Arc v' August 2002

[Mac OS X Hints]: Avoid Finder FTP services in 10.2. Sadly, they're right. FTP Services in the Finder are really sub-par, similar to where WebDAV Services were in Mac OS X 10.0. Even if the FTP Services work, I've had issues with file permissions. I was very happy to mount a Zope server via FTP, go into a Python Script object, and open it up very quickly in Apple's simple TextEdit editor. I made some changes, and tried to save, only to get permission warning after permission warning, with no changes saved.

So I tried WebDAV editing of Zope objects from the Finder. I was able to open, edit, and save a file, only to go to the "Zope" server's management screens to see that the SQL Method I was trying to edit had turned into a plain File object. Looking at the Undo Log (Zope's default object database keeps historical transactions that can be rolled back), I noticed that the save command had resulted in a page full of WebDAV operations - and that I had not actually saved to the old object in Zope, but that Mac OS X's WebDAV 'File System' support had renamed the old object, put the new one in as a fresh upload, and then removed the original. As such, Zope had no clue what the new incoming data should be, so it simply made a generic File object. Fortunately, I was able to use Zope's undo capabilities to get my original SQL Method back in place, and I went back to the old standby of editing in the TextArea or via XEmacs' FTP support.

sigh. Hopefully a nearby update to Mac OS 10.2 will fix the FTP support so that the upper layers of the OS don't freeze up. And it would be especially nice if the file permissions problem went away too.

A new conspiracy has amassed against me - as I was looking to settle into the sleep of the healing, the construction noise outside (at midnight!) was too much. So, I close my window. It doesn't take them long to come up with new noises that travel very effectively through closed windows. Ugh. And when the major construction noises have stopped, an insane windstorm comes along to wake me back up, only an hour or so later. Fortunately, the windows were closed - the wind was pretty intense. But, as a result, new construction noises have to be made.

Ugh.

I did have a nice dream of being at a rather intense anti-Bush rally. It wasn't even a rally. Just like a visit to some Californian place where EVERYBODY was politically active. I thought "man, I've missed this". Interesting.

Nightcap notes (a corollary to the more common morning coffee notes): tonights nightcap, Milwaukee's Best!

An a web feature for The American Prospect, Katharine Berland writes an excellent article about a case in Florida that proves the need for an international criminal court, which the Bush administration has so nimbly (for some definition of nimbly) ducked out of in their continuing "Not Invented Under Clinton" campaign to turn back every advance made in the last eight to thirty years (these are my editorializations, not necessarily those of TAP).

In any case, Katharine's article is a worthy read, and not easily summarized here.

My own feelings on the matter: the Bush Administration's party line on this one is that the International Criminal Court (ICC) could be abused by America haters to call into question any American act in the world, and that it would put innocent Americans at risk. Yet, the Clinton Administration signed a treaty to establish the court in the first place. To me, it feels like the Clinton Administration felt that the United States and its armed forces should be held accountable to the same international-human-rights laws and decisions as the rest of the world. It makes sense, given what we (Americans) like to pride ourselves in. But why does the Bush Administration want to avoid that accountability? Protecting U.S. citizens sounds fine on the surface, but it also gives a large U.S. only shield to hide unknown operations behind.

So the U.S. marches on with an administration proudly wearing the badge of being so much more right than others, it is exempt from their jurisdiction. This applies not only to the ICC, but to the UN as well, particularly in the whole Iraq "will we or won't we" invade game. There is an excellent write up of this at CrimesOfWar.org covering the 'Bush Doctrine' of pre-emptive self-defence, which is another fine read (and one I need to read in more detail and wakefulness) detailing why the U.S. is having such a hard time finding real support for its Iraq Invasion cause, and why that cause can be a tough sale (since it's hard to determine, particularly in this case, if it really is the right or wrong course of action).

There was an article in The New Yorker a few months back about the efforts focused on drilling/reading the historic ice. At least one team has been bringing up rods of ice from the ice caps, which accumulate annually, and using them to try to guage historic atmospheric conditions. Among the interesting things in the ice are things like smoke from Mt Vesuvius.

Anyways, there appears to be a pattern of 90,000 years Ice Age, 10,000 years warmth. And apparently, we're at the end of the 10,000 years warmth. There's even some speculation (in this article) that Global Warming may in fact be keeping us away from an Ice Age.

It's probably just another theory in a field full of them. But it is an interesting alternate view on the big GW (global warming, not the president seeking to augment it).

A Japanese Summary of yesterdays post, "ZTUtils.make_query". It looks beautiful in Chimera 0.4.

