Old Ex Cathedra

You have to hand it to political operatives who can turn the Christmas celebration of Jesus’s birth into a nasty wedge issue, transforming a traditional message of love, peace and tolerance into one of anger, conflict and resentment. – Robert Parry

When asked by a kindly but seriously ignorant friend at work whether we celebrated Christmas, I replied, “Hey, we’re Unitarians. We’ll celebrate anything.” But that was too glib. Christmas is a brilliant secular holiday (allowing in a few less than perfectly proven characters like Santa and the Grinch and Rudolph and Olive), precisely because it’s a celebration of life. We get that. The folks with the Christmas lights shaped like giant crosses, I’m not so sure they get it.

If you’d like to join the snarling, nasty, little souls who are running their War on Christmas scam, you’ve got our blessing. Go for it. It’s Christmas.

OK, so last time I wrote such an elaborate introduction I never got around to doing the actual review. We did come up with a pretty good set of requirements, though, and they’ll be just what we need to evaluate Forumzilla. So enough procrastination: how is Forumzilla at “subscribing to, aggregating, formatting, arranging, and reading feeds?”

At first glance (a glimpse of the entries in Thunderbird’s mail folders) it’s very encouraging.

After installing it, I got a new folder in my Local Folders called “Feeds”, and after entering a few feed URLs you can see some of my friends’ blogs on the list.

Now let’s look at the whole Thunderbird screen:

[You may need to select "View Image" to see all the details.]

Each blog is a folder in the folder pane on the left. The folder contains the most recent posts for the blog in question, displayed like email messages (in the header pane and the preview pane). What gets into the preview pane (or the message window) depends on what the site owner decides he’s going to put in the feed, the whole article or just an excerpt.

And up among the headers on top of the preview pane is an extra header: “Website”. Click and it opens the URL of the article in your favorite web browser. That’s usually the permalink, but that depends on what the site’s RSS engine puts into the feeds. Want to read the rest of the article or see it nicely formatted with all its pictures? Click that link. So for arranging feeds, I give it 100% and another 100% for reading feeds. It’s exactly what I want a feed reader to do. And it does it inside my favorite email program, a tool I bring up all the time.

Deleting article feed messages, moving them to other folders, printing, saving — they act just like other email messages. No surprises.

How about aggregating? You set up the polling interval (for an individual feed or a default for new feeds) in the Options bar. You can access that through Tools / Extensions / Forumzilla / Options or through the Feeds button on the toolbar (mine’s on the right in that previous picture next to the Address Book).

The default polling interval is 30 minutes, but that’s absurd. I’ve set the default to 120 minutes. It seems to get at least some of the feeds when you start up, but so far the startup wait hasn’t been too bad. Considering that what you want is to poll the sites without your thinking about it, I’ll give that a 95%, just to account for the times you might want to see the newest posting on a favorite blog right now. And I’ve noticed some blogs will give you duplicate feeds. Evidently the messages show up as new all the time, perhaps because I’ve been playing around with the feeds. I’ll let you know if it continues.

Later: I stopped fooling around with the folders and I stopped getting duplicate messages.

Formatting? If you’ve set up Thunderbird to display messages as text, Forumzilla displays the RSS text as text. I like text. I have to admit not everyone is as forgiving as I am about things like .flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }. But if you have no fear of nasty things lurking inside the emails you get and display your emails in HTML with pictures permitted, Forumzilla does a very decent job of displaying the pictures and the rest. I have not tested this very much, but the feeds I displayed as HTML looked fine. Let’s make it 95% to allow for some unexpected gotchas.

Later: After a little experimenting, it seems the messages Forumzilla generates are HTML, which means when you do a “save as”, you’ll probably want to save them as “whatever.html”. It also means that if you forward a feed message to an archiver program like hypermail that expects plain text, you may find the message isn’t properly converted.

What about the remaining requirement: subscribing to feeds. Uhhhhhhhhh, gee, it sure does aggregate, arrange, and format and let you read well, doesn’t it?

