Courtesy of Lambda the Ultimate is this link: "Explaining why we use RDF instead of just XML". In the whole ongoing RDF/RSS 1.0 versus RSS 2 debate, I'm finding myself ever more on the RSS/RDF side. Part of it is the politics. But a greater part of it is that RSS 2 seems to be trying hard to be a weblog format. And weblogs are not the only kind of data out there on the internet. (Although, since most webloggers seem to be stuck writing about weblogs, webloggers, and so on, it's not surprising that they might think that a weblog is the only thing worth doing on the internet anymore).
To see an interesting application of RDF for editing purposes (take that, Echo!), look at Moztop:
Moztop is a site development environment for Zope. It is written in Mozilla and aimed at people who think Dreamweaver UltraDev is a good tool.(Except that I don't think UltraDev is a good tool, but that's just me. It's been years since I've gotten along well with the User Interface of a Macromedia product). In any case, RDF is used to send descriptions of the data and site structure to the Moztop client, and XML-RPC is used in many cases to save data back to the server. (XML-RPC in Zope 3 is easy. It's fairly easy in Zope 2 as well, but Zope 2 is much closer to the dream of what XML-RPC should and could be, but isn't, for better or worse. I've written on this before, but don't really care to revisit it now).
The results from the MovOn.org PAC primary are in. Howard Dean took first place in the online vote, which was "larger than both the New Hampshire Democratic primary and Iowa caucuses combined." Dennis Kucinich came in second. They came in at approximately 44% and 23% respectively.
From my initial reactions to their statements and pages in MoveOn's candidate pages, Kucinich spoke the most to me. I thought he was a long shot, so it was nice to see him land second. Will he go all the way? I don't know. But it was nice to cast a vote for a strong minded generally-quite-progressive candidate for once.
From The Memory Hole comes this: 5 minute video of George W. Bush on the Morning of 9/11. That's right. Bush is told that America is under attack, and does nothing - NOTHING! - for at least five minutes. This is after the second plane hit the towers. As The Memory Hole analyzes it, he was a sitting duck. Under a terror attack, anyone following the President's public itinerary would have known where his photo op du jour was taking place. Yet the Secret Service, Chief of Staff, etc, do nothing to get the President out of there.
As analyzed by Bob Harris (co-writer at the This Modern World weblog this morning:
The White House admits that Bush fully understood what was happening. So keep this in mind while watching: in New York, as these long, precious minutes slowly tick by, people are burning horribly, people are jumping 100 stories to their deaths, and more planes are very likely headed for other targets (the Pentagon, for example, as it turned out).This is the president who's being hailed as this great commander-in-chief, a rally-round-the-troops guy. Yet he doesn't even leap into action when America is facing the gravest attack on its soil since Pearl Harbor. (This is also the man who is cutting funds to the Veterans Administration and their hospitals so that our underpaid troops won't even have decent medical coverage anymore).
Bush sits complacently, doing nothing.
Perhaps, as a human, he was stunned and processing the events. But as a commander in chief, and surrounded by secret service and other high ranking individuals who had been trained in doing more than pumping oil and managing ball teams, you would think someone would end the photo op saying "something has come up that needs our attention." It's no wonder that a public disclosure of his actions that day are still being suppressed.
But some have made valiant efforts to compile the events of that day and the days leading up to it. Allan Wood and Paul Thompson have put together the article An Interesting Day: Bush's Movements and Actions on 9/11 (link found via The Memory Hole's video description). Among the interesting tidbits of the September 10th night and September 11th pre-attack morning are these: there were surface-to-air missiles and an "Airborne Warning" plane circling overhead (the essay states that it's unclear if this is standard operation or if there was knowledge of an increased threat); and there was apparently an assassination attempt made that morning using a similar tactic to the assassination of AhmedShas Massoud (leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance). From the BBC on September 10th:
But the loss of Ahmed Shah Masood would push the balance, perhaps decisively, in the Taleban's favour.It's an eerie reminder of the unbalanced world that few Americans took notice of in those days. I knew of some of it as a reader of The Economist at that time, but (of course) had no idea how such things could ever impact us. And, of course, we're still not thinking of our place in the world except that we are the world, not just a cog (albeit a big cog) in a connected machine where world wide politics, actions, inactions, can all come crashing back on us. Lewis Lapham wrote in one of the essays published in Theater of War (an essay written after the immediate aftermath of the attacks) that he had hoped that a real dialog about our place in the world would have opened up. That we would realize the perception of some of our global actions as imperial and evil, no matter how good we may intend them to be (or pretend them to be). Of course, it didn't happen. The rhetoric fell sway to wishes of payback and resolution - a knife in the throat of anybody, as long as it proved how all powerful the United States was. It's too bad that "all knowing" doesn't come along with that "all powerful".
