Orders of Magnitude

By Evan — — Science

My mathematical skills have been decaying for years. First it was tensors and what little I knew about group theory. Then PDEs, then multivariable calculus, linear algebra, …

Now the arithmetic module is finally failing. This week I went to go look at tile. I tried to do a first-pass estimate of the cost of materials.

  1. “Okay, the bathroom is 7′ x 10′. So that’s 700 square feet.”
  2. “The tile is, say, $6 per square foot. That’s… crikey! $4200!”
  3. “Okay, maybe I’ll feel better if I try to calculate the tile square footage more precisely. That should knock things down by at least a third, probably more.”
  4. “First, let’s subtract out the sink and counter area. That’s 7′ x 2′, or 14 square feet.”
  5. “700 – 14 is… waaait a second. Something’s wrong here.”

Pretty sad, really. You know, I used to have circuit breakers designed to halt ridiculous calculations in process, and they should have kicked in at Step 2. Either those circuit breakers are gone, or they got disabled when I started browsing through fancy bathroom supply stores and catalogs. After all, when you see shower heads going for $699 and heated towel racks going for over $1000, that tile calculation doesn’t seem too far out of whack.

As an aside, I wonder how hard it is to make your own heated towel rack? I might have forgotten all my math, but I do remember how to use a soldering iron.

Laws of Computational Metaphysics

By Evan — — Tech

In the post “Welcome to goer.org 3.0”, I mentioned a number of reasons for the redesign. Better permalinks. Better comments. Upgraded feeds. Not hideously green. All sorts of good stuff.

I also upgraded from Movable Type 2 to Movable Type 3. MT3 offers a number of improvements, such as a better web interface and a more sophisticated plug-in system. However, the truth is that I could have done the whole redesign in MT2. And I was reluctant to upgrade, because:

  • I had already paid for MT2, and MT3 would have cost more money.
  • MT2 could operate using flat files, but MT3 requires a database, which would have required me to upgrade my web hosting plan.
  • MT2 was working Just Fine, Thanks.

But eventually all of these became not-true. First, MT3 became free for personal use. Second, my web host made MySQL available for all their plans, even the El Cheapo ones like mine. Third, Jacques alerted me that MT2 was not, in fact, working Just Fine, Thanks. The unpatched security hole was enough to convince me.

So it wasn’t enough to just start creating new posts using a new template — I also had to import all the old posts so I could shut down MT2 permanently. Unfortunately, technology has (surprise!) gotten in the way.

Importing the posts themselves wasn’t too bad. As long as you remember the simple rule of Movable Type upgrades:

  • uploading your posts by FTPing them to the import/ directory: GOOD
  • uploading your posts via the “web upload” feature: BAD

then everything works out alright, mostly. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that even though most of the old posts use raw HTML, and all of the new posts use Markdown, MT correctly formatted them all. Unfortunately this cleverness doesn’t apply to comments, but I’ll take what I can get.

What’s more annoying is permalinks. The old site just had monthly archive pages, not individual entry archives, so it had permalinks that looked like this:

https://www.goer.org/2003/Apr/index.html#29

By contrast, the new site has permalinks that look like this:

https://www.goer.org/2003/04/the_xhtml_100.html

This is pretty yucky for a couple of reasons. First, unless I am reading the documentation incorrectly, MT3 changed its archive formatting syntax so that you have to represent months using numbers. Strings such as “Apr” are right out.
Ok, fine, I can use numbers for months, and I can even fix everything up with mod_alias.

But then there’s the second problem: all my old posts used anchors (the #29 part) in the permalink. What I didn’t know back in 2001 is that the anchor never gets sent to the web server, which mean I can’t use that information to redirect the old posts to its new location. (Oh, you could always try to do the redirect on an individual basis using JavaScript, but the search engines wouldn’t be able to follow, so screw that.)

