Discussing the various game/book bundles available:

So you can get the Bible, or cheat codes, or a book by people who think they’ve figured out the cheat codes to the Bible.

(Via slacktivist.)

After watching the President’s candid camera moment at the G8 summit, I’ve decided to rank what was most embarrassing about it, from least to most:

1. The fact that the President uses profanity in what he thinks is private conversation.
2. The fact that the President didn’t know that St. Petersburg, Russia is a long way from Beijing, China.
3. The fact that the President has the table manners of a goat.
4. The fact that the President has no idea what the word “irony” means.

Couldn’t he have at least watched Reality Bites?

Last week at work we were having a discussion about reporting, and I shared one of my principles when it comes to data collection, which is that logging is nearly always preferable to counting.

Let’s say I’m required to produce reports that show how often every entry on a weblog has been viewed. There are two obvious options for doing so. I could create a table called entry_views that has columns for the entry ID, and a date field to record when the event occurred. If I had some identifying information for the viewers, I could store that in the table as well.

Another option is to just add a column to the entries table called times_viewed. Every time someone views the article, you can just increment the field. Some people would argue that if all you care about is the count, this is all you should do. Your logging table is going to get huge, your reports will be slow, and you’re recording lots of extra information if you build that table just for logging views.

There are two things that you lose if you count rather than log. The first is that you lose all of the information that’s stored in the log. Take a look at Amazon.com sometime and you’ll see tons of features built on what someone once probably thought was extra information. You can see a list of the products you’ve viewed recently, products that were purchased by people who bought the product you’re looking at, and even products people purchased instead of the one you’re looking at. Keeping detailed logs is what makes all of those features possible. Collect the data now, and figure out what to do with it later.

The second thing you lose is an audit trail. A few years ago, I worked on a rewrite of a licensing system for a software company. When a customer purchased a number of licenses, a record was added to the database. When the customer came and generated those licenses, a column in that table was incremented. When the license count was equal to the number of licenses purchased, the system refused to generate any more licenses. The problem was that there was no audit trail. If a customer called and asked who had used up their licenses or when they were redeemed, the company couldn’t tell them.

Obviously, the person who failed to record the individual licenses made a really terrible decision since revenue and customer satisfaction were on the line, but the larger point is that hoarding the data is, to me, always a better decision than not recording something there’s a chance you may need later. Data storage is cheap. The only issue is how to handle reporting performance when you’ve logged tons of information. I generally file that in the category of problems that are nice to have.

The Al Jazeera documentary Control Room finally came up in the Netflix queue and I got a chance to watch it tonight. The documentary follows Al Jazeera through the beginning of the Iraq war, from March to May 2003.

There’s no overarching theme of the documentary, it mainly just follows the reaction of Al Jazeera’s personnel as the war unfolds and the US military responds to its coverage. It makes for powerful viewing, especially now that we’re three years removed from the US invasion of Iraq. It’s surreal to watch people react in realtime to arguments and justifications that seem totally absurd today.

What really resonates today, though, is the huge list of baseless attacks made by Donald Rumsfeld and others on the professionalism and honesty of Al Jazeera. Rumsfeld actually accuses the network of fabricating the news, rounding up children and claiming that they lived in a building that was bombed. It’s not surprising to see the same people today make allegations against the New York Times and other media outlets that were made against Al Jazeera during the early days of the war. The criticisms were hollow them and are hollow now, but making them is a pathology for a certain proto-fascist segment of society.

The bombing of the Al Jazeera Baghdad office by coalition forces is given much attention in the film. I had forgotten that on the same day that the Al Jazeera correspondent was killed, the Abu Dhabi television office was also bombed, and a journalist in the Palestine Hotel was killed by a tank round. The idea that these incidents were a coincidental seems ludicrous, especially when the official response by the coalition was that the aircraft were taking fire from the building where Al Jazeera was housed. The Al Jazeera correspondent was broadcasting from the roof of that building only minutes before he was killed, and it was obvious nobody was firing from it. The film suggestively shows a US spokesmen (a thoughtful Marine lieutenant named Josh Rushing) commenting on the incredible accuracy of US bombs immediately before moving to the death of the Al Jazeera correspondent.

When I got the DVD, I thought the film may seem incredibly dated at this point. It doesn’t. It’s a difficult but mandatory watch, in my opinion.

In an interesting turn of events, Lieutenant Rushing has since been hired to host a show on Al Jazeera’s new English language station.

I am once again trying to keep up with too many feeds, and it’s time to pare down. This time, I’m removing most of my few remaining feeds from sites about politics. It’s not that I don’t care, but rather that I just don’t have any more energy for more of the same every day. I know exactly which politicians I support, and if they do anything really noteworthy, I’ll find out about it from news sites.

Political sites serve a different purpose, which is to tell you how to think about the news. I can figure that out for myself, or if something interesting crops up, I can always go check with the blogs. I think more than anything I’m giving in due to fatigue. I just can’t read any more posts analyzing the proper political response to the day’s events or what kind of messages politicians need to be delivering. Good luck Democrats in 2006, you have my vote and my money. What I don’t need is the hand wringing and amateur political strategizing. And what I certainly don’t need is a daily avalanche of spin.

I’ll go ahead and name names. Feeds that are departing for now: Juan Cole, The Plank, Think Progress, and Talking Points Memo (I’d keep it if it were a full text feed). That seems like relatively few feeds, but they are all high traffic.

An executive with Royal Dutch Shell (an oil company) says that it’s morally inappropriate to use food crops to create fuels because there are hungry people in the world. I hope he doesn’t leave any food on his plate when he dines out.

More to the point, currently the world produces more calories of food than are required to feed everyone in the world, and of course more food crops could be produced. There is no global food shortage. Hunger is caused by problems with food distribution and poverty, not due to an insufficient food supply.

It’s this sort of disingenuousness that makes people distrust corporate spokesmen. If they have created some new, sustainable alternatives to fossil fuels, I’m excited to hear about them. There’s no need to make up reasons why people should care.

In a weird turn of events, last week the New York Times ran an article about my home town, Orange, Texas. As I’ve mentioned before, the town sustained a lot of damage from Hurricane Rita last October. Times writer Dan Barry was dispatched to write a feature about the losses the town has suffered, both from the storm and more recently when a man from the town was killed serving in Iraq.

The article mentions how different the town looks since the storm. The hurricane knocked down many of the trees, and the town just looks like a different place. Interestingly, the matriarch of the town’s obligatory rich family died a few years ago, and it turned out that she owned what seemed like all of the undeveloped land surrounding the city. Not long after her death, the land was all sold off, and nearly all of that land was deforested. The changes as you drove into town were shocking. I’m sad to say that the change after Hurricane Rita was even bigger.

Mentioned in the New York Times article is First Presbyterian Church, which I attended until I moved away and which the rest of my family attends. The church structure is probably the most impressive building in town, home to the only opalescent glass dome in the United States. The dome was damaged by Hurricane Rita, and estimates are that it will cost $2.5 million to repair. (There are some pictures of the stained glass online.) I was glad to read today that a stained glass aficionado who read the article has contacted the church about a donation.

Anyway, it’s pretty amazing to read a feature about your own home town and the church where you spend hundreds of Sunday mornings in the New York Times. Everyone in the town that I spoke too was awed by the article, and it looks like it’s brought some tangible good for the town as well.

This week I have to look into ways to get filter out more comment spam here. I dutifully mark things as junk, but that doesn’t actually do anything other than get rid of the junk comments I’ve marked. Looks like it’s time to dig into what’s available for comment spam prevention with Movable Type.