One Minute No Silence; One Minute Suspended Detonation. This track was done as a brief and noisy outlet of my frustrations over the increasingly inexcusable Iraq war and the fucking warmongers who took us there. You should hear the hour of new noise works that I'm sending out to potential labels or distributors this week. It looks like I'm being given yet more fuel to glorify and burn.
About a month and a half ago, I wrote an entry titled Component Relational Mapping?. It covered a new direction I had taken in my ongoing quest to cut down on the amount of SQL I had to maintain for an application. This new direction entailed dropping the object-relational mapping dream which can be awfully difficult to obtain. The dream was replaced with a series of more explicit components that interfaced to the RDBMS to help me build and validate forms, apply that data to a "Table Gateway", and have that generate the appropriate DML statement.
For the most part, it has worked rather well. We now have much more stable administration screens, and schema modifications require a lot less manual labor in terms of having to update INSERT and UPDATE statements, the Python code that wraps them, and the forms for adding/modifying them.
This week I've been applying the same principles to a simple application that stores its data in LDAP. Considering the vague requirements and starting from scratch (not to mention that it's been a long time since I've dealt with LDAP), the application has come along at a pretty quick place by applying pretty much the same design patterns mentioned in that earlier post. Now, much of the application can be built by merely describing the data. There's no end to how much I love that concept.
Plus, this time I was wise enough to put in some Unit Tests for the core communication components. Unfortunately, I did not do that last time around.
I'm swamped under a lot of work and little sleep (as usual), but wanted to share some quick thoughts about what we now know about Mac OS X 10.3, aka Panther. First, I'm really excited about the new iDisk functionality. I really like iDisk, Apple's remote storage option as part of .Mac, but it can be slow. Or quite annoying, in fact, when disconnected from the internet. I have a few files that I keep on there because I update them from numerous locations, primarily OmniOutliner documents being used as task lists or status reports. In Panther, you always have a local copy of your iDisk's contents, and the contents get synchronized in the background. And, since it's a local copy, you can update files offline. Nice.
Now, about the new Finder... I'm curious to hear about people's reactions to it that have one of preview copies. Generally, I spend a lot of time now in "Column Mode", as it's extremely helpful for working with audio snippets (the live preview is a godsend), and this new Finder looks like it makes working in that mode a lot easier. But what I haven't seen is if there's any spatial finder capabilities left in. Spatial Finder is how the classic Finder worked, all of the time. It was very fast and very easy to lay things out how you wanted them, and your muscles could get trained to certain positions very rapidly. I still find this handy for some (small) uses these days, but the behavior - even in Jaguar - is too unpredictable.
John Siracusa wrote up an interesting article about the Mac OS X Finder - what's wrong with it, his ideas how to fix it - for Ars Technica a few months back. It looks like Panther's options satisfy one of his ideas for fixing the Finder (making the 'browser mode' be more distinguished from traditional Spatial mode, and borrowing from the web browser for design). I wonder where the rest of it fits in.
Steve Jobs compares the new Finder to iTunes playlists. I really really really really hope at some point we can get the equivalent to "smart playlists" in the Finder. (Which would, obviously, be saved searches).
Late last night, Apple reportedly posted 'G5' specs on the online Apple Store. A lot of the rumor sites, of course, leapt on this information, with many speculating that someone at Apple made a big mistake by leaking these supposed specs early. But Slashdot's posting on the matter proposes it as a marketing ploy.
Marketing ploy or accident, MANY sites beyond just the rumor ones are carrying the story. This is in advance of anything having been released. A lot more attention now will focus on next week's World Wide Developers Conference keynote from Steve Jobs. Whether Apple intended it or not, people are talking about it with pretty ravenous fury now. If this isn't clever marketing, I don't know what is.
Personally, I'm more interested in what Apple will show of Panther, the next release of Mac OS X. Now that both Apple and Microsoft have fulfilled their long time dreams of getting their consumer OS's onto a more stable platform (OS X for Mac, NT for Windows (Windows 2000 is 'NT 5.0', and Windows XP is 'NT 5.1')), they have chances now to finally get back to doing some cool new things like we all dreamed about in the mid-90's (when Pink/Taligent and Cairo seemed attainable).
