December 23, 2004
A neat Apache idea
So I’m working on this site that does a lot of SSI processing of the source. I keep wanting to refer to the pre-processed source, but it’s a pain to always have to SSH into the server just to look at it. So I got the idea to get Apache to serve up the content as text/plain depending on how I access it. It works like this. Say the directory is foo. I just put in these directives:
Alias /foo-src /path/to/htdocs/foo
<location /foo-src>
AddType text/plain html
</location>
Now, if I access the content from foo-src, it’ll just display the source in the browser window (well, not in IE, but who uses IE?).
December 21, 2004
The Post on Slate
From the Washington Post article on their purchase of Slate:
Given its Web-based DNA, Slate does some things differently than The Post. A week before the election, nearly all its editorial staffers, including Weisberg, disclosed that they were voting for John Kerry over President Bush. On Election Day, Slate posted leaked numbers from the early wave of exit polls made available to the networks, the Associated Press and such clients as The Post, something the newspaper would never do.
Actually, those decisions had nothing to do with Slate’s “web-based DNA” but are rather legacies of its creation by Michael Kinsley. He often wrote, years before the web was invented, of the absurdity of television news withholding exit poll results and of journalists’ pretending they had no political leanings. There’s nothing internet-specific about what are essentially philosphical questions.
December 14, 2004
Song of Quoodle
Woke up this morning with lines from a poem in my head:
They haven’t got no noses,
The fallen sons of Eve;
…
The brilliant smell of water,
The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder,
The old bones buried under,
Are things in which they blunder
And err, if left alone.
Couldn’t remember what it was from. Google tells me it’s G.K.Chesterton’s “Song of Quoodle”. I’m not a big poetry fan, but I do like this one—too bad about the anti-Semitic verse in the middle. Oh well. I like poems about dogs.
December 12, 2004
Google Groups with a monospaced font
Well, they fixed most of my complaints about the new Google Groups. Still in a proportional font, though. Oh well, that’s easy to fix with Mozilla. Now in my userContent.css:
@-moz-document domain(groups-beta.google.com) { .mbody {font-family: monospace !important} }
So there.
December 5, 2004
New domain
So I registered scarborough.chicago.il.us. Dunno what I’m going to do with it, but it was free, so oh well.
Maybe I’ll start giving out my address as kim.james@scarborough.chicago.il.us because it’ll amuse me when people screw it up. Almost makes me wish I had a really difficult Polish name…
December 4, 2004
A good question for people
I’ve stumbled upon a great rule of thumb. When discussing politics or religion with somebody, ask them this early in the conversation:
“What would it take to convince you that you’re wrong?”
If they can’t answer, or if the answer is “I’m not wrong”, then there’s no point in continuing the conversation and you can stop wasting your time.
So far, I’ve found that Communists and Christians have the hardest time responding to it.
This fantastic article in The New Republic gets a thoughtful response from Kevin Drum. (And then all the idiots start piping up in the comment section, but never mind.)
December 2, 2004
Google Groups
Looks like Google is monkeying with their groups archive. This is hair-raising (just like back when DejaNews started screwing everything up), because there’s no competition for this. There are other search engines should they break that, but nobody else, to my knowledge, has a complete Usenet archive.
There’s a few good things about the new service that I see so far, I have to say. First of all, the threading’s not as braindead. They used to thread only by subject, so you wouldn’t see replies with a new subject and often different threads (sometimes years apart) would be combined if they had the same subject and were in the same group. They seem to be actually looking at followup headers now so as to properly thread messages.
Also, there’s a show/hide quoted text toggle, which is really nice for messages where people quote pages and pages before starting their reply.
Those are the only improvements I see so far. Now for the much more serious degradations:
Search by date is gone. What a horrible decision. What were they thinking? I just used it yesterday, as a matter of fact; I was curious what people were saying about the Johns Hopkins professor John Money back before the John/Joan scandal broke out. I did a search and limited it to hits before 1998. There’s no equivalent to this on the web, since web.archive.org currently doesn’t have a search function. Now there’s no way I could do something like this. What an awful thing. Hopefully they’ll put it back when enough people complain.
Search by author also seems to be gone, another pointless removal of functionality. It seems even more obvious why one would want this.
They’ve changed the layout to make it more message-boardy. There’s no real delimiter anymore between messages, so it’s a bit hard to read. That’s not as big a deal for me, but still a little annoying.
Much more irritating is that they’ve gone back to using a proportional font for the messages, breaking all kinds of messages that were written assuming people would be viewing it with a monospaced font (the signature on my posts is especially broken). Interestingly, they sorta thought about this: alt.ascii-art is still set to display monospaced.
This can sorta be compensated for by per-site stylesheets, which Mozilla now supports (yay!), althought not completely since they redo the line breaks and compress whitespace.
A lot of people in Slashdot are complaining about the inability to link directly to posts. It’s still there, though; you have to go to “show original” under the message options. People will get a bunch of headers when going there, but who cares.
Well, who knows. Google’s earned the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’ll fix this stuff, or at least leave the old interface around.
November 30, 2004
Machine names
I’m really happy that I’ve managed to name some of the production servers at my work after animals. It really takes the edge off a crisis when somebody rushes into my cube and says, “Cow is dead!”
