it requireth haste

Look!

I made a web site.

Yes indeed, with the help of the peerless Tim Malabuyo, I have brought online The King’s Business, Biola’s old monthly periodical.

I really like the feeling of working with a designer. I’m a programmer, and I’ve really only done a couple sites that I feel good about the design. So having a designer working with me lets me focus on the fun stuff. Plus, he’s really good. (Of course, he also thinks that he gets to focus on the fun stuff and leave the hard stuff to me. Ha. I’m not the one that has to deal with IE bugs!)

The other different thing about this project is that I hardly spent any time on the coding. (136 LOC, for what it’s worth.) The difficult thing was dealing with the gigabytes of image files that had to be converted and organized. I wrote some Ruby scripts to handle the conversion (in retrospect, Bash would have been more appropriate, but it was a good learning experience.) The image conversion was a huge task; the first time I ran it, it took 9 hours to complete. I think the CPU of my desktop running that program raised the temperature in the apartment noticeably that day.

Anyway, feel free to take a look and tell me what you think. There’s some good stuff in there. Biola had some pretty sharp people in those early “what can we do to take the world for Christ” days, back before it became “a safe place to send your kids.” One of my favorite parts is the ads for the Bible Institute: “Tuition Free!”

the only band that matters?

When they kick at your front door,
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
or on the trigger of your gun?
When the law breaks in,
how you gonna go?
Shot down on the pavement,
or waiting on death row?

You can crush us,
You can bruise us,
Or even try to shoot us.
But you’ll have to answer to
the Guns of Brixton.

Three cheers for the second ammendment. (I know, I know, they’re British.) The Clash have actually made me quite curious about the political climate in 1970’s England. (No music has ever done that for me before, oddly enough.)

whom to trust?

“Quake Mobile takes all of the action, gameplay and atmosphere of the groundbreaking original, and puts it right in the palm of your hands.”
—Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software, commenting on a planned release of Quake for mobile phones

“You aren’t going to be able to make an immersive experience on a 2-inch screen, no matter what the graphics look like. Moody and atmospheric are pretty much out. Stylish and fun is about the best you can do.”
—John Carmack, creator of Quake, commenting on developing for mobile phones

share and share alike

I have been known to criticise the state of American copyright law in the past, but some people were confused because most of what I said was criticism without offering much positive opinion on what things should look like. My biggest problem with the current state of affairs is that people have lost sight of the fact that the original intent of copyright was a compromise. The public would allow for certain people to control media for a time because it was the only way that certain works could be produced. As the U.S. Constitution puts it:

“The Congress shall have power [...] To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

Thus we get the basis of the authority which has established copyright and patent law.

It was always intuitive to me that the recent extensions of copyright did nothing to further this goal. In particular, the DMCA prohibits rather than promotes the progress of science and the useful arts, and it always seemed obvious to me that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension (which extended copyright term to seventy years after the death of a work’s author) has more to do with protecting media cartels than promoting the creation of new art. However, I never really felt that I could express why I felt that way.

Well, the other day I stumbled upon a fantastic article on K5 with Lord Macaulay’s copyright speech. Lord Macaulay was an influential British statesman and philosopher who was largely responsible for drafting the legal system of colonial India, among other things.

His speech, while long, is really a gem. It is a bit of a shock for me (and probably anyone who is used to contemporary American speeches) to hear a politician give a long discourse that appeals to common sense and reason. He makes a sound case that (a) copyright is based on a compromise of accepting a necessary evil of monopoly so that creativity will flourish, and (b) extending the period of that monopoly past the death of the author does much to increase the public disadvantage of the monopoly while doing little to increase the advantage of the author. The context of the speech is that of opposition to a bill which would extend copyright duration to sixty years past the author’s death. The bill was soundly defeated.

Almost all of the speech is surprisingly relevant even today (perhaps because his warnings have been ignored?) but the most powerful is the closing of the speech:

I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind.

Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions.

Pass this law, and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim’s Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?

Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.

If only today’s politicians had the wisdom and vision of this fellow! (Jon: now do you understand?)

another one bites the.... oh, wait.