Part of the overall Zope Page Templates system is a package called ZTUtils. ZTUtils contains a number of useful functions and objects for Page Template and Python Script usage. Among other things, it contains a range of items for generating and dealing with trees (in replacement of the dtml-tree tag), batching, and assorted smaller helpers.

My favorite helper that I use in both Templates and Scripts is make_query. It does what its name says - it builds a query string. But it's more than that - it also properly marshals ZPublisher types, does url quoting, and more. So, gone are the days of building URL's like this:

  RESPONSE.redirect('page.pt?message=All+very+well+then')

And in are the days of:

  from ZTUtils import make_query
  query = make_query(message='All very well then')
  RESPONSE.redirect('page.pt?%s' % query)

While it doesn't look terribly impressive, it's when query parameters start to build up that it's the most useful. And the intent is clearer. A page template example, based on working code:

  <ul tal:define="ztu modules/ZTUtils; MQ python:ztu.make_query">
    <li>
     <a tal:attributes="href python:'./force.py?%s' % MQ(item_id=item.id,status=4)"
     >set all to passed</a>
  </ul>

When the url is generated, it comes out as:

  ./force.py?item_id=IXL0102&status:int=4

A couple of months back, I wrote up a series of posts on "Zope" Page Templates. There was "Zope Page Template Joys", "More Page Templates (a buttal of sorts?)", and a screenshot of "GoLive Editing in QuickEdit Mode".

As a quick follow-up, I just have to say that with certain exceptions*, I'm never going back to DTML again. With or without a graphic HTML designer, Page Templates are just a much cleaner way to do dynamic pages.

* The exceptions are for when dealing with non-HTML/XML dynamic content. Besides SQL Methods (which have special DTML tags that are actually a delight to use), this includes JavaScript and Style Sheets that need dynamic code. Most of the time this tends to be JavaScript code snippets that need absolute URL's (a common Zope-ism), including navigation bars with heaps of rollovers.

If there is one thing that I desparately think needs improvement in Mac OS X, and is hopefully fixed in 10.2, it would the Help. The current Apple Help application is notoriously slow at launching. Help should be instant. The new Help application looks better from some of the screen shots that have been floating around, I just hope it performs better.

I sometimes forget the beauty of this film.

It looks like Apple's caught on to what many potential .Mac customers are doing - waiting until the last minute to purchase the discount upgrade price. The reason so many are waiting? .Mac membership is valid for one year from the date purchased. As a result, many would-be upgraders are waiting until the last minute to eke out the most value out of their purchase (and I think that once iSync and other utilities are in place, .Mac will actually be worth its price).

So, this evening, I get a notice from Apple that if I convert from a trial account (the status bestowed on all current iTools users) to a paid membership before September 30, 2002 (when the discount upgrade ends), it will be valid until September 30 2003, regardless of purchase date.

Alright. Maybe I will have to upgrade now. If Apple's promise of being able to synchronize calendars, contacts, and certain files between multiple Macs holds true, I'll be in heaven. I've got three calendars and three address books running right now (and this is with my iBook off the network). I can't wait to get it all down to one.

Tim O'Reilly comments on the same side as my earlier "Protectionism, bah!" and "The Bill of Rights says nothing about free code." posts. It hearkens back to Tim's (re)definition of Freedom Zero:

My biggest beef with Microsoft is not that it offers proprietary software, but that it uses anticompetitive tactics and its monopoly position to take away my right to use non-Microsoft software through the introduction of deliberate incompatibilities and other roadblocks. If Freedom Zero for developers is the freedom to offer software on whatever terms the developer sets and a user will accept; Freedom Zero for users is the right to choose whatever software they like, without interference from platform vendors who try to deny that choice.

It's astounding. Here it is, Saturday Morning, and the brilliant minds at Annoy Jeffrey Inc.* found a new tool for their destruction of South Temple (the road in front of my apartment that is now a grand carnival of various Caterpillar machines) that beeps like my alarm clock. This thing was going off every couple of minutes, I assume starting at 7:30. I finally pull out of bed at 10:00 am after a late night of Beth Orton and Beer. It's not long before they notice me up and moving about and all the machines fall silent. They've done their job.

* (For reference, see the great short Annoy Kaufman, Inc. by George S. Kaufman, which can be found in Fierce Pajamas, An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker).

From the same article cited in the previous post, this closing quote makes sense:

"Such purchase decisions should be made on the basis of objective criteria without a presumption that proprietary, hybrid or open-source software would be the best solution in every case stated," Grant Mydland, CompTIA's director of state government relations and grassroots programs, said in a statement Thursday.

