Theodicius
Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

Continuing the journey, I run aground.

Have just hit a complete showstopper while evaluating Drupal as a CMS. True, I only discovered it when testing the Event Module, but the deficiency infects every drupal module I’ve seen. They make no differentiation between the ability to create a content item and the ability to publish it.

I’ve a number of community sites I develop, where the list of people allowed to submit stories/content items is larger than the list of people allowed to post to the website. Any CMS that wants to invade my space has to provide that functionality.
(more…)

OK, so you’ve seen what I have to say about Mambo/Joomla. The only other CMS I’m inclined to try is Drupal (I once wanted to test Xaraya, but they’ve backed off their original excellent design aims, it appears).

So I’ve done a test installation of it. The install went fairly smoothly, but there was nothing automatic about it. Every step was manual. Soon after installing it, I got bored with the limited set of modules I had, so I went after more.

First impression: More flexible than Mambo/Joomla, and the price for the flexibility is that considerably more technical expertise is involved. Unlike M/J, Drupal supports a templating engine that will let me create any kind of page design I desire. But it takes more knowledge to do that.

I’m still maintaining my connection with Joomla, but I’m going to keep experimenting with Drupal. When I’ve climbed the learning curve farther, I’ll know more.

OK, sonow I’ve seen a few episodes of the TV series based on Kathy Reichs’ books, what do I think?

Ick.

First, ifyou’re expecting to see anything resembling the books, you’ll be disappointed. This Tempe Brennan also a Forensic Anthropologist, but that’s where the resemblance ends. This one seems to go out of her way to physically deck at least one person every show. There’s also more sex in the show than the books, and none of the supporting cast seems to have made it into the show intact, either.

The writing is incredibly spotty (one show Boreanz calls her”Bones” all the time with no issues, another everytime he does she snaps”Don’t call me bones!”). There are all the cliche characters and gags, nothing real in it at all. You might be watching Quincy reruns, except the plotting isn’t as good.

As a show about Temperance Brennen, it stinks. As a show about a forensic anthropologist, it’s no better than average, maybe worse. If you watch the show, my advice is to turn off your brain before you turn the show on; you’ll enjoy it more. The more you think about what you’re seeing, the worse the show will seem. If you have to watch TV, I suppose this is OK. But you’re better off reading any of Kathy Reichs’ books than watching it at all.

Rick Schaut rises to answer him. Now Rick’s a good guy, and sincere, but I suspect he knows in his heart of hearts just how right John Welch is. Still, Word is his project, and I’m sure he loves it, and we all want to defend our babies. (My apologies to Rick for misspelling his name in the first iteration of this article.)

I certainly think no less of him for his attempt, but he glosses over most of the points Welch makes, and limits himself to defending against the easier ones. I remember well the pain engendered by moving a reasonably complex document from MacWord to WinWord and back, from Welch’s post it’s apparent this hasn’t changed much, and from Shaut’s silence on those issues, I suspect it never will.

Welch’s list of problems includes incompatibility with a laundry list of Microsoft technologies, Shaut focuses on IRM, and blames the problem on Apple for not having such a system built into the OS. It’s a valid point, though still arguable, as Welch’s comment was about Word’s interaction with IRM on a MS server and it’s a fair question to ask why Apple should concern itself with facilitating MS software to talk to MS servers.

But I can be gracious and yield the point to Shaut entirely, and still Welch’s complaint will stand. I’d even add something obvious. I can’t believe MS is committed to MacOffice until I see similar capabilities shipping in both versions of Office Professional. Windows version ships a page layout app; Mac version, well, sorry about that. LiveMeeting, Sharepoint, Content Management, all those are pure MS plays that MacOffice can’t use.

As an outsider, the only conclusion I can draw is the one I drew all those years ago. MS doesn’t want me to use its software in a diverse environment. It wants me to be either all Mac or all Windows, and doesn’t want me to mix platforms. Since I’ve always been a firm believer that people should use the tool that best fits their hand, that point of view doesn’t cut it with me.

I’m open to evidence on this point, though. Show me any meaningful effort MS has made to create diversity and I’ll listen. Publishing APIs doesn’t count, though. I want to see actual effort expended; Welch mentioned Services for Macintosh, which is so badly decayed you can smell it even outside of the server room; if you want to connect Macs and PCs, you certainly can’t use anything from MS to do it. You have to use products from Apple or Thursby. The MS attitude seems to be, “You have to spend time, money and effort to talk to us; we won’t spend anything to talk to you.”

And as along as that attitude prevails, I can’t be a MS customer.