So I’m doing the next best thing, which is to redirect each old-style link to the appropriate monthly archive page. Straightforward enough, although I am wondering whether I should put in some special cases for the two or three posts that had wider than usual linkage. For example, if someone links to the aforementioned:

https://www.goer.org/2003/Apr/index.html#29

then my poor webserver only sees this:

https://www.goer.org/2003/Apr/index.html

but I know that the person actually meant to go here:

https://www.goer.org/2003/04/the_xhtml_100.html

and not to some other post made in April 2003. I’m not sure what the proper thing to do is here, but I’m tempted to go with the ugly hack that will help most people and annoy the remainder, rather than the cleaner solution that will annoy everybody.

Anyway, this little tale of woe is all just a roundabout way of getting to my Laws of Computational Metaphysics. I used to have one, now I have two. I’m sure someone has stated these laws before, but here’s my formulation:

  1. Information that resides only on a single hard drive doesn’t exist.
    This one is the most important, since this one bites both geeks and non-computer geeks all the time. (Computer geeks: raise your hand if you’re older than 22 and you’ve never lost data.) Among non-computer geeks, only very very very smart people like my kid sister and my mother can be made to understand this problem. So for everyone else my default advice is not, “Get yourself a good backup system,” but, “Don’t store anything important on the computer, ever.”

  2. Permalinks that contain an anchor don’t exist.
    Law #2 has a narrower scope, but I think that amongst the web nerd set, it’s underappreciated.

Feel free to add more Computational Laws of Metaphysics in comments…

Quetzalcoatl’s Ziggurat of Death

By Evan — — SF

Met up with fellow VPXers Zak (and Sharon), Dru, Lucy, and Erin in San Francisco last night. You know you’re with the right crowd when one minute they’re giving you a proper chiding for falling off the wagon and taking up World of Warcraft again, and then the next minute they start suggesting new guild names for you.

(Regarding World of Warcraft… don’t worry, I’ve got it under control this time, man.)

Anyway, I must say the SF Hyatt is most impressive on the inside. I think I must have been there as a child many years ago, because the feeling of vertigo and “Holy crap, I’m inside a giant open-air ziggurat!” seemed… strangely familiar. Or maybe I’m confusing the Hyatt with the Luxor? Regardless, they did have a loungy bar, which served a drink called “Cotton Candy” that was pink and delicious, and I am totally going to order one on my next first date. If there ever is another first date in my future, because let’s face it, once you get back on the World of Warcraft wagon, things like “talking to women” and “bathing” start to fall by the wayside. Kidding! Got it totally under control! [thumbs up]

The bar also deserves props for making clever use of hanging lights and wispy coverings, strung to create the illusion of a smaller, cozier space. Just don’t look behind you or straight up, because then you realize that no, you’re still inside the scary ziggurat and ohmygod Quetzalcoatl is going to swoop down and eat us all. Ah, the primal human fear of being eaten by giant flying lizards. Although my fellow VPXers seemed unconcerned. Maybe it’s just me? And the Creationists, probably, what with their Pteranodons and all.

Always Watch The Skies.

Meta-messages

By Evan — — Culture

Last night I went up to San Francisco to see a showing of The Czech Dream, a documentary about two young state-sponsored filmmakers who hired and persuaded professional advertisers to help them promote and launch a fake supermarket. The students covered the the marketing campaign from the inside, and then filmed the reaction of the thousands of people who showed up on opening day.
This stunt caused a nationwide scandal and led to a political backlash against the government and its pro-EU marketing campaign — which just so happened to be sponsored by the same ad company portrayed in the film.

The basic theme of the The Czech Dream is unremarkable. “Consumerism is bad”, “modern marketing sure is gosh darn powerful”, i.e. nothing particularly radical or interesting for any Westerner over the age of twelve. There is also a strange disconnect between the magnitude of reaction and the rather low-wattage of the stunt itself. The victims of the hoax cheerfully berated themselves for being “idiots”, but they were being awfully hard on themselves. After all, this sort of trick pales in comparison to what goes on in reality TV, where producers consistently manipulate people into doing much more embarrassing things than showing up to a fake supermarket opening.