The Memory Hole gives us this wonderful series of pictures of U.S. officials cozying up to President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. The thing is - there are many reports of gross human rights violations committed in Uzbekistan under Karimov's watch. But they helped us in the war against the Taliban. It reminds me of another human rights violator who we cozied up to not so long ago.
There are a good number of brutal dictators in the world, beyond the ones propped up by the U.S. Given that we haven't gone after them and have no clear plans to, the whole "Saddam Hussein is a bad man" argument for war has zero plausibility. The whole "It's to bring freedom to the Iraqi people" argument has close to zero - there are plenty of others who deserve freedom and are unlikely to get it (especially on the basis that the World Bank and IMF traditionally prefer to work with more "stable governments" such as dictatorships with none of that pesky possibility of change every few years due to a vote).
The weapons of mass destruction that were such an imminent and terrible threat have yet to be found, contrary to all the evidence we claimed to have of them before the war.
I think I'll stick to getting my world coverage from a cut-up machine from now on. It's bound to make more sense --
During from Iran's "ruthless and inhumane a press tactics." conference Friday, Mr. Van Boven said torture is "not just incidental but has The directive a nature of being orders preparation of "a systemic in this country." plan of action [source] designed to avert an Iraqi collapse." [source] From "Uzbekistan: U.S. and Iraqi consultations about Iran's 1984 draft Torture Death in Prison" by Human Rights Watch, 3 May 2003: Another resolution seeking United Nations Security Council condemnation Uzbek prisoner was tortured to death, contradicting U.S. claims that Uzbekistan is making of Iraq's chemical weapons progress on human rights, use. Iraq conveyed several Human Rights Watch said today. “Another requests to the U.S. about the resolution, prisoner including its tortured to death in Uzbekistan is not progress—it is more of the same,
See Get Your War On #25, another beauty. Any joke with the correct use of "orange" in it is alright by me.
I wish my economy would be more stimulated. I'm sitting here making pathetic whiney crying noises. Why? Because I want this: Lo-Fi Loop Junky, a terrific tiny analog looper from Z.Vex, the king of unique, handcrafted, awesome, and expensive pedals. I wish I had bought more when I had the money. That said, I'm pretty damn happy with The Machine:
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that this pedal basically sounds horrible. It's primary purpose is to cut through. But like a wild man with a machete, it is not nice.
It's no surprise. At least - it shouldn't be a surprise. While George W. Bush cuts taxes at the federal level, basically all the states are having to raise taxes, make service cuts, close schools, and come up with other creative ways of raising funds - often for Federal mandates that lack accompanying financial aid.
From Daily Kos comes this link covering tax and fee changes, state by state.
Locally, I'm still trying to fathom the logic of "we need to make smaller classes for more individual time with teachers" with "we must close certain schools". Maybe the smaller class sizes campaign promise really means smaller sizes of class rooms as more students are squeezed in to fewer buildings?
A redesign has occurred here at Industrie Toulouse. It's more abrasive than the previous design, but it's closer to my current aesthetic output choices. Nicely - almost all of the changes were done/doable in the stylesheet. The original is still lying around, which will make it easy to reapply when I've settled down.
I just had a good live (not performance live, but studio live) session of The ELW. Unfortunately, one of the recording mechanisms wasn't enabled fully. There's another recording, however. It's from a tape 4track player that was being used as not only a recording device (using one track only), but as a feedback generator. Now it's time to record it onto the computer for editing.
The theme of an old Python conference (the only one I've had the pleasure of attending) was "Life is better without braces." I just lost about an hour of my life trying to clean up some Javascript code (which I rarely touch) to eliminate an image rollover problem that occurs on a site that we're replacing. Everything looked right. But time after time after time, the code wasn't running. Finally, I realized the problem: I had lost a closing brace on a function definition. I put the brace back, everything now works as it always should have.
Eight weeks. And still no sign of the damning weapons of mass destruction. Where was the threat that was so dangerous that we had to spend billions of dollars and the lives of U.S., U.K. soldiers and 5,500-7,200 Iraqi civilians (as of current estimates)?
As this shakes out and the country wakes up (hopefully) to the wool that was pulled over their eyes concerning the Iraq situation, what happens next time when there is a legitimate threat? I have two speculations on that:
The latest essay I read out of Lewis Lapham's Theater of War paints a pretty damning picture of the CIA. The essay was written before the September 11th attacks, and mentions the many things the agency has gotten wrong over the years (including the idea that the peasants would rise up and join us when we tried to invade Cuba - sound familiar?). When our enormous military machine gets fired up for whatever is next, how can we trust the reasoning and decision making behind it?
