Oblomovka

2003-08-18»

We’ve been running a competition on NTK to get people to redesign shit nebsites – literally, pulling the useful content dynamically from the terrible sites and redisplaying it in something close to usable form. Think of it as the paramilitary wing of the usability movement. Anyway, the de facto leader of this practice, Matthew Somerville, has just hacked together a marked improvement on the laudable but javascript-o-frame-o-riffic official Hutton Inquiry site.

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2003-08-14»

Quinn told me two years ago that the basic problem with the global economy was that the idea of money was broken. Around the same time she announced that junk DNA had to have some sort of function, despite what current theories indicated. I humour Quinn on these and other theories, as long as she doesn’t talk so loudly that the geneticists and economics professors at the next table hear her speak that way.

Today I discover that a) some scientists are coming to the same conclusion about junk DNA, and b) the guy who co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism for the Euro, and co-founded one of the largest and most successful currency funds, Bernard Lietaer, agrees with her about money.

I can only conclude that those bastards were scribbling notes on their napkins all along.

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Is it bad to secretly wish Schwarzenegger gets in, just because of the excellent rewrites of California Uber Alles it will encourage?

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2003-08-12»

The co-location company that hosts a community server with which I’m involved went bust – at 11am yesterday. Without telling anyone, including their own tech support and hosting facility.

I suppose we could have predicted this. We’ve been trying to pay them for for a few months now, with very little success. Hard fast rule of e-commerce: if you make it impossible for people to pay you, and yet you are expecting to be paid, something bad will happen.

We can tell the precise point at which the co-loc company ceased to co or loc, because at that moment our machine vanished off the Net. A lot of heavyweight sysadmin types run their mail from this box, so turning off the packets is a bit like throwing up the BOFH-Signal into the sky. Heads turn.

First step when a hosting company spontaneously bankrupts: get your box out of there before the creditors mistakenly melt it down for slag. A fantastic friend who runs her company from the box ran cross-town to airlift it out. Serendipitously she bumped into a guy who is running a hosting outfit in the racks upstairs. He’s an ex-employee of our co-loc, and realising what is going on, kindly takes us (and I’m guessing several other bedraggled servers) on board and plugs us into his network.

He’s given us a few days leeway to sort ourselves out, but – always assuming this all hasn’t been part of his evil masterplan – I think we’ll go with him. He’s still at that phase where he knows all his customers and answers the phone himself. I still have problems explaining to people why little ISPs like this seem to work better than big ones. I guess, if I wasn’t so dog-tired, I’d say that the economies and diseconomies of Internet services are shaped like a big mexican hat. You can scale up pretty quickly, and then it all goes to shit until, if you’re lucky, you sell out to someone big enough to run matters properly again. You can either be Henry Ford or William Morris, but you can’t be Mr In-Between.

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2003-08-10»

Well, the weekend’s over, and I’m sticking with Python. I caught up to where I was with the Perl implementation pretty quickly, and in far fewer lines. To be fair, I think a sizeable part of that may have come from me using the Test::Unit / unittest suites to do my test-first development. Both are derived from Kent Beck’s Smalltalk framework and are very OOP-oriented, which favours Python over Perl5. I was beginning to stumble into some hairy data structures with Perl, all of which turned out a lot simpler-looking in Python. That, and I’m doing some email mangling in this part of the coding, and Python’s built-in email module has much of what I need. There are some even better libraries in CPAN (as usual), but I was greatly spoilt for choice and little spoilt for time.

Anyway, this still leaves the problem of a decent templating solution for Python. I got loads of very useful suggestions, which I’ll attempt to summarise here:

Aaronsw wrote back to say that he uses cheetah and sqlobject . He wrote back suspiciously fast. I think it may have been one of his bots talking. Both cheetah and sqlobject look tempting – especially as sqlobject supports sqlite, and I’d like to stick with that very basic SQL implementation until my lusting and hunger for relational database power become known to more people, as the Boney M song has it ^[1].

Noted real-world Python user Zooko said that the Mnet gang would probably be going for whatever templating Twisted had. Then he confessed that they probably wouldn’t have much need for templating at all. His most abiding point was, I think, to exclaim w00t python w00t, which I took to heart.