On the plus side, the movie did have many genuinely funny bits: the composing of the marketing jingle, the crowd’s reactions, the bewildered looks of the filmmakers. It was also interesting to get an inside look at the thought processes of the marketeers, who were good at their work, proud of it, and just as young and hip and well-educated as the filmmakers themselves. (At one point, one of them argues that advertisers never lie, it’s the filmmakers who do.) The filmmakers also did something really clever in the trailer for the film, which includes a scene with an angry mob chasing and beating them up. Although that scene was completely fake, it does a fine job of raising the stakes of the film. It also hoaxes the audience a bit, which seems only fair.

But by far the most interesting aspect of The Czech Dream was not the film itself, but the reaction of the San Francisco audience. At various points in the film, Czechs from different socio-economic backgrounds would observe that shopping made them feel happy. Each statement along these lines provoked howls of laughter from the audience. Not garden-variety patronizing chuckles from We Sophisticated Western [Hyper-/Anti-/Meta-]Consumers, mind you… no, these were actual howls, the kind of noise ordinarily reserved for particularly awful pundits or politicians.

It’s hard to say whether the filmmakers intended this, but The Czech Dream manages to portray the Czech people in a fairly positive light. Some were annoyed, some were bemused, some were clever, many were funny, all were humanized. Coming away from the film, you get the feeling that the Czechs are basically all right. My fellow Americans, though, not so much.

Welcome to goer.org 3.0

By Evan — — Web

goer.org: weblog. A website barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild it.
We have
the technology.
We have the capability to make the world’s first…
errr, scratch that, we have the capability to make Evan’s first
not-completely-hideous website. goer.org will be that website. Better than
it was before. Better… stronger… faster.

Yes, after almost five years, I’ve finally redesigned the ol’ blog template. Out with the hideous green of goer.org 2.0, and in with the soothing earth tones of goer.org 3.0! (Hmm, so what was goer.org 1.0, then? You really don’t want to know.)

Aside from being vaguely displayable in Netscape Navigator 4, the previous design had very little to recommend it. The new design has several advantages over the old, including:

  • It’s not hideously green.
  • Oh, it’s hideously brown, you say? Well, according to Microsoft, brown is the new black. So there.
  • As an added bonus, this design is one of the only sites out there where the little orange “feed” icons actually sort of harmonize.
  • Atom 1.0 feeds. I was going to hilariously title this post, “Up and Atom!”, but then I discovered I was only about the 800th person to come up with that.
  • Individual entry archives. The old blog had everything filed away on monthly archives (mimicking the format from back before I had blog software) and presented comments in a separate pop-up window (a hack from back when Phil Ringnalda taunted me into opening up comments, and that turned out the quickest way to enable them.) Now each post has its own page and its own set of permalinkable comments. Technology marches on!
  • You can now post comments using a subset of John Gruber’s Markdown. That means bulleted lists, blockquotes, preformatted code blocks, and other goodies.
  • There is a de.licio.us-powered linkroll.
  • The site has migrated to MT 3, which has a wide array of nifty new features to play with.
  • Did I mention, not hideously green?

Plus many other minor tweaks. And newly-introduced bugs. For one thing, this template looks a little sketchy in Internet Explorer 6. For one thing, the blockquotes are causing weird formatting glitches. Also, IE 6 does not seem to like border-style: dotted. But I’m sure this is all fixed in IE 7.

A final note: the banner at the top is a composite of photographs from Flickr. I can’t take a picture worth a damn, but fortunately other people can… and not only that, they sometimes release their work under a Creative Commons license. So thank you to the following people for making this redesign possible:

And that’s all for now. Technically, this blog only has one post in it, so I’d better start filling it up. Don’t want to look like a newb…

Early Onset Something-or-Other

By Evan — — Personal

I just finished sending off email thank-yous to all the holiday cards I received this year. Admittedly, sending an email response to a physical Christmas card is probably not up to snuff from an etiquette standpoint. I can only hope that my friends have low expectations, given that the Undomesticated Young Jewish Male is perhaps the least likely demographic in the English-speaking world to do a good job with the whole holiday card thing. Anyway, I have grown to appreciate holiday cards, and despite my failure to fully hold up my end of the holiday card bargain, friends and relatives keep sending them to me anyway. And so I read them and smile and put them up on the mantle and feel warm and fuzzy seeing them up there. So, thank you friends and relatives!

