Ideas & Analysis

Discussions of various issues including suggested solutions to problems and pure speculation

An Outrageous Proposition

I just got home to Colorado Springs from a week's trip to Chicago, and whereas a week sounds like a long time, well, it may be when you're 12. I am not 12. Poof! The week was there and gone.

But I had an idea yesterday that I'm going to pursue in this space. It's a challenge, to myself and to all of you, to engage in an outrageous experiment here in Contra. This will require the comments feature here on LiveJournal (alas, I'm not quite ready to move Contra over to WordPress yet) but that isn't the tough part. The aim of the experiment is to see if the larger “we” (again, myself and all of you) can engage in online political discussion completely devoid of anger.

I do not mean that you can't be angry; that's unreasonable and may be impossible. What I want you to do is write without anger. That takes some effort but it can be done, and it's a useful skill to have. I've found that forcing myself to write without expressing anger allows me to think more clearly. In some weird way, it decouples my anger from my rational mind and leaves it on a side track for awhile where it won't get in the way of the points I'm trying to put across.

Note that this is a challenge, but (for a limited time only! As not seen on TV!) it is also the rules. I have a rule for Contra that I don't invoke very often: You can be either angry or anonymous on my blog but you cannot be both. I delete ten or twelve comments a year from anonymous flamers who come out of nowhere and flame either me or someone in the comments. I sometimes give them a chance to identify themselves, but this rarely happens. Mostly I get another flame, and then the thread goes where all flames eventually go: Out. But until I finish up this series on politics, a new rule applies: No anger. It applies from today's entry until I call the whole thing done, which will almost certainly be when I go get my mouth worked on next week. Until then, angry comments will be deleted.

However, there's one final wrinkle: If and when I discern anger in a comment, I'm going to point it out in a nonjudgmental fashion and ask my readers if they agree that the message contains anger. I reserve the right to override the vote, but I promise to consider it seriously. A thumbs-up or -down is sufficient, but explaining why you agree or disagree with me regarding the presence of anger in the comment (not with the comment's factual content, which should be done separately) could be interesting.

I will be watching for the very human tendency to see anger more clearly in people you disagree with. I may or may not say anything, but I will be watching.

Let's see what happens.

_ . . . _

Some of the most reliable political theater (though generally not the best) proceeds from promised tax cuts. If I were to flip the Magic 8-Ball this second, it would predict that neither party will even attempt a tax cut in the next two years, irrespective of which wins. All the promises we've heard will be quietly forgotten, and probably explained by the obvious truth: We cannot afford to cut taxes at this time. The Bush tax cuts will quietly expire, and among the ill and elderly wealthy there will be more assisted suicides (both willing and unwilling) in 2010 than a civilized nation should tolerate. The Magic 8-Ball says no more than that, other than its standard mantra when answering political questions: “You are all behind me now.”

What I want to talk about tonight is another oft-heard mantra: “The rich aren't paying their fair share!” What never seems to come up in discussion is what the “fair share” would actually be. I want some hard numbers here. I remember reading of a psych experiment years ago in which people were asked a question something like this: “One man makes $10,000 a year. Another man makes ten times that amount. In a truly fair income tax system, how much more should the second man pay in income taxes than the first man?” The several choices ran from “The same” through an ascending scale of multipliers, like 2X, 5X, 10X, 50X, 100X, and 1000X. Overwhelmingly, people answered “10X” and seemed to think (as gleaned from subsequent discussions with the experimenters) that this was a progressive tax. It's not. It's a flat tax. The experiment was (if I recall) about leading questions, and this was only one question among many. But it suggests to me that we as a nation don't even remotely understand the tax system that we have, which is unsurprising, given that most Americans probably couldn't even lift the tax code. This makes the discussion difficult and complex.

We do have some hard numbers on the state of things as they now exist: 26% of Federal tax receipts come from the wealthiest 1%, which comprise 1.1 million individuals. The wealthiest 6% of taxpayers (5.6 million individuals) contribute 42% of all Federal receipts. The poorest 40% of Americans pay no Federal taxes at all beyond the Social Security payroll tax. And that's looking at Federal taxes generally; if you look at income taxes alone the picture is even more striking: For tax year 2005, IRS numbers tell us that the wealthiest 1% paid 39% of all income tax revenues. The top 10% paid 70%. This is a pretty progressive system. The question we need to ask ourselves as a nation is whether it's progressive enough, and we need to be brave enough to talk about real numbers.