Jonathan Moore says “all the cool kids have quit templating and gone to XSLT”, which I subconsciously knew. But then if the cool kids jumped off the Post Office Tower, would I join them? Naturally, because cool people are usually into BASE jumping and stuff like that, and would be cool enough to help me with basic safety precautions. And, besides, how cool does jumping off the … I digress.

My thoughts: XSLT is one of those technologies best kept for either times when someone is paying you to learn it, or you’ve lied on your resume and said that you wrote the W3C spec, and now you find you have the job of your “dreams”. I’m in neither position, for once.

David Jeske wrote an informed recommendation for ClearSilver, which isn’t surprising as he’s been hacking on it for yonks. ClearSilver looks really interesting. It has a nice, simple, theory behind it. The original, closed-source version drives Yahoo Groups . Jeske and friends’ open source re-implementation is used at PyMeld too, but wasn’t sure if it could cope with high-performance sites. Richard Jones likes SimpleTAL.

When I hit my templating problems, I think I’ll hit them back with either ClearSilver or Cheetah. Which one will depend on the size of my problems and on what speed I’m plummetting into disaster at the time.

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2003-08-09»

I’ve got a new medium-sized project to be working on. It’s just me coding it at the moment but at some point (if it comes together), I do want to be able to pass it on to someone else, preferably without apologising first.

I’m utterly torn between Perl and Python. My first choice in this case would be Python, because bad Python code doesn’t seem to be quite so personal. I’ve seen people spit blood at other coder’s Perl, just because it’s not the way that they would do it. Perl demands rather more sympathy with your predecessor than does Python. With Python, it’s just more code to stare at.

That said, your successor does need to actually know the language. Most of the people I can imagine maintaining this code will know Perl but not Python. Python doesn’t take that long to learn, but reading Python to take on someone else’se project just isn’t much *fun*. Sitting down to learn someone’s Perl, while tough, does teach you about the way they were thinking when they wrote the application. Python’s clarity, I think, cuts down on its expressiveness in depicting why certain decisions were made. When I had to hunker down and learn POE or Moveable Type, for instance, I came away with a very deep understanding of how it was supposed to work. It was fun, albeit time-consuming. I sometimes have problems doing the same with slabs of Python code, just because they can be very lacking in personality.

That said, I’m not paid to be a programmer. What is fun is a hobby can be skull-crackingly frustrating in a job with a deadline.

I eventually made the decision to go with Perl and Mason – mainly because of Mason. I know a lot of people who know Mason who I can ask when I got stuck, and there’s a fair bit of this code that will end up being on a Website, eventually. There don’t seem to be any Python templating solutions that stand head-and-shoulders above the crowd (and whose implementors I know). I felt that going with Perl would provide my successor with a clearer understanding of the whole project, and not necessarily lock me into an immature Web tech that no-one knows.

Now, a couple of days into it, I’ve begun to seriously reconsider. I’m nowhere near the Mason bit of the application, and I’m getting continually bogged down in Perl style issues that really don’t have anything to do with what I’m trying to write.

To be honest, I think this is my Perl rustiness kicking in; and I think it may go away after a few more days hacking. Worse, though, is the effect of something I thought would be a real boon – CPAN. There’s a bunch of useful utilities there that I’d love to suck in and use in my program. But they all have different idioms – all of which I have to sit down and learn. Plus there’s the whole dependency issue: sooner or later I’m going to have to install all of this on the working server, and there’s a real penalty to be paid for being dependent on a lot of scattered Perl modules. Will they work? Will they still be maintained? Which of alternative implementations should I choose?

So, I’m going to spend this weekend having a bash at a Python version. My XPish working style has recently become dependent on a lot of Python features, and the Python core library has most of what I need in the way of modules. I really haven’t written much code, so there’s not much time lost. And I figure that if it all goes to hell in Python too, I’ll learn my lesson quickly and go slinking back to Perl with my tail between my legs. Plus, no-one’s paying me to be decisive here. As if anyone would.

I still don’t know of a good, solid, Python templating language though. Or rather, I know of three or four, but I don’t know anyone who has used any of them seriously in high-volume production environments. I’m not interested in Zope or Twisted (tempting though they are) because I’d be obliged to wrap my solution in their terms, but I really don’t know whether I should go for SkunkWeb or WebWare or Spyce or any of the others.