OK, there’s two ways to do it. One is to use this interface:

Find the feed URL (not the site URL, that won’t work), copy it from your web browser, paste into the dialog, give it a name, and in it goes.

That’s absurd. RSS feeds are annoying to locate (I’m certain some site designers hide them deliberately) and Forumzilla’s error messages are terse. Here’s a marginally better way I’ve found. Fire up Sage, the Firefox plugin, and grab the link URL using the little magnifying glass finder:

I decided to make subfolders “Friends” and “People” for my feeds. So I’ve stuffed the feed I found (PZ Myers’ brilliant Pharyngula) under the “People” category. I collect several feed URLs or just one, and then use Sage’s “export OPML” facility.

Not quite done. Forumzilla does a splendid job of HTML importing, turining the outer <outline> containers into into subfolders, but if you bring up the export file in your favorite text editor:

you can see it’s got one container too many, the one marked “Sage Feeds”. So I delete that and its corresponding </outlne> element, and then Forumzilla will import it (and, incidentally, when I tried it just now, it put Pharyngula right amongst the other sites under “People”).

But don’t throw away the exported OPML files! Forumzilla doesn’t currently export OPML files.

I also imported some OPML files generated by FeedDemon, but somewhere along the line they picked up BOMs (byte order marks) at the beginning of the files. Forumzilla wouldn’t import them until I stripped off the BOM. After that, it picked them up fine.

There’s another Thunderbird extension. I won’t name it, but if you browse through theThunderbird extensions, you can hardly miss it. It’s huge, it fairly reeks of complexity, and it seems to rest uneasily on top of or beside or around Thunderbird. By contrast, Forumzilla is smallish (72K), simple, straightforward and (unless you put half the Internet in your feeds) unobtrusive. Were it not so bloody difficult to add feeds, it would be perfect. Even so, it’s what I’m going to be reading RSS feeds with from now on.

An British study reveals that, at least for some species of birds, evolution may not be proceeding according to the most commonly accepted theory. Good news for Recent Creationists? Not exactly. It turns out that, with humans in the environment, evolution of other species may be happening more rapidly with more local diversity and less resistance due to dispersal than previously thought. Not only does this stick yet another spoke in the wheels of Recent Creationists, it further weakens their ties to corporate conservatives who had made common cause with them on the issue of human impact on the ecology, each group asserting for its own reasons that it doesn’t matter very much. Now we see evidence of evolution ramping up as almost a panic reaction toward humans’ relentless destruction of habitat.

This study was published in Nature in 2005, which was a while back, but I don’t think it’s too late to be reporting about it here because (a) Creation “Science” hasn’t made it to 1950 yet, and (b) the press release on the Oxford University site has The. Greatest. Headline. Ever.

RSS is a technology in search of a product.

Not in search of a problem, notice. The problem is very well known: I (and lots of people like me) only want to visit a favorite website (a) when there’s something new there that we haven’t seen before and (b) when the new content is something we’re interested in.

A little more abstractly, we need to marry web-based content with push technology. The web is the apotheosis of pull technology. You can publish on the web, you can gather comments and sometimes spark genuine discussions like we’ve had here on Ex Cathedra. But you have to go to the website yourself. Now that’s good: the idea of web pages coming to you without your asking for them is the stuff of nightmares. But what if you don’t know there’s an article on Ex Cathedra that you might want to read or a discussion going that you might want to participate in?

You can do as a number of our faithful readers do and drop by every few days to see if there’s anything new or anything you missed last time. I do that too. That’s one of the reasons I put a blogroll over there in the right-hand column.

But I don’t really need to do all that clicking. Well, I do, but I shouldn’t. I don’t want to visit a website if there’s nothing new there, or if the only new article there is something I’m not very interested in. What I really want is a reminder when there’s a new article on the site, along with a brief excerpt so I can see what might be hiding behind the sometimes too clever titles. I want the owner of the website to send me a nice little message whenever there’s something new and enough information that I can decide whether I want to see it.

And by no coincidence at all, that’s exactly what RSS provides.