I agree. Stating that everything software related purchased by the government must be open source sounds awfully protectionist, the antithesis of free-trade. Hmmm. Open Source advocates going after a measure that's the opposite of free-trade? I guess some freedoms too are more equal than others.

(Which, apparently they are. If Bloomberg has his way, I'll be free to drink to my hearts content and livers discontent, but I won't be free smoke to my lungs (nor lungs of neighbors, I suppose) discontent at the same time if I'm at a bar. Smoking and trying to outdrink Nicolas Cage's character in Leaving Las Vegas at Orchard and Tonic is part of the experience!)

Another marcher, Tim Sullivan, said the event is a chance for programmers to actively protect their right to code.

"I think this is a good chance to stand up for our freedoms," said Sullivan, 22, a computer science student at Oregon State University. "I'm not really a policy person, but it's pretty evident that it's ridiculous to stop people from writing software." (from news.com)

Ummmmm, what? We're no longer going to be allowed to write software? What the hell kind of march was this? Were there T-Shirts commemorating "I was in a stupid pointless march that annoyed far more than it enlightened?". I wasn't aware that anyone's right to code was being taken away (and given my liberal conspiracy reading list, you'd think I'd hear something), so why are people making quotes like this?

Start winning contracts and getting Open Source in place by proving its value. And I mean serious proof! Saying "well, you can look and tinker with the source..." is not good enough.

Open Source can (and should) compete using issues such as licensing fees - if you do a $100,000 contract with the likes of Vignette or Oracle, the first $40,000 is spent on software alone.

Open Source can (and should) compete using solid numbers, facts, and proof of value. Show what, when, where, and how it's been used. The big companies can do it.

Open Source contractors should know that they're not being paid to tinker with the source - they have to deliver very strong results or face the possibility of being sued. It may sound strange, but it's a common case - if the government or some other large corporation signs a big deal with Oracle, there's a strange comfort in the fact that Oracle (or whomever) has big pockets and can be sued for not delivering promised results. The main point here is that - you must realize that it's more than politics, it's work and contracts. The people who seem most vocal in calling themselves the Open Source Community seem to understand the business side of things the least. They either claim to be working towards a practically monetary-free utopia, or they just like to tinker and/or just don't like paying for software. The Big Companies know the business side (some have been taking a little too much advantage of it lately). They know what it means to deliver. They know what it means to lose. They know what it means to get sued. They know the stakes.

There are open source based companies making money off of contracts with governments and corporations, and some are in fact doing quite fine without the need for any stupid "some development policies are more equal than others" type laws.

And rights... Standing up for your right to code? Please. Fight a real fight for rights:

Constitutional rights are meaningless if they do not apply equally to everyone, even Ted Bundy and Charlie Manson and Tim McVeigh, and even traitorous-high-ranking-al-Qaeda-dirty-bomb-plotting-except-as-it-turns-out-not-really gang members from Chicago. You either believe in our system of Constitutional protections or you don't, but there's nothing to debate here, especially when your strongest argument is, But he's a terrorist! I just know he is! There was never much doubt that Charlie Manson was a mass murderer--he still got a damn trial.

The Ski magazines are starting to return to the racks. sigh.

I bought so many Ski magazines last year between September and December, waiting (and whimpering) until the season got into full swing. The pull is starting to happen again.

Until then, I have to remind myself, "Summer will end, fall will be beautiful, the snow will come...".

And now, armed with a small army of cameras (although I didn't win the Elph Sport in a recent drawing at Pictureline), I hope to get a better bounty of shots this year.

It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. It will be winter again. I hope.

Finally, some new motherboard designs from Apple.

This paper is a good read as we near Mac OS X 10.2. Possibly one of the most underappreciated engineering feats has been combining the single-user focused Mac OS and multi-user Unix environments. It's also an interesting reminder of the very different design goals, and the sort of feats and concessions that were made to bring the Mac OS out at a [relatively] affordable level.

A couple of paragraphs could probably be used to explain the problems facing the myth of Desktop Linux:

This makes for an interesting system architecture. The ideal result is a system that can be the sort of reliable server platform we use today to host high-volume web sites, file services, network gateways, and engineering computation services while also being the simple to use home computer platform of choice. This is a daunting task, because the server platform goals mandate a certain level of complexity (high security, performance tuning parameters, various network servers, etc.), while for most home users, simplicity overrides other concerns.

Unix and Mac OS have evolved independently of each other, and there are fundamental assumptions made in one system which cause numerous failures in the other. The capabilities of the available file systems, the networking protocols, and the user/system model are profoundly varied, often in ways which cannot be rectified without changing the architecture of system components. Additionally, people use the systems in very different ways and expect different behavior from them.

