Eagles may soar, but weasels don’t get sucked into jet engines. — John Benfield
Speaking of eagles, we can’t neglect this masterpiece (from National Lampoon, but I’ve forgotten the author):
He grasps the crag with crooked hands
Close to the sun in far off lands
Ring’d by the azure world he stands.The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls
He watches from the mountain walls
And like a thunderbolt, he farts.— Alfred, Lord Tennyson
To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
I believe I’ve discovered a real-life shibboleth. No, not that shibboleth, the original kind: a word that some people can’t utter.
The word arises in this hypothetical. The folks who can’t pronounce it are our traditional figures of fun, the far Right.
Either the amount of waste, fraud, and corruption in government added to all the things that the government just plain shouldn’t be doing are finite or they’re infinite. Since governments are run by mere mortals, and since the government budget itself is finite, that total, though large, must be finite. But if it is finite, then if we follow the advice of libertarians and Reagan conservatives and starve it out by cutting taxes, then the time must eventually come when we have reduced the size of government as far as we can. Are we done? No. Things don’t stay the same forever. The number of citizens to protect or the number of threats from abroad or some factor must increase, and that means the time must inevitably come when the only rational course is to raise taxes.
And that is the thing which you’ll never, ever get anybody on the far Right, even the most “squishy soft”, to admit. And that is the thing that distinguishes right-wing philosophies from rational philosophies.
A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward. — Jean Paul Richter
Which means brave people are just people who don’t get it? That bravery is a virtue of the dull?
Works for me.
I’ve been collecting some photo and art links on del.icio.us, and when I’d collected over 100 I decided to grab them and post them, mostly uncommented, on the blog. There’s galleries (commercial and amateur), howtos, equipment, and heaven only knows what else. Afaik there’s no pr0n, but there are some art and glamour photo galleries, some of which may not be safe for work. Don’t rely on their being edited or even visited very much. For instance, the first item on the list is subtitled “dedicated to the child portrait photographer”. I don’t think it’s one of those sites, but if it is, it’s not my fault!
Well, I suppose I can check my log, and if Michael Jackson visits, we’ll know.
Nick Bradbury reports that Microsoft is beginning to care about the browser wars, again. Well, maybe. When the code hits the street, I’ll believe. I’ve seen too many friends ride over the cliff with some of Microsoft’s flashes in the pan. Remember Chrome which became ChromeEffects which became a corpse, all within the space of a single SIGGRAPH? I really wish I’d gotten one of those balls.
Nick, as usual, has his priorities straight: standards, standards, standards, standards: CSS2, PNG alpha (I’d add PNG gamma and then camp out on the W3C’s doorstep until they add the AssumedGamma tag), and correct MIME handling. Actually, it would be churlish not to mention (a) the considerably less broken handling of content-encoding in MSIE 6, and (b) fixing MIME handling in MSIE without fixing MIME handling in Windows is like putting a bandaid on Monty Python’s black knight.
Let me now become the 99,000th person to link to Joel Spolsky’s How Microsoft Lost the API War. One thing all of us linkers had in common is that we almost wrote that article ourselves, and certainly would have if only we’d been clever about something besides the decorations on our mediocrity.
In fact, I did write an article here about a nice young man who built this cute little .NET application — that took 80MB of downloads before you could run it. Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but it’s really almost that bad. Microsoft, a company that prides themselves on eating their own dogfood, seems to be pissing in that dogfood.
By turning their backs on the Win32 API, Microsoft is risking not only the debacle of releasing a new operating system and no one will care (blithely ignoring how close they came to that very thing with 2003 Server), but they’re risking something even worse. They may wake up one rainy morning to find some collective of hippies squatting at SourceForge has taken over effective ownership of the Win32 API and are producing GPLed killer apps with it that force users off of Longhorn and its successors.
Mind you, some of us blogging on this article are pissed off that our knowledge has become obsolete overnight, but software geeks are far from stupid people, and despite the smoke and lights from the man behind the curtain, the business case for .NET simply isn’t there. Having learned QT and XSLT last year and Integrity this year for projects where I did see a business case, I think I can survive if somebody decides to call me a Luddite who’s unwilling to learn.
This is almost a “contractual obligation” article right here. It’s an important notion flying around the net, and I’d better mention it. And perhaps I may even figure out a practical lesson to be drawn from it: like not turning your back on your past accomplishments. Or maybe not.
Acts of Volition, a weblog I’ve been reading more and more, has an article “How Websites Learn” that takes a look at how Stuart Brand’s How Buildings Learn applies to website design and development.
