Old Ex Cathedra

It’s always impressed me how easily Microsoft and other corporations pollute the information space with phony front organizations, subverted think tanks, “testing” labs, and coordinated USENET postings.

Not that they do it, but how easily they do it. How they simply reach over and push that button without a moment’s hesitation.

But then, how else would they behave? They’ve never been a part of the internet’s information space, and so they have no stake in it.

To Microsoft and its corporate brethren, the internet is an advertising channel. Nothing more. There is no community. There isn’t even a commitment to trustworthy information. It’s not that they recognize those things and devalue them. They are utterly incapable of recognizing them. All they can see in the net is an advertising medium, a tool they can use to exercise power.

I’m reminded of a verse from a favorite poem by Blake:

     For Mercy has a human heart,
       Pity a human face,
      And Love, the human form divine,
       And Peace, the human dress.

What we see before us when we look at corporate use of the internet is the shining face of a machine, wholly bereft of mercy, pity, love, peace, or any other human quality.

I think it’s our duty to continue to say to those machines and their servants, you are not welcome here.

But I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both.- Sir William Berkeley, 1671

Is it generally true that conservative ideas look worse the farther back we look to find them? Probably. It’s in the nature of conservatism to cling not just to the ideas of the past, but to the bad ideas of the past.

Mind you, human folly knows very few bounds, and occasionally conservatives are right. I wish we’d had a few more of them around while we were all doing our T-Groups and dressing like Partridges in the 1970s. But in general, we move forward (I don’t know how or why) and so conservatism represents what all but a few of us have outgrown.

I use this as a sigquote every now and then because I think it’s a darn good idea to point out that when conservatism is wrong, it’s mind-bogglingly, horrifyingly wrong. It would be amusing, were it not for conservatism’s habitual use of force and even violence to hold the rest of us back to a philosophy that, ten or twenty years from now, we’ll shudder at just as much as we shudder at that sigquote.

Rrrrrrrring. Rrrrrrrring.

Decatur Police Department.

Hello, I’d like to turn myself in.

Yes, sir, what did you do?

I made a false report.

What report is that, sir?

This one.

Mr. Epimenides, if you don’t stop calling like this, we will come out and whup you.

“We were half way to Rivendell when the drugs began to take hold.” - Hunter S. Tolkien

Saw it on slashdot, couldn’t resist.

We held a pair of shootouts this weekend at the luxurious Temple of the Dog Studios in beautiful Decatur, Alabama: AmphetaDesk vs FeedReader, and w.bloggar vs Movable Type’s web interface.

The final score: one vote for a native Windows interface, one vote for a web interface.

AmphetaDesk vs FeedReader

AmphetaDesk and FeedReader are both servers that run on your Windows box and periodically go out to check RSS feeds. Both of them can be configured to listen for subscribe requests on Amphetadesk’s and Radio Userland’s ports (8888 and 5335, respectively).

AmphetaDesk uses your default browser for just about all its interaction. FeedReader is a classic 3-panel Windows design: the leftmost panel lists the feed sources; the top right panel lists the article titles, authors, and dates; and the largest panel on the bottom right contains an Internet Explorer control for displaying the article summaries and, if you click “Read On” in that windows, the articles themselves.

Because FeedReader doesn’t rely on your browser to display the feeds and articles, it’s relatively easy for it to, for example, show unread articles in boldface type and read articles in normal type (changing from one to the other as you click) and to show a running count of unread articles. There are several ways for AmphetaDesk to be as responsive to user inputs, but none of them looks particularly attractive from here.

More importantly, FeedReader can display just the summary from the article you just clicked on. AmphetaDesk displays a single page with all the summaries. If you have a lot of feeds, or if you’re taking feeds from folks who publish big summaries, that page can grow to be pretty fat.

These programs share some common faults. There’s no “undo”. Once you delete a feed, it’s gone. It was far from obvious how either program managed articles you’d already read – though FeedReader at least showed them in a different font weight. And neither of them can read opml files or any other multi-feed list format I’ve tried. Either there’s a secret I haven’t figured out yet, or both programs make you enter feeds one at a time.

