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Final Post

2006-12-10T23:01:00.000-05:00

After 2 years of procrastinating I've finally setup a new blog at http://daniel.collectiveidea.com.

It will be a work-in-progress for a while, but please join me.

I won't be posting here anymore. Thanks for reading.

Programmer Humor

2006-11-02T11:37:00.000-05:00

From Brandon:

>> "SOA".succ
=> "SOB"
>>

Inspired by: SOA Facts

Written in Ruby

2006-10-06T11:52:00.000-04:00

XMPP4R is written in Ruby. If you don't know this language yet, continue to ignore it. Learning it will make you realize what you missed until now, and you might run into severe problems (depression, etc).

From: XMPP4R's Docs.

Playing .mp4 files via QuickTime in the Browser

2006-08-22T21:41:00.000-04:00

Documenting an hour's worth of frustration.

No video? Just a big blue Q icon? Add mime types to your server (assumes Apache). You can do it in an .htaccess to make it easy.

Contrary to expectations, the following will not work.
AddType video/quicktime .mp4

Use this instead:
AddType video/mp4 .mp4

Of course.

What are they thinking?

2006-08-08T01:22:00.000-04:00

From MasSlash:

Needless to say, HTML email is NOT EVER an enhancement. - AcaBen

Amen.

Update: AcaBen's mini-editorial.

Sign Up?

2006-07-17T17:05:00.000-04:00

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

My email box is constantly plagued by spam, phishing, and other random junk.  Banks, PayPal, and other merchants have spent a lot of time educating the public on how to recognize "spoofed" emails, and not believe (or click) everything they get in their inbox.

Wouldn't it be great if I could know that email came from PayPal?

We have the tools--we have for years.  Public Key Encryption (PGP, GPG, and the like), in addition to allowing for top-notch privacy also can allow for nearly-perfect sender identification.

With Encryption, I can send an email to a colleague and know that only he can open it (at Collective Idea, we do this as a matter of habit--even if we're just sending a funny link).  The other side, Signing, allows for me to send an email to anyone and have them *know* that I am the only person who could possibly have sent it.

To know that the sender is who they say they are, I do need to have PGP installed, and be smart about accepting keys.  If I do both of these things, I have a greater level of assurance.  If I don't, I see a message that looks exactly like this one.

I'm starting to think that all web applications should sign emails without exception.  Do I care if my account notice from Bascamp is real?  Probably not, but I would like to know I can.  I'd also like to see PGP more widely used... this could help, if only in a small way.

I'm considering adding signed messages to some apps I'm working on.  Is it worth it?  Would people respond well, or get confused?



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (Darwin)

iQIVAwUBRLv6khd0oToplsYeAQI1whAAoIdeDC1nXXc5DVlXslxt434/3OBfs1I+
/MwzLkSYDufmJw9eobU35OZq7YJOGcKdjr5G2cINJElOv5o0S+pIhuF4rBRKgcx8
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MTiQ08ya3uD55SZ8awLSRjOixy/JcBcShG8by4TghW+Phx7ZOoyHHyvOwJ9pzUF1
jgUVJbweOyvn3VLyX+ylQGn/qBcHY3riEXWS2XlET1pN63kc3XFCBKFBZvvo32uK
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Hsa9zmOuYyiD/nenj3EdYifEH7cq4fqUJn2ZJjy5lo0oVPef5vmRdYG2q25ugpRS
AtlSxyZOCACvAjh8Mzm2dwC/51XZWz7QY/eTPy2lOQksbKXKta8VyN5prxAvrcsO
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0vt7TCnBXRw=
=PpAa
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Coded Message

2006-07-11T20:51:00.000-04:00

Aaron: 200 I'm 410
Daniel: 406!
Aaron: Jodi says 405
Daniel: 200.

We're leveraging our knowledge of HTTP.

On Rails

2006-07-08T15:58:00.000-04:00

Some brief notes:

RailsConf was fantastic. I expect next year to be much crazier, but we'll hope it keeps its class. The current community is so bright as a collective whole.

Chicago's "L" system is really good. People who live there often don't realize how easy it is to get around the city.

Chicagoland's Metra trains are also very nice. No complaints there, though I wonder if they could add wi-fi...

I took an Amtrak train from Chicago to Washington, D.C. which arrived 7 hours late. I do love Amtrak, but they don't make it easy. We really need to make rails service more of a priority in this country.

D.C.'s Metro system is surprisingly nice. Very clean and few advertisements. July 4th found it body-to-body after the fireworks, but it could have been much worse.

The airline industry, while much quicker, is completely backwards. I should be able to pick and choose flights (find a cheap one from D.C. to chicago, then find one to Grand Rapids) but instead, am forced to pick one airline for the entire trip, limiting my options. It is ridiculous that a ticket from D.C. through Chicago to Grand Rapids is cheaper than a ticket from Chicago to Grand Rapids (on the same flight) alone.

Excitement from RailsConf

2006-06-25T13:38:00.000-04:00

HOWTO: Build and Instant Indie Music Collection

2006-06-18T23:18:00.000-04:00

You're getting ready for a sweet dinner party. You have some foreign cheeses, a bottle of wine, and a fruit salad, but you really need some good hip music. Don't let on that that last CD you bought was Avril Lavigne (its ok that you enjoyed it when it came out, but now its a bit passé) grab an eclectic playlist of free music.

KEXP (90.3 FM) in Seattle, besides being a fantastic radio station with a great internet stream, provides just the podcast for you. I know, you don't think a podcast is a viable option. This one is just songs. One per day, with a good backlog.

Grab the podcast, preferably using iTunes. Not because you have to use iTunes, but because that's what I'm using.

Click their handly link to subscribe via iTunes. There, that was easy. At this point, iTunes will ask you for confirmation, and will begin to download the current day's song. This is great, but your dinner party is in half an hour. How will you get a full playlist?

Notice the little Get icons next to each previous song? Get 'em all. Every single one. You can delete them later if they suck.

In a matter of minutes, you'll have a great set of songs. Even better, they show up in your Library and will also sync to your iPod (depending on your settings). I'd recommend making a playlist (smart playlists are great) for them, maybe throwing in the few cool songs you already own. Then throw it on shuffle, and see what happens!

All your friends will think you're cool, and you saved yourself a ton of time actually learning about Indie Music.

Better

2006-06-16T20:48:00.000-04:00

Dan: one guess why Eventful is better than Upcoming
Slack: atom?
Dan: yep.

& I rest my case.

2006-06-14T20:40:00.000-04:00

Via Tim Bray, James Holderness describes why RSS is broken beyond the point of fixing.

Clearly if you want to support Firefox or Internet Explorer you’ve got no choice but to use the single encoding option. For certain strings, though, that would mean losing support for at least twenty other aggregators. No matter what you do, you can’t win.

I agree with Tim that this is a decisive argument for Atom. I rest my case.

Flickr makes my day.

2006-05-30T23:58:00.000-04:00

Flickr, the online photo community which I have formed a minor addiction to, just went 1.0. No, the site isn't out of beta (or gamma), but they have an Atom 1.0 feed.

I haven't seen it advertised (probably because it doesn't quite validate), but I was able to hack the URL from ?atom_03 to ?atom_100 and it worked!

They've made some great progress, and the validation error will be easy to fix. What I'm really excited about is how they correctly mark up tags in the feed:

<category term="up" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />
  <category term="kayak" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />
  <category term="memorialdayweekend" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />

I hope more tag-happy apps follow suit!

New Book

2006-05-15T11:00:00.000-04:00

Aaron: i've already started my Agile Bullshitting book
Dan: haha
Aaron: that's the beauty of the book
Aaron: i totally bullshited you just now
Dan: nice.

Moving to Ma.gnolia

2006-05-10T14:35:00.000-04:00

I've been using the social bookmarking service del.icio.us for a while now, but not quite as often as I could. Usually when I have a site open for a couple days, I clear it out by adding it to del.icio.us.

For an upcoming plot to take over the world, I wanted to take an Atom feed from del.icio.us and merge it into a new feed. The only problem: del.icio.us doesn't use Atom.

I want Atom for a few reasons, mainly because you can do some tricky things when you create new feeds from existing Atom feeds. Also because Atom is generally cooler.

So I looked into alternatives. Ma.gnolia is another social bookmarking service that does outpu valid Atom feeds, in addition to some other goodies. I quickly copied all my del.icio.us data into ma.gnolia. I wanted to be sure the feed would work appropriately, so I ran it through the feed validator. It was valid, but had a few minor warnings. I shot of an email to support detailing the solutions and within hours they had fixed the feeds!

Now, if i can only convince Flickr to upgrade their Atom 0.3 feeds to 1.0, I'll be happy.

Abstracting Web 2.0

2006-04-08T16:48:00.000-04:00

My colleague Matt Slack is abstracting Web 2.0. His new site, integernoun.com does a nice job of poking fun at those of us building and using sites with silly names.

Collective Idea

2006-03-16T12:16:00.000-05:00

Collective Idea has a new site. It offers 6x more information, which means it is still very very minimalist.

In the coming months, we will have a lot more to say. Soon this blog will die and a new one will sprout up over there. We will begin releasing our own products, bring more people into the collective, and some cool open source tools will pop up.

I have purposely talked very little about Collective Idea here. Collective Idea is my development/consulting company that I started a little over a year ago. We have worked on a number of very exciting sites and applications in that time, some of which have been highlighted here.

Update from Austin

2006-03-09T22:29:00.000-05:00

Update 10-March: In addition to my photos, check out Aaron's and Rich's too, as I might actually be in some of those.

For the next week, I'm in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest (SWSW).