Yesterday my friend Dustin Guenther married his friend Katie Fisher. They are so uncommonly right for each other in a way that doesn’t need to be explained if you know them. I happily returned the favour of being a groomsman in their blessed wedding. They are off in Hawaii at the moment, but expect an update when they return, if you can expect anything about Dustin’s blog to be timely. (Dustin—there’s nothing wrong with posting on your honeymoon…. I did it.)

My warmest congratulations to you both.

It looks like Libby posted pictures And Lem promised to put some up, too. I only got three pictures, and two of them were of the cake.

the shame has ended

Finally our connection at the new apartment is up! We’re with Verizon this time. I’ve heard a few nasty things about them, (blocking port 80 for one) but no problems so far. They even gave us a nifty DSL modem that has an integrated router and wireless! So much cool! Hopefully service doesn’t cut out when it rains… (ahem—SBC!)

The week of downtime was embarassing, but it’s over. Worst was not having Planet Zacchaeus and having to check all my friends blogs manually. Poor me, I know. (Actually worst was not having email at home without going outside to bum off an unsecured signal a few units over. We are the 5th or 6th wireless signal in the complex that I know of. I haven’t done a thorough search yet.)

I’ve always thought those ‘My child is an honor student’ stickers were kind of silly, but here’s something worse. ‘My child may not be an honor student, but he tried really hard’.

Oh yeah, and we have a phone in our apartment now. It was hooked up two days ago, and so far we have received nine phone calls, none of them useful. They’ve been divided about evenly between wrong numbers and telemarketers, with one “open the gate, Phil” call from Dustin. (The gate wouldn’t open.) Additional irony: we used to need a land line because our handphones got no reception indoors. Now we have perfect reception through the whole apartment, but we have to get a land line for DSL purposes.

link backlog

I actually feel a good deal stupider after watching this movie:
http://spherule.com/media/video/ballmer_musicvideo.mov
Dance, monkey boy; dance! Oh, sorry. What I meant to say was, ‘stay away’!

If you ever visit China, you may find this link helpful!

From the Tao of Programming:

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of
the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: “Which is easier to
design: an accounting package or an operating system?”

“An operating system,” replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. “Surely an accounting
package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system,” he said.

“Not so,” said the programmer, “when designing an accounting package,
the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different
ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must
conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited
by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the
programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is
why an operating system is easier to design.”

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. “That is all good and well, but
which is easier to debug?”

The programmer made no reply.

This is absolutely insane. It’s Lemmings written entirely in
Javascript! Unbelieveable.

Oh, and Ben, are you
listening?
Public key cryptography is where it’s at! But you knew that.
Implementors? Please?

ancient melodies of the future

The symptoms of our getting older
The problems we say we don’t mind
Most of us never get over
Memories mingled with lies

Coincidence gave a confession
That no one’s allowed to forget
I don’t wanna give the impression
That predestination is set

The distance will increase the danger
Where certainty’s never enjoyed
Regarded as equal yet stranger
Embark then embrace then destroy

Observing the process will change it
And afterwards even if you
Subconsciously rearrange it
It doesn’t seem any less true

And no one can tell me to listen
And no one can tell me what’s right
‘cause nobody has my condition
And no one can see in your mind
In your mind

When magnifications explore
There slowly emerges a pattern
The details you normally ignore
You notice really what matters

There isn’t a time or a place
Only an ebb and a flowing
A permanent repeating space
Occuring, connecting and growing

And no one can tell me to listen
And no one can tell me what’s right
‘cause nobody has my condition
And no one can see in your mind
In your mind

In your Mind by Built to Spill

I think that part of this song is a justification of moral relativism through quantum uncertainty. Which is, of course, absolutely absurd. Still, you have to give them points for trying. The audacity of such a mental project is definitely something.