The immediate impact of the article was to put three books into the “buy next payday” nook of my Amazon shopping cart: Brand’s book, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (I’ve taken it out of the library twice, and I decided to buy it this time, just in case someone else checked out and succumbed to the same temptation not to return it that struck me last time), and A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, which I buy with some trepidation. I may sneak into Books-A-Million or B. Dalton to peek into it. There was a book, heavily touted in The Whole Earth Catalog, that derived a formal language for design that was supposed to be the Russell & Whitehead of design. What a pretentious, empty, load of crap! The title has mercifully faded from my memory, but that description ought to be sufficient to remind you of it, if you’ve ever seen it yourself. Anyway, I want to make sure A Pattern Language isn’t like that.
There’s actually some practical purpose for those books. We’re fixin’ to start (at long last) on our home remodeling (fear not, this blog won’t become a construction blog, and we’re taking our time about it). But I’m worried that I don’t know enough about design to keep from doing something that turns out awful and ugly and unusable. So time to brush up. And maybe a book on Palladio too.
In case you still needed some incentive to stop using MSIE for a while, now SANS is reporting that some Microsoft Internet Information Server webservers have been compromised so that they attach a nasty piece of JavaScript to every web page they serve. The JavaScript takes advantage of a still-unfixed vulnerability in MSIE to install a keystroke logger on your machine and connect you to some IP addresses that are already known for spam and other malicious activities. If you’re running Firefox, Opera, or just about anything but Microsoft Internet Explorer, you’re safe. If you’re running MSIE, you’re screwed.
I have our faithful correspondent Tim to thank for these entries. First, Cory Doctorow’s talk to the kids at Microsoft Research on DRM. Given Tim’s down-to-earth nature, I figured my initial reaction that there was no hope the Microsofties would listen (and even if they did, the decision absolutely will be made by the suits, not the geeks) might have been too downbeat. And having said the same thing about the “time to dump Internet Explorer” movement (an idea whose time has not come, imho — it’s gonna take the equivalent of an asteroid striking the earth through MSIE before people will dump it in numbers that matter), let’s let the cheerful folks have their day.
Btw, ExCathedrites (if I call y’all the Cherub Choir, would that be too twee?), in case you’re worried about my glumness in the past couple of articles, I’m downright chipper otherwise. Work is going great (I’m finally on the hardware, yaaay), I’ve been hugely productive on the graphics pages, I’m over the bug, and I’m learning (and loving) Finale PrintMusic. I just can’t figure out why anybody would pay attention to Doctorow or Miessler. And I see a corporate takeover of our computers facilitated by Microsoft already most of the way toward the finish line, and nobody’s paying attention to it. Oh well.
More typical Tim is this delightful essay on Volokh Conspiracy about why the Sierra Club is insane to be calling for First Amendment rights to be stripped from corporations. Big hint: can you say New York Times, boys and girls? I blush to admit I actually gave that cockamamie idea a “hmmm” when I first saw it.
This has been a miserable year for virus colds. I got put out of action again this weekend and Monday and Tuesday, so apologies for not blogging.
It’s not like I didn’t have enough topics, I was just asleep most of the time. So, to clear away the backlog, let’s take a trip to see:
I haven’t looked, but if MetaFilter or BoingBoing had these, let me know and I’ll dig up some others.
Daniel Miessler writes in the latest Lockergnome, Why You Should Give Up Internet Explorer. And he gives some good, sound reasons why using Microsoft Internet Explorer is a bad idea. He concludes that, whatever the tradeoffs might have been in the past, the pluses no longer outweigh the minuses.
He’s got a point. Microsoft hasn’t worked on MSIE for Windows in a long, long time. There are CSS bugs and bugs in rendering PNG images that were fixed on MSIE for Mac, but the changes never got rolled into MSIE for Windows, because Microsoft won the browser wars, so why bother? Modern web browsers are way ahead of MSIE. Us Opera and Moz fans would like to think it was our complaints that reversed the trend toward MSIE-only sites to the point where they’re pretty hard to find these days, but it was probably accessibility laws and regulations. So there’s no longer any reason to keep using MSIE because the web sites require it. Most of them don’t any more. So when you look at the security history of MSIE, it simply makes no sense to keep on using an out-of-date, broken, dangerous Web browser.
But there’s a big problem: there are two classes of people in Miessler’s audience: geeks and mom’n'pop. It’s a continuum, so pick your place anywhere between them, because nobody is going to pay any attention to him. Geeks have already given up routine surfing with MSIE, but they keep it around to test their web sites. Mom’n'pop will write you a letter just like the one I got the other day when I sent out a warning about the latest killer MSIE bug:
Do you have aluminum foil wallpaper??? [Correspondent's name] (living on the edge, using Internet Explorer…) If Linux was #1, it would have as many or more “vulnerabilities” as Windows…(imho)
And that’s not the worst letter I got: another correspondent liked my posting, and asked “Do you hate Microsoft as much as I do?”