In its favor, AmphetaDesk has a gigantic alphabetical list of raw feeds to choose from. FeedReader’s offerings are skimpy, requiring you to go out and hunt feeds down yourself. And when a site offers multiple feeds through its “link rel” headers and you use the “subscribe” bookmarklet, FeedReader concatenates the URLs for all the feeds into one string. Oops.

FeedReader, which, to be fair, is advertised as alpha, has a few functionality problems. For instance, quite often in FeedReader, when you click on a feed name in the left-hand column, you’ll have to click on some other feed name and then go back to the feed you want to get the article names to display in the top right column.

Two elementary lacks in FeedReader drive me crazy: the absence of a “back” button for the Internet Explorer control and the lack of integration with the default browser. If you hit shift-click, you’ll open a separate full-featured Internet Explorer window, which is a step in the right direction, but a tremendous portion of the time I find myself right-mousing on the link in FeedReader’s panel, selecting “copy shortcut”, and pasting into Opera or Moz.

Despite these advantages for AmphetaDesk and the fact that I never had a problem with AmphetaDesk, either with Opera 6 on this Win98 laptop or with Mozilla on a Win2K desktop, FeedReader’s ended up as the RSS aggregator I’m using all the time. That’s because of:

1. FeedReader’s ability to handle a large number of feeds without producing an absurdly large web page
2. its somewhat quicker responsiveness
3. the ability to tell easily which articles I’ve read, and
4. the ability to control the order in which feeds are displayed. Whoever decided to constantly change the order of feeds on the summary display page in AmphetaDesk made a huge mistake, imho.

w.bloggar vs Movable Type

w.bloggar (formerly known as just bloggar) is a Windows application that replaces the web-based interface for Blogger, b2, MovableType, Nucleus, BigBlogTool, BlogWorks XML Blogalia and Drupal. It works (at least on MovableType) through the XMLRPC interface built into MT.

My test with this blog was short and not particularly sweet. I created a dummy blog entry and posted it, but it didn’t show up on the blog. Then I selected “post and publish” which brought the article up on the blog (though I was unable to tell if it pinged the hosts I notify). Then, I told it to delete the article, but the article itself was left behind in my archive where it will doubtless stay forever.

The editor window offers several convenience features, like highlighting a section and selecting “italics”, which you’d find on a basic web editor. But it seems to be all old-style HTML, rather than the XHTML “style”.

When I went to enter another article and found that there was no way to add another article category, I pulled the plug on the test. Granted, I have to enter XHTML by hand typing it this way, and I’ve got to pay a call on a validator from time to time, but Movable Type’s user interface is far from awful, and there weren’t enough convenience features to motivate me to use w.bloggar regularly. I can easily see how, if I had several blogs and was using two or three different blogging systems, or if I had a slower connection or a less responsive domain host, w.bloggar would rise dramatically in value.

…are scary.

According to an Op-Ed piece by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times (free registration required), “Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).”

Nearly three out of five believe it’s necessary to believe in God to be moral, perhaps the Religious Right’s most hideous lie, which lets them set their own sick selfishness in the place where morality ought to be and condemns everybody not exactly like them to perdition when dead and subhuman status while living.

Your neighbors: arrogant, willfully ignorant, superstitious, the long hoped for fruits of conservatism. Keep an eye on them, and keep your wits about you. But you already knew that.

Well-Formed Web crashes Opera 6.

Here’s a fairly recent quote that’s entered the libertarian bag of tricks:

When government forces people to help their neighbors, conscience atrophies. When people are free to choose whether to help their neighbors or not, conscience is strengthened. – Jacob G. Hornberger

Here’s the pin for that particular baloon:

Just whose conscience are we talking about here, bucky? I mean, you’ve lived under a government that, since 1787, has purported to do precisely that. Has your conscience atrophied?

Because unless you can say that your conscience or mine or the conscience of some real person has atrophied, then you’re talking about precepts that are so lofty and abstract they never come down to earth to concern themselves with real people.