There are two complications that need to be part of that discussion. First of all, the very rich have a great deal of control over how much their income is and when they get it. This is why tax receipts often go down when tax rates are raised: The rich simply cut back on generating new income and draw on their cash reserves until they call their tax guys and figure out which loopholes they can switch to in order to reduce their tax liability. This is in large part why the very rich have not been champions of the flat tax or other radical tax simplification schemes: Any such scheme would increase their liability hugely because such systems offer little flexibility and few loopholes.

The second complication is related to the first: It's not a good idea for the Federal government to depend on so few taxpayers for so much of its tax revenue, because the fewer people are paying, the “wigglier” and less predictable the numbers get. Even short-term planning becomes fluky, because a change in tax laws, or even an innovative new investment mechanism, can sweep across the finance business in less than a year, making previous tax revenue projections obsolete. The very rich share a common culture, and their money is “shaped” by a relatively few large banks and financial services firms. Small changes in the way money is handled are thus hugely leveraged.

I haven't even touched on the argument that everybody should pay something in income taxes simply to have a stake in the economy and the government. I only want to point out that Federal revenues would be a lot more stable and predictable if hundreds of millions of people are each paying a little (and those at the top paying a lot) than if only the people at the top are paying at all.

And on that note, I've got dogs to walk. More tomorrow. Remember: Keep your cool! (We may all learn something if you do!)

Suspending the Suspension

Oct 29th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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By conscious choice I generally don't talk about politics, having realized by degrees over a couple of decades that politics makes you stupid. Yes, it does. I'm amazed at the number of highly educated people I see in the blogosphere screaming anathemas at one another over a candidate's campaign promises, or some perceived slight of a partisan icon, etc. etc. The sheer quantity of raw hatred makes me want to pull the covers up over my head, even when I'm out in traffic and hear it on the radio, miles away from my comfy Sleep Number bed. I don't know most of these people, but I do know a few, and I need to remind one and all that anger is how the Emperor enslaves you. (You'd think that watching the full Star Wars saga 23 times would have taught people that much, at least.)

But I'm now annoyed enough to suspend my suspension, and for the next seven days I will indeed talk about politics, but with a wrinkle: I will not mention any candidate by name. (Could you do that too? Dare ya!) Politics is not about specific people or parties, but rather the ideas surrounding governance, and much could be discussed today that is not being discussed, because far too many of us have taken up our spears, smeared on plenty of colorful gonzoberry juice, tossed our intellects up on the rack over the mantle, and bumbled out the door to scream tribal insults at anyone who dares disagree with us. (Tribalism itself is an interesting psychological issue that I will return to after my self-imposed political embargo resumes.)

Why seven days? Because seven days from today I go back in for more oral surgery, and at that point it will all be over and I will pull the covers up over my head.

_ . . . _

So. Have I read the latest candidate platforms? Have I evaluated the various promised tax cuts and health plans and other goodies? Of course I have. Have they persuaded me to vote one way or another? Get real, people: Such things are rubbish. Nothing a candidate says or does after they declare candidacy is the least bit useful in making voting decisions. Here's why:

It's legal to lie. And politicians never lie, right?
It's legal to change your mind after taking office, even if you didn't consciously lie during the campaign.
There is no penalty for failure.

All this being true, candidates can be expected to say whatever they think will get them elected. The worst we can do is vote them out of office at some future date, after which they can safely sell their memoirs to Random House and get rich on the lecture circuit, irrespective of the number of deaths and lost jobs directly attributable to their time in office.

All this seems pretty obvious to me. But there's a fourth item that one would think a semester of high school civics would have made clear:

Presidents are not kings. We are not ruled by presidents. We are ruled by political parties.

Once a single party holds all three elected branches of national government (and for the Senate, “holding” means a filibuster-proof majority) that party pretty much governs alone. Lacking such blanket control, we are ruled by “the politics of the possible,” which is a glorious way of saying, “whatever both parties can compromise on.” There is a strong argument for divided government as a way of minimizing the damage that single-party rule can easily cause, and that argument is one of the things that informs my voting decisions.