I’m debating the point of putting music here because I realized it’s not nearly as interesting to read it if you don’t have the sounds in your head. It turns out that’s a bigger issue than just with music, because half the stuff I post doesn’t make much sense without the context I have. And yet somehow I still seem to maintain a positive comments-to-posts ratio. (Don’t know how that happened…)

New Design: better? It’s not yet done; I still need to style the posts themselves. But the business at the top will stay how it is, and the sidebar might just change a little.

burbclave

I’m mostly just posting this so that hideos picture of Billy Idol isn’t the first thing you see when viewing my site. No need to thank me; it was done mostly for selfish purposes. However, I did find this interesting article by William Gibson about Singapore entitled Disneyland with the Death Penalty.

It’s twelve years out of date, but a lot of what he says still holds. (They do sell his novels there, BTW. I think the censorship board has lightened up a little.) The franchise “Mr. Lee’s Greater Singapores” he mentions didn’t seem to take off at all—I think I would have heard of them if they had. But the IT revolution has happened, and they’ve been keeping up fantastically at that.

His most interesting comment is made near the end:

Myself, I’m inclined to think that if they prove to be right [that they can compete in an information-centric world], what will really be proven will be something very sad; and not about Singapore, but about our species. They will have proven it possible to flourish through the active repression of free expression. They will have proven that information does not necessarily want to be free.

This really resonates with me. Though I think the phrase “active repression of free speech” may be a little strong, this is ultimately the problem I was left with. If everything we hold dear about Freedom is true, how is Singapore so prosperous?

I think the key lies in that phrase, “active repression of free speech.” If it truly were an active repression of free speech, I think things would be much grimmer. But as it is, I didn’t see much of that. Sure, you can’t chew gum, but who does that really bother besides the ex-pat kids? People deal with it, and it doesn’t bother them. They get along fine without any anarchist punk rock and Cosmopolitan magazine.

The reason behind this is something I’m surely not qualified to ponder, but I think it has something to do with the vast gap in thinking patterns between East and West. We can’t help but feel a little stifled when reading Gibson’s account, but that feeling isn’t something the locals have over there. I don’t think it’s propaganda or the frog-in-boiling-water syndrome; I think it’s something deeper.

Sorry to leave you hanging, but I haven’t a clue how to describe that deeper something.

righteous dub

Discovered love,
In the rancid days of ruin
My body’s sweatin’ toxins,
Of my own demise

Only from space, can you see
How much earth is burning
Smokin’ out the innocence inside
The child

It’s the age of destruction
In a world of corruption
It’s the age of destruction
And they hand us oblivion

Neuromancer and I’m trancing
I’m the Neuromancer—and I’m trancing

Man wallows in his insatiable greed
More in the answer that sweats
From desparate palms
Turn on the lies, the secrets,
Of our desolation,
Or be smothered, by the red hot core

Denied love in the age of ruin
Suicide toxins of my own demise
In cyberspace, you know how much
The earth ain’t learning
Smoking out the man, inside the child.

Neuromancer by Billy Idol

The nice thing about listening to Billy Idol is that it’s really ok…. You don’t have to take him seriously. He is the only one allowed to do that. I mean, come on…. Cyberpunk? It’s just too much.

Oh yeah, and there’s something really wrong about having a sponsored link for “Popular Wedding Songs” show up on the page for Rebel Yell.

transition

Sorry for the interruption in service.

Last Saturday Alisha and I moved into our new apartment. Much thanks to those who helped us. Our new place is superior to the old in every way with two exceptions: #16 is better than #226 since it is two to the power of two to the power of two, and it’s not right across the street from the dollar store. (It is across the street from Borders though, so that’s all right.) Also, the new place has no uplink yet.

Which brings me to the reason for the web site problem. I left Thoth, my server, in the old place where there’s uplink, and I moved Technomancer, my desktop, to the new place. Problem: my web server directory was a network file system share mounted from Technomancer. Ouch. So philisha.net was running on old backups for a while.

In other words, things have been way too hectic to think about finally fixing the CSS for this new design. Bah. So much to do….

Oh yeah, and this thing is pretty cool, but I don’t know if I’d want one. I’d much rather have one of these.