At least this real person hasn’t got time for foolishness like that.

Analysis:

One of the least palatable characteristics of the libertarian philosophy is that it deliberately turns its back on the ill, the impoverished, the handicapped, and the weak. Libertarianism is much easier to sell to the smart, the healthy, and the powerful.

But no matter how callous libertarians are, nobody wants to seem to be callous. So what do libertarians do? Well, they certainly don’t become more compassionate themselves. Let’s not be ridiculous here. No, what libertarians do is the old semantic shuffle.

Whenever citizens act through their government to promote the general welfare, all the libertarian needs to do is re-label it as “forc[ing] people to help their neighbors” and Voilla! Now the libertarian looks like he’s in a morally superior position.

Well, he isn’t. The way to help your neighbors is to help your damn neighbors. And if you and your fellow citizens want to do it together through an organization you’ve established (and one of those organizations just happens to be a freely elected government), then no libertarian should stop you, no matter how smug he feels.

Never attribute to malloc that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. - Joerg Pommnitz

You absolutely can call malloc() and free() in a C++ program. Sometimes a block of memory is just a block of memory.

Most people wouldn’t know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.- Frank Zappa

Mark Saleski posted another pithy quote from Zappa on Blogcritics this morning. Go see it.

Zappa would not only say things just to be ornery, he’d do musical things just to be ornery. I never heard a dissonnant composed passage or free improvisation from him that didn’t steal my heart at once. And yet, I find his fascination with doo-wop completely inexplicable. I only wish he’d spent half the time he spent being another Sha Na Na on what I think is his more substantial music.

Lots of feed feeders know you can get an RSS feed from your favorite Yahoo group (maybe), but now the nice folks at feeds.archive.org have made it simple enough that your mom can do it. Type in the group name on this form and it’ll tell you the URL for the feed, ready to plug into your favorite aggregator, or if you’re too lazy for that, it shows you half a dozen icons that’ll subscribe you with one click in most news aggregators.

The “maybe” is that your favorite group has to have its message archives open to the public. And Feedreader displays the author’s name as the message headline, so there are still some bugs to be worked out. Still, if the bazillions of blogs and news sites that have RSS feeds just aren’t enough, now you can get (some) Yahoo groups.

Thanks to Glitch of LinkFilter: Raphael Benedet’s gallery of 3D Artists. Naturally the site includes the incomparable Gilles Tran and some of the other folks in the POVRay Hall of Fame and the Internet Raytracing Competition.

I like Benedet’s gallery because of the range, not only in styles and subjects and technologies, but in scope: along with the super-rich Viennese tortes, there’s some perfectly good White Castle hamburgers. Feed your head.

ActiveWin reports Outlook Express joins Internet Explorer on the trash heap of history. Just as with MSIE, Microsoft will do no new development on Outlook Express. I’m guessing you’ll still be getting security patches and “upgrades” that install anti-file-sharing technology on your computer. Nevertheless, if you use OE, you’d better love it the way it is.

Lockergnome’s Meryl was first to say, “Sure, kill the less bloated email program.”

“Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer.”
- Jim Allchin, Vice-President of Microsoft

The obvious comment is, “Duh!”

Of course open source is out to destroy certain kinds of IP. Lots more folks than me believe corporate ownership of IP is a disaster for the countries that let it run out of control. I also put my money where my mouth is, btw: my free software page.

When it comes to colors, I’m a guy.

I was one of the folks who helped set up the Web3D Consortium’s Color and Lighting Working Group, but (don’t tell anyone) the reason I did it was that I hoped I’d pick up some kind of clue about what colors go together.

Didn’t happen. Instead I learned more than I’d ever wanted to know about color spaces and intensity transfer functions and how CMYK stands for “Can’t Make Your Kolor”, and how the principal use of PMS is getting your printer to knock a couple of bucks off the job when they get the color wrong.

But I was still wearing brown socks with blue pants. Oh, I could tell a good color combination. I just couldn’t make one.