I did have a disturbing experience sending thank-yous this year. I picked up one card from an old friend of mine that had arrived a few days before. It was a delightful little card with a hand-drawn cartoon on the front, portraying each family member as a robot with a Santa hat. “Oh, the robot card! I really liked the robot card,” I thought. Then I opened an email to send them a thank you — and suddenly I experienced the sensation of knowing who to send it too but not the name of the person to send it to. I could remember my friend’s face, the names and faces of my friend’s immediate family, the name of her blog (which I had read several hours before), but not her actual name. I considered looking inside the card, but decided that no, that would be cheating. Finally, after about fifteen agonizing seconds, my brain dredged out the correct name. Stupid brain! What do I pay you for, anyway?

Recently, this has been happening a lot to names of good friends, fairly close relatives, and other bits of information that I should be able to retrieve instantaneously. Last night, I took my sisters and my brother-in-law to a holiday party, and I remember introducing my brother-in-law as, “this is uh, my brother-in-law Adiv.” I cleverly snuck in the “uh, my brother-in-law” part because I needed an extra one-and-a-half seconds to retrieve his name. This is a guy I’ve known for about six years now, not to mention that we had been chatting in the car just a few minutes before. At least I remembered my sisters’ names. And the hosts. That would have been embarrassing.[1]

If I were exhibiting any other symptoms, I’d be seriously worried that this was some kind of early-onset medical condition. Then again, if I were experiencing any other symptoms, would I be the best one to notice? Maybe I should ask friends and family members to please keep an eye out for… what, exactly? Agitation? Mood swings? Irascibility? Hoo-boy. I’m basically screwed.

1. An addendum to the party: as I started up the car for the trip home, I saw a five-or-six point buck galloping down the sidewalk, nearly brushing the car. Fortunately, everyone else in the car saw it too. So I’m not going completely crazy.

Irrevocable

By Evan — — Writing

Perhaps it is a sign of the impending Web 2.0 apocalypse, but “display sites” are reappearing. Why is an idea that failed in late 90s making a comeback?

We can clear up this mystery with a simple example. Let’s say you’re trying to cash in on the new bubble the modern way, by throwing together a website in a weekend and getting bought by Yahoo!, or hopefully (cue angelic music) Google. You have all the right ingredients: a ratio of three business guys for every one engineer, a cutesy logo and domain name, and a hotshot web dev who knows how to make rounded corners and everything. Now you just need a business plan related to “social networking” and “user-generated content”. But what do these mysterious user-creatures manufacture that you can piggyback off of? Video? Locked up already by YouTube. Photos? Pretty crowded. Music? Sound? Hmmm. Text? Wait — doesn’t everyone have a book inside them? Yes! Books it is! Fabulous. [clink beer glasses]

And thus it came to pass in Teh Dawn of the New Millenium that new display sites began springing up like, errr, things that spring up a lot. Amusingly, of the seven sites Victoria Strauss mentioned in her post early this year, two of them are already dead. Less amusingly, Strauss just highlighted a new site, Associated Content (“The People’s Media Company”). As Strauss puts it:

No doubt many people will simply click “I agree” rather than slog through the whole of this dense, small-print document–but that’s never a good idea. If you read down far enough, you find the following clause (bolding is mine):