I'm really exited to be here, getting to see a lot of web visionaries and my Rails side will be fed well with _why and meeting up with Austin on Rails.

While here, I'll be uploading photos as often as possible, and working on 7dots.

Since I've kinda dropped off the face of the earth, here's just a bit of what I've been involved with lately:

Century Hardware - All custom code.
Educational Schools of America - Much more custom code, which will also power the websites of their 100+ schools (code is ready, domains are not).
JP's Coffee and Espresso Bar - Photo gallery integration with Flickr and the upcoming online store.

Meta Challenge

2006-03-07T22:54:00.000-05:00

A colleague sent me an email today about EasyEULA:

Dan, you should put meta tags on EasyEULA.

Like this:

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="false" /> <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" /> <meta name="title" content="EasyEULA | Home" /> <meta name="Copyright" content="Copyright (c) 2006 Collective Idea LLC" /> <meta name="description" content="Started in 2006, EasyEULA strives to simplify End User License Agreements for the benefit of end users, software developers, and for general good karma." /> <meta name="author" content="Daniel Morrison, Collective Idea" /> <meta name="Rating" content="General" />

I don't want to pick on anybody, but I don't like meta tags for two reasons

It conflicts with my love of minimalism.
I don't see why these are useful, let alone necessary.

My question of the day: Is there any benefit to including these elements?

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="false" />
The first one drives me nuts. An http-equiv? This means that this should be interpreted as if it was an HTTP header. Doesn't sound like one that made the spec. In practice, this keeps Internet Explorer on Windows from displaying those annoying little boxes (print, save, etc.) over images when you mouse over.

<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" />
The second one, I have no clue about. A quick search sheds some light, but is hardly seems worth of an element on every page.

<meta name="title" content="EasyEULA | Home" />
The third seems entirely worthless to me. Any robot should realize that there is already a <title> element. This isn't metadata, it's data. If this meta title is different from the real title, we have a problem.

<meta name="Copyright" content="Copyright (c) 2006 Collective Idea LLC" />
<meta name="description" content="Started in 2006, EasyEULA strives to simplify End User License Agreements for the benefit of end users, software developers, and for general good karma." />
<meta name="author" content="Daniel Morrison, Collective Idea" />

These next three I have the least problem with, as they could clear up ambiguities. However, I feel that they could be better represented by good semantic markup or RDF, which is the modern replacement for <meta>.

<meta name="Rating" content="General" />
This final piece of metadata seems reasonable, though I see no use for it unless your content is of a questionable or variable propriety.

So what is the solution? Are major robots actually looking at meta elements? Is anybody? What about RDF, is Google parsing it? Am I right to avoid meta? Should I replace it with RDF? Should I leave it all out?

Comments requested.

EasyEULA

2006-03-07T01:13:00.000-05:00

Ages ago, I wrote about the need for better simpler End User License Agreements, or EULAs.

While the solution is still pending, I have launched EasyEULA.org to begin the discussion.

I have had some very positive discussions privately, and have been encouraged to take the idea public. Feedback (idea at easyeula dot org) is encouraged and welcome, and hopefully this will turn into a viable solution.

Sam Ruby on RSS vs. Atom

2006-02-20T19:37:00.000-05:00

Sam Ruby give a new exploration into the RSS vs. Atom debate. It's a must-read for anyone who's interested. He touches some of what's changed since Atom went 1.0.

Q: But Microsoft is planning to include RSS support in LongHorn, I mean Vista, in 2006 or 2007 or 2008 or something. Microsoft is no dummy. Why did they pick RSS over Atom?
A: You have to realize that Microsoft uses the term RSS like many use the term Kleenex. I’m not sure why they insist on confusing the market this way.
Q: So you are saying that Microsoft supports Atom too?
A: Yes, their Feed API works just fine with Atom feeds. They were also amongst the very first to produce feeds that conform to the Atom 1.0 specification.

There's much more than this. I'm still angry at Apple for using the term RSS all over Safari. All feeds being available, Safari will chose the Atom one. Coincidence?

Don't Touch my Dock

2006-02-17T19:40:00.000-05:00

I just installed Apple's iLife '06. First, I think I have a bad DVD (because it took forever and the the disc sounded like a space heater mating with a dryer) and then my dock disappeared.

I thought it was odd that iLife crashed the Dock, until I realized that it wasn't a crash; it installed icons for all iLive apps in my dock. All of them. Never mind that I did a custom install and only installed iPhoto and iWeb..

My dock is mine. I like it just the way it is. Don't install things for me; I'll put what I want it the Dock.

Atomic Superiority

2006-02-13T19:32:00.000-05:00

Last week, I asked why I should support RSS in addition to Atom.

Since then, my colleagues seem to relish any opportunity to use RSS in conversation when I'm around, instead of Atom, or the more generic Feed or XML. So it's time to pick on one of them, and in the process, RSS itself.

Time to Pick on RSS

Aaron has a long list of feeds that you can subscribe to, but really Atom is the most useful here. To be fair to Aaron, he's using Movable Type, which makes it just as easy to support all of these feeds as it does to support one. But why would I even care about the others?

First, there is a RSD feed. Huh? Honestly, who is actually using that, and if there is anyone, who is actually relying on it?

Next we have not one, not two, but three RSS feeds! Whoa! We have RSS 1.0 and 2.0, which are fairly different. Then we have a RSS Full Post feed. What format is the Full Post feed in? No way to tell at a glance (RSS 2.0), and since the RSS versions a not really compatible, we can't make assumptions.

Finally, the whole concept of separate Summary/Full feeds is completely solved by Atom. Atom supports sending both full post and summary, so the client can decide what to show (bandwidth could be a consideration for not sending full-text, but I'd wager that supporting HTTP 304 headers would make a much bigger difference).

Kill RSS?

I'm not advocating that Aaron kill all but his Atom feed, this would be shortsighted. There is no reason to kill something that costs you nothing, just to promote a new standard (IE <= 7 is a major exception, but i digress). But my original question stands. Is there any reason for a new application to support non-Atom syndication? I am still struggling to find a single compelling reason.

Atom

2006-02-04T12:10:00.000-05:00

I spent a bit of time today adding XML feeds to a site. I decided to only add Atom feeds, not RSS.

While a lot of people talk about RSS, it really seems to be a dead. Blogger stopped using it a while ago, in favor of the far-superior Atom format. Really the only group going nuts with RSS seems to be Apple, with iPhoto and iTunes, except that they're using it in non-standard ways. Worse, they use RSS to describe any sort of feed in Safari, making the casual user think that RSS is better, and more prolific than it is.

So should I spend a small amount of time and make my sites support one or more flavors of RSS? I can't think of a viable reason why I should.

Google Just Won the IM War

2006-01-18T23:23:00.000-05:00

...but it may be a while before anyone notices.

Today, Google Talk started supporting XMPP which means I can run my own Jabber IM server (oh wait, DreamHost already has that) and can use my own email address, at my own domain, and chat with folks on Google Talk (or any other Jabber server).

This will make IM much more friendly and open. Openness has a history of making lives easier.

Google Talk wins. My prediction is that at least one of the other instant-messaging providers (MSN, Yahoo) will go XMPP this year, in reaction. Yahoo is probably the most likely. Keep people using their client, but open up the network to keep the user base. I'm ignoring AOL right now, as their going XMPP is basically already planned.

I've been waiting for this to happen every since Google Talk was announced as Jabber. Thanks, Google!

Internet Explorer 5 for Mac is Dead

2006-01-02T09:58:00.000-05:00

Roger Johansson said it better a while back, but as of yesterday, Internet Explorer on the Mac is an unsupported product.

I hope web developers follow Roger's lead and stop sending CSS to IE/Mac (on new sites). While is was a great browser at one time, that time has passed and we must move ahead.

1 Easy Payment and your Identity, Please...

2006-01-01T11:57:00.000-05:00

Last night, a while after watching the ball drop into 2006, we saw a commercial for some CD set, that I can't remember the name of. It was by the same people that did Monster Ballads (Music Choice, I think, but their website gives an error message for Macs, and I'm not wasting my time finding a PC). It was another compilation of ballads, but more late 90s.

Anyway, the guy sitting next to me decides to order a copy, hopefully prompted by whatever he had been drinking, because it certainly didn't seem worth the $23.95 to me.

The first question they ask him is for a postal code. Sure, no problem. Then they ask for his Social Security Number! Not a credit card, not an address, but a SSN!

Fortunately, he was smart enough to flat-out refuse, saying something like There is no way reason you need my social security number. Music Choice was willing to lose a sale over this, which they did.

I wonder how many SSNs this company has collected from folks unaware that this is a major security problem. I was happy that everyone that I was with was angry with the request. Maybe we're a little more aware in 2006.

7dots blog

2005-12-22T13:11:00.000-05:00

We have a blog for 7dots. If you're interested in what we're up to, this is one to bookmark.

Trying to love FireFox

2005-12-14T13:56:00.000-05:00

I'm trying to stop using Safari. It's a great program, but a few features drive me nuts. When I accidentally hit command-q and lost a bunch of open windows and tabs, I was ready to jump ship. See, Safari doesn't ask you if you really want to lose all of your tabs, it just dumps them. (There is a hack to do this, and I installed it right away, but I was ready to give up on Safari at this point.)

So two days ago, I began using FireFox as my default browser, prompted in part by Jamis Buck, partly because version 1.5 made it feel a little quicker. I looked at Camino, and Opera, but I like FireFox the best, and I really really love the Web Developer extension, and GreaseMonkey, so if I switch, I'm going to go where I can get them.