Have in front of me Creative Computing’s guide to Dreamweaver. Someday, perhaps, I’m going to read it. Not because someday I’m going to use Dreamweaver; I own a copy of it now and work with it on an occasional basis. I bought the book in a hurry one day because I’d expected to use the tutorials, etc., in it to improve my techniques.

No, it’s not because it’s not timely, or because I don’t have the time; it’s because it’s too diificult for me to read. Not badly written, but badly designed: a mixture of what appears to be 7 and 9 point type on varying background colors. In other words, it’s laid out with no thought whatever given to who might be reading it.

This is a common enough problem. At a recent WorldCon, George Scithers was telling me about the magazine designer that was called in to handle the redesign of the science fuction magazine he edited. The first design sample had colored text in tiny print, low-contrast type on busy backgrounds. Luckily enough, George had some measure of control, and the young genius’s design never saw print.

Just as writers write for themselves, most designer’s first impulse is to design for themselves. But what works for a writer is a major flaw in a designer.
(more…)

Just finished To The Nines by Janet Evanovich. The first and last book of the series (I did another in the sequence as abridged audio on my recent trip to Phoenix; I did the book to check the real series.)

Evanovich has a way with dialogue. Her plots are more from the thriller genre than the mystery genre, as she doesn’t require anyone to do much thinking. For example, as soon as she introduced the evidence for the existence of the WebMaster in this book, I knew the rest of the story. It wasn’t at all hard to see who the main villain was, and I ended up cursing the supposedly intelligent characters in the book for not recognizing something so obvious right away. The remainder of the plot required the good guys collectively act like idiots for the remainder of the book.

Between that and the annoying characters she’s populated her world with, there’s every reason for me to avoid stopping by here again. Even though Lula did manage to discover the major drawback to the Atkins diet (there’s blessed little to crunch on in it) I really never want to meet up with her again. Life’s too short to spend it with characters who make you wince.

And that’s the bottom line. I cringed often in this book, mainly at the characterizations of ethnic minorities, but at other points as well.

Released some software, that is. Haven’t done it for a couple of decades, and this time I used the GPL rather than my old “Baen Convention” tag. (Yes, that’s not a typo for “Berne Convention.” I christened it in honor of the grand fellow I stole it from, Jim Baen, the SF editor. While editor at Galaxy he released a nifty hack with the copyright statement “All users are hereby granted all rights to this software, on a nonexclusive basis. In fact, the only reason this is copyrighted at all is to prevent someone else from copyrighting it and thereby restricting its distribution!” The words tickled me enough to borrow them for the HyperCard XCMDs I was at that time releasing.)

This time it’s a mambot for the CMS Joomla (recently forked from Mambo, the bot will so far work with both). The CMS refused to allow me to place the output of a module where I wanted to, namely as a sidebar to my main story. It insisted upon maintaining an empty column beneath the inserted module until the content item itself ended. Very ugly. So I wrote something to fix that. I offered it to the dev team, thinking naively they might want to bundle it, but that never happened. (Offer’s still open, team.)

That seemed like a good enough excuse to learn to use SourceForge (or the Joomla implementation of it, anyway) and so was born Module Insert as an Open Source project. Along the way I added something I wished I’d added to it in the first place, so I guess it still qualifies as a new release, despite the fact I’ve been using it in Mambo sites for a year or so.

I wonder if the people who play poker are as stupid as the spammers who advertise poker sites?

I’ve been watching the political commentators, and I’ve just realized we have a new oxymoron in town.

It used to be the definitive oxymoron was “military intelligence.” (A phrase that still brings a smile to all of us ex-mil types, as we know the oxymoron intimately.) But I think a new one has just appeared: “political dialogue.” I’ve yet to see anyone who uses the term actually engage in it. Instead what they do is synchronous monologues.

A dialogue implies that each party listens to and responds to what the other is saying. What political commentators do instead is speak their pre-arranged talking points regardless of what gets said by the other side. This applies to both right and left, and all points between, it seems.

Noel Paul Stookey used to have a routine that went something like this:

“First there was a magazine called Life. It was filled with pictures about everything. It had a very wide scope, all of Life. Then came a new magazine, People. It was still far-ranging, but wasn’t about life, just people. Then came Us. It was still about people, but it was about us, not them. Next will have a magazine, Me, that will be just 27 pages of reflective foil!” (NB, there did soon follow a magazine called Self, but it wasn’t filled with reflective foil, other than metaphorically.)

Yes, he did it for laughs, but there was a point. We as a people were gradually narrowing our focus. We were becoming more and more self-centered, less inclined to listen to anyone.