Oh all right, it’s not exactly like that, but it’s close. We have to go get a site’s RSS feeds ourselves, and check them against our list from the last time we visited. But we don’t have to read and interpret the whole website and that’s a good thing. Asking every website to manage a mailing list and send out emails? It’s (a) not gonna happen and (b) practically the definition of spam. Besides, (c) do you really want Andrew Sullivan and Markos Moulitsas to have your email address? Not to mention the kindly old Rev. and the Enormous Hooters Forum?

OK, I think we know enough now to tell the software pixies what they need to put into their bag of tricks to make it easy for us to play with those feeds and accomplish something useful with them.

First we need a gizmo we’ll call an aggregator to go out and fetch the RSS feeds from the sites we’re interested in once a day or once every couple of hours and make a note of anything it finds that wasn’t there last time. And we need another gizmo we’ll call a feed reader that makes it easy to read the feeds the aggregator has collected.

Somewhere in between we need a gizmo that formats the RSS feeds (RSS is a variety of XML — isn’t everything these days?) into something readable. And we need a gizmo that organizes and arranges the data from the feeds so our feed reader can display them in a way the user will appreciate.

Almost done. Did you notice that I said “sites we’re interested in”? We’ll also need some kind of gizmo that lets us tell the other gizmos what sites we’re interested in. Following Usenet usage, we call it “subscribing” to feeds, even though we don’t tell the site anything. We just add it to our aggregator’s list of sites to query, our feed reader’s list of sites to display, and so on.

Sometimes these functional requirements are all bundled together in one program, other times the functions are divided. And sometimes the designers are extra-smart and let you read the feeds in a program you already know your way around: your favorite web browser, Usenet news reader, or email program.

Everybody pretty much caught up again on the pieces of the puzzle? OK, because now we get to the fun part, the puzzle itself: what’s the best program (or set of programs) for subscribing to, aggregating, formatting, arranging, and reading feeds?

I’ve tried lots of them, and I’ve even reviewed some of them here on the blog:

• I started out with a shootout between feed readers back in the summer of 2003. None of them was very good, but RSS hadn’t been around that long. It turned out that, apart from a brief flirtation with w.bloggar, I ended up not using any of them.
• Then I became a loyal fan of FeedDemon and really gave it a workout. I blogged about FeedDemon quite a bit, but I never actually reviewed it. In a nutshell, its principal fault is that it requires that you learn a whole new program (FeedDemon) to read feeds, and after a while I ended up forgetting to fire it up.
• I tried out Sage, a Firefox-based feed reader, but it was too clunky and I ended up never using it. It was awkward because a web browser is the wrong tool to read feeds in. If I have my web browser up, why bother going into Sage? Why not just go to the website?
• Then I tried aggregating feeds on my Google Homepage, and discovered that reading feeds in the main page is just as uncomfortable to use as reading them in the sidebar, and it turned loading my homepage into a test of patience, thereby violating the Prime Directive for homepages: they have to load fast! So I went on to
• nntp//rss, a very clever little program that runs an NNTP server on your local PC as a service. The interface is any Usenet news reader, which is a huge step in the right direction. But you have to run the NNTP server. I ended up turning it off to save some CPU cycles and forgot to turn it back on again.

Even as far back as 2003, I was pretty much convinced that the ideal paradigm for RSS aggregators and readers is an email program. It’s exactly like the author of the website sending you an email when the site changes.

And finally somebody did exactly that: Myk Melez, with his lovely Firefox extension Forumzilla. Well, the “finally” isn’t quite right. I blogged about it over two years ago but never got around to trying it. I should really read Ex Cathedra more often, especially the articles from that Crispen guy.

Anyway, let’s wrap it up for tonight, and later on, maybe tomorrow, I’ll write about how Forumzilla works. Or you could just download it and try it yourself.

Wouldn’t you like to start your Advent musical season by listening to what the Pope is listening to? No problem. Thanks to MarineBrat for a message on the MediaMonkey forums that I stumbled on while I was looking for something else, here’s some free MP3s of music for the liturgical calendar performed by the Pontifical Musical Chorus of the Sistine Chapel.

As opposed to the Mime and Juggling Chorus, one assumes.

