (link from plastic)

And in other news, I discovered this evening that my mother reads my livejournal. Can anyone remember if I've posted anything incriminating lately?

Yes, I've heard about the Ana Voog abuse complaint thing. No, I don't care. There has been no statement from the people who actually run livejournal about this, there's just been one alleged email from somebody who may or may not be correctly representing livejournal policy. I sincerely doubt the people who run this site actually care that someone may be selling things from their LJ page, just so long as the account is really a journal. The whole thing is a storm in a teacup. But oh, don't people love getting their knickers in a twist over things like this!

Dave Winer opines:

I've been posting this question on various weblogs and in private emails. The question is this. Why not add language to the spec that says it's okay for an RSS feed to include elements not defined in the spec, and leave it at that.

Please. God. No.

• Pretty much every element of RSS0.94 is optional, and can be left out. If you also allow arbitrary elements to be added, do you have a specification any more?
• In the RSS 0.9x series, a valid version 0.9x document is also a valid 0.9x+1 document. If you allow arbitrary elements you break this contract, or at least make it impossible to add new elements to the specification. Each added element becomes a redefining of a previously permitted but undefined element.
• It would discourage the adoption of RSS modules (for which there are already a good set of defined standards, and which can be mixed and matched) in favour of a hundred splintered dialects of the core RSS, which may be mutually incompatible.

Oh, and ten points for someone who can tell me where this post's title (Babble out in simile, since the titles are only visible in my RSS feed) comes from, without using Google.

For a while, my mother had a job that involved helping writers. If you were a writer, she'd be able to tell you how to get in touch with publishers, how to get your manuscript assessed, what writing events were going on around the state, and so on. Regularly, she'd receive a phone-call that went something like this: “I've got this really good idea for a book. Do you know someone who could write it for me?”

If you want to see the same theory at work in programming, have a look at this gem on Sourceforge (all spelling and grammar atrocities are transcribed verbatim from the original):

An online life simulation game. You play againts many users for a life simulation game. Its like an online version of The Sims accepot better and multiplayer. It will be targeted to run on linux, using mysql as the database apache as the web server php

Looking down below the Development Status: 1 - Planning, but just above the section that shows the project has released no files, and has nothing in CVS, is a link: HELP WANTED: This project is looking for Developer(s). Follow that link, and you get the plaintive request...

start programming first step. We need the game planned up. Please give us ideas.

It would improve the site no end if sourceforge refused to make a project visible to other users until it posted some working code. Just one minor feature or prototype would do, just enough to show that the thing isn't just some flight of fantasy.

Nice job, if you can get it...

Bush has spent a whopping total of 250 days of his presidency at Camp David (123 days), Kennebunkport (12) and his Texas ranch (115). That means Bush has spent 42 percent of his term so far at one of his three leisure destinations.

To date, the president has devoted far more time to golf (15 rounds) than to solo news conferences (six). The numbers also show that Bush, after holding three news conferences in his first four months, has had only three more in the last 15 months -- not counting the 37 Q&A sessions he has had with foreign leaders during his term.

Unless nobody signs up and the whole thing gets cancelled, (or they decide to hold it at the Newtown Arms) I'll be at the Sydney webloggers meetup on Wednesday the 18th. Live in Sydney? Come along. Anyone who mentions Java, XML or Dave Winer has to buy a round.

Dave is also now working on a Java implementation of Radio Community Server. Charles started working on this a while ago, but I'm not sure how far he got. You guys should collaborate with each other, and with Roller! Java-Radio man!

[rebelutionary]

My implementation of xmlStorageSystem was up to the point where radio could register itself as a user, upload/delete files, and keep track of the most recently updated weblogs on the server. It uses Apache XML-RPC, and Hibernate for persistence (hooked into hyper-squirrel right now, but with hibernate that's just a configuration issue). I'm quite happy to share the code (as un-pretty as it might be) with anyone, since I've been neglecting it so badly. Just drop me a line.

I also had a lot of good ideas how a radio server could be improved, so if the project takes off, I'd like to at least contribute.

Edit: Oh, and I had the "mail to blog owner" stuff set up, too

This week's Something Awful Comedy Goldmine is pretty funny. If you're a complete nerd. Which I am.