Now, FireFox is great, and easily one of, if not the, best browser on every platform, but after two days, I'm going back to Safari. The first reason was the look and feel. I followed Jamis' suggestions and made FireFox look a lot like Safari, but it was still not quite as Mac-like as Safari. Putting close boxes on each tab is great but they're on the wrong side, and you can't click to close a background tab. Say what you want about Safari's Metal interface, but it is clean-looking.

The feature that really did it for me, however, was spell checking. In Safari, I can use the OS X spell checker to check every form on any site. I love the little red lines under words, and I love the system integration. There are ways to spell-check in FireFox, but none that I've seen that integrate with the OS X dictionary.

Another big pro for Safari is PDF support. At first, I didn't think I'd like PDFs returning to the browser (old versions, and FireFox send them to the Preview app, by default), and Safari doesn't give you much control over the PDF display. However, it is much quicker to see the PDF in the browser first, and then save or open it from there. I didn't realize how much I appreciated this in my workflow until I lost it in FireFox.

Finally, speed is a back and forth issue. Safari seems to hang a few times a day, and only a restart helps. However, it still feels faster than FireFox at dealing with windows. I don't think there is a clear winner here. Also, Jamis complained about the tab key in Safari. Maybe I've been in Safari too long, but it actually makes more sense to me than FireFox does.

FireFox will continue to live right next to Safari in my Dock, and I will open it often for testing and such, but I'm sticking with Safari. I know there are ways around a lot of the problems I've described, but if I'm going to spend time pimping my browser, I'm going to PimpMySafari.

On a final note, other browsers have come up: Opera is great, but I'm just not feeling it yet. I don't know why, but I can't get into it. Flock seems pretty cool, but has a way to go before it will be usable. Camino feels very good, but I'm not convinced yet. It will be the next one I try. OmniWeb? Sorry, I'm not paying for a browser. iCab? Seems cool, but I don't see any great benefits. All this browser-hopping is tiring.

7dots

2005-12-04T23:32:00.000-05:00

After some prompting from the blogosphere, Elevator Up and Collective Idea are pre-announcing our first web application, 7dots.

A quick development summary: Ruby on Rails, AJAX, API, and more!

Think of it as one place to manage all the little things you have to remember. A little more info is available on the site and more will appear soon. We're also setting up a development blog, but some DNS issues have postponed that until tomorrow. We are releasing in February, but we'll certainly have a public alpha or beta out before that.

Check it out!

Beautiful Polymorphism

2005-12-04T13:53:00.000-05:00

Aaron, Rob and I went down to the Snakes and Rubies event yesterday, and it was a fantastic time.

DHH's talk was the one I went to see, though I did walk away with a new respect for Django.

The beauty of RoR was front and center, and I was very excited about some of the new features just added yesterday. I was admiring the new has_many :through associations for polymorphic tagging (non-techs, I'm impressed if you're still with me...), and I wanted to cheer when it was all wrapped up into a acts_as_taggable association!

The tagging also impressed me, because I had just written a data model for a web-app that will extensively use tagging. ~~I can't reveal it quite yet, but~~ suffice it to say this post at 37signals has made us ramp up our timeline... Update: We have made the annoucement. Check out 7dots!

HTML Help

2005-11-28T23:02:00.000-05:00

Quote of the day, via Katie B., who was editing some HTML

haha, i definitely added <center> to the beginning
and at the end instead of </center> i accidentally put </weird>
too bad ending weirdness isn't that easy

Evening at Adler

2005-11-15T10:19:00.000-05:00

On October 21st in the year of '05, ten top Mac developers (primarily indies) from around the USA were invited to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, IL for an evening of conversation around a broad range of topics...

I was there, and it was a fantastic night. A lot of very smart folks talking about some very interesting things.

DB has posted video and audio from the evening, and if you're interesting in the Mac development world, I suggest you check it out. I'm also providing a mirror, so you can grab it from me.

Recent Launches

2005-11-12T11:28:00.000-05:00

A while ago, I talked about working with The Image Group on some projects. A few weeks ago, we launched the portfolio section of their website.

We wrote a custom application for managing their portfolio that gives them unlimited room to grow. New projects can be added at any time, and you can access case studies from a variety of entry points. We even set it up for full-text searching, which will probably be added before too long.

The app is written with Ruby on Rails, with a MySQL backend. I am using ImageMagick behind the scenes to manipulate most of the graphics, and using Rails' impressively-simple caching routines to make the process quick and low-impact. There are a few server-configuration issues that we will continue to tweak, as well as updates to the interface and content, but it's a fun site already.

Other than that, I don't have much publicly available work to share, though the folks at Dance Marathon are beginning to experience their new management system. It's a lot of fun.

In other news, our friends at Elevator Up launched a new site design. My corporate side received a nice plug over there, so I'll plug them back.

US Health care sucks. (duh!)

2005-11-03T23:51:00.000-05:00

I always run into people who think that our heath care system is great, and that any kind of nationalized health care is doomed to fail. A new survey finds that the US is actually in pretty bad shape (surprise!).

I'd link directly to the survey or the article, but Kevin Drum sums it up nicely.

Additionally, I always think of all the costs associated with processing insurance, from employees to paperwork, there is a lot of money being wasted (and going to big insurance companies) that could be spent on actual care.

Printing Google

2005-11-03T10:10:00.000-05:00

If anyone is following the Google Print story, you probably know 2 things:

Google is trying to index a whole lot of books (eventually all of them)
(some) publishers are pissed.

Larry Lessig gives the best argument I've heard yet for why the publishers are being stupid.

Google isn't copying books, they're indexing them. This is no different from what they do to web pages (which are all copyrighted), its simply a new medium. Producing an excerpt of a book from a search is no different from writing a book review and inserting a passage. Fair use. Not copyright infringement.

Finally Google has to (and can) store a copy of the book for indexing purposes. When you search for web sites in Google, they don't spend hours crawling every page for your results. Instead, they have to store a local copy to make the search useful. Same with books. They can't send armies of readers off to run through libraries every time you search. Instead they have to store a copy. They aren't giving you a copy (which would be infringement), just giving you pointers. It is up to you to get the book, and once you know about it, you are infinitely more likely to buy it.

Update: 12:00
I got lost in my initial rant that I forgot my main point. (this is why I have many posts that remain unpublished...)

The important thing to note is that nothing is stopping any other company from duplicating Google's efforts. Google only has a monopoly on print searching because they are the only ones doing it (Microsoft is doing some print work, but at a much smaller scale). Google is raising the bar, but there is room for imitators (see Yahoo Maps beta). This is a good thing as it makes information more available to everyone. The complaining publishers need to realize that Google is merely filling a void that the publishers have ignored.

Reader Mail

2005-10-26T23:45:00.000-04:00

POST SOMETHING NEW!!!!

Thank you and have a lovely day. :)

Bums

Ok.

You have a lovely day as well.

Drivers Wanted

2005-09-20T23:14:00.000-04:00

Another successful site launch to report: Century Driving School. This one is a project with Aaron Schaap at Elevator Up. While half of my work is hidden in the back end, I did help with some fun front-end code.

Aaron designed a cool Location Finder that is the only site I can think of to use Google Maps as a design element, not just an fun feature. I coded up the map and the database hooks to tie it all together, and allow Century to easily add more sites in the future. Try clicking around the map, and going to one of the sites.

Aaron also has some info on his blog.

Goodbye Third Coast, Hello West Coast

2005-09-19T20:37:00.000-04:00

At the end of the week, I finally get to go to the Pacific Northwest. I'm off to Seattle for Steve and Lauana's wedding reception (married in Brazil; Seattle was a cheaper flight).

I'm looking forward to seeing a new corner of the US, and hopefully get to Vancouver too. I'm generally bad at taking pictures, but I have a new Flickr account that I'm looking forward to filling.

If anyone has suggestions for places to see or do, let me know. I'm out for a week, so I hope to do more than just sit in coffee shops (though it is Seattle so I'll have to hit some).

The Image Group

2005-09-16T09:29:00.000-04:00

It seems that most of the sites I'm working on are not for public consumption, but here's one: The Image Group.

Visually, I didn't do anything for this, though it's a stunning site, and pure CSS. Great work, gang!

What I did is invisible, tying it all together (oh yeah, and some Flickr coding). The biggest part of my involvement is yet to come. I'll be sure to pass that along when it's ready.

Urgent Exit

2005-09-15T21:26:00.000-04:00

I first read about this earlier in the day. My reaction then was that, sure this probably happens to everyone. But I came across it again on BBC and the more I think about it, the funnier it becomes.

This is the leader of the free world asking permission to... hehe.

Helping After Katrina

2005-09-05T21:23:00.000-04:00

2 ways to help that you may not have thought about:

HurricaneHousing.org: An amazing site from the fine folks at MoveOn.org that lets you offer displaced folks a place to stay. Check it out. I just found a place to stay for the iPunk's team that is down in Gulfport trying to lend a hand.
DisplacedDesigner.com: It might sound silly, but this is a neat way to help creative pros get back on their feet. Very cool idea. Go offer some desk space.

Rails is amazing.

2005-08-26T09:57:00.000-04:00

I've been doing a ton of Rails coding lately, and every day I find some new thing that makes me so happy.

Here is just one example: link_to_unless_current() This let's you throw a link on a page, unless you are already on that page. So simple, but so common! I wouldn't even think to look for such a method, but i stumbled across it accidentally. Thanks again, Rails!

G8

2005-07-01T17:04:00.000-04:00

I haven't delved into politics lately, but this post (poem? song?) from Andy Clarke (designer, not a politician) really struck a chord with me today, and is worth reading over the Independence Day weekend.