Some readers might say "So it's been eight weeks. Give them more time!" To which I remind those readers that which was said of the weapons inspectors prior to the attack.
And as another reminder of just how convinced the administration was (or appeared to be) about these vast stockpiles of evil weapons, the Whiskey Bar takes us on an entertaining (and sickening) trip from the past to the present.
So I now have a new 15GB iPod. So far, so good. iTunes is filling it up right now. Some observations, so far:
The design, of course, is impeccable. This is why Jonathan Ive (and his team) receives so many awards. Like all good design, it's integrated with overall brand image. Just about everything out of the box (including the box itself) is beautifully packaged and presented. The iPod box is a cube that is two equal halves. Upon opening the box, you're presented with two white squares. The square in the right has a light grey text that reads "Designed by Apple in California" (vertically centered, aligned left). The left side is blank. Opening the left side, you're presented with a CD sized box with the single word "Enjoy" on it (vertically centered, aligned right). The CD sized box contains documentation (a quick reference and a full booklet) and, of course, a CD. Underneath this box lie the headphones, the remote, a 4 pin to 6 pin Firewire adapter, and a pair of dock connector covers. Also on the left half is a carrying pouch, which contains the belt clip. The belt clip seems surprisingly cheap in comparison to the rest of the delights inside. But there are plenty of good third party units out there for those that need one.
The iPod itself is even more beautiful than the previous generations, and quite a bit smaller. The only moving part on the outside is the Hold switch. All other buttons are completely touch based. It takes a little bit of getting used to, and the button placement is less intuitive than the previous generation iPods, but I imagine it's something that one gets accustomed to easily. A nice feature of the new buttons is that they get illuminated when the backlight is turned on. The text and symbols on the buttons is a pleasant dark silver color by day and a fiery sinister red color by night.
Another change from previous generations is that there is no longer a Firewire port on the iPod itself. Instead, it has a docking port on the bottom that is thin and wide. One annoyance of this is that I have to carry the charging/docking cable between home where it charges overnight or over a weekend, and work where the music library is. But there are many upsides to the new connector. There are new accessories like a battery pack (uses AA batteries, useful for long road/bus/plane trips) that plug into it. And I assume that dropping the Firewire port helped make the new units thinner. And then, there's the docking station itself. This is another delightfully minimalist unit. The new cable plugs into the back of the dock, and it features a line out - effectively making the iPod a super-miniature bookshelf stereo. The dock is weighted and features a very gripping rubber base. On the bottom are the words, again, "Designed by Apple in California".
It reminds me of a phrase I love so much: Aesthetics are the ethics of the few.
My iPod may not be dead, but the description can be revised to "1.6 Gig Model". That's about how much data one can stuff in before hitting that bad bad bad area of the hard drive. That's no good. So this morning, I may as well go deeper into my credit lines (something I generally loathe doing) and get a new one. It's a shame that the new 10 gig model doesn't include the remote, something that's very handy when biking. I've been needing some extra storage space anyways - not a lot, just a bit. So I'm thinking of going for the 15gig model. Hopefully the cool camera store downtown will have them in and I don't have to go out further to get one. Although, getting CompUSA's extended warranty plan might be a good idea...
My iPod (one of the originals - those very first 5 gig models) appears to be quite sick. It's smelling like a hard drive issue. Now she's looped on boot and won't even get to the internal disk verification mode. It might just be that there's not enough battery life left. I don't know.
Hopefully it turns out OK. The warranty has long expired and I didn't get any extended option. On the upside, I might end up with one of the new ones. On the downside, I can't afford anything like that right now.
But once you've added an iPod to your life, it's surprisingly difficult to go without one.
I'm back, again, after a long weekend. This time I stayed in the valley, but spent a lot of time either at the dentist or with family. I'm actually feeling quite rested. It will be good to get back into the game.
I have a lot of work ahead of me this week. I'm looking forward to most of it, actually. What I'm up to is similar to Archetypes, a content-type development system for Plone, except that my system is for developing so-called "disk based components" for administering data in a RDBMS instead of ZODB content. But both Archetypes and my work probably owe a lot to Zope 3's Schema/Editform system, where a Schema is part of an Interface contract, which can also be used to generate HTML (or other targeted) forms for editing. Overall, it's a much better way to work - describe your data, automatically generate forms, and get a validation framework in the process. It definitely beats building HTML Forms (a very mundane process) manually. We've been using Formulator for months to build public-facing user interfaces, but the interfaces for administrators has suffered.
Now that chapter is finally closing behind us.