My friend Randy called me about it this morning, twice. Twice because I didn't answer the first time he called. Chris linked to it. Just what is it? It is a secret nestled in the American South. It's not just a secret, but a meta-secret for many other secrets are nestled inside of it. It is home to the brain power behind every US rocket that has launched astronauts into outer space. It is Huntsville, Alabama and CNN has an article about it.

For every uninformed, insulated, never left the big city yokel who is happy to mock Alabama, Huntsville stands as a testament to their own provincial buffoonery. While it's hills and valleys pale in comparison to some it presents a moderately good compromise of high-tech living with lush, green climes. What I don't understand is the extremes that Huntsville cultivates. Some of the smartest people in the world live there, but they happily turn off their minds and let religion and mass-media feed them pap. When I was there this past Christmas I thought I'd need an ipecac to purge the trendy, manicured, perfectly coiffed, SUV for trips to the grocery, plastic automatons that had taken over. There is that contrast again though because of fucked up people I've known, Huntsville by far takes the cake. It frustrates me to see so much potential squandered away.

I think the fact that a burning yule log won its TV time slot in New York speaks volumes about the state of television today. It won the 8am-10am time slot beating out WABC's "Good Morning America.

Best quote from the article: "Every year we get so many requests from people to bring back the yule log"

If you want a fire on your television I believe the Short 7: Utopia DVD has this in the "Junk Drawer" area of the DVD. I'll pop it in when I get home tonight and make sure.

"I'm looking for a travel charger that plugs into the wall for my touchpoint phone."

"We don't have any of those up here. Let me check in back" came the perfunctory response from the Sprint PCS accessory guy. Leia and I waited patiently. This was the fifth store I had tried and I was getting desperate as I had no way to charge my phone for the next couple of days. The sales rep came back empty handed.

"We didn't have any in back" - Zip-Zip - "That phone" - Zip-Zip - "is old."

Oh my God, is he doing what I think he's doing? He is. He is zipping and unzipping his fly while he talks to us.

"Yeah I haven't" - Zip-Zip - "seen any accessories" - Zip-Zip - "for that phone in 4-5 months."

I better not start laughing, so I'll look away. Zip-Zip. Uh-oh, that's not helping. Okay, it's even harder not to laugh when I'm looking away. I better look back at him.

"You would probably" - Zip-Zip - "be better off buying" - Zip-Zip - "a new phone."

Leia and I excused ourselves with some vague "Thank you for your help" and fled the store. I was glad she had seen it to because I might have dismissed it as a hallucination had I not had a witness.

What an odd shopping experience.

The multi-talented and wonderful Leia clued me into an event going on at the Angelika this coming Saturday. Check out this excerpt from their email:

The Angelika Film Center and the Sierra Club would like to invite you to join us for a discussion immediately following the 7:00 pm show on Saturday, December 29. This film provides an incredible opportunity to raise global awareness and deepen our understanding of the impacts of globalization and free trade on countries like Jamaica. The reggae soundtrack and entertaining storytelling brings a powerful spirit to the film as well.

This sounds pretty cool. Check the Life and Debt web site if you are curious when it is playing elsewhere.

While searching for the gods of capitalism on google I found a good, short article asking the question is capitalism compatible with Asian philosophy? The guy who wrote it is Enzio von Pfeil the chief economist at Clarion Securities Asia in Hong Kong. This reminds me that I've been wanting to watch Life and Debt at the Dallas Angelika which is about globalization, or perhaps more appropriately, economic imperialism.

Being without car I decided to take a walk over to Wendys. This is the closest fast food place to where I work so it's not surprising that a lot of SBC/Cingular employees were there. (It's fascinating how corporate name badges strip away anonymity in public) Two of them were talking at the table next to mine.

"I don't want to take anything away from Sean's accomplishment but he used the GUI."

The speaker then went on to explain that Sean was using Mandrake's GUI tools and that he didn't have access to those since he runs FreeBSD. I gather the main problem in all this was a configuration change to Apache that the speaker hadn't been able to figure out for a day. He explained his reticence towards Linux as "I don't like not knowing how things work" and his fervor for FreeBSD with "Why do you think places like Yahoo are using FreeBSD instead of Linux? It's stable."