The chorus consists of 18 men and perhaps half again as many boys. The recordings were evidently made either in the Sistine Chapel or in a similar hall and converted to a perfectly respecable 160kbps. The chorus has high calibre of singers, and they sing together with a feeling of ease and musicality. They sound like a smaller group, which means either that everyone wasn’t there for the recording, or what I prefer to believe: they’ve worked together long enough to have found a comfortable balance.

The website talks about the blessing of their organ, which means the organ is new and they’re anxious to show that the donors’ money wasn’t wasted. And as I feared, the organ is too prominent. In mitigation, it’s a very nice sounding organ and not that prominent.

The music is liturgical, and while there are hints of the late 19th century in some of the melodic intervals, I wouldn’t bet on it: due to my abysmal ignorance of choral music in general and liturgical music in particular, it could well be 17th century or 21st century. No lush harmonies like the John Rutter Christmas album, which is also going into heavy rotation here in the rectory, but very clean, understated music.

I have often wished I had been alive during the Big Band Era, anywhere from the late 1920’s thru the 1940’s. Why? Well, despite the diversity of my knowledge and appreciation for the great artform called Jazz, the swing music played during this era always occurs to me as “home.” Having performed some of this great music in college also has a lot to do with it, because I was able to experience what it was like from within the Beast, while everything was “in the pocket,” and “all the cats were swinging” (pardon the musical cliches).

But to be a modern fan of this music can be a lonely experience. Even the people still around who were alive and witnessed Ellington and Basie and Goodman and Kenton at their greatest, often don’t seem to share the same kind of musical passion. Instead, these great bands occurred to them as something to dance to, a sign of the times. For them, it was just as exciting to see Stan Kenton as it was Kay Kyser, despite the vastness between the musical quality of the two ensembles, despite the contrast between either the commercial or artistic intentions of the musicians themselves.

And despite how many times pundits say that the big bands are coming back, they never will. Instead, we get half-assed swing bands who play their music uncontrollably fast, and only care about creating caricatures of the bands they claim to admire, dressing in extravagant zoot suits and feathered fedoras.

Still, the modern era has some qualities that the golden era of swing didn’t. First, there’s the unprecedented access to the music due to technology. In the past, only serious discographers could have filled an IPod with their collection of music – nowadays, anyone can. Second, there is a real possibility that there are more big bands performing today, than in the 30’s and 40’s. And they’re performing a much more diverse palette of music, influenced by anyone and everyone that came before them. Third, the musicians themselves are much better trained, and able to play many different kinds of music. A trumpet player can sound exactly like Harry James one instant, and exactly like Randy Brecker the next.

So where does that leave us? Well, in a strange place indeed, wishing we were ninety years old on one hand, and twenty-five on the other. For those of us in the middle, it remains a lonely existence.

One other thing I’d like to touch upon, however. As a student of jazz, it’s been fascinating to understand how the development of Jazz has progressed, from its earliest roots to the incredibly diverse entity it is today. I wonder, though, how the present era will be described fifty years from now by jazz historians. Where are the Coltranean shifts in the artistic identity of the music today? Did Jazz mature for good twenty years ago, and today’s new ideas represent just a different suit placed on an old mannequin? Is Wynton Marsalis the anti-christ of Jazz? (I’m being a little facetious here, but just a little). Has the music run out of revolutionary progressions, and revolutionary players?

Inquiring minds want to know – or at least this 41-year-old, slightly rusting one does.

I just watched an interesting panel discussion from 2005 at the Darwin Center in England entitled “Life After Darwin.” The panelists included the Britons Jonathan Miller and Richard Dawkins, and their intellectual prowess got me to thinking about my own humanity.