Another and more important thing I do is look at what a candidate did and said (in government or outside of government) before he or she declared candidacy. Voting records matter greatly. The political culture in which a candidate grew up is also pertinent. One can learn a fair amount about a candidate by looking at who their friends are, what their religion is, where they went to college, where and in what industry they worked prior to working in government, and so on. The key here is what the person was like before election to office was in the picture. With long-time career politicians this is tricky, but it can still be done.

The final factor, of course, may be the most important of all: Look at where their money is coming from. The first thing that any candidate does after election is pay back big campaign donors with political favors that make the world safer for them. The little guys don't matter at all. The big-money donors basically own both parties and candidates. I hear a lot of tribalists deny this, but it's true. It's how the system works. We're about to see it happen again. Just watch.

The "Pepper Riots" and the PNCC

Oct 22nd, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

History is often written by the victors, and one of the gnarliest problems with victor history is not what the victors say, but what they leave out. You can ask the losers what they think, but sometimes what the victors leave out is something the losers would just as soon forget as well.

I learned something today about the founding of the Polish National Catholic Church, the first significant Old Catholic jurisdiction in America. The history we have of the PNCC describes the the tension between the predominantly Irish Roman Catholic clergy in America and the waves of dirt-poor Polish immigrants who started arriving in the late 1880s. This tension did exist and was the energizing force behind the Polish Old Catholic movement, but the actual triggering incident in the split between Polish immigrants and the Roman Catholic Church may have been a riot at St. Hedwig's Church in the Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago.

Some of the story is here; scroll down about a third of the way through the article. I'll summarize: Overwhelmed by the numbers of new immigrants pouring into Bucktown, the Polish-American pastor of St. Hedwig's brought in Fr. Anthony Kozlowski, a fiery, European-educated young Polish priest to help minister to the parishioners, few of whom spoke English. St. Hedwig's was under the administration of the Resurrectionists, an order of priests of mostly Polish extraction. Their former nationalities aside, the Resurrectionists were conservative and fiercely loyal to the Pope. The order attempted to play down the Polishness of religious expression at St. Hedwig's. Many of the younger immigrants were suspicious of the order, thinking that it was being pressured by the Irish hierarchy that otherwise ran the American church, and the Chicago church in particular. Details are thin, but in early 1895, Kozlowski led a revolt against the Resurrectionist pastor, Thaddeus Barzynski, and his brother Joseph Barzynski, that eventually resulted in two-thirds of the St. Hedwig's congregation quitting the church and following Kozlowski away from governance by the Pope.

The revolt went critical on February 7, 1895. Kozlowski's hotheads broke into the St. Hedwig's rectory, where the Barzynskis had barricaded themselves, and assaulted the priests. The police were called, and found a crowd of 3,000 immigrants milling around the church. When the officers attempted to disperse the crowd, several protesters threw powdered red pepper in their faces. Dozens were injured in the ensuing brawl, and Chicago's (Irish) Roman Catholic archbishop shut down St. Hedwig's for several months.

By that time, the 1,000 or so immigrants who objected to Papal rule had bought land a few blocks away and began built their own church, All Saints Cathedral. This is where my other histories pick up: Kozlowski traveled to Berne, where he had earlier met the the leaders of the European Old Catholic Church. The Old Catholic bishops of Germany, Switzerland, and Holland consecrated him as the first bishop of the Polish Catholic Church of America. A similar but unrelated situation was then playing out in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in which a parish priest named Francis Hodur broke with the Pope and in 1897 founded the Polish National Independent Catholic Church, again outside Papal control. Still more Polish-American groups broke with the Pope as the 1890s wound down, including a major one in Buffalo and smaller ones in Cleveland and other cities. In the years after Kozlowski died unexpectedly in 1897, the European Old Catholics persuaded the various American parishes of independent Polish Catholics to unite under a new banner, the Polish National Catholic Church. In 1907 Hodur was consecrated bishop by the same groups that had consecrated Kozlowski, and he led the PNCC throughout his long life until his death in 1953.

It's interesting to see where the various histories disagree: The current Roman Catholic pastor of St. Hedwig's of Chicago provided the factual information on Kozlowski's revolt that I summarized above, but suggested that the Polish National Catholic Church never really went anywhere. Not so: The PNCC was a force in American Catholicism as long as there were Polish-speaking communities in America, and only began to decline after the children of Polish immigrants assimilated into English-speaking American culture after WWII. (There has been a resurgence of PNCC parishes in Wisconsin and other places in the past few years, serving recent Polish immigrants.) Histories of the PNCC emphasize the heroic efforts of Bishop Hodur, even though Kozlowski was the first Polish American Catholic to quit the Roman church, and made the European Old Catholics aware of Polish discontent with Papal Catholicism. Riots of Poles against the Roman Catholic Church happened in other cities as well as Chicago, but PNCC histories tiptoe very lightly around them. Histories of the PNCC published by the PNCC mention Kozlowski only in passing, if they mention him at all.