I'm pointing this out for a few reasons. When was the last time you were at Wendys and overheard two people discussing Linux vs. FreeBSD? This was certainly my first time, although I've heard the discussion in other venues before. Secondly, do GUIs make operating systems unstable? I don't mean technologically speaking, just that they open up the OS to a new class of user who doesn't have to know as much. Finally, I have friends who do know their httpd.conf from a hole in the ground and they are unemployed. I know the great gods of capitalism said competition means the best survive but I'm beginning to think perhaps some of the cream of the crop are unemployed and that random chance plays a bigger part in capitalism than hard work and skill.

Okay here's a challenge. I want a platform that J2SE 1.3.1 runs on but it can't be Linux or Windows based, and it needs to run on x86 hardware. I've tried the Java 2 stuff in the FreeBSD ports collection on FreeBSD 4.3 but I must be missing something because they all have serious problems, however I think I'm just missing a kernel patch. I know that the Java I want is on OS X but that isn't available for x86. Did I hear you say use Darwin since they have an x86 image now? That was my thought too, but I can't find Java stuff that runs on x86 Darwin.

If anyone has any clever hints please let me know. Oh and I do have the free Solaris 8 for x86 which is probably the best alternative at the moment.

It's gotten easier to not worry (as much) about what others think as I've gotten older. Is that just an age thing? I tend to think it got easier after I did my solo drive to Fairbanks, Alaska. I had put myself in a situation where I had to interact with other people to get food and shelter. At first I was still scared enough of people to not bathe, sleep or eat for extended periods of time. Eventually those needs overcame my concerns that I would be impolitely disturbing people if I talked to them.

I remember traveling for hours looking for some place new to be. I would get so restless in my apartment doing the routine. I had to get out. I needed to be in an entirely new city before I felt better. Whenever I saw a place that looked worthy of visiting I was too scared to stop by. Sometimes, I even turned my car around thinking I might screw up the courage the second time around. No luck. I always made up excuses in my head about why I didn't belong in the buildings I went past. Mostly it was variations on "They aren't like me inside there. I'll feel every minute difference reflected back at me a thousand fold."

Sometimes I would go to a rest area off some interstate and grab my paper journal and sit at a picnic table trying to figure out what was wrong me. In between thoughts I watched all the different people come and go. I would stay till I started worrying that people thought I was some psycho watching them.

What a great idea. I get stuck seeing things dead on sometimes. It's a good idea to have tricks like this to stimulate new ways of seeing the same thing.

Kathy was in another dream last night. We were sitting in a grassy field during the day. It was particularly odd because I was wearing blue pants and not jeans. I don't remember looking at Kathy but I can remember every detail about the hem of the pants and each individual blade of grass around my shoes and pants. People were walking by us in both directions. In the dream we weren't dating but I felt very strongly that I wanted to be with her. However, I stood up and thought "I want to be with someone else" and told her "It can't work out." Then I walked off.

I wish Leia wasn't caught up in the maelstrom that is my emotional state. I turn so cold sometimes. I just stand there, my emotional reponse Saran wrapped inside. Absent those emotions my body clumsily plods through whatever is in its way. This dream is good though, I think this dream bodes well for Leia and I.

That is if dreams mean more than a load of horse-puckey anyway.

Did you know that <font class="large blue tall">Large Font, Blue Text, Tall Line-Height</font> works? I did not know that you could have multiple stylesheet classes in a class attribute.

Took comments out because the implementation was very bulky and made the pages much more difficult to render. I will put them back in when the new threaded discussion code and interface are complete.

Note to self - Make tool that crawls blogs looking for longer entries with fewer links and vice versa. Then build histograms of non-common words in those entries. Maybe you can find some patterns.

Holy complexity theory Batman

I was just talking about my fascination with the desert with Dave last night. I was trying, poorly, to explain that I liked how the desert reduced all the clutter. I sometimes feel that the universe conceals one great truth that explains how everything interconnects and grows. If one could find those spots in the universe where the curtain that conceals the great truth had been worn down you might peek through. I feel as though those threadbare spots are places where everything has been reduced to some sort of primal elements. I think the desert is an example of one of those threadbare spots.