And that’s happening out on the net. Oh sure, you can find someone writing from every possible point of view out here. But you don’t, and you know it. Instead you look only for those whose point of view echoes your own. It validates and strengthens your own opinion, rather than challenges you to think beyond the box you’ve encased yourself in. And, since you can find other writers on the net who agree with you, you must be right, and anyone who disagrees with you is stupid, moronic, or at least mentally deficient, and you don’t need to think about (or even read) what they write to know that, because all the others who share your point of view say so (also, generally, without thinking).

Just one more factor in the general decline of our civilization.

You want to reverse the tide? Make it a regular practice to read or listen to at least one person who disagrees with your political views. Left-wingers, listen regularly to Limbaugh, Coulter, or Hannity while right-wingers should listen regularly to Franken or Hightower. Don’t try to rebut thier arguments by calling them (or their viewpoint) names, instead try to marshall some actual facts to support your disagreement (and don’t take your facts for granted; both sides play fast and loose with facts). I guarantee you’ll learn something, if you’ll honestly listen and think. If you don’t, then you’ve become so case-hardened in your views that, I’m afraid, there’s no hope for your further intellectual development.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “A mind, stretched by a new idea, will never return to its former shape.” That’s both a wonderful and a fearful concept.

God gave you the ability to think; how will you explain your refusal to use such a wonderful gift?

Those who have paid attention to me for a while (and I thank both of you) know my opinion of the Content Management System segment, commercial or open source. While nothing is excellent, or even good, for that matter, I did have hopes of one open source project, in particular, growing up to be something useful. And now we’ve got some ,um, interesting (in the chinese curse sense of the word) news on that front.

There’s been a major happening with Mambo, the CMS I’ve used on several projects. In a nutshell, the original owners of the code, Miro, decided to move control of the code into a foundation. Now this in itself isn’t a bad idea, and was, AFAICT supported by at least some members of the dev team.

But that’s where the story gets messy, children. Apparently Miro managed to alienate the entire development team along the way. While I’m tempted to put on my journalist hat and do a lot of “he said, she said” reportage on this, I’m going to restrain myself. I will limit myself to the observation that, as an outsider, it appeared to me that much more than just wrangling over a piece of code was going on. The reaction from all sides shouted out there were other issues, left unsaid, lurking behind it all, and backstage I could hear the sound of axes being ground. Several rumors have surfaced about the reasons behind the scene, and as usual none of them make their targets look especially good.
(more…)

Here’s why the BBC is wrong in their current portrayal of Jane Marple. (For those who haven’t watched the new Miss Marple series, imagine a skinny Margaret Rutherford. No, I take that back; it’s a slander against Dame Margaret.)

Their new actress has her loving murder mystery stories.

Yes, that’s what turned me off about her. Jane Marple, as she reminded me in Nemesis, hates reading about murders. She really doesn’t like them, and further, isn’t really interested in crime at all. Not one bit. But why then does she seem to be in the middle of crime so often? She considers herself to be one of those people murder just happens around. Rather like one of her relatives, who had been in so many accidents (by both taxi and railway) that no one else in the family would travel with her. Murders just seemed to happen in her vicinity, and so she would get drawn in. Not by choice, but by circumstance.

I really can’t take any portrayal of Jane Marple seriously that involves her actually being interested in solving crimes. No, Joan Hickson’s portrayal may not have been perfect, but she’s miles ahead of anyone else I’ve ever seen in the role. Aunt Jane is one of my favorites, and I simply won’t watch the new series at all. To this point I had been impressed with the casting choices the BBC had made with the heroes of my youth (Suchet as Poirot and Davidson as Campion were both nothing short of inspired selections — I danced with joy when I first saw them — Petherbridge as Wimsey and Bret as Holmes took some getting used to but were brilliant, at least while Bret’s health held up, and Warwick and Annis as Tommy and Tuppence were simply wonderful) but this Jane Marple has been a serious mistake; they’ve slipped up horribly with her. It’s an even worse choice than Simon Williams as Roderick Alleyn, which they immediately rectified with Patrick Malahide, who while nowhere near perfect was a definite improvement. (OK, since my eldest daughter’s middle name is Ngaio, perhaps I can be considered a bit hard to please when it comes to Alleyn.)

Now the spammers are using a hole in SCO’s website to attack me. Wonder if I could sue SCO over that? I’ll keep that thought in hand for the next time they decide to threaten to sue me over using Linux.

Is what you are doing right now enjoyable? If it isn’t, why are you doing it? If it’s necessary, why aren’t you enjoying it?

This isn’t an argument for hedonism, BTW. It’s a question about attitudes.

Just worked Program Ops for the recent NASFic, CascadiaCon, and I’m home, tired but happy.