Right now, I’m delaying the decision until I’m a bit deeper into the code. Which feels a bit uncomfortable. But under the terms of XP, perhaps forgiveable.

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2003-08-07»

There’s a US federal law which lets individuals prohibit companies from sending unsolicited sexually provocative or erotically arousing mail. According to the postal ruling implementing this law, “”Postmasters may not refuse to accept a Form 1500 because the advertisement in question does not appear to be sexually oriented. Only the addressee may make that determination.”

Kayne McGladrey is doing the obvious thing: declaring that all those Sharper Image catalogues and coupon collections are quite filthy, and should be exorcised from her letter box. Instructions included.

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Learn something new every day, with the vim.org tips RSS feed. (Thanks, Phil!)

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2003-08-06»

A friend of mine was going to drop by while on a trip to San Francisco in a few months. Not anymore. He’s a french citizen living in the UK. When he went to renew his passport, he discovered that the french consulate can’t provide him with a machine-readable passport. And from October the 1st, the US is refusing visa-waivers to anyone without one. You have to get a normal visa. Male visa applicants aged between 16-45 also have to fill in this new extra form, DS-157.

Questions on the new form include:

• Mother and father’s full name.
• All the countries you have entered in the last ten years (with year)
• Your last two employers (with address, telephone number and supervisor name)
• All professional, social and charitable organisations to which you belong or have belonged, contribute or have contributed or with which you work (or have worked)
• All educational institutions you attend or have attended (excluding elementary school)
• A list of specific locations you will visit in the US

Understandably, he objects to filling in this form. So he’s not coming.

There’s a lot of problems with demanding info like this, but I just want to concentrate on one.

Most American voters will never see this form, and neither will the citizens of countries that the US media listens to.

But the majority of people visiting the US will. Any male between 16-45 coming from these countries will:

And this is what they will learn of this country: that it requires that a large amount of biographical data be handed over to its government. It obligatorily requires anyone to reveal any and all organisations, political or social, of which they are a member. That its government also demands to know the location of those within its borders, and the precise time of their movements. And that men and women are to be treated differently.

I think it’s one thing to require visitors to a country to obey its laws, and comply with its values. But to propose a set of rules like this that seem to me to represent the very opposite of those values – well, that seems to be not only wrong, but a strong danger sign.

I keep on asking: if this bureacracy, this data collection, this process is necessary or even useful, why is it not applied to all Americans too? Or, if the administration is only worried about foreign terrorists, all visitors?

I cannot imagine that the percentage of terrorists in the sum of non-visa waiver countries is much larger the some total of terrorists globally. Either way, it is a tiny fraction. Why are we collecting so much data on the rest of the world? And if it is not a problem – a minor inconvienience – why don’t we subject ourselves or the majority of Europeans to it, too. What do we have to fear?

I really think that these questions should be universally required, or not required at all.

Or is it simply because we know that Europeans, and Americans have a greater voice; can declare these questions to be against their natural rights? Do they have more natural rights than others? Is that what the bill of rights means? That these rights are reserved only for American citizens and their companions? Is that what the creators of these rules propose?

I worry about this, and I worry about any number of other proposals that seem to go through without the slightest oversight by all the checks and balances of this country. And I worry that the people who are in charge don’t seem to consider what they are doing might be wrong.

The point at which the Constitution becomes little other than a crucifix one waves at powerful figures who have no understanding or sympathy with the values it represents, is a point I believe it at risk of becoming useless, even to those few who can still shelter behind it.

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2003-08-05»

My editor mailed me to ask about that last entry, and whether we should rewrite the piece. He said someone had pointed it out to him.

Someone, my foot. Do you see what this is? This is the Internet getting back at me again. Leave me alone, Internet, I say, waving my fist in an indescribable direction.

And I’ve finished the CD-ROM piece (it was all right), even though when I started to do some last minute research, the first site that came up for my google search terms was my own QuickTopic page. Oh very clever, Internet. Very sarcastic. Just because you don’t want to do all the work.

I’m not linking to anything on this entry, just to punish it.

Oh alright, here’s some nostalgic reminiscences about people’s first computers.

You liked me then.

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