Bonaire Vacation - Day 5

2005-06-14T22:39:00.000-04:00

The sun set today on our time in Bonaire. We have seen much of the island, eaten very well, and played hard. This isn't one of those vacations where you sit on the beach all day sipping pina coladas (though it could be). This is an active vacation with lots to see and do, and I much prefer it this way.

We had good wind today, so the morning was spent windsurfing. I had a little less luck than before, but it was still fun. Strangely, the entire bay was full of debris—mostly driftwood, a bit of garbage, and other miscellaneous floating objects. The locals seemed annoyed by it, so we assume it wasn't normal. It was so widespread that surfing became a touch harder. I would be sailing along at a decent clip, then get slowed down by three or more two-foot sticks hanging on my fins.

After lunch, we had our diving lesson. I must say that it was a lot easier than I anticipated. I had a little trouble at first getting my right ear to pressurize, but it soon fell in line. We got down to 40 feet, which I felt was deep for a first dive. The three of us must have been an accelerated class. Diving was great fun, and I'm sure I will do it again. Though Bonaire is well-known as a windsurfing destination, it is more well-known as a Diver's Paradise.

Tomorrow morning we fly back to Aruba, and have enough time for a long lunch at the airport before flying back to Chicago, by way of Charleston. It will be a tiring day of travel.

Bonaire Vacation - Day 4

2005-06-13T08:19:00.000-04:00

Today we had a few more missteps, but it turned into a good day. We got up early and almost missed our first destination of the day: A sailing and snorkeling tour. For a couple hours we sat on a beautiful sailboat and stopped for a bit of snorkeling at one point. At the end, fun turned to embarrassment when we didn't have enough cash to cover our trip. Between Carl and I, we would have been able to do it, but I had left my wallet in the room. We came within $5, but we felt pretty stupid.

While we were sailing, we had a good amount of wind, though it was changing directions a few times. By the time we disembarked, the wind was almost nonexistent. We called out to the surf shop, and they confirmed our suspicions: No wind. Instead, we walked through the downtown, shopping and sightseeing. We also bought tickets back to Aruba. So if all goes well, we'll get home as expected. We won't get to see any more of Aruba than the airport, but I think Bonaire more than makes up for it.

Today was our least active day, but the sail was fantastic. Tomorrow, we're getting up to look for more wind, and trying our hand at scuba diving.

Bonaire Vacation - Day 3

2005-06-12T23:16:00.000-04:00

Today was a mix of surf and turf. We began the day with a missed triathlon that Carl wanted to do, but we didn't find a bike quick enough. He also slept late, so my Dad and I drove around for a bit, and went in the hotel pool. We also scheduled a scuba dive for later in the week. Then, snorkeling peaked our interest, so we bought some snorkel and went off the hotel's dock. I as amazed at the abundant sea life so close to shore. It felt like I jumped into Finding Nemo.

For lunch, we drove to Lac Bay, the windsurfing area, and ate at Kon Tiki, a great little resort on the lake. From there, we went to the surf shop, but the wind wasn't great, so we decided to drive around the island and snorkel. We went all around, from the salt pools on one end of the island, to the hills on the other end. We stopped at a number of snorkel sites and had a try. Quite a lot of fun.

Today was the day I started driving, though don't tell the rental company. It actually proved to be a very good change. Other than a few problems with a sticky reverse, my dad was doing fine, but I seemed to have a better sense of island orientation. Also, it freed him up to decide where to go, and read about everything on the map. Strangely, this all turned out to make everyone a bit happier.

Bonaire Vacation - Day 2

2005-06-11T23:23:00.000-04:00

Today was windsurfing. I forgot how much I hate windsurfing. Well, not hate it, exactly. It's a lot like golf. Golf is a very fun sport but I'm horrible at it, and when you play with people that are really good, you find nothing but frustration.

The windsurfing could not be more perfect, however. Lac Bay is knee deep as far as the eye can see, with the waves breaking over a large reef at the end. You have miles of shallow sandy water, with a ton of wind and no waves. I'm still no good at windsurfing, but I could enjoy it. I've decided that the sport is all about control; finesse. You have to know that sail like the back of your hand, exactly how it moves and behaves. My sail is like a insolent child.

You know you're in a different part of the world when the weather can be summed up in one question: "How's the wind today?" (More is better)

Before surfing, however, I had to go to the ATM. Though every place here will take US Dollars, we had mostly run out buying our flight from Aruba. My savvy traveler of a Father doesn't have an ATM card, so I became the bank. Fittingly, I found my horoscope in the local newspaper:

Be diplomatic but stem.[sic] Don't be too hard on yourself. Travel will be to your advantage; however, it might be expensive...

The diplomatic part definitely refers to my family. I find myself being the sole voice of reason too often. Even my limited traveling experience has proven to be invaluable.

One strange fact about Bonaire is that there are hundreds of wild donkeys running around—like deer in the U.P. Apparently, the government has rounded many of them up and put them in the Donkey Sanctuary (haven't been there yet), but many still run around (the ones they haven't been able to catch). Bonaire is also famous for pink flamingos, but they aren't in season.

After surfing until 5ish, we came back to the hotel and cleaned up for a fantastic european dinner at one of Bonaire's many great restaurants. Afterwards, while carl was cleaning out the small gash on his foot, I sat on a beach chair and watched the lightning on the horizon.

Unlike Aruba, which is its own country, Bonaire is part of the Netherlands Antilles, which in my understanding is effectively a "protectorate" of the Netherlands. There are a lot of Dutch vacationers and workers here, but the common language is English. So I forked over some Guilders for a Heineken, at the beach-side bar, and watched the ocean.

Bonaire Vacation - Day 1

2005-06-10T23:12:00.000-04:00

Wednesday night, my Dad bought tickets to Aruba. Random, I know.

Today (Friday) my Dad and my Brother Carl woke up at 5am and drove from Holland to Chicago. Not really believing me when I said it would definitely take 3 hours to get there, my traveling companions didn't move in any great hurry. Traffic going to O'Hare and car trouble didn't help anything, and we only made it to our plane because of a 30 minute delay. Once on the plane, we had a good flight and I was able to work most of the way.

Upon arrival in Aruba, we quickly decided to try to get to Bonaire, a nearby island, boasting the best Diving and Windsurfing in the world. So my dad blew most of the cash he brought with him booking a flight on the cash-only airline. We sat around the Aruba airport for an hour before flying on to Bonaire.

We arrived at Bonaire's Flamingo Airport (the island is also home to large flocks of the bird) and rented a pickup. From there, we drove directly to the windsurfing areas. By this point it was after 6pm, so the surf shops were closed, but we got our bearings, and drove back to find a hotel. We ended up at the Eden Beach Resort, which while a little pricey, is very nice and right on the ocean.

We had BBQ at the resort, except for Carl who went for a run and missed out. We went out and got him a queso, and we all had ice cream.

Apple x86? Nope.

2005-06-06T09:54:00.000-04:00

There's a ton on speculation in the Mac community about Apple switching to Intel's x86 chips.

I just want to go on record saying that this is complete nonsense. Why? Nobody would switch to the x86 platform if they had the choice. Sure, it's a good family, and it's had a great run, but I'm sure even Intel and Microsoft would get off the x86 if they had the option. It has to support so many legacy instructions, that it is crippled. Intel is an amazing chipmaker, and they could do a lot better if they could start over.

Now, I'm not a chip designer, nor am I an expert, but it seems to be that I'd rather bet my company on a more modern chip (PowerPC or other). x86 is great, but it's aging quick.

So what are the real sources of this rumor? My guesses are either

Some new product (iPod, wi-fi) using an Intel (non-x86) chip.
Intel manufacturing PowerPC chips for Apple.
Steve Jobs having a good laugh.

We'll see. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it.

Update: Daring Fireball does a good job debunking too.

Update 2: Well, it turns out I'm wrong. That's fine. I set myself up for that. I have to assume the folks at Apple know more than I (well, duh). It just seems strange that while the entire gaming industry is moving to PowerPC, Apple would move to x86. Damn it, I hate little endian.

Ruby on Rails - Days 2 & 3

2005-06-05T22:44:00.000-04:00

Friday night, I stayed up late to work with Rails for a bit. I purchased the first Rails book that doesn't even exist yet. A very cool idea called a Beta Book lets me pre-order Agile Web Development with Rails and get an incompletely edited version on PDF today. It seemed like a good deal, and it is a good book.

I made it through a few chapters on Friday, and spent a few hours Saturday morning working through it. Once I got to the MySQL example, I hit a roadblock with my installation that I haven't been able to solve. Rails doesn't see my instance of MySQL, and I'm finding that many other are having the same problem on OS X 10.4. Needless to say, this little problem is not exciting. I will have to see what part of the installation is broken and start reinstalling. My guess is MySQL.

I was thinking that it was just about a year ago that I decided to learn PHP. I had never touched it before, and I dove in and created a highly successful product. Now, I consider myself quite skilled at that language. I hope my experience with Ruby on Rails will be even more successful!

Ruby on Rails - Day 1 (sort of)

2005-06-03T13:05:00.000-04:00

Last night was my first night with Ruby on Rails.

Well, not quite. A few days ago I installed everything I needed. A month or so ago, I briefly looked through a book on the Ruby language to get a handle on the syntax.

But last night was the first day. So what did I do? Not much. I watched their fun introductory videos, and read a lot about the Rails community. But did I code anything? Nope. I didn't even try.

Ruby is truly exciting me. Since playing with WebObject a few years ago, Rails is the first framework that truly seems smart and easy. Sure PHP is fine, and it is quick, but the elegance (and rapid development) Rails provides seems unparalleled. Really, PHP's ubiquity is about all it has going for it.