Starngely enough, I really like working conventions, and working with this group was a new experience, and a good one. Miriah and her support team from ISS worked heroically, and thanks largely to them I actually looked like I was capable of doing my job. Both Lea Farr and Charlie Harmon went far above the call of duty to make my time in the Program Ops office an enjoyable one, and the entire staff had enough enthusiasm for the job to make it an altogether fun experience.

One of the hazards of working Program Ops is you don’t get much feedback on what is going right with the convention, all you hear are complaints. And there are always complaints; you can’t please everyone. One example: We were told we should have cut the number of kaffeeklatsches in half, because holding two different ones in a 600 square foot area made it hard for the hearing impaired. Doing so would, of course, have disappointed some pros and their fans, who would not have had the chance to get together at all. So either way someone gets irritated with us. (Personally, I was on the side of the hearing impaired complainer until he as much as called me a liar to my face when I told him we were noting the complaint as something to be more heavily considered for the next con. Just a note for his future reference, if he’s reading this: It never helps your case if you go out of your way to insult the person you’re trying to convince to help you.)

The intent of the programing head was to provide as varied a program as he could, WorldCon-class programming in a space that was certainly not WorldCon class in size. A laudable goal, and one which was achieved, although achieving it made several panel audiences much smaller than they otherwise would have been, and made getting to some panels problematic.

There were rough patches, some made worse by the cultural differences of the staff (we’d all worked different conventions, and so were used to doing things in different ways) but those got smoothed out by mid-con. At something over 1500 attendees, this was the smallest con I’d worked in over two decades, so the looseness of some of the operation scared me at first, as did the low number of volunteers. You need bodies and a more rigid system to run a large con, but smaller cons can spend more time in improv mode and still succeed. And smaller numbers of attendees means a smaller number of volunteers; there’s no valid reason to suggest the percentage of volunteers would go up as number of attendees goes down. But once I’d had time to think about it rationally, I understood and adjusted, just as other con staff began to understand me and adjust.

It was a fun time. If you were there, thanks for making it fun. If you weren’t. you missed out on something good.

over 40 spams in the last 24 hours, with more piling up as I write.

(Three hours after writing this we’ve topped 100.)

NB: As of Sept 11, I’m seeing a full-fledged attack. None are getting through, but they’re delaying lots of other nice things I’m trying to do.

He pulled a George O’Leary. That’s enough.

In 2001, George O’Leary seemed a perfect fit for the job of head football coach at Notre Dame. I mean, forget his coaching ability, what better Irish Catholic name can you possibly come up with? This was a match made in heaven. Then the facts that he didn’t actually have a Master’s and wasn’t really a three-year letterman surfaced, and Notre Dame bid him good-bye.

Mike Brown claimed to be an assistant city manager (he was the city manager’s administrative assistant) and to have authority over the city’s emergency services division (he had no authority over anyone, the city says).

Anyone trying to defend him in the face of that has to answer this question: if people who do this aren’t fit to coach football, how can they possibly be fit to oversee the spending of tax dollars?

Go home now, Mr Brown. It’s time to write your book.

I get tired of a lot of things, but right now I’m just tired of all the clueless bozos jumping up and down on Sensenbrenner for his vote. Now, I’m one of the first to say I don’t agree with many, if not most of his political stands, under normal circumstances. But this time he’s got a point. Even a stopped clock is right, twice a day.

He voted against a bill that shovels $50 billion in tax dollars hopefully at the aftermath of Katrina. On the surface, yes, the “no” vote doesn’t look good. But I’ve never been comfortable with superficial judgements, so let’s dig a little deeper. And when we do, we find it’s not a case of Mean Republican vs Needy People. For example, Henry Waxman (D-California) voiced similar concerns about the bill, so there’s defects in it that are visible to both parties.

What’s the problem? It authorizes a $250K spending limit on single purchases made by governmental employes using government issued credit cards, without oversight. One wonders how many brand new plasma TVs are going to show up. Government audits have already shown the current system (with its $15K limit) is subject to abuse; how many more millions are not going to make it to the people who actually need it now?

It’s axiomatic: “Act in haste, repent at leisure.” It’s exactly this kind of shoot-from-the-hip legislation that brought us the PATRIOT Act and the accompanying loss of liberty. Yes, the legislators meant well with this aid bill. But it needed a few more minutes thought before handing every bureaucrat with a chunk of plastic in his wallet a blank check to draw on my money.

My political leanings definitely aren’t with the current administration, but this frenzy of demonizing everything remotely conected with them is brainless, idiotic, and unproductive. I find nothing more comforting about yellow-dog Democrats than about yellow-dog Republicans. Both attitudes should be stomped out.