A. User Content. By submitting any User Content through or to the AC Network, including on any User Tools or User Pages, but excluding any User Content you submit on AC Blogs, you hereby irrevocably grant to AC, its affiliates and distributors, a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and fully sub-licensable license, to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, create derivative works from, transfer, transmit and distribute on the AC Network, in connection with promotion or elsewhere, such User Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate the User Content into other works in any format or medium now known or later developed. Notwithstanding the foregoing, when you submit a text, video, images , AC may modify the format, content and display of such User Content. The foregoing grants shall include the right to exploit any proprietary rights in such User Content, including but not limited to rights under copyright, trademark, service mark or patent laws under any relevant jurisdiction. With respect to User Content you Post for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of AC Blogs, You grant AC the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such User Content on the AC Network or on any media. You agree that the foregoing grant of rights by you to AC and its affiliates is provided without any the entitlement of payment of fees or consideration.

Just by posting on the site, you’re granting Associated Content the right to exploit your work in any way imaginable–and possibly to make money from that exploitation–without any compensation or consideration to you. Of course, the chances that Associated Content will actually exercise this right for any given piece of content are probably fairly slim. Also, since it’s a non-exclusive grant, you aren’t prevented from selling, re-posting, or adapting your work yourself. You may, therefore, consider it worth the risk.

Strauss goes on to say:

(This kind of language, by the way, is not unusual on the Internet. For instance, you’ll find something similar–though not as encompassing–in Yahoo’s Terms of Service (see Clause 9), and also in the User Agreement of Triond.com (see Clause 5), another content site. As katya l. points out in the Comments section of this post, just about any online service will require you to grant certain basic rights, otherwise they won’t be able to transmit content over the Internet without violating copyright laws. However, what Associated Content is asking its content providers to agree to goes some way beyond that basic license.)

Actually it’s much worse than that. Here are the terms of service for Yahoo! Groups (and most other Yahoo! sites that enable user to post text):

Yahoo! does not claim ownership of Content you submit or make available for inclusion on the Service. However, with respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Service, you grant Yahoo! the following worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license(s), as applicable:

With respect to Content you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of Yahoo! Groups, the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Service solely for the purposes of providing and promoting the specific Yahoo! Group to which such Content was submitted or made available. This license exists only for as long as you elect to continue to include such Content on the Service and will terminate at the time you remove or Yahoo! removes such Content from the Service. …

What about the good folks up the road in Mountain View? Here are the terms of service for Google Groups Beta:

Google claims no ownership or control over any Content submitted, Posted or displayed by you on or through the Service. You or a third party licensor, as appropriate, retain all patent, trademark and copyright to any Content you submit, Post or display on or through the Service and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate. By submitting, Posting or displaying Content on or through the Service, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt and publish such Content on the Service solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting the Service or any other Google Services. This license terminates when such Content is deleted from the Service. Google reserves the right to syndicate Content submitted, Posted or displayed by you on or through the Service and use that Content in connection with other services offered by Google.

Both Yahoo! and Google assert affirmatively that they do not own your stuff, that the “worldwide, royalty-free license” is scoped to “displaying, distributing, and promoting the ‘Service'”, and that the license terminates when you delete your content. None of this scoping is present in the Associated Content terms of service. They own your book and or their buddies can do whatever they like with it. Forever.

What makes this particularly odious is that on a site where people are putting up their books, you would expect a lot more protection than the boilerplate Yahoo! and Google Terms of Service, not less. I wonder how far you’ll get taking your work to a publisher and telling them, “Well, see, I’ve already granted these other guys the right to sorta kinda do whatever they like with my stuff… but you should totally buy it anyway!” I’m guessing that your average publisher would get a little tetchy to hear you say something like that. Now my guess could be wrong, since after all, I know very little about how the publishing industry actually works. Then again, neither do the employees and backers of these next-gen content sites, which is something that prospective users of these sites should perhaps keep in mind.