My goal now is to find enough time between projects to dive in to Rails. It is laid out so well (compared to PHP) that the hardest part will be unlearning my PHP skills.

Ready, set, go!

It was a good weekend, but...

2005-05-31T16:55:00.000-04:00

...if you're towing anything, stay out of the left lane.

Worst Web App Ever.

2005-05-25T10:46:00.000-04:00

Doug Hughes discovers the worst web application he's ever seen. It's pretty humorous, and makes me feel better about my apps.

My vote, however, goes to Michigan LearnPort, whom I've had to work with for a client (unfortunately, their app requires an account). Their problem is the evil hides in a pretty package. It was designed to look good, and that's about it. It took me days to figure it out, and I kept thinking I do this for a living!

Summer Goals

2005-05-24T00:20:00.000-04:00

Last week, I was asked what my goals were for the summer. I didn't have many good answers at the time so here goes:

Pay off my debt. I'll do it, but we'll see how fast. The end of the summer might be pushing it.

Learn Ruby. Ruby on Rails is getting a lot of hype right now, and for good reason. Ruby as a language excites me for all sorts of nerdy reasons (true object-orientation!) and Rails seems quite useful. I'm certainly ready to get back into a nice language. Plus I love learning new languages.

Boost my level of QA. No more trusting myself. Stuart, this one's for you.

Finish my own website. I know this project will consume me, so I'm avoiding starting it.

Buy a house. Ha! Just kidding. A house a couple doors down went on the market today, and if I were in a buying position, I'd consider it, not that it's terribly nice. Good rental house.

That's a good list for now and maybe I'll add to it.

Insurance Policy

2005-05-18T14:51:00.000-04:00

After a small but scary hard drive error last week, I decided to get a new hard drive.

Yesterday, my external 200GB laCie drive (with FireWire 800, FireWire 400, and USB 2 ports) arrived. It is reconditioned, so I got a great price, on a fast, huge drive.

laCie is definitely on my good side. I expected it to not include any cables, but it had 4! One for every input above, plus a 6-4pin FireWire cable for good measure. I not only didn't have to buy an expensive cable, but I bolstered my collection! Then, I checked the disk format, and to my delight, it was already Mac formatted (HFS+)! Let's be honest, they know the target market for these drives is the Mac creative user.

No, I can have a bootable backup of my entire hard drive. Before, I had all my really important data backed up between my old Mac and my web space. Finally, my photos, music, and everything else will be safe, and daily updated. Should my drive go down now, the hassle will be minimal.

Yesterday was also the day that Jason's PowerBook decided to die. Fortunately, my giant drive came to the rescue. We retrieved all of his files and he's sending it out for repair tomorrow.

Designing the Future

2005-05-17T12:41:00.000-04:00

If you've never heard of William McDonough or the ideas behind Sustainability, read this short article (Karen: it's from Newsweek, so you'll like it).

McDonough's ideas are phenomenal, and are finally starting to catch on. His book, Cradle to Cradle is also very good if you're interested in reading more. For those of you in Holland, he's the designer behind the Greenhouse Herman Miller factory on 16th Street, and the upcoming Grand Rapids Art Museum.

Correction: I was wrong about the GR Art Museum. Turns out their design was a finalist, but ultimately not selected. Thanks to Kyle Copas, from William McDonough + Partners for setting me straight!

Something Old, Something Else Old

2005-05-12T00:47:00.000-04:00

Time to share a couple new sites that are up and running.

Oyez Review - Roosevelt University
I helped KTB with a site for her grad school internship some time this winter (Kate, I think you sill owe me coffee). It has finally been uploaded. I wish I could take credit for the design of the home page but, alas, that was her class. I just took their idea and made it happen. The rest of the site is nothing too exciting, but one cool thing is that the header and the logo at the bottom of each page is a PNG with an alpha channel. This means that the white part is the image and the color is the background showing through (yes, I know the logo looks mangled - it was truly the best graphic I was given). This makes it easy for them to add pages, or change the color - no image editing, just change one line of code!

British Motor Trade Association
This went live a couple weeks ago, but there are still some minor changes to be made. My role here was limited to the member database and private administration pages. Still, a fun site to be a part of.

Another Large Cat

2005-04-29T13:52:00.000-04:00

I finally read an interesting article about Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" which comes out today (though my pre-order from Amazon isn't scheduled to arrive until May 5!).

John Siracusa of Ars Technica reviews the new release in the amazingly in-depth way he has reviewed every release of the OS. John argues quite convincingly a point I have been arguing lately: "Tiger includes updates that are at least twice as significant as any single past update." Ok, that's actually a bit stronger language than I've used. The problem is that most of the truly interesting changes are under the hood, so they won't be noticed directly by the average user.

Some other choice passages:

"Well, the Tiger "X" does make the Panther "X" look kind of puny. But the spotlight effect lessens the "Box o' Death" thing Panther had going on."

"The whole Mail application looks like it got beaten with the ugly stick in Tiger."

Truthfully, I'm not done reading the article yet. When I got to page 7, I checked to see how many pages there were. 27!

Tiger marks the 6th release of OS X I have paid for (though never full "suggested" price). This includes $20 for the Public Beta, which was my primary OS for a few months. That was an exciting time, but never again.

iPunk 2.0: The 'punk Returns

2005-04-26T00:29:00.000-04:00

After having a number of Murphy's Law creative sessions, I'm happy to unveil the iPunk 2.0.

Jason and I figured out the design and I coded it up sporadically over the last few months. Here's the skinny: He's off of Blogger and on to a custom blog powered by b2evolution, the blog software with a lot of heart, and not enough PR.

The iPunk 2.0 is unfortunately a work-in-progress. We had trouble exporting from Blogger, so Jason is slowly uploading his old content. Some links don't work, and there will undoubtedly be more bells—possibly even whistles—in the near future. Check it out. I'm very happy with how it it turning out.

Open Sources

2005-04-19T23:11:00.000-04:00

Of all the interesting things I've read this week, strangely I find this tops the list:

I just noticed on a BBC News story that The Beeb is including links to competitors' news stories on the same topic. The technology is nothing new, aggregate popular news sources and algorithmically select relevant stories, but the application is stunning.

Where Google News is just a collection of primary sources, BBC News is the primary source. What's more, they're linking directly to their competitors for free, and not expecting anything in return. BBC is opening up their business in a small, but significant way.

I expect that this will strengthen them as a source. How? First, their readers will have an easy way to see if BBC is the best source on a topic. If not, then they will hear about it, and find out what they are not covering well. Also, this will trickle down to the referenced sources, who will try to better compete with BBC.

Ok, ok. I realize this is all far-reaching thought, based on a small change. The point is, this is an impressive move. Can you imagine CNN or MSNBC or the New York Times doing this? Maybe it is different for the BBC because they are financed differently from the other media outlets. I don't think so, however. The BBC is good because it is consistent and real. Consistent in their quality of reporting, and real in the sense that they do not try to sensationalize news. If the US media every understands this second point, I'll go back to watching/listening/reading them. Also, we do pay for our media in the US, but through more indirect means (everything from the FCC to advertising).

Openness is key. Not just in software, but business models, government and news!

New Developments

2005-04-12T02:47:00.000-04:00

Tonight wrapped up development of a site that's been consuming my nights lately. The talented Jeff Welch has put up his industrial design portfolio online for all to see.

This was an interesting project, as it is quite different from my normal work. Not a single form or database, and very inaccessible (though for a design portfolio, accessibility is kind of difficult).

Also, another site went public last week. SchoolVote, little brother to Project preVote, is a new site for publishing endorsements for school elections. Check it out.

After a few more professional and pro bono sites get finished, I'll focus in on some of my own stuff that has been on the far-back-burner. I'll bet you can't wait.

On Pessimism.

2005-04-11T16:48:00.000-04:00

Some people like to make life a little tougher than it is.

Tougher Than It Is by Cake

That's my philosophical thought for the day. I've seen too many people take life too seriously recently.

Lighten up! You're only making yourselves miserable. The rest of us just feel bad for you.

Ok, back to work.

A perfect day.

2005-03-29T14:11:00.001-05:00

I can't believe it's still March, the weather is so beautiful!

At lunch, I was able to run in shorts and a t-shirt.

Now, I'm working in the sun on my porch and drinking a cup of good coffee.

66 degrees. Amazing.

Update 2:39 PM:
I just had a squirrel run past me, three inches from my coffee cup. I was worried that he was going to drop the giant nut he was carrying into my mug.

But now the battery is getting low... I definitely need to find a way to get power out here.

My new dev suite

2005-03-21T16:43:00.000-05:00

After giving up on DreamWeaver a bit ago, I'm finally settled in to my new workflow.
XCode + CSSEdit + Transmit

For coding, I settled on Apple's XCode. It has a slew of useful techie features, and I've used it a lot in the past, though generally not for web projects. I lose (most) of my loved auto-completion, and the syntax coloring isn't as good, but I have full control, which I never quite had with DreamWeaver. Plus, SCM features might come in handy someday (setting up Subversion is on my long-term to-do list - working alone makes it easy to put off). Plus, it's free, which is the reason I prefer it over BBEdit. As a side note, I was in love with SubEthaEdit when it was first released (under a different name) and use it for XP but I don't like it for everyday use.

I found CSSEdit a while ago, and I love it. Brilliantly simple, and a breeze to use. The Source Editing mode is great (auto-complete alone saves me tons of time), and I can switch into Visual Mode to get a more compartmentalized view.