Which is why EasyRGB.com is just what I needed. Pick a color, and the Color Harmonizer will give you a dozen colors that go with it. I picked the colors for this blog that way – though I only used a few of the dozen, and I’m still kinda timid. For instance, the very next project I styled, a little sales pitch for using simple HTML, just kept the same colors.

There’s some more tools there, but I haven’t played with them yet: finding equivalents in different manufacturers’ paint catalogs, converting between color spaces, monitor calibration, converting between computer colors and real world colors. For color fans, even guy color fans, this is heaven.

Thanks to Steven Hall for pointing it out to me.

And now the voices are telling me to clean my guns.

This started off as one of a list of “really good excuses for staying home from work”: the voices in my head told me to stay home and clean my guns.

I have my mail and news programs set up to start replies with something like “The voices are telling me that %PERSON said on %DATE”. So this brings it to a nice symmetrical close.

No idea who originated the thing I adapted.

A freeware font by John Martz, Robotic Attack Fonts. About half the time I see the font name spelled like this and the other half I see it spelled correctly (weird).

This font is usable. I don’t know how many slacker, spacey, “olde”, handwriting, and nouveau fonts I’ve downloaded over the years, only to discover that the only word that doesn’t look like hell when you try to render it in that font is the name of the font. Sometimes even that looks bad. But I have yet to find a word or sentence that looks bad in Girls Are W[ei/ie]rd. And you can read it from the back of a big room.

I did the example above in Paint Shop Pro 7, auto-kerning off, effect: Blade Pro classic with Tony Cheroke’s preset “Rust Bucket”.

I asked my Magic Eight Ball what email program to use.
“OUTLOOK NOT SO GOOD”
Good old Magic Eight Ball! Thanks for the warning.

This is a somewhat expanded version of a sig I’ve seen a couple of people use on slashdot. No idea who was first.

As a wordsmith (amateur variety), the last line worries me. It seems like you could get rid of it, but when you do it makes the sig seem kinda harsh, and like it ends too abruptly. Immediate fame and glory for anyone who solves that problem.

Btw, I have to use Outlook at work, and most critics miss its charm. It’s the delightful combination of bloat, security holes, and inability to do anything useful that makes Outlook what it is.

Found a click away from one of the random blogs Syndic8 sent me via AmphetaDesk: Conceptual Guerilla’s Strategy & Tactics. Current leader: “Defeat the Right in Three Minutes”.

“Cheap labor conservatives” – got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

One of the most harmful things we do to our own cause (“our” being staunch anti-conservatives like me) is the energy we waste talking about John Ashcroft. I’ve even seen the name spelled “Aschkrofft” (oh for Fraktur type).

Here’s the facts.

Ashcroft is a former Senator. The reason he’s “former” is that the voters of Missouri decided they’d rather have a dead guy than him. He came to Bush’s Cabinet with no constituency. Politically, he’s as dead as the guy who beat him.

Fact two: Ashcroft took office as Attorney General with Bush’s support, and if Bush didn’t agree with every single thing he did, he’d be gone. Who’d care?

Fact three (evidence for fact two): shortly after 9/11, Ashcroft made a move to undercut Tom Ridge at one of his frequent press conferences. Ashcroft was called to the White House, and suddenly the press conferences stopped. You can’t blame the guy for trying: an old pol like Ashcroft is like a race horse. When he hears the bell, he starts running. But Bush brought him to heel.

Bottom line: Ashcroft doesn’t do a single thing that Bush doesn’t want him to do, and that Bush probably told him to do in the first place. The guy who wants to tap the phones and internet connections of you and me and everybody who isn’t hard-core right-wing? It’s Bush. The guy who wants the star-chamber trials? Bush again. The guy who wants to imprison people without charges, and without even letting them see an attorney? You got it. Bush.

The only way to get rid of Ashcroft is to get rid of Bush, and every milliwatt spent talking about Ashcroft is a milliwatt that isn’t addressing the source of our country’s problems.