Posts

Rogers Cadenhead wonders what happens if FeedBurner goes belly up.

Endlessly reporting the horrifying facts of the day can get tiresome, and I have found that many of us liberal or progressive types have burned out on it to a certain extent since last year’s election. I post about political matters when I literally cannot stop myself, but I never intended for this to be a political weblog, and frankly the problems seem too big and too pervasive for my cries in the wilderness to do a whole lot of good. The fundamental source of my discontent is that it’s just too hard to stay well-informed on the issues of the day. I work hard to keep up with what’s going on, and I usually find that I only really understand a very small percentage of any ongoing controversy. Most people don’t even try very hard. Anyway, Billmon posts about what it’s like to go through this crisis when you do maintain a political weblog. For me, it’s write more about the Web, and programming, and other stuff that interests me. For a site that is about politics and current events, there isn’t that sort of fallback. What I find interesting is that Billmon seems to have turned toward art. I don’t think it’s a surprise that the best art usually happens at the worst times. Certainly at times like this I wish I could write a bitingly humorous novel, or play, or musical that captures what it’s like to live through these times when in many ways, hope seems to be lost (at least to me). I think it would do a better job of getting my point across than just complaining about what I read in the news all the time. ...

Amanda Marcotte argues that for conservatives, freedom and life are opposing values (via Respectful of Otters). Here’s the crux of it: I have also noticed that two values that BushCo likes to fling around are "life" and "freedom", but I have also noticed that the two are opposite values in their rhetoric. You can have freedom or life, but not both. They are pretty consistent in this viewpoint, and if they evoke freedom, you can be sure they are covering up for someone's death, and if they evoke "life", you can be sure they are trying to take away your freedoms. It’s a seductive argument, but is it a valid one? I’m not sure yet, and the fact that it is so seductive makes me a bit wary. ...

I’ve set up an installation of Mediawiki to play with. Here’s a link. Mediawiki 1.4.0 was just released earlier this week and there appears to be a problem with the install file. I had to copy a file out of the 1.4rc1 archive to get the installer to work, and now the default skin looks somewhat broken. I’m going to hack around and try to fix it. Update: Looks like I fixed the problem, more or less. ...

I just noticed that the MySQL database that contains all of the entries posted here (and not much else) is over 24 megs. That’s a lot bigger than I would have thought.

I have a feeling that once I understand this, I’ll have achieved a higher state of consciousness. (Via Tim Bray.)

Jeremy Zowodny rightly points out today that Web development is hard. Back in the good old days, I used to do mostly HTML and JavaScript stuff, writing very little code that ran on the server. After assessing my own design skills and my loathing for JavaScript and browser incompatabilities, I ran toward server-side development as fast as I could and never looked back. When you consider the fact that most applications are straightforward CRUD (create/update/delete) front ends for databases, it’s easy to see that most of the magic happens on interaction design side of things. Server-side development is both more straightforward and more lucrative. I wonder why the job market doesn’t value the skills of the Web developer as highly as it probably should. ...

The New England Journal of Medicine has published an editorial on the Terry Schiavo case. (Via Eric Muller.)

I’m still in the design phase for my all new weblog software with comments and all that other good stuff. I’m planning on building it using Ruby on Rails (a nifty new version was just released). Currently I’m working on setting up a development environment. I just installed Ubuntu Linux on my development box, and the next step is getting Ruby, and Rails, running properly. At the same time I’m working on writing up some design notes for the application. I was planning on writing them up on a wiki on my server, but maybe installing a Wiki at rc3.org would make more sense. ...

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has a great, well, rant on how the Terri Schiavo legislation passed this weekend trashes the rule of law in this country.