Finally, I purchased Transmit, a handy FTP client. I spent a couple hours test-driving a number of options, and had a bunch of personal email deleted in the process. Needless to say, Transmit did a bit better. Its interface is simpler than most, but actually offers more advanced features than the competition.

I've completed my development suite at a fraction of the cost of a DreamWeaver upgrade. I'm happy.

Question of the Day

2005-03-16T01:12:00.000-05:00

Why are the people who believe in predestination the same ones that insist that you need to be Saved?

I want to use Unicode, but...

2005-03-15T00:07:00.000-05:00

I want to use Unicode in my work. I really do. UTF-8, to be specific. It's safer, cleaner and easier to use... but I can't.

Let me pause and elaborate. What I'm talking about here is text-encoding, which is the way a computer represents characters (letters, numbers, punctuation). It's something most people should not have to worry about. Most web pages use some variant on Latin-1 encoding. This is great for english sites, but start adding accents and you get in trouble. And Eastern characters (think Japanese or Chinese)? Shoot, we didn't plan for that.

So some nice folks created Unicode (actually, a few flavors - many sub-par) to represent every character in every language known to man.

Here is a simple example of why Unicode is handy when you're writing pages: Let's say I want to show the Copyright symbol: ©. I can't just type it, because it doesn't work in Latin-1. Instead I have to write ©. But wait, using XHTML, that isn't guaranteed to work, so I have to use the difficult-to-remember ©. All this just to display a ©. If I was using Unicode, I could just type the symbol (option+g on my mac) and save the page.

So back to my problem. Why don't I just use Unicode files (UTF-8)? First, I'm dealing with a silly problem. My (old) version of DreamWeaver saves UTF-8 with a byte-order mark (BOM) which is unnecessary and causes all kinds of problems with PHP. Becuase my budget doesn't allow for upgrades, I'm stuck using other programs (XCode, which I don't like for PHP editing) to save UTF-8. This is more a productivity issue than a technical one.

The bigger problem comes in with MySQL, the database I love to hate. Older versions of MySQL didn't utilize UTF-8. This wouldn't be a problem if two hosting companies I'm working with right now used the newest version. (Fortunately, one client just upgraded their database.) So even if I go to unicode, any data in or out of MySQL is stuck in Latin-1.

One client is running UTF-8 pages, with latin-1 database data thrown in. Another is all latin-1, but I hope to switch to full UTF-8 after the fortunate upgrade I mentioned before.. Unfortunately, my upcoming personal site will be stuck as a mixture.

I want to go to Unicode, but I'm being held back.

Where's the Law?

2005-02-28T00:04:00.000-05:00

Silicon Valley millionaire John Gilmore, of Sun and EFF fame, refuses to show an ID to get on an airline.

The gate agent asked for his ID.

Gilmore asked her why.

It is the law, she said.

Gilmore asked to see the law.

Nobody could produce a copy.

To date, nobody has. The regulation that mandates ID at airports is "Sensitive Security Information." The law, as it turns out, is unavailable for inspection.

GIlmore raises a good point on the dichotomy of the desire for privacy vs. the desire for security.

The elegance of Gilmore's thinking is that knowing someone's ID does not prevent the person from committing a terrorist act. The 9/11 hijackers had driver's licenses. Knowing someone's identity, as Gilmore argues it, adds less to a security than it takes away from a traveler's protection from authority that might oppress simply because it can.

It's good that Gilmore is standing up himself and it will be fascinating to see the outcome of his legal argument.

Coding for Fun and Profit

2005-02-24T17:43:00.000-05:00

I spent most of the day working on a very useful, reusable chunk of PHP code. I'll be able to use it in many current, future and even past projects, so I developed it off-the-clock. It is not fair to charge one client for code I will directly use in others' projects. It's also not fair to spend extra time on something that doesn't directly benefit the client.

So I spent a day off-the-clock, writing code to save me on-the-clock time. It just seems silly.

How Conservatives Work

2005-02-24T17:37:00.000-05:00

Ahh, back to politics. Over in the diaries at Daily Kos, Palladiate writes on how liberals are clueless and tries to explain the difference between the conservative and liberal mind.

Its a long article, but one of the most interesting I've read in a while. Read the whole thing. I'd love to hear what some conservatives think.

Proposal for Simple EULAs

2005-02-24T00:36:00.000-05:00

7-March-2006: I have expanded the idea of an EasyEULA at easyeula.org

Update You know those boring, ugly licenses that you click through before you use new software? Did you know those are legally binding contracts, and that many companies slip in sections that you might not approve of if you actually read it. The most common is that you agree to let companies collect personal information, or install spyware.

To prove that almost nobody reads these End User License Agreements, or EULAs, one company gave $1000 to a man who read the agreement and followed the instructions to receive compensation.

So what do you do? Software makers want the legal protection an EULA provides, and consumers don't want to waste time reading legalese. We clearly need something simpler.

Enter the Easy EULA
What if a non-profit came along with a Creative Commons-style model? You make some easily-recognized symbols for common EULA terms such as "No Warranty" and "collect personal info", all similar (or at least as coherant) as the Creative Commons symbols. It would probably be best to trademark these symbols, so people don't misuse them.

The next step is to make a common, short form for our Easy EULA. Again, I'll use the Commons' as an example.

What I envision is, opening up that new copy of Tiger, seeing the Easy EULA, quickly understanding it, having the option of viewing the full license, clicking "accept" and installing.

Finally, I assume you would have to have some sort of agreement for companies to agree to in order to use the Easy EULA. That way, they are held responsible for making the Easy EULA accurately represent the terms of the full EULA. This is where we hire a lawyer.

So would this work? I'd love to hear thoughts.

Different Town

2005-02-18T15:47:00.000-05:00

I'm back home in the UP for a few days.

Its a different world than my daily Holland existence. I world of middle school basketball games, a world where broadband doesn't exist, a simpler world (no offense intended to anyone) where life just moves slower.

Much slower for me. As soon as I arrived, I was hit with a nasty cold. I've finally got my energy back, but my head still feels icky.

So I'm off for some time with my little brother, but he has a friend over so maybe I'll try to get some work done instead. Then, it'll be time to order my favorite greasy pizza... mmmmmm....

Get excited, but not yet.

2005-02-15T17:02:00.000-05:00

The big news of the day is that Microsoft has committed to release a version of IE 7 for Windows XP (and possibly Windows 2000)!

Microsoft Press Release
IEBlog - Developer's Thoughts
Web Standards Project's take

The Good
Security. This will (in theory) make IE much more secure. Also, more users will benefit and quicker. Without this release, you would have to upgrade to Longhorn to gain any benefits. That would take a while, and many people won't want to pay.

The Worry
Standards. Here are a couple scenarios:

Standards-compliance stays about the same. This really isn't much of an issue, though it would be disappointing. It would simply mean IE 7 is irrelevant and people keep switching to alternatives.
Slightly better compliance. In my opinion, this is actually the worst option. If web developers have to add new hacks to filter out IE 7 bugs, it makes everyones' lives harder, and hurts the web.
Almost Perfect. FireFox isn't perfect. Neither is Safari or Opera. They have two things in common: They are close to perfect, and they are working toward perfection. For IE 7 to be a competitor, it must follow standards competitively with FireFox. I'd welcome the competition - it would make all the browsers better.

The Possibility
IE 7 could leapfrog all the current browsers, and fully support CSS3, DOM 2, and other emerging standards. This would be amazing. I don't expect it.

This sounds like great news, but I'm still hesitant. Lets hope, when we see the beta this summer, that we're excited!

A Fox has four legs.

2005-02-10T09:47:00.000-05:00

I started responding to a comment by Anonymous (Mike?) but I think it warrants an upgrade to a full post.

Anonymous asks:

I wonder if we see IE share continue to fall, we will simultaneously see more virus/spyware targeted at firefox, opera, etc...

...the bad code out there is largely written for IE because everybody uses IE...

...could we be digging our own graves if you will, as we encourage writers of malicious code to target programs like Firefox?

Do I think virus writers will start targeting FireFox? Absolutely. But I'm convinced that FF is saver from the outset, so we will never have the volume of problems we have with IE. Also, there is more chance for improvement. FF has a great team of programmers eager to crank out patches and new versions. IE won't be updated significantly until Longhorn, and then only for Longhorn.

»Insert obligatory rant about standards-compliance, and how IE is so horrible that it needed to be updated years ago.

Security walks in parallel with standards, and the basic solution is the same: Diversity. For a few years, IE was truly the best browser, (Mozilla was just to kludgy, and Opera doesn't count because it wasn't totally free) but now FireFox has impressive speed, security and standards-compliance. Also, on the Mac side, Apple's Safari browser is almost as standards-compliant as FF, and probably more secure. All Safari code gets dumped back to the open-source KHTML project which will benefit Linux browsers.

With three major browsers (I'll count Opera here, to be nice) striving for standards-compliance, we can be sure that we have a diverse gene pool. See, I'm not a zealot for any browser (I use Safari, but I generally have FF running too). Instead, I want strong standards-compliance across the board, so we can all use the browser we like best. The web is the API of the decade (and will be more-so as move further toward XML). If you don't believe that, just look at Google (gmail, Google Maps, etc.). If we have many browsers that work, the web platform is stronger and a better experience for all. The security comes through attention to detail, not getting carried away (ActiveX?), and a diverse browser population.

Are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Far from it. We're giving ourselves more legs, and we'll be much sturdier as a result.

Plea

2005-02-07T20:45:00.000-05:00

Please, if you have any compassion.

Stop using Internet Explorer.