Once again, the lesson is this: If you want anything approaching the truth, you have to listen to both sides. And sometimes, you have to fill in the gaps that neither side wishes to fill. But hey, who ever said history was an easy subject?

The Sunspot Curse

Oct 14th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Sure as hell, every time I go looking for sunspots, they run screaming. I was first licensed as a ham radio operator three whole solar cycles ago, and when I finally got my haywire, buzzing, borderline lethal homebrew transmitter running in 1973, Cycle 20 was rolling over on its back and kicking its legs in the air. It didn't seem fair: Most of the reason I started studying for the ticket was that my friends were speaking glowingly of how you could work Rangoon on three milliwatts into a bent paperclip in 1968. (And you only needed one milliwatt in 1957…) By the time Cycle 21 was peaking in 1980, I had discovered computers in a big way, and my trusty Kenwood mostly gathered dust. And of course, when the next peak rolled around in 1990, I was working myself to exhaustion getting PC Techniques off the ground. When Cycle 23 peaked in early 2001, the ionosphere was screaming again, and my publishing company, which had expanded so amazingly in 1990, was imploding along with the tech bubble. I had other things to think about.

So now life has settled down, and I have a marvelous multiband dipole up in the rafters. I need to talk some sense into my fire sensors, but the shielded alarm wire is on order and the rest is seat-of-the-pants attic carpentry. By the time the warm-weather QRN has receded south of the equator to deafen the VHs instead of me, I will have the best antenna system I've had in a long time. (Not like I've ever had anything especially jazzy.) Alas, the sunspots ran screaming three years ago, and the sun's complexion has rarely been this clear nor healed so rapidly once the occasional blemish appears. Supposedly, the first Cycle 24 sunspots have begun showing up, but they are so small that they can only be seen in significant telescopes, and disappear again in only hours. I'm sitting here starting to stress: What's going to keep me from getting on the air at the next peak in 2012? Oh, wait, I forgot: The world's going to end that year.

Bummer. I need to work on my timing.

All Dogs Go to Heaven

Oct 7th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Sam Paris sent me an image that's been bouncing around the Net for some time now, and I roared. It's funny on the face of it, whether you know anything about religion or not—but if you've struggled like I have with the difficulties of understanding the several competing concepts of God, salvation, and the life to come, it was, well, ineffably hilarious.

I understand that it's not real, and in fact was created with Church Sign Generator. I don't know where it came from so I can't credit it, but read it all the way down. Yee-hah!

Where the topic comes up for discussion, I've heard many people say that the descriptions fed to us in childhood of Hell were vivid and very detailed—but Heaven was always vague, colorless, and ultimately boring. I keep flashing on the classic Gahan Wilson cartoon of some guy with wings and a halo sitting alone on a cloud, thinking to himself: “I sure wish I'd brought a magazine.”

Although the Catholic Powers go out of their way to deny it, buried deep in Catholic culture and tradition is a very radical kind of universalism. God did not create the physical universe as a temporary nuisance to be endured and then left with no regrets. The physical universe is in fact a crude, low-res reflection of higher realities that we simply cannot apprehend in this life. One metaphor might be Olaf Stapledon's cosmology from Star Maker, in which the Star Maker crafts a steady succession of increasingly mature creations, each creation “better” in a metaphysical sense than the one before. Another metaphor might be one I heard in college 35 years ago: That our physical creation is a faint echo of a higher world, which in turn is a slightly clearer and louder echo of an even higher world, and so on far beyond our ability to grasp. At each level there will be challenges, struggle, and probably suffering appropriate to our levels of spiritual development. Creation was in fact a far, far bigger Bang than we think.

So do dogs go to heaven? Hardly. They are already there. And when we leave this world and continue our long walk back toward the Creator, they will be right beside us.