Other issues such as file system layout, packaging, and so forth are also discussed in the paper.

My referer lists disappeared due to a loss of a certain macro while modifying / tweaking out Industrie Mint, the new theme of Industrie Toulouse, based on Movable Radio: blue, but modified to deal with odd issues found and features lost from previous Industrie Themes.

It's been a pretty nice Saturday. I woke up at noon (after a 4AM bedtime), and have spent most of the day finally catching up on my New Yorker magazine reading. And I've been enjoying a pleasant phenomenon about this apartment - my record player actually sounds good in here! I don't know if I just have things hooked up different, or the nature/layout of this place compared to my old one (new apartment = 1910 building with 12-13 foot ceilings, hard walls, hardwood floords, one big open room with tiny satellite rooms (changing, kitchen, bathroom); old apartment = 1993 new suburban prefab "luxury" apartments, odd angles, thin walls, carpet), but I've enjoyed the sound a lot more.

So, I'm finally enjoying some items I bought on vinyl but never really listened to in Fredericksburg - Portishead, Radiohead, Pizzicato Five, Gershwin, etc. Now I'm just missing a lot of old records from my youth. It's time to start record-shop crawling.

My Ranking Information seems to have gone away entirely once I moved Radio to the iMac. Odd.

I've been doing a lot of "Zope" and "CMF" work lately, wrapping up a couple of projects and tinkering around with our own internal project site (hence all the recent interest in Bug/Issue Trackers, of which I still don't have a satisfactory conclusion about). There's not much to say except for a fair amount of praise. Zope 2.5.1 is a pretty solid release, and the recent new technologies that have been added to Zope, such as Page Templates, Python Scripts, and long-overdue Session management are pretty much done right. I'm not without a few complaints / desires. The one that really caught my mind today (from an annoyance that I had to bully through under tight deadline a month and a half ago) is this:

Page-Load Handlers for Page Templates

On one recent project, I had to deal with session timeout situations or situations where a user visited a page directly with no session data (their user id or shopping cart contents). The solution that worked out best for me was to just allow certain errors to happen (KeyErrors, etc), and catch that in standard_error_message and report it as "hmm, your session has most likely expired.. Unfortunately, this could mask other errors in the system - testing found most of them, and a "session timeout" is a friendlier error message than most, but I'm still uncomfortable for the situations it may be untrue in. In DTML, it was pretty easy to add a couple of lines of code to catch the situation and raise a redirect error. In Page Templates, it's a bit trickier. And uglier. ASP.NET has a 'Page_Load' event handler a developer could write. It can be used to prepare data for a Page, or to do preconditions. I think that Page Templates might benefit from a similar solution - add a 'Page Load Handler' field that is a TALES expression of its own. I see a fair amount of page templates that weigh themselves down with excessive TALES 'define' expressions at or near the top of a document, sometimes with funky boolean logic to try to prepare data for use later on. Attaching a Page_Load handler that could return data to add to the TALES options context, or return a substitute page in advent of some logic succeeding/failing (ie - a session timeout) could be quite advantageous. It could also benefit situations where Response headers need to be altered. And finally - it would help the separation of Template Logic (aka "display logic") from some of the more programmatic logic that still seeps in to Page Templates from time to time. It's just a thought. There are ways around having such a handler built in, but the ones I've toyed with have proven to be fallible or tricky to maintain.

It's no wonder that Microsoft is having such a tought time with .NET - it lives two lives under the same moniker. The first is familiar to all developers, and that's the .NET Framework and development tools / systems (ASP.NET, ADO.NET, etc). I think Microsoft has done a decent job with this part of the system - so far as I can see.

But the other half - the services - is where MS seems to be struggling. And not just Microsoft, it's the whole Web Services camp. Eric Knorr wrote up this article in ZDNet, and Doug Kaye summarized it as "that the easy part of the web-services stack (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) is nearly complete, but the upper layers (authentication, business processes, security) are in turmoil." But Microsoft most of all is getting slapped around for Passport/Hailstorm/".Net My Services".

So, there's something very curious about Apple's revamping of their previously free iTools services into .Mac. Much ballyhoo has been made about the pricing (which really comes down to a little more than $8/month, a little less than $5 a month for current iTools users who upgrade - I do wish Apple actually offered a monthly pricing option though), but there hasn't been much talk about .Mac's more serious aspects.