In the desert you have a small number of elements (sand, etc.), and a small number of rules that effect those elements (wind, gravity, etc.). What I find endlessly fascinating about it is the complexity that emerges from the way the dunes move and shift. The words I wish I had had last night is that In the desert you can clearly see a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. When I first had this realization in the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado it was the first time I felt like I had an understanding of what God is...I felt like God is that piece that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Really, one could come to this realization anywhere, because complexity is everywhere. I needed a place with all the noise turned down for me to see it and for me that is the desert.

My pseudo-intellectual vomit aside, imagine my delight to get a new issue of Netfuture in my email today that covers this very topic! In it Steve Talbott mentions a great article he wrote in the latest Nature Institute publication on Complexity Theory. He spends a great deal of time documenting the complexity theories that have evolved from contemplating how grains of sand form dunes. Overall I thought the article did a really good job explaining complexity theory terms like emergence, holism, self-organization and generality. I came to it as a neophyte to complex systems. Considering the coincidence in timing, it has left me to wonder what role coincidence plays in emergent systems.

By the way, this all figures in quite nicely with Jim's recent post on Kurt Gödel's theorem of incompleteness. Complexity theory seems to fly in the face of Gödel's assertion that a computer can never be anything more than the sum of its parts. Jim did an awesome job assembling a very thought-provoking entry.

The sequel to the watershed comic Dark Knight Returns has come out, 15 years later. It's called the Dark Knight Strikes Back, or just DK2. The same team has built DK2 that created the original comic. When the Dark Knight Returns came out it blew everyone away. The artwork and the writing were brazen and the series was capped off with an incredible fight between Batman and Superman. Perhaps more importantly the vacuous pretty boy (who represented the faction of mankind who had cheerfully let the good retreat as long as everything looked nice) and the thoughtful brooding antihero (the representative of the down-trodden trying to make a difference as they railed against a society that no longer cared about real problems). All the social commentary that had been in the background of previous issues of Batman was brought to the surface as panels carried cheery news anchors reporting on grim, violent activities. Also the comic book had incredible amounts of violence and depravity inside. A few images were raw and obvious but most of the imagery was suggested by what you didn't see.I don't think the Dark Knight had ever been more cynical and bitter about mankind wallowing in its own waste. DK2 picks up three years after the first series. The first issue of three came out this December and it totally feels like it was written post September 11, or Frank Miller is uncannily prescient. This time a lot more DC characters are assembled like the Flash, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, and so forth. The new Catgirl is a spunky fighter that could kick Lara Croft's ass in a fight. The new series also has a similar running commentary through various panels but the news and politics aren't alone as capitalism takes its fair share of jabs. Lines like "EVIL has SEDUCED mankind. And MANKIND has shown all the CHASTITY of a three-dollar WHORE" written in a ragged typewriter monospace have a strong impact as you read through. The comic also carries on with the dark humor like the dotcommer bum in San Francisco with the "Will Network For Food" sign. I think the most stinging rebuke was saved for the US presidency. The president is nothing more than an image projected on TV, quite literally. Yet, nobody seems to care when this is made obvious. (Sound like a recent presidential election to anyone else?) Also right off the bat Batman and Superman get into a fight, none of this waiting for the last issue. I can't wait to see where this goes. I was stunned by the first issue.

Scot Hacker formely the foremost BeOS evangelist has chronicled his switch to Mac OS X from BeOS. I felt myself nodding in agreement and saying "Yes that's exactly right" enough to draw the attention of nearby cube mates. In my pre-OS X days I didn't really attack Macs but I didn't like them. Apple got something right with OS X though, and it's not just that Jordan Hubbard works for Apple now. High profile Be engineers like Maarten Hekkelman have also gone to work for Apple.