I consider myself an intellectual in the sense that I am always searching for new ideas and perspectives on life. I do suffer at times from some of the stereotypes attributed to intellectuals, such as a snobbishness (especially when it comes to music), but realize that these, like many other traits, are essentially human, neither good nor bad. My wife is also I think very much an intellectual, and in many ways, much smarter than I am, mostly because of the differences in which she has applied her intelligence during the course of her life.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference in which my wife and I have applied our intellect relates to our avocations. For Nancy, life is fueled by financial wealth. Not a gluttonous amount, but certainly an amount which enables individuals to release themselves from the shackles of everyday struggles. For myself, life is fueled by the pursuit of beauty, creativity and sharing one’s gifts with others. Not beauty in the sense of vanity, but rather the ways in which humanity has transcended its own limitations and made us better both individually and collectively.

For example, Nancy is perfectly content spending her free hours completing her MBA, where I would rather learn about things which are not necessarily potentials for profit, such as music. I also like to envision an eventual society where the drive for financial gain is not the epicenter, but rather the betterment of humanity and its relation to the cosmos. Very Roddenberryish, I know, but I can’t help it that I didn’t think of it first.

Perhaps my insatiable desire for learning about music comes from how I perceive its value. Not being religious, I nevertheless have difficulty finding a better descriptive word for music’s value other than “sacred.” Music occurs for me as an omnipresent window into the full depth of human experience, ready to be opened effortlessly, bringing in a breeze that can simultaneously comfort and evoke both sorrow and joy. In other words, music never lets me down whenever I need to be inspired or uplifted, and the way it does this is just as magical to me as the result. The fact that even a nonliving person’s musical creativity can have such a profound effect on me is extraordinary.

So here’s to a lifetime’s worth of discovery and wonder, however long that may be.

Well, not quite. More and more people are being exposed to what he believes, and if nothing else, at least a substantive dialogue is taking place, which has to be better than blind faith or apathy.

For those who are interested, here’s a multimedia representation of Dr. Dawkins’ exploits.

Maria Schneider is working on a new CD, Sky Blue. I found out about it early enough (and now, so have you) that I didn’t miss the loot that you get when you pre-order — scanned sketches, a couple of videos, and two MP3 files: “Tork’s Cafe” (from 1996) and “Blues for Toots” (recorded for Concert in the Garden, but it had to be left off because it wouldn’t fit).

And it reminded me of a favorite expression of Kelly’s for a specific color: sky blue pink; so that’s pretty good too.

Get on over to Maria Schneider’s ArtistShare website and give her the $16.95 (plus postage: in my case the total was $20.90) to pre-order the album. Then, as you wait for the album’s release in June, show up at the site (be sure to sign up for the email newsletter so you’ll know when there’s new stuff there) and follow along as one of the most important composers working today puts together a new album. If you’ve got a couple of extra bucks, she’s got more offers than a Public Radio station.

Before your eyes glaze over from the offers, this is important: if you haven’t got Concert in the Garden, you’d better get it. Once the last copy is gone, it’s gone.

And be sure you don’t miss the charming slideshow of the things Maria does to avoid writing. I’ll just bet her self-portrait in swim goggles is the real Maria Schneider.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

- William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Sonnet CXVI

Kelly, my wife of 39 years, died unexpectedly last Thursday. That was one of our favorite poems.

Our older son Patrick wrote a tribute to Kelly on the Oblivion community. I hope you’ll read it, because it captures the fun and creativity that were so much of her life. Just in the past few months she not only flattened pedestrians in cities around the world in her driving games and decorated her Oblivion houses and guild halls within an inch of their lives, she built magnificant houses and public buildings in The Sims; she compiled a thick notebook of Sherlock Holmes scholarship with hand-drawn maps and an astounding array of details and deductions about the stories; and she put together an even thicker notebook about Salem and the witchcraft trials. She was planning a major improvement on her Tudors site, and had planned to use the notebooks to improve her Sherlock Holmes site and to start a new Salem site. And she was planning a needlepoint project for Christmas and researching our family’s genealogy.

Her creativity and curiosity were just signs of the life and love that filled her and overflowed. Wherever she was, there was a home there. I’m honored and blessed to have shared 40 years of love with her.

Because I craved a gift too great
For any prayer of mine to bring.
Today with empty hands I go;
Yet must my heart rejoice to know
I did not ask a lesser thing.

- Theodosia Garrison (1874-1944)