The first of which is - Apple now has their own "universal identification" service, similar to Passport. I don't see Apple trying to open Passport up to a plethora of different web sites as a usable login in the same way Passport is currently being used, but the use of the .Mac account with iChat is an interesting sign. For those not in the know, iChat is a new instant messaging client built in to the upcoming Mac OS 10.2. What makes it interesting is that it uses AOL's AIM network, but unlike other AIM clients, you don't need an AOL account/"screen name" to use the service. Your .Mac login can be used instead (or, if you choose, you can use a normal AOL login with iChat as well).

So suddenly, you're using the .Mac identification system to gain access to a different network. Hmmm. And while Apple is not listed as a Liberty Alliance member, AOL is. I would not be surprised to see .Mac's Identification scheme getting accepted into or somehow otherwise used with the Liberty Alliance, who are trying to make a challenger to Passport.

But Apple continues to do things in that lovable Apple way - quietly doing what everyone else is doing (yet somehow pulling it off), and then acting like it is their own idea. And when I say pulling it off - they really are. iPhoto integrates web services (it's unknown whether it's SOAP, XML-RPC, or some other mechanism) to allow ordering of Prints and Books online - but without ever leaving iPhoto (or being presented with anything resembling a "web UI"). It communicates with iTools/.Mac to generate web based photo albums, and makes them editable in an understandable way. The upcoming iCal calendering and task list program uses .Mac and/or WebDAV to share and synchronize calendars (finally!). And another upcoming application, iSync, is the bees knees. Apple is touting it as a single way to synchronize the plethora of devices we have, but the secret weapon of iSync which alone makes .Mac membership worth it is the ability to syncronize multiple Macs!. I'm sure I'm not alone in having three Macs in my life - my iMac at home, my G4 tower at work, and my iBook in between. I sync my Palm at home, but frequently need my Address Book and Calendar at work. If I have my iBook with me when traveling, it's much nicer to use than my Palm, but is never up to date with addresses and other items. With iSync over .Mac, I can synchronize my calendars at work to my home machine, and then put them on my Palm. I'll finally have one address book again (alright, two - my current cell phone isn't fancy enough to play with iSync) instead of five.

This all sounds vaguely similar to some of what was (vaguely) promised for what used to be called .Net My Services. The big difference - it's going to be installed and working on thousands and thousands of desktops soon.

Amtrak May Cut Back On `Unreliable' Acela - WP. It's a shame the Acela Express project got so muddied. It was a really good opportunity for Amtrak to boost business in the DC-NYC-BOS corridor, but due to manufacturing and communication mistakes, among other things, the trains are seldom able to run at "express" speed, and apparently very unreliable.

When they run, they're nice trains. I only rode one once, on what ended up being my last New York trip before leaving the east coast. The train was smooth, the seats were nice, the cafe car was fun, and I was able to use it to actually catch up to a train I had missed. I was trying to get from NYC back to Fredericksburg, VA, and after much thought had decided to take the train back instead of the Delta or US Airways shuttle, which I had grown quite fond of. I bust in to Union Station after a taxi ride through some of the worst NYC traffic (in city - not counting tunnel/bridge traffic) I had been in for quite some time, and noticed that I had narrowly missed the train that would take me to Fredericksburg. Fortunately, that train had actually been a little bit late in leaving, and I noticed there was an Acela Express that was leaving shortly and due to arrive in DC a few minutes before the Fredericksburg-bound train left DC's Union Station (all trains going south of DC take about twenty minutes to a half hour in DC to change engines from Electric to Diesel). So I hopped it, hoping there would be no significant problems. There weren't any, and I made it to the other train in time.

Definitely one thing I miss about Fredericksburg is the train access. There were a few Amtrak trains that came through a day, and one could use their commuter rail passes to ride Amtrak up to DC. From there, you could go anywhere.

Besides my European trip last fall, I've hardly been out of the Salt Lake valley (besides some Park City ski days) since returning back here last August. I miss having the money to travel, and I also miss the ease of east-coast traveling. It was only a few hours by train to any good city (DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York), even less when putting the Delta / US Air shuttles to use. And, before September 11th, the Delta/US Air shuttles were almost as easy to use as the train. It was great to just be able to walk on with one bag, a copy of The New Yorker for the trip up (to help find out what was going on that weekend), or The Economist for the trip back (a nice sunday morning jet plane ride with bagels and coffee).

Hopefully Amtrak can come up with a decent solution to the Acela difficulties for the populous corridors. And hopefully, the long haul system can get overhauled (no pun intended) or opened up enough for trains to start showing up again where they make sense. Like a Salt Lake to Wendover line... Ahh, there's a good way to waste a weekend.