So I say to everyone else out there that is still hiding out from OS X. It's okay. I like Scot's line that Linux has no feng shui. He hit the nail on the head. FreeBSD has a much nicer cohesion, and therefore OS X does because of its FreeBSD parentage. Is it any surprise that Apple has spawned innovation in the OS market directly with things like OS X and indirectly with things like BeOS. Where is Microsoft's influence? I don't get how they could have some of the most talented people in the world and still put out such pedestrian and uninspired software.

I read an article about google's new search capabilities and how it turns up private information on people now. I always find such articles laughable but I decided to vanity search on my name at google and OMG, I wish I had read this back in 1996.

FROM: Jordan K. Hubbard
DATE: 05/25/1996 01:30:27
SUBJECT:  How to write "tutorial" docs for FreeBSD. Maybe I`m just easily impressed, but I`ve found:

    http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/mh/mh.html

By Matt Midboe to be an excellently written tutorial on using MH.
It balances descriptive text with real-world examples, all organized
into a very approachable framework.

This isn`t just to say kudos to Matt Midboe, this is also to point
out his tutorial as an example of how I think a lot of our other docs
_should_ look like, rather than do.. :-)

                    Jordan

Jordan Hubbard is one of the people I look up to. Whenever anyone says anything nice about some piece of code I've written I always think about how much better it would be if Jordan Hubbard had worked on it. He is a force of nature in the way other programming gods like Richard Stallman or Jamie Zawinski are. I don't mean that all they do is write great code, it's more than that. What sets them apart is that they see the world slightly skewed and have new and novel approaches to solving problems.

I find it apropos that I've never emailed him to explain my admiration, and that he never emailed me his complementary message as well.

I feel like I should just replace the whole of my resume with JH's email.

Unlocking XML Database problems

A while back I was lamenting the problems of locking parts of an xml file. As I didn't have 500 euro to spend on a cool XML database like X-Hive or Tamino that handle locking I decided to rethink things. I decided to break my single XML document with 78 link entries into 78 separate XML files. This gave me the granularity to operate on a single link that I needed.

Over the weekend I installed eXist. It's a Java based open-source XML database and it's pretty fast too. It has a convenient XML-RPC API and I commenced stuffing my 78 individual XML files into it. This was mostly due to my faith that putting the links in a database was the "right thing" rather than thinking the problem through. At any rate, it gave me a nice way to easily access any individual link and update it. Since it has an XML-RPC interface I could update the links from any Internet connected machine. The problem comes in reassembling the 78 links into a big document again. That means either 78 queries or one big query with a lot of OR statements.

Is this a compromise I have to make? One big file gives me great convenience, lots of smaller files gives me reliability. Can I combine these two things somehow? Perhaps I should make one big file that does an XInclude of the little files in eXist? What would really rock is if I could stuff the one big file into eXist with the XIncludes in it. Then when I retrieved it I could tell eXist to resolve the XIncludes before sending me the results.

The Progressive has an interesting article on The New McCarthyism. Mainly the article catalogs all the naughty things the government is doing which appear to suspend the Constitution (mainly First Amendment rights). The one that surprised me is that a new rule allows the government to seize your book purchasing records. The rule removes all legal recourse for the bookstore, and a gag order is in place that prohibits them discussing the government actions with anyone. The article also make the point the word "terrorism" seems to hold the same power that the word "communism" held in the fifties. Some powerful meme mojo at work here.

On the weblog-devel Bill and Aaron have been wondering how to assign an entry to multiple categories. You can read the last message in the thread so far. While the technical details are fairly straightforward it presents a really nice design challenge. One approach to assigning a category to an entry is a Select BoxThatYouPickFrom.The problem is that you can only add one category this way. Another approach is to make CheckboxesThatYouCheck. Clearly neither approaches scales well for twenty or fifty categories.

When I posed the question to Designer Andy he lamented that he had to run to work, but offered up this idea.

Proposal...
If there was a way to add context, like a matrix of two large concepts(A &
B), ea broken into sub-categories, w/ the checkboxes at the intersection of
the sub-categories....


A | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

B

1      x    x    x    x    x

2      x    x    x    x    x

3      x    x    x    x    x

4      x    x    x    x    x

5      x    x    x    x    x

Maybe, the writer of the blog understands the writing in the context of A
and potential readers understand it in context of B

I started wondering what those large concepts would be. Obviously you can do stuff like if you have a bunch of categories like Inkdeep, A Large Head, Erica, and Karen you could make a Blogger meta-category. This seems a bit silly to make categories to manage categories, when does it all stop? As I thought about what Andy said I started thinking about context. What if the system looked at all entries with the meta-category Blogger and realized that certain words occurred more frequently like Inkdeep, A Large Head, Erica, or Karen. It would list like say the top five guesses at the meta-category, and then have an escape hatch for the big screen of checkboxes if you needed it because it guessed wrong.

The better question here though is what purpose do categories serve? How do people use them? It's easy to get caught up in technical fetishism and categorize things because you can. I think most people use them as a basic search facility where the search terms are hard coded. So maybe abolishing categories and making a better free-format search tool is the way to go? At the very least, the categories should be based on like the top five searches people have made on your site, rather than arbitrary categories you assigned when you made the entry. Although, what if the author is writing a number of entries that are part of a serial or something? Then hard-coding the category is important. At any rate, I think if I get a better handle on how people use categories the design challenges might solve themselves.

Reunions are always a touching moment, and when one isn't caught up in the emotion of the moment they provide some introspection. Picture soldiers returning from war to their sweethearts and wives, dogs meeting their owners after a week of boarding, or long lost cousins reuniting on Oprah. Yesterday I couldn't help but get caught up in the moment as my clothes from storage and my traveling clothes were brought together for the first time in almost a year.

I remember packing up my apartment to put it into storage. I had to make some tough decisions about what clothes would stay with me through the spring and summer. It wasn't easy. A lot of favorite shirts and shorts were folded and stored. I tried to explain "This doesn't mean I don't love you just as much." I secretly confided to other shirts destined for storage, "I'm doing this because you are too special and I don't want you to get hurt in all the travel." Who would have thought that my favorite Tick/Speak shirt with Tick saying "We need a furry moist avenger like you on the team" wouldn't make the traveling batch? Tough decisions.

The clothes that made the cut had some good times though. They've been buried beneath the earth as I squeezed through caves. They sheltered me from the snows in Idaho. They troopered through the deserts of Nevada and Area 51. They hung around as I talked with complete strangers and unraveled details about their life. They rocked out at Sebastian Tellier/Air concerts in Dallas and Atlanta. They were there for Radiohead in Stone Mountain. They were there for court room victories, and car searches. They witnessed the grand opulence and green spaces of the Biltmore Estate. They hiked through the Smokey and Rocky mountain ranges. They were there when I fell in love.

Now I like to think of them reunited in the closet and talking about good times. Good times.

This is too cool. Hymie just told me that google expanded their USENET news archive back to 1981! I now have hours of USENET news reading fun at my fingertips. Ahh the good old days of alt.pud, alt.config, alt.2600 and hsv.general. I was pleased to see that the Google Usenet Timeline includes the first mention of the Amiga. It also has a funny post from 1982 complaining how it will take Lucas some absurd amount of time, like until 1997, to get all nine Star Wars episodes out.

While at the doctor's office yesterday I started thinking about the three month life span my relationships have had the past year or so. (Why wonder about this at the doctor's office? Maybe my mind was in a "let's fix things" mode.) One of the things I wondered was if it started after Kathy's death.

Last night I had a dream. In the dream I learned that Kathy hadn't really died back in June 2000. It didn't matter though, because in my dream she had just killed herself. I found my parents and they were upset and crying because she had called them looking for me. I think she'd left an answering machine message like "What are you doing with her?" In the dream I understood that "her" didn't mean Leia, it meant anyone.

Two things to note: I never remember my dreams. They never seem to correspond to my real life. Where does this fit in?

The World had a report on my hometown yesterday. Here's the teaser for the report: "As America hunkers down for what President Bush says will be a long and global fight against terrorism, local officials all over the United States are looking for ways to defend their citizens. And as Aaron Schacter reports, much of the playbook for homeland defense is being written in a relatively small community in northern Alabama."