Scarcity Leaves Its Mark

Sep 26th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Whether or not an unexamined life is worth living, examining what goes on inside your head is a lot of fun. I’ve become interested in psychology late in life (after treating it with contempt when I was a cocksure young rationalist) and identifying my biases and tracing them back down to their sources has become a minor hobby here.

My recent study of CSS reminded me of one of those biases: I hate windowing. I just hate it, and hate it so deeply I don’t even notice the hatred anymore. If you were to look over my shoulder as I work, you’d notice that I don’t use it. Whatever app I’m working in gets the whole screen, and when you can see the desktop at all, it means I’m in neutral and nothing useful is going on. I came to the insight after practicing fluid layouts in CSS. BTW, If you’re interested in learning how to do fluid layouts, I haven’t found anything better than Nate Koechly’s Web article “Intricate Fluid Layouts in Three Easy Steps.” Nate created the Yahoo UI Grids CSS system, which I may begin using once I learn enough CSS by building things from scratch. I like YUI because it supports fixed widths. Fluid layouts are not mandatory.

This is good, as I find fluid layouts peculiarly repellant. Things like this suggest a live frog nailed to a tree, squirming in agony. (Drag the corner of the window around and you may start to see what I mean.) Part of it is my long history with fixed page layouts in magazine and book work, and part of it is a desire to focus and not be distracted by things going on in other windows. The bulk of the bias, I think, proceeds from the same reason that the Greatest Generation were tireless savers and hated to waste anything: They grew up in conditions of scarcity. I ducked the Great Depression and WWII, but I followed personal computing from its rank beginnings, when displays were 16 X 64 character text screens or worse. I learned computers starving for screen real estate.

The IBM PC gave us 24 X 80 displays, but that was never enough. Text windowing systems like TopView seemed insane to me, and back in April 1989, when I was doing the “Structured Programming” column in DDJ, I wrote and published an “anti-windowing system” that treated the crippled 24 X 80 display as a scrollable window into a much larger character grid. Full-page text displays eventually arrived: The MDS Genius 80-character X 66-line monochrome portrait-mode text display (left) sat on my desk from 1985 through 1992, when Windows 3.1 finally made text screens irrelevant. (Lack of Windows drivers for the display soon forced MDS into liquidation.) It wasn’t until I bought a 21″ Samsung 213T display in 2005 and started running at 1600 X 1200 that I first recall thinking, “Maybe this is big enough.”

And only just barely. People who were born with a 1024 X 768 raster in their mouths may not be able to figure it, and I guess there’s really no way I can explain. It’s just me. Starve a man for screen space for thirty years, and he is unlikely to want to share what he has with more than one app at a time. Scarcity leaves its mark.

Why I Don't Use LinkedIn Much

Sep 15th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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From time to time I get notes from people who have asked me to connect to them on LinkedIn and then didn't have their invitations accepted. I need to emphasize right here that it's not because I don't like you, though I wonder sometimes just how useful LinkedIn actually is. I've done a few introductions, but that's about it. I don't have the paid version, and thus most of the system's features aren't available to me.

No, the problem with LinkedIn is purely technical: Most of the time, the damned thing goes into the bushes after I try to respond to an invitation or other communication from another member. The browser spinner spins and spins, but for whatever reason the progress bar gets about three-fourths of the way toward the finish line and just stops there until the connection times out.

I get this behavior from other sites now and then. I've been very interested in the CSS WebApp IStylr, but I have yet to get anywhere with it for the same reason: Click on a control, and the transaction stalls without going to completion. IStylr may simply be on an overloaded server. It's a one-man project and it's not located in the US. LinkedIn has no such excuse, and I see this problem only very rarely on other large sites. Sometimes logging in very very early or very very late seems to help—but if I have to log in at 2 ayem to get it to talk to me, well, ain't gonna happen.

Every so often I go up to LinkedIn to try and work on the stack of invitations and other things I have waiting, and every so often I get a few transactions to go through. It seems like a lousy way to run a cloud computing site, and I wonder if there's something weird about my own system configuration that LinkedIn just doesn't play well with. If you've had this kind of problem with LinkedIn (or if you have any thoughts on where I should look for possible incompatibilities) I would fersure like to hear about it.

Fetishes

Sep 8th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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The original Star Trek premiered 42 years ago today. Feeling old, I went for a walk and tried to identify another pair of three-syllable homonyms and got nowhere. Viritrilbia, we need ya down here for a bit—and bring McPhee if you’ve got him.