November 5, 2004
Why I voted for Bush
I’ve written thousands of words, in this blog but mostly in e-mails, about why, despite my disagreement with almost his entire domestic agenda, I’m was voting for Bush. But this article is really all the reason I need.
Some Clarifications
From A Small Victory:
I voted for George Bush.
I am not a redneck.
I do not spend my days watching cars race around a track, drinking cheap beer and slapping my woman on the ass.
I am not a bible thumper. In fact, I am an atheist.
I am not a homophobe.
I am educated beyond the fifth grade. In fact, I am college educated.
I am not stupid. Not by any stretch of facts.
I do not bomb abortion clinics.
You will not be thrown in jail for the sole reason of being a liberal.
Your child’s public school will not suddenly turn into a center for Christian brainwashing.
Your favorite bookstore will not turn into puritan central.
This is not Nazi Germany in any way.
You will not be forced into concentration camps.
You will not be burned in human-sized ovens because of your religion.
We will not be forced to wear uniforms and march in line every day.
You will not live in fear.
If you think this is a country in which you have to live in fear, I have some friends in Iran who would like to have a little talk with you.
It’s embarrassing that some of this stuff needs to be said. I’m glad there’s somebody around to say it better than I could.
November 4, 2004
Some interesting numbers
In my ward, I was one of Bush’s 1104 votes—4.83% of the total. In my precinct specifically (which just covers one block), Bush did a little better: 35 votes out of 428 cast, or 8.18%. Interestingly, Stephanie Sailor, the Libertarian House candidate, also got 35 votes. The same people?
I was happy to see that, while they were still retained, the incompetent judges I was bugging everyone I knew to vote “NO” on at least got 25% against retention… until I saw that all the judges got about that. I strongly suspect that nearly everybody is just randomly poking those holes. The judge system here is seriously broken.
November 3, 2004
No gloating, but…
I will say that being called a stupid fascist is already wearing thin.
The Day After
When the 1996 election was held, I was a secretary for the corporate banking department for the Chicago branch of a large international bank. The day after, all the bankers looked very irritated and somewhat depressed (even though the results were known long before the election). Now I’m at a university. I never seem to be around happy people the day after an election.
I have to try to not look happy. I don’t want to seem like I’m gloating, and I honestly do feel bad for all the people who are so upset (well, not the Democratic Underground–type extremists, but just normal people who hate Bush, like my friends and my mom). When I went home from work yesterday, I was convinced Kerry was going to win based on the exit polls, and I was incredibly hostile and bitter (it didn’t help that at work, today was the first day that I was forced to use this horrible “call tracking” software that seems designed to make my co-worker and I as miserable and unproductive as possible just so a bunch of managers can manufacture a bunch of busywork for themselves). I felt like if when I went into work today I would want to punch anyone in the face who was all bouncy and happy. So I totally sympathize with the people who do feel like that now.
Things will work out. That’s all I can say. They always do.
My vote, II
So I ended up splitting my vote for the Big 3 three ways. That’s kinda amusing.
My Senate vote goes to Obama, not that I particularly care for him, but I don’t agree with Alan Keyes on just about anything. I like Keyes a lot, though. Intelligence cuts a lot of ice with me, and he was the most intelligent presidential candidate of the 1996 and 2000 elections. I’ll vote for his talk show being brought back, if that’s ever on the ballot. He’s also insane, but that’s okay. Some of my best friends are insane.
House vote goes not to Jesse Jackson Jr. who annoys me but to this kinda cute libertarian with big boobs. I agree with the libertarians more than I used to but I still don’t really want them running things, not that there’s any danger of that but oh well. If any of the third-party extremists actually came to power, they’d probably be the least objectionable.
On all the downticket stuff I just voted for the Tribune’s endorsements. How am I supposed to know? I can’t believe we actually have to vote for Water Reclamation District commissioners. And the judges! Illinois makes you vote on retention of judges every two years. I assume that system was set up back when every farmer knew the county judge. Now we get a list of 100–150 judges, and have to vote “Yes” or “No” on every single one. Sheesh. Couldn’t I just hire somebody to make these decisions for me? Like, say, a politician?
Anyway, as usual there are a couple judges that both major papers and every single bar association says are hopeless incompetents and should be thrown out. It’s frustrating because that rarely happens (and hasn’t since 1990) despite the unanimity. I sent out an e-mail to my Chicago friends, but somehow I don’t think that will tip the scales.
Finally, I voted “YES” on some proposal to make the legislature give money to rehab clinics, which is an odd fit with my Libertarian vote, but consistency is overrated anyway (of course, that sentiment conflicts with my Presidential choice, but I really need to stop typing now).
My vote
“Do you think your vote is based on fear?” asks a friend.
No! It’s based on hope!
As in, I really hope Bush will fix his messes if elected.
October 29, 2004
Excitement
These guys sure are excited about their history.
October 28, 2004
Favorite band this month
Just discovered the Outsiders (Dutch psychedelic band, not to be confused with the “Time Won’t Let Me” guys). Wow, can’t believe I never knew about them before. This is Monks-level quality. They may even be better than Kennelmus.
Nader finally loses it
And to think some people actually used to take this guy seriously. (thanks to Colin)