The report mentions this but I'm putting it here for emphasis. Huntsville has the second largest research park in the nation and the fourth largest in the world. It houses Marshall Space Flight Center of NASA fame. I've heard it has one of the highest densities of PhDs but I couldn't find anything to back that up. I could go on and on about it's scientific research resources but I won't. I mention these things because I like tweaking Alabama stereotypes. I have no desire to move back there, but it was an interesting place to grow up. The mountains and valleys of the area were my playground growing up. I was sad to see that over the years the old people and the mega churches have clawed tremendous parcels of that beauty to pieces.

I finally got an apartment this past weekend. I'm living at St. Andrews. It's a yasac (yet another sprawling apartment complex) but my apartment overlooks a five and a half acre park which has a bubbling brook running the length of it. Also it's nice to have a sanctuary away from the busyness of life. (Is it a coicidence that busyness and business are so similar?) I've kinda missed the sounds of all my computer fans spinning in the night, it will be nice to have that back.

f I was a work of art, I would be Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus. I am a beautiful and alluring composition, not afraid to show off a good deal of bare flesh. People surround me and gaze at me with the adulation due a goddess and friendly breezes gently push me along my path in life.

I realize it's the prerogative of fools and talk show hosts to come in after the fact and point out the mistakes made previously, but I'm feeling indulgent. I work on a project at work that was written by consultants with KPMG, as far as I've been told. I have not seen such shoddy code since my own early experiments with programming. It's a bunch of StoryServer templates (read: Tcl templates) with HTML and JavaScript mixed in. While this isn't a bad thing in and of itself, what they did to it would send shivers down the spine of Dante and Virgil.

The baboons, excuse me, the highly compensated team of baboons that wrote this program appear to lack any design, coding, documentation or testing capabilities that progressed past elementary school. I have my own theories about the culture that exists within a company like KPMG, and the code naughtiness they unleashed on Cingular seems to confirm my pet theories. The details of my rant are sprawled out below for those who are curious about the egregious, dare I say it, domestic terrorism KPMG waged against Cingular.

In the HTML they have a number of missing closing tags, like closing <tr> tags. They use this phantom <image> tag instead of <img>. Two times out of ten they will spell JavaScript correctly in the <script language="JavaScript"> tags. If I were to be pedantic I'd call them out on their lack of a DTD, but I'm not. I am repeatedly appalled at the inconsistency with which they use " marks around their attribute values in their HTML tags.

In the JavaScript code they do things like name frames "top" which makes it really awkward to get to the top object at times. What genius thought abc was a good function name? Who decided to use JavaScript document.writes to put the proper stylesheet for IE or Netscape in the documents? StoryServer's variations are meant to solve this very problem.

In the StoryServer tcl code they do nasty things like use hardcoded template IDs in their CURLs. You'd think they never learned how to do a SQL join with the number of times they will perform a SQL query in one template. Also they have never heard of components or libraries because they just cut and paste all their code everywhere rather than reuse it. While I'm talking about that how about moving some of the JavaScript into external files so it can be reused between templates? The size of some of these templates is absurd because they pour the kitchen sink into them. I don't know who thought the templates would be easier to maintain and debug by putting everything into one gigantic template instead of componentizing things! Also someone must have thought they were clever using the lindex command to extract database results from queries instead of using FIELD. I guess they never realized that wouldn't work if the database table changed. It's not like these people are new and deserve a little slack. When I was brand new to StoryServer I did not make those mistakes, and I'm just a lowly wage slave compared to what a KPMG consultant gets.

The above is an excerpt from my deferred adjudication paperwork. One benefit to deferred adjudication that is not often mentioned is that it confers upon you a new superman status that puts you above the law. This is the loophole that many super villains exploit in order to operate outside the law. It is a little known fact of the legal system that they must tell you when you are or are not to follow it. Once I complete my 60 days of obeying the laws of Texas I will be free to flaunt them as much as I want. At such time I plan on carving my name into the moon with a high power laserbeam and the troopers of Texas will be helpless to stop me.