For the record, no, probably not, unless you don’t hate Microsoft at all. But I’ve made a judgment based on experience and study that over the years Microsoft’s products for the world-wide porinformation superhighway have been and continue to be pretty bad. And on occasion they’re just incredibly dangerous to use. I won’t have either of the Outlooks within a hundred yards of my home machines — Outlook and Outlook Express are two entirely different code bases, so they generally take turns being the more dangerous. And MSIE stays in its little cage, except when I’m going to microsoft.com. I’ve stopped using Feed Demon because I’ve already had a website install malware on my computer through Feed Demon’s MSIE control.
So the problem is, who’s going to take Miessler’s advice? If you’re still using MSIE as your general purpose web browser, you’re probably not gonna change. If you aren’t using it, you probably stopped quite a while ago. Best case, maybe some people will stop using MSIE so much, and the copy of Firefox or Opera they’ve already got will become their primary browser. It’s not that installing those browsers is hard (nowadays it’s ridiculously simple, but it’ll take you a few minutes to an hour to customize them, depending on how geeky you are). But some folks just don’t install very much software. If you’re a hard-core mom’n'popper, you don’t install any software.
I’d like to be more hopeful, but I can’t see any reason for it.
Kelly and I are gradually getting our Web Builders’ Toolkit site back on the air. What was once a page of links has turned into a whole bunch of pages of links and comments and even a little bit of original content.
The latest section (incomplete, but the core material is there and you can tell what sections we have yet to fill in) is “GIF, JPEG, or PNG?“, which talks about graphics on the Web. In the past few years the Web seems to have picked up some very nice people who’ve fallen into some rotten habits. In particular, we’ve got folks who save everything as a JPEG, and as a result, there’s a ton of unreadable scans out there.
At this point, our “GIF, JPEG, or PNG?” section probably isn’t ready for general visitors yet, but if any of our gentle readers would like to check the facts in there, I sure would appreciate it.
I’ve been thinking off and on all weekend about a new friend who’s on the point of our communities’ effort to make life a little more decent for our children. She’s frustrated by some of the idiocy of our policies, and especially frustrated by the incorrigibility of some of the parents and kids. I shared with her some “social worker chat” I’d read recently: “If they don’t get it when you take the kids, they don’t get it.”
And I wonder, do people become conservatives because of their frustration with the idiocy of the policies that seem to protect and perpetuate the system to the exclusion of acting in a sharp, definitive way to change people’s lives?
Because if that’s what it is, then there’s a serious case of mistaken identity going on here. Liberalism isn’t about the specific laws and methods and policies. Those things just represent our best guess at the time about what we should do. It isn’t even distinctly liberal that those practices become institutionalized and develop buttresses of precedents and thick, idiotic manuals. Indeed, if you want to put a label on inflexibility and unwillingness to change, there’s never been a better word for that than “conservative”.
No, liberalism isn’t about the programs or policies, it isn’t about the institutions. What’s distinctively and uniquely liberal is that we try.
And I’m perfectly serious that trying is uniquely liberal. I encourage people to ask conservatives what they propose instead of some of the things you can hear them heaping scorn and derision on night and day, and sit on them until they give you a straight answer. Ask a hard-right conservative what she wants for education, for example, and eventually she’ll tell you that what she wants is the destruction of the public school system. And, oh by the way, if she can siphon off the last couple of bucks and send them to private schools through vouchers, she’d like that very much, thank you.
Conservatives will tell you that private charities are more productive, that churches exercise better stewardship, that big government is the problem and just makes everything worse. They’ll tell you stories for hours and hours, but when it comes down to public policy, when it comes down to what we all do together, the answer is, we don’t do anything. Or we hold out a hand up once or twice, but we make it hard (“It’s a test of character”), and the core of public policy is giving up (“they had their chance”).
And so I could very easily say, liberalism may suck, but it’s better than what they offer as an alternative, because what conservatives really, truly do offer as an alternative is doing nothing.
But I’ve been thinking about something even worse than that. Do people become conservatives to find others who’ll give them permission to give up? Mind you, I’m talking about giving up on people who any rational assessment would conclude we’d all be better off if they were simply put to sleep. There are people like that: people who aren’t just unfortunate or lack opportunities or don’t know any better. There are people who live lives of active harm to everything we hold good and beautiful and true. And sometimes I have given up on people I thought were like that. Because I was human, because there was only so much I could do, because I had to stand for something, and because I wanted to have something left to give to the people I still had some hope for.
But a political philosophy — a philosophy of what we all ought to believe together — should never be about giving people permission to give up. Giving up should be a lonely choice, a sad choice. But a political philosophy needs to be something that nourishes hope, that inspires the best in us. It is to my mind a corruption, a perversion of politics to say that deep down, what you’re all about is giving permission to give up.
And if you’re looking for something to label as liberal, label that. Because what liberals say is “never give up.”