In closing, GNOME rules.

browser comparison

A few days ago I posted about browsers and my switch to Galeon. Well, now I got my new monitor, and I discovered Galeon has this strange bug—it only runs on your primary monitor. Funny how a simple bug like that can instantly become a show-stopper.

I did some research, and (surprise, surprise) found out there is no best browser. They each have things they end up doing best. (There is a worst browser, but I won’t get into that at this point; I mock it enough as it is.) Here are some of the things I considered that were important to me:

• Tab handling: Firefox has basic tab support, but you can’t do things like re-order them without installing a separate extension. While I like the idea of having extensions available, in practice it’s too annoying to try to get the same set of extensions installed across all four of the computers I regularly use. Galeon and Epiphany have drag-arrangable tabs—extra points! Plus, when you close a tab, you go to the last tab you used, not the adjacent tab. I’ll mention Konqueror for the sake of completeness. Konqueror has lots of options for dealing with tabs (that is to say, its menus are cluttered with options), but none of them turn out being as useful as Epiphany’s functionality which doesn’t cause any clutter. (Update—after searching through the menus, I see Konqueror has tab-handling options in the ‘Window’ menu, not the tab contextual menu. Points off!)


• Javascript Console: this is essential for the web development that I do. It allows me to see where the errors may be in the scripts I write. Firefox and Galeon both have good Javascript consoles, although somehow the one in Firefox broke, and I can’t get it back. This is the only place Epiphany falls behind; it does not include one. Konqueror similarly does not include one, but it took me sixty seconds of searching through the menus and toolbars to realize it.


• Search integration: In my opinion, Epiphany handles this the best by doing it Mozilla-style. You type your search query into the location bar, and then select “web search” there. It is as instantly accessible as the Firefox way, and it doesn’t waste any screen space. Even though it is hidden, it’s easy to discover. Mad props! Galeon has a separate search box, which is all right, but it wastes even more screen space than Firefox’s since it must be on a separate toolbar and can’t be moved to the main one. I couldn’t find any search in Konqueror.


• View Source: This is also important to me as a web developer. The browser that handles this the best is Galeon; it opens a new tab next to the one you are on that contains the source of the page. Firefox is all right, but what’s the point of opening a new window if you have the tab option available? Epiphany and Konqueror both open the source in an external editor, which I think is tacky, but it could be useful to some people. They all have syntax highlighting, which is very helpful.

I feel bad because I did nothing but rag on Konqueror. Before I say anything more, I think it’s a bit unfair because the Konqueror team has the unenviable task of developing a web browser, a file manager, and a rendering engine all at once. If they miss out on a few features, that’s probably why. (Of course, whether combining all of those in one program is a good idea, well, that’s another question.)

But there are some other things that bothered me about Konqueror. The ‘close tab’ button should be on the tab, not on the toolbar. (Firefox has this problem, too.) That way you can close the tab without switching to it. On slower computers this is important, because sometimes you’ll want to close a tab that has (say) a huge flash animation or something. Switching to the tab just to close it wastes time loading. Also Konqueror makes sounds when you have an error. I know you can turn this off, but what ever happened to sane defaults? And lastly, the biggest deal was that it failed to render a page on konqueror.org correctly. I can understand an occasional rendering glitch, but your own web site should be the first thing you test:

In case you couldn’t figure it out, I decided to go with Epiphany. Epiphany and Galeon are both tied for the ‘it feels fast’ category, but I can’t use Galeon because of the previously mentioned screen bug. The only thing I miss about Firefox at this point is an ad blocker. I wouldn’t be surprised if one existed; I just need to look around. Also the fact that neither Galeon or Epiphany focus the location bar on the creation of new tabs is annoying, but minor.

You’ll notice Opera isn’t on this list. I’ve heard it’s a nice browser, but first of all, it’s not Free. Not having the source available makes me hesitant to rely on it for a variety of reasons which I’ll not get into here. Secondly, it costs money. The browser market is crowded enough as it is; there’s no room for a paid browser. I’d feel pretty stupid if Galeon were a paid browser, then I switched to it, and then a week later realized I’d be better off with Epiphany. Ad-supported does not count; I see enough ads as it is. (Yes, being Free and not costing money are different things. See Stallman.)