The web could be a much cooler, safer, happier place, if IE would die off. That will only happen in average users make the switch. Its happening, but not fast enough for me.

High School Flashback

2005-02-06T14:04:00.000-05:00

I'm spending a portion of the day installing Windows 98 on my Mac. Good old Virtual PC lets me do this, and I've found I need a PC around to test websites. I have been using friends or walking to the Library, but it hasn't been cutting it. I thought about getting an old PC to use, but in the interest of space, power, and karma, I decided that Virtual PC was the best option. Plus I already have a copy, and a Win98 CD.

Then I remembered how annoying Windows really is. First, it takes too long to install, though I'll give it a break for being emulated. Then I had install problems. The kind where it says it can't find some .dll file on the CD, even though its should be there. Then IE (the only program I want to run) decides to perform an illegal operation every time it opens.

So as I attempt a reinstall, I'm left wondering how many times I've installed Windows in my lifetime. Far too many, is the answer. I think of hours spent in the Server Room at Pickford High installing copy after copy of Windows. Yuck.

FrontPage (still) sucks.

2005-01-31T01:31:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting outside Chicago after and evening of website creative collaboration. KTB and I worked out a sweet upgrade to the Oyez Review site (not uploaded yet).

Over some Caribou Coffee (Note to Caribou: Nobody wants to pay for Wi-Fi), I played with FrontPage for the first time in a few years. It still sucks.

Allow me a few sentences of ranting...
<rant>I have never seen another program code as poorly as FrontPage. Between gratuitous <font> tags, invalid code nesting and a propensity to add absoulute URLs (long path referencing your hard drive rather than something like "../images/header.jpg") it is enough to make anyone crazy.

Then there's the funky options (shapes?) that are just silly...

And God forbid I try to add a DOCTYPE or XML directives... It will allow them, but won't help you any.
</rant>

I don't want much in an editor. I don't use most features anyway. I really just want something that can nicely color my code so I can read it easier. Currently I use Dreamweaver, and occasionally Apple's Xcode, though Xcode doesn't handle the mixing of php and html as well as I'd like. I also like the built in, one-stop-shopping, FTP server in Dreamweaver, but its far from perfect.

Regardless, promise me, for your own sakes, that you will avoid FrontPage like the plague. Your browser will thank you.

Regular Expressions (still) Rock!

2005-01-24T16:43:00.000-05:00

Note: I'm writing more about code lately. Sorry for all of you who don't care or understand. ;-)

I finished v.2.0 of my Creative Commons Plugin for b2evolution a few days ago. I figured out a way to post CC's RDF metadata, which was causing problems before. This version seems pretty solid, though I haven't had any bug reports yet. Actually, I've only had 2 people even mention that they've used it! I know more have, but it would be nice to hear a "yep, works great" or "this really sucks" once in a while. I also put it up on a server that I can't track downloads... shoot.

I got to write a couple quick regular expressions in the process. If there's one thing I wish I'm better at, its regular expressions... I really haven't taken advantage of them enough. For the CC plugin, I only needed a simple one and the hardest part was a misunderstanding I had with PHP's syntax.

I picked up Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes at the Library today. It looks ok (nowhere close to O'Reilly's) but hopefully it will a good refresher!

Putting the X in HTML

2005-01-19T20:54:00.000-05:00

I'm on a standards kick. Since I've been doing more web development lately, I decided to jump into XHTML and CSS full force. I had used CSS before, but XHTML 1.1 (and 1.0 Strict) requires that display tags be separate from the XHTML, and CSS (or XSLT, etc.) be used exclusively. (for the semi-tech-saavy: this means no <FONT> tag, bgcolor attribute, or anything like that)

So I'm now a standards junkie. I wrote the Project preVote site (and another one in progress) using XHTML 1.1, but today I went to the next level. Web guru Roger Johansson posted The Perils of Using XHTML Properly today, and points out a few difficulties of moving to proper XHTML. After some tewaks, preVote is now correctly serving (on my testing server; eventually at the real site) "application/xhtml+xml" to browsers that can handle it, and "text/html" to older browsers. This coupled with strict usage of XHTML and CSS means that I'm completely standards compliant!

Here's a real-world example of a peril. If you send a page as "application/xhtml+xml" to FireFox and it contains even one improper tag (this could be <br> instead of <br />, or class="mainArea" instead of class="mainarea"), it will display an error instead of the page!

So other than giving me a sense of accomplishment, what does this do? Well, it means consistent rendering in future browsers. It also means these sites will be able to use cool tools like XSL someday, if I wish. It also means that every part of the sites are valid XML and are therefore more flexible.

But proper (and strict) XHTML isn't easy. I was only able to do this because these sites are in their infant stages. If I were starting with a large site written in HTML 4.1, this task would be much more difficult with no imminent rationale to change. My goal is to keep these sites proper as they grow. It should make my life easier in the long run.

Name That Company

2005-01-18T01:04:00.000-05:00

I'm looking for a great name for a new company - mine!

The idea is to have a company that encompasses my consulting business, web and software development, media ventures (hehe, that sounds cool), and whatever else I or my associates decides to do. :)

Comment or email me with suggestions. If I pick your suggestion you'll win something! I'll at least buy you a nice dinner, and maybe you get cash or something better if the company does well! Silly, stupid, and serious suggestions will be considered!

Requirements? I don't have many:

Keep it simple.
The .com must be available.
Originality is always nice.

Veritas

2005-01-15T14:33:00.000-05:00

I had the opportunity to hear Jim Wallis speak Thrusday about his new book God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. This book is going on the reading list - I've already ordered it.

One of Wallis' main ideas is one I have often talked about: The Republicans and Democrats can't seem to solve problems because they are too busy fighting each other. I don't even think I need to give any examples of this. Pick any issue, and its pretty obvious that a solution lies in compromise. If you don't understand, read the book then we'll talk.

I hate JavaScript

2005-01-13T01:22:00.000-05:00

Recently, when I'm not working, playing, or whatever else it is that I do, I have been playing around with b2Evolution, a great piece of blogging software.

I'm eventually going to move this site (and also probably the DPS and The iPunk) to this code and off of blogger to take advantage of some of their cool features.

As I've been playing I've also been writing. I put together a couple plugins for their code: a Blogger Import Plugin (the rationale should be obvious there) and a Creative Commons Plugin.

This doesn't mean anything to most people, I know.

I did get the joyful experience of working with JavaScript. JS is a really useful, and terribly annoying language. And thanks to the FireFox JS Debugger (with is actually a life-saver), I was treated to errors such as Error: Error can not be converted to a string. As if I wanted the stupid error at all, even as a string!

Veritas

2005-01-07T11:16:00.000-05:00

Someone commented here a while ago "I want to hear some progress! I want some dissent!"

I think the last couple of posts were a decent dosage of dissent. How about some progress?

Next week, the Hope College Veritas Forum will be keynoted by Jim Wallis of Sojourners fame. For those of you who don't know Sojourners, they are a group for "faith, politics, culture" and Wallis' Keynote should be good. If you are in the Holland area Thursday, Jan. 13 make a point to go.

More on the Westboro Morons

2004-12-31T18:18:00.000-05:00

In my previous post, I mentioned the Westboro Baptist Church and their unbelievable stupidity.

After wading through their website about as long as I can take, I found the final thing in their list of What the Bible says about other topics to be a bit contrived. Does this mean that the poor are evil? Sounds like it. We should kill them.

14. No Begging for Money

3 John
Because for his name's sake they went forth, taking nothing of the Gentiles.

Acts 8:20
But Peter said unto him (Simon), Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.

2 Pet. 2:3
And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you.

Titus 1:11For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision, whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake.

They also tell us that long hair is an shame for men (J, good thing you cut it). Where's Bartlett when you need him?

Tsunami

2004-12-31T11:21:00.000-05:00

DigitalGlobe has some amazing before & after photos of the Tsunami destruction.

Meanwhile, it is nice to see big companies like Apple and Amazon devote their home page to promoting the relief effort.

Finally, this article is disgusting. Stay far away from the Westboro Baptist Church. (Yes, this is for real. Scary!)

Sexy Math

2004-12-15T02:07:00.000-05:00

In browsing book reviews, any title as incongruous as Mathematics and Sex is bound to stand out. This looks like a fun book.

Let's quote the review:

As an example of what this whole subject is like let me tell you about a long-studied model of interpersonal behavior that the author discusses in Chapter 3, a chapter titled "Road Testing the Bed"--I kid you not.

"You have to choose your life mate. The rules we adopt for this model are that you will be presented 100 choices one after another, you may date them, sleep with them, whatever. But, at the end, you must say yea or nay and if you say nay, you will never see them again."

What strategy should you adopt? Well, if you wait to the end, the odds are only 1/100 that the last person is the optimal choice; ditto if you choose the first person. The modeler then asks: what strategy should you adopt for optimum results? A little bit of mathematics involving infinite series gives the answer. You can prove mathematically that the best strategy is to look at (approximately) the first 36.787944117144235 people (rounding it to, say, 37 people) and then you should choose the first person from that point on that is 'better' then the previous 37 people. This increases the odds of your finding the best match from 1% to about 37%- roughly a 37 times improvement.

I may have to add it to my reading list. Heck, anytime there is some math that I can understand, I'm interested.

I'm am a Giant Rollercoaster!

2004-12-15T01:36:00.000-05:00

I'm usullay not into the online quizzes, but this one was silly enough to mention, and its late at night and I'm bored.

What Disneyland Attraction are You? I am apparently Space Mountain. I'll take that.