Patrick’s friend Christine flew up (er, actually, across and down) to visit him in Birmingham while he was speaking and running workshops at the Alabama Educational Technology Conference. Here’s Christine, who’s a Republican, asking Patrick if he thought the restaurant could serve her a nice plate of “the poor.”
And now Christine is explaining, “But I really am a meanie.”
Nope. No you aren’t. Your secret is out. We caught you being nice.
One of the favorite dystopian themes in sf is a future where corporations hire armies, conduct wars, and ride roughshod over governments. That makes it kind of interesting that a tipping point just happened recently, and nobody paid attention: of the world’s 100 largest economic entities, 51 are now corporations and 49 are countries. IBM total sales, for example, are higher than Ireland’s GDP. Wal-Mart is behind Sweden but ahead of Denmark and Norway.
But I wouldn’t worry about it. Corporations, after all, are excellent citizens.
One of the few temptations I haven’t given in to is microphone lust. In my tiny studio I have one mic, an ND257B which picks up details cleanly as a guitar mic, warms up nicely when you crowd it as a vocal mic, and is wonderfully roadable. I also have a mic stand which has never been adjusted without first loosening the appropriate wheels (a claim I think few of us can make) and a mic shield because that mic sure does love to pop. I probably should have ordered a couple more at the time, because they don’t make them any more.
Microphone addicts can’t understand that at all. What can you possibly do with one mic?, they’ll ask, bewildered. It’s for the true microphone addicts among my faithful readers that I offer Learning about Microphones. Oh if you don’t know the difference between a dynamic mic and a ribbon mic, you can learn it here, but it’s the photographs, the loving details of the reflections, the cool, smooth surfaces that just beg to be touched, even caressed, that I’m sure will give micoholics “that special feeling”.
SUVs are the tools of Satan.
Not in the way you probably think. I care maybe 10% worth about the harm versus good that a particular car does to society and 90% about the harm versus good that a particular car does for me. I suspect I’m not alone here. While I get mildly ruffled about low mileage vehicles, so long as nobody’s making me pay to fill them up, I can pretty much live with my pain.
No, the thing that’s wrong with SUVs is the quintessentially deceptive nature of the whole SUV idea. First off, I should explain that in my college days I gladly spent a good part of several weekends as a passenger in a borrowed Jeep careening over the logging roads and through the streams of the Allegheny mountains. And while the fact that the driver was drunk out of his mind undoubtedly added to the thrill, there’s just no denying that this was fun.
And so, people buy SUVs expecting to have that kind of fun occasionally. But the truth is, not only does an SUV have less cargo space than your average mid-size sedan; not only is it uncomfortable and overpriced and under-powered and under-braked; not only does it steer like a bullet; not only does it want to tip over at the slightest curve; but an SUV is such a crappy vehicle as a vehicle that it isn’t a fun source, it’s a fun sink. Head on out in your SUV with a little fun in mind, and before you’ve gone five miles, that SUV has sucked all that fun out of your soul.
And so, you end up in the left lane, inattentive, going a couple of mph slower than the speed limit, wondering what went wrong.
Well, I’ll tell you what went wrong. You’re in the left lane! Get the hell out of the lane that’s set aside for drivers and take your suburban disappointment with you into the spectators’ lane where you belong! That is one part of the social cost of SUVs that I do care about and that I will not gladly pay. If you want to drive in the left lane, get a car!
Well at last a handful of conservatives are starting to admit the possibility of global warming, but their latest delaying tactic is — get this — they don’t know how much is due to us and how much is natural.
‘Scuse me! Shouldn’t we be asking, what’s gonna happen and how much is it gonna cost to keep it from happening?
I don’t care whether it’s SUVs in the line at the tollbooth or cow flatulence (if it’s the latter, I blame Clinton), it’s really pointless to ask how much we’re responsible for, so we only do (or undo) that much. The question is, how much is needed if we want to keep the planet from turning into Waterworld.
Btw, if it turns out Kevin Costner is going to be starring in the remaining days of civilization, just kill me now.
…at Forbes Field was Benny Benack, who played “The Bucs Are Going All the Way”. It was that song that some friends and I formed a dixieland band to play about a million times in the back of a pickup truck during the Baldwin Borough parade that year. That was when I got my first intimation of mortality: my embouchure wasn’t going to let me be a trumpet player no matter how much I wanted to be one. I switched to baritone horn, then bass trombone, and was much happier. But this article is about something else.
A good friend from Chicago writes about something different: what kind of music do lefties listen to? Fortunately, CounterPunch magazine has provided an answer.
I’m so darn proud of them. Not just for the energy they’ve applied to making sure Bush is a one-term anomaly, but for their interest in improving the world in general.
But lest you think it’s all granola and saving the whales, here’s proof that they’re also involved in advancing theoretical mathematics.
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