Sam Ruby explains where he would take RSS if he were king of the world. Imho, he punts on the hard decisions, but maybe that's not so bad. [Scripting News]

Now, given a few minutes digging through the recesses of my memory for my sketchy recollections of American football, I can almost work out what “punts on the hard decisions” means. Ward's Wiki has a page on this: AmericanCulturalAssumption.

It's been a long time since I wrote a stream-of-consciousness rant. I expect to not make much sense. :)

After seeing all the advertisements of what is lined up, the only thing that is going to convince me to turn on the television this September 11th is if something new blows up.

This isn't about grief, or respect, or commemorating the dead. It's about adopting someone else's tragedy. It's standing by the side of the road, gaping at the wrecked car. It's an emotionally stunted public trying to become part of something bigger, even if that “something bigger” is a mass-murder. It's about taking the humanity away from everyone involved in the event, and turning them into media symbols.

This isn't part of a healing process. Showing all that footage again in prime time isn't a memorial of lives lost, it's a replay of death. Showing the fire-fighters rushing into a building we know is about to collapse on them, that we've seen collapse a thousand times already in the last year, is voyeurism, pure and simple.

It's the same pattern repeated. When two children in England are murdered, the news value of the event in Australia is practically nil. But it's run anyway, full page spreads in the tabloids, pictures in the news, for weeks on end. Why? For the entertainment of the masses. Yes, it's entertainment. It's something that has absolutely no meaningful impact on the people who read it, it just provokes an emotional reaction. It's the same reason we go see movies. It's a tear-jerker, a murder mystery, and in the end they catch the killers.

Entertainment. We live mostly routine, unremarkable lives, and that's not enough. We crave the endorphin rush we get from extremes of emotion, that natural chemical hit. It's just so much more convenient to get that hit vicariously, to momentarily adopt someone else's emotion, than to actually be involved. Much less messy. Much easier to limit it to a short, intense moment, and then be done with it and go back to our lives, sated.

Until, of course, it's time to re-show all the footage for the first anniversary.

Lovely quote from Doc Searls (via Dave Winer) about Steve Jobs' contributions to computing: “They were also inventions intended to mother necessity”

This week I'm experimenting. I bought a USB keyboard, turned off my Win2k desktop box, and I'm running the Powermac as a desktop replacement plugged into its monitor whenever I'm home. So far, I've not missed Windows one iota.

A very interesting mailing-list post from Ralph Johnson, one of the authors of Design Patterns. He talks about good and bad Patterns practices.

People who make up-front designs are attracted to patterns, because they think that patterns will help them to have designs with less of the flaws of their current designs. Patterns might help a little, but the real problem is lack of feedback and lack of experience, and patterns do not directly address these problems. If people are both designing and implementing systems, then when they use a pattern, they will quickly learn whether it works and whether it makes their system better. If they are doing paper designs then they will not, and so are likely to use the pattern inappropriately.

One of my pet Java peeves is that some people religiously avoid the String concatenation operators, + and +=, because they are less efficient than the alternatives. It's an urban legend with a very tenuous basis in fact. Yes, there are some situations that requires StringBuffer instead of String. No, that doesn't mean that String concatenation is bad in all cases.

Read the rest of this entry…

I recently had a similar experience to John H. Farr. I followed a back-link from my referrer log, and found that someone was using my RSS feed to re-display my whole front-page on their website. I can't remember the name of the site any more—I was going to write about it at the time but I got distracted.

Anyway, I think that republishing my blog on another site is somewhat less than polite. Hence, I've stuck a copyright notice in my RSS feed explaining what I consider to be permissable uses of the file:

Copyright 2002 Charles Miller. This content is made available for personal use and limited syndication. It may be viewed, stored and cached without limit. It may only be republished in an abbreviated form: as headlines, with optional truncated summaries of the contained items. Permission is NOT given to republish this page in full, even if all credit is given to the original author.

From Daily Zen

Grace is within you;
Grace is the Self.
Grace is not something
To be acquired from others.
If it is external, it is useless.
All that is necessary is to
Know its existence in you.
You are never out of
Its operation.
ÐRamana Maharshi ( d. 1950)

If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty—Japanese Proverb (thanks lonita)

A few words to live by from Mike¹Mark Pilgrim: “Most of the people you hate don't know it, and the rest don't care.”

¹ I haven't a clue how I made this thinko. I've only been reading his site regularly for the last year, after all.