Space Mountain: A thrilling rocket ride through the darkness of outer space! Futuristic and forward thinking, you have just enough 2001-esk elements without escaping Walt Disney's utopian vision for a brighter tomorrow. You represent speed, stealthness, and the promise of technology, while your Dick Dale surf guitar riff of a soundtrack makes you retro and mysterious, without being corny. Keep the lights low and avoid revealing too much, lest you ruin the show, you're only going 28 mph! Regardless of speed, you prove that in the vacuum in space, you CAN hear people scream!

Tree

2004-12-10T15:37:00.000-05:00

There is a large tree that sits in front of my apartment. There is nothing special about this tree. It is not particularly beautiful, or extremely old. It is a very average tree. So average that I cannot even recall what kind it is. Deciduous, tall, straight. There is a little black squirrel that lives in the tree, right where the trunk splits to the large branches. He has a hole that he has been using to collect nuts for winter. It is his home.

Yesterday the City of Holland came to remove the tree. They arrived mid-morning to chop the tree up limb by limb load the branches into a chipper. The tree seemed healthy an harmless, but it was an average tree so I paid little attention to it.

Today, as the sun beats down on a tree-shaped part of the formerly-shaded earth, a new tree is growing. I cannot see it yet, but it is there - reaching for the sky and trying hard to poke through the ground. Soon, the squirrel will find a new home it its branches and he will thrive. Again he will gather nuts for winter. He will survive.

Fur Elise

2004-12-08T16:13:00.000-05:00

Its almost Christmas and I'm not in the mood. Its not that I'm in a Grinchy mood, but my birthday and Christmas are around the corner, and I'm just not feeling it.

Maybe its because I don't have the end of a semester approaching. Maybe its because I don't have any decorations up. Maybe its because there isn't any snow.

Either way, as the annoying Old Navy commercial says "The Holidays will hit [me] like a brick." Shoot.

Oh yeah, and the post title? I'm trying.

Snow Falling on Mazdas

2004-12-01T01:46:00.000-05:00

Burnsey has been giving me crap for not blogging lately. I don't have a coherent thought, but when has that stopped me? Sara, this one's for you.

Today I got estimates on my deer damage. The worst was $2000, but I'll be hard pressed to lower that to much under $1000. The ole Mazda will sadly never look the same, unless I want to pony up 2 grand...unlikely. Now where do I apply to be on Pimp my Ride?

In other news, it is snowing. Not for the first time, but certainly the best so far. Soft, fluffy calm. Just sitting in my living room watching it fall makes me happy. Hopefully it will stay this time.

After making soup tonight, Jeff, Ellen, Steve, and I went to 'Til Midnight for dessert. Good fun. We need to do that more often.

Finally, I have a new creation up and ready for viewing. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Now, everyone go get a copy of The Snowman by Raymond Briggs (preferably the movie version - its really great) and turn to an evening of relaxing and happiness. Happy December!

Attack!

2004-11-10T01:59:00.000-05:00

Last Wednesday night, I was driving around Holland with a couple girls in the car (see, life is good). Anyway, I was on Ottawa Beach Road, and a deer came out of the woods on a curve and sat on the hood of my Mazda. If I had not been driving somewhere near 40 miles per hour, this might have been more fun. Liz, in the front, got to see the deer go up, and down, landing in front of the car. None of us saw it until it made contact with my car.

I immediately slammed on my breaks and the truck behind me did too. The guy from the truck dragged it off to the side of the road. I was trying to help, but the other two legs were still kicking a bit. Regardless, it was too hurt to get up. I moved my car off the road, and went into the Itty Bitty Bar, which was the closest thing open, to call the police. A few Hope guys were in there (I had class with one of them) and on hearing the news, they got excited to see it. They found a knife and slit its throat, putting it out of its misery. Probably a good thing.

These guys then proceeded to call a friend with a bigger knife. The friend came, and they field-dressed the doe and threw it in their pickup. We waited an hour and a half for the police, and they finally made it all legal. It made for a long night, but it was kinda fun. Emily came out to see them cutting. Liz had trouble sleeping.

I love maps

2004-11-09T11:29:00.000-05:00

I'm a map nut. Give me a map and I'm as content as can be. Take me to a map store and I may never go home.

I've been looking at a lot of post-election maps, but some folks over at the University of Michigan have the best collection I have seen yet. They're just cool. Check them out!

I'm a Busy Bee!

2004-11-02T17:26:00.000-05:00

5th post of the day! Holy crap! I can't believe myself.... maybe its the coffee.

As today is Election Day in the US, I am devoting some time to type out my vision for election reform. I have been thinking and talking about these ideas for a few months, so its about time I put them into writing. Maybe some of it will get posted today. We'll see how the caffeine treats me.

Happy voting!

Tragically Hip

2004-11-02T17:04:00.000-05:00

Saturday, I was able to go to do something I have wanted to do for nearly 10 years.... see The Tragically Hip live.

Saturday, I went up to the Orbit Room in Grand Rapids to see the Hip play a great set to the loud, smokey, drunken crowd. They have been my favorite band since I started having a favorite band. Even though most people I know have not heard of them, they continue to be a Canadian icon. The setlist was pretty solid. I was hoping for a couple songs they didn't play, but was pleasantly surprise at a few they did. In all, it was a great time. The Hip do a fun live show and the crowd was obviously hard-core fans. Jeff and Kyle went with me and enjoyed it too, though they couldn't sing along.

Now I am trying to find a way to get their two CDs that I had but were stolen from me without having to pay again. I still have the cases, but never imported them into iTunes... shoot.

Kerry in Detroit

2004-11-02T15:19:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I found myself in Detroit's Joe Louis Arena watching John Kerry give his second-to-last stump speech of the campaign. It was a great time! Emily and I drove over (Well, I drove. She slept.) and joined a large crowd of happy, excited, and motivated democrats and like-minded people.

The event started with former Gov. Jim Blanchard, followed by Senators Levin and Stabenow, Presidents of the UAW and Teamsters, Gov. Granholm, and a bunch of others whose names I am forgetting. Rev. Al Sharpton made a surprise appearance to deliver a prayer, and Stevie Wonder (with a bad cold) performed a couple songs.

Kerry gave a good positive speech. The crowd went wild. It was a good day in Detroit.

At the end, Emily suggested we go down and try to get in the crowd Kerry was working. I honestly didn't think we stood a chance of getting near, but I get pretty determined when I get in the mood. We made our way down, and got a good position about three bodies back from where Kerry would exit. I proceeded to lift emily up so she could me in position to shake hands. It worked, she got a good handshake, and we left happy!

For Dolores

2004-11-02T14:19:00.000-05:00

"This should be the rallying cry of every church, synagogue, and mosque in America: God have mercy on us and our nation and help us out of our need! But he will do this only if we become active. Even if we vote for the wrong party, may every vote this November be seen as a prayer to God for his intervention and his will to be done. If we see our vote in this way, then we will be united as a nation as never before."

- Johann Christoph Arnold, author, social critic, and senior pastor of the Bruderhof - an international communal movement dedicated to a life of simplicity, service, sharing, and nonviolence.

Source: Bruderhof.com (and I stole it from the Sojourners' SojoMail)

Punditry & Predictions

2004-11-02T02:40:00.000-05:00

I'm not much of a pundit, or even an expert in much of anything but nevertheless, I have decided to post my predictions for the electoral college voting. This way you can make fun of me if I'm way off. My magic number is 300. I know I'm going out on a limb here, but I have a gut feeling that Kerry will win decisively. We shall see.

Kerry: 300
Bush: 238
Nader: 0

I give Bush IA, MO, WV, VA, HI, AZ and Kerry gets MN, MI, WI, OH, PA, FL, NJ, NH, NM, WA, OR.

I feel strange about Hawaii going to Bush because it seems so strange, but that's how its tracking as of late. I'll throw it in as a red state to keep at an even 300.

Ok, there's my prediction. Feel free to comment.

Update: 4:14 PM
Popular vote prediction? This one I'm not sure of. I'd say Kerry should win by 2-6 points, but you never know. I would laugh if Bush won the popular vote, but I don't see that happening. One big factor will be turnout in solid blue and red states. If turnout is strong in those state as it will be in swing states, Kerry wins the popular vote.

In the Coffee Shop II

2004-10-18T15:38:00.000-04:00

An update to my August 8 post, In the Coffee Shop.

My friend Emily works in the Coffee shop. We have been hanging out lately, and went there together Thursday night.

While Emily was working on Friday, the woman who confronted me came up to her and asked about the guy she was with the night before (me). Emily acknowledged our friendship and the woman fearfully warned her "I think he's doing something with Kerry!" Emily, being the caring soul she is, informed the woman "I don't want to disappoint you, but I think I'm voting for Kerry too."

I wish I could have seen the look on her face. The woman then asked Emily if she supported abortion. Emily replied that she did not, and not wishing to explain how she does not believe in legislating against others having abortions, she ended the conversation and went back to work.

So now I am bringing down my friends. At least I got a good laugh about it.

I saw the woman this morning. She said "hi" and I replied "hello", as I smiled.

Hillarious Roommates

2004-10-18T14:53:00.000-04:00

Politics aside, these are funny: Larry Lessig, et al. have set up a site for political ads. In the Kerry section, watch the "If the Bush Administration was your Roommate" series (there are 5 of them).

They're really funny and remind me of my roommates....

Klingons for Kerry

2004-10-08T13:03:00.000-04:00

In one of the funniest and least scientific polls available, Klingons in Portland, Oregon overwhelmingly support John Kerry for President. From the article:

According to the poll of eight local Klingons, a whopping 75 percent support the Democratic nominee.

Two Klingons polled--or 25 percent--said they planned to write in Satan.