Wry Havok

By Evan — — Writing

Brad DeLong uncovers this passage:

I thought we had finished with the subject of your wanting to become a writer when you passed through New York last April. You asked for what you called “an uncle’s meddling advice,” and we spent an afternoon talking about your chances of commercial or critical success (nil and next to none), about the number of readers that constitutes the American audience for literature (not enough to fill the seats at Yankee Stadium), and about the Q ratings awarded to authors by the celebrity market (equivalent to those assigned to trick dogs and retired generals). You didn’t disagree with the drift of the conversation, and I thought it was understood that you would apply to business school.

To which Brad remarks:

The graders of the PSAT/NMSQT say that the tone of the parenthetical comments is best characterized as “wry.” We in this house agree–unanimously–that “surly” is a better characterization. They are not dryly humorous with a touch of irony. They are, rather, sullenly ill-humored.

I think this is exactly right. First, as one of Brad’s commenters clarifies for us, “Wry involves an attempt at weak humor, surly is a brooding, passive-aggressive, sullen low-level frustrated anger expressed as reluctance and sloth.” I think this fits the uncle’s tone to a T.

Second, there’s the particular issue the uncle is whining about, which on the scale of “things that are tapped out” falls just behind “complaining about how kids these days are so disrespectful to their elders.” The uncle is surrounded by illiterates, and only he, the nephew, and possibly fifteen thousand like-minded readers in the Upper West Side are daring to keep the flame of culture alive. As we cretinous Internet kids like to say these days, “Oh noes!” It’s hard to appreciate someone’s allegedly wry humor when you’re rolling your eyes at them instead.

Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold

By Evan — — Web

Via Jacques, it looks like Sam Ruby has written some JavaScript that enables you to embed MathML and SVG in an HTML 4 document. XHTML is no longer required. Wow. Ever since XHTML came out, the only thing XHTML 1.1 has been able to do that HTML 4.01 couldn’t do was embed MathML and SVG. Now that’s gone.

There is also a little historical irony here.

At the 2004 W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents, prominent W3C member and co-inventor of CSS Bert Bos went on record saying that JavaScript is the worst invention ever.

That always seemed harsh to me. Sure, JavaScript can be dangerous. You can easily shoot yourself in the face with it, boy howdy. But really, the worst invention ever? No wonder that Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript, expressed his irritation at the time — although this was less over the W3C calling his “baby” ugly and more about the disconnect between W3C’s recent work and the actual needs of web developers. In fact, it was right about this time that the WHATWG started picking up steam. But that’s another story.

Now fast-forward a couple of years. XHTML was the W3C’s baby.[1] But with a not-particularly-long snippet of JavaScript, Sam Ruby has kicked the chair out from under XHTML. Actually, that’s not really the right image. Imagine a man with a chiseled jaw in a nearly immaculate tuxedo, Agent XHTML, clinging desperately to the edge of a sheer cliff with just two fingers. A dark, menacing, bearded figure approaches. “So,” he sneers, “you’re the best the W3C has?” Agent X looks up. “Ruby. I should have known you’d become a minion of J.A.V.A.S.C.R.I.P.T. Your evil master will never succeed in poisoning the World Wide Web!” Ruby just shrugs. “It’s a long way down, Agent X,” he says. Then he stomps on Agent XHTML’s fingers. The tuxedoed man plummets, screaming all the way down. Meanwhile, somewhere from his underground lair, the shadowy criminal mastermind known only as “Mr. Eich” watches all of this from a screen, stroking his pet cat thoughtfully. Hmmm, or does Brendan have a shark tank? Because that would be totally awesome.

1. Or more accurately, the last thing they’ve thrown over the wall to webdevs in the last five years.

I Win Christmas!

By Evan — — Personal

Today I went to the annual Ryan Troll Holiday party, which includes a “White Elephant” gift exchange.

What I gave up: components for a vintage 1998 home-built computer — 350 MHz Pentium II processor with heatsink and fan, Asus P2B motherboard, 128 MB of screaming fast RAM, Matrox graphics card with 8 MB of VRAM, two sound cards, various cables and documentation.

What I received: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine in near-mint condition.

Looks like Santa’s got my back this year. I’m as tsetummelt as anyone over this. Who knew?