I’d be interested in anyone else’s thoughts on the subject. Obviously this is wildly subjective, so don’t flame me if my needs are different from yours.

thulcandras tales tale

That Hideous Strength needs to be made into a film. Please, someone. It would be amazing.

Here’s who should play in it:

• Sean Bean – MacPhee


• Rowan Atkinson – Deputy Director Wither


• Martin Freeman – Mark Studdock


• Angelina Jolie – Fairy Hardcastle

The character of Ransom would be tricky, since so much rests on his performance. The three people who might be able to pull it off are Mel Gibson, Liam Neeson, and Antony Hopkins. I think Hopkins should be ruled out because (a) he is too old, and (b) he would be too good at playing Merlinus to pass up. (But the Lewis tie-in from Shadowlands would be cool.)

Kenneth Branaugh might be able to do Wither if he could do it like his character in Harry Potter. Joachim Phoenix could probably do Mark pretty well too. I’m coming up with a blank for Feverstone and Frost. Comments?

im a switcherm a switcher

Just switched my blog to Typo. Typo is a blogging system that runs on the inimitable Rails framework. For a long time I’ve run on my own blogging system, but I wanted to give Typo a try. It’s not because there was anything lacking in my own implementation; it’s just that I wanted to try out one of the coolest Rails apps.

All in all, Typo is great…

Pros: live search is sweet. Try it. I also love the instant preview as you edit; it’s helpful. On my old system I would always post, edit, post, edit till it looked right.

Cons: I would have liked commenting inline a la my old system. Also, Typo would show trackback links even though I disabled trackback on the whole site. Oh, and instant preview doesn’t work with Textile, which makes it much less useful. And I can’t get it to do past posts in chronological logical order; it orders them newest-first.

From my experience, publicly available blogging programs gather more comment spam. This doesn’t seem to be the case with Typo, but it might just be because its market share is low.

The new design’s still a little rough around the edges, so I’ll leave the old version up for a while.

Blog posting has been a little sparse recently. What with the move coming up soon and just general business around, it may be that way for a while.

Also, mad props to Alisha for helping with this great design.

behold the spiffitude

Happy Rails Day.

I’d like to take this moment to speak out against the practice of including links in the title of blog posts. If you think for a moment with me about this, you’ll see why it’s a bad idea. Many blogging systems make the post title a permalink to the post by default. So if the title is a link, people won’t notice if you make another link of it. So your clever linking will go unnoticed. So don’t do it. (An example of this practice can be found here.)

That is all.

it’s guh-nome, not nome.

My desk is beginning to sag in the middle. Multiple monitors can be hazardous, especially two 17-inch CRTs. It’s too much weight. So I’m stashing one of them and buying an LCD. (Really, it’s to save my desk!) I used to have trouble justifying the extra expense, but I’ve really started to be bothered by flicker at high resolutions on CRTs. So I'll keep my CRT at 1024, and put my LCD at 1280.

In an unrelated note, I’ve been quite impressed with the Galeon web browser. Firefox is fantastic, and I continue to cheer it on because it’s without question the best cross-platform browser now that Mozilla proper is no longer with us. But it doesn’t hurt to look at the alternatives, like Galeon.

Galeon impresses me firstly because it’s noticeably faster than Firefox, but also because it thinks intelligently about tabs, instead of just implementing things the simplest way. For instance, when you close a tab, the tab that shows next is the one that you were previously viewing, not just the one to the left. It’s a simple thing, but it shows thought has been put into everything. It’s also got a cool way of changing keyboard shortcuts—just put your mouse over the menu item and press the keystroke you want to use.


Oh, and Google’s Summer of Code looks awesome. Too bad I am just now out of studenthood. I’d love to learn to hack GNOME or contribute to Ubuntu. Kudos to Google for their enthusiasm and spirit.

I watched a Guadec video and learned the right way to pronounce GNOME. I’m such a fanboy.