Also on the word front, I got a note last night from a reader asking me how I define “fetish”, as my use of the word in yesterday’s entry puzzled him. I think he’s young, and maybe he’s thinking latex or bicycle seats, but not so: A fetish is a morally-neutral opinion held with peculiar force. The words “bias” and “prejudice” are now generally considered pejorative, so I had to think of something else. “Fetish” seemed to fit. We all have them, and as we get older and more willing to consider the possibility that we are not all-wise, we often begin to admit it.

My best-known fetish is the contrarian reaction to the well-known (and pretty silly) tech culture aversion to upper-case characters. Talk about a fetish: EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT UPPER-CASE CHARACTERS MEAN THAT YOU’RE SHOUTING, SO NO ONE ANYWHERE IN THE UNIVERSE SHOULD EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER USE THEM FOR ANYTHING EVER AGAIN!!!!!! well guys in just spring when the little lame goat-footed balloon man begins coding far and wee (in pretty-how towns like palo alto) even e. e. cummings cant figger out wtf hes trying to do especially if he does it in c {heh}

My fetish is this: Upper-case characters should be used for the framing members of program code and content markup. In Pascal, things like BEGIN, END, WHILE, REPEAT, UNTIL, IF, THEN, and so on give the program its shape. They should stand out against the general landscape of functions and variables like kleig lights. Ditto content: Markup tags should be in upper case. They need to stand out. Statistically, ordinary content text is lower case, with a sprinkling of upper-case characters so thin as to barely be there. Not being able to spot a tag in the thick of your text can make errors so hard to see that you start flip<p>ing out, whether you’re in Palo Alto or Pa<hr>ump. The whole idea is to make the structure of your work easier to see at a glance, especially when there are pages and pages of it to go through and keep correct and-up-to-date.

I know I’ve lost the war, but I and others with the same fetish may have fought it well enough that the lower-case fetishists had to build the prohibition into what amount to the physical laws of content markup: XHTML absolutely will not allow upper-case characters in tags. God help us all if somebody somewhere perceived our HTML tags as SHOUTING!

And we give these people Ph.D.s, mon dieu.

(The only rational argument I’ve ever seen about this involves HTML compression, which gains you a mind-boggling 3-4% in markup file size. OMG, PONEZ!)

My other major fetish is about visual development. As our tools get better, hand-coding is increasingly a waste of time and an exercise of pure hubris. I know it’s fun, but how much will you bet that you can write better assembly code than gcc? I’m sure that I can’t, and I may know maybe a little bit about the subject. This goes triple for CSS/XHTML, which compared to modern x86 machine code are almost trivial. The field is newer than native code generation, and the tools are less mature, but the day will come when you draw the screen you want, and correct, optimized markup and styles come out the back end. We may be closer than you think, and halleluia for that!

It’s downhill from there on the fetish side. My off-dry wine fetish is well known. I’m increasingly sure that high-fructose corn syrup lies behind most of our obesity problem. I worry that the Pope will become a serious danger to the Catholic Church, if he hasn’t already. Etc. The point is that we all have our obsessions. We may have reasons for them—or think that we do—but certain ideas put down roots in us, and after awhile it’s difficult to set them aside. The wise person watches his/her own fetishes closely, lest they become damaging in some way. Shoot for moderation in all things, especially your obsessions!

On Being a Webfossil

Sep 7th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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Carol and I bundled up the puppies and took Otto (our Bigfoot RV) down the road about 100 miles to Buena Vista, Colorado, and we’re kicking back here amidst the mountains for a few days. We’re not doing much—that’s the idea!—but reading and gathering our thoughts.

I’ve been tearing at what I call my “Webfossil” problem for some time now without saying much about it here. I’ve been posting content to the Web since 1995, and way back then I tried all kinds of things. However, for the past seven or eight years I’ve been using basically the same toolset: Dreamweaver 3/Fireworks 3. These were released in 1999 and are pretty creaky, but they work and the content gets posted. Periodically people message me and tell me that my HTML is a little bizarre, and it is, because I don’t write it—that’s what software is for. (Newcomers here should keep in mind that I’m the Visual Developer Magazine guy, and that WYSIWYG design, whether for code or for content, is one of my major fetishes.) I’ve become a bit of a Webfossil. Yes, I know, I need new software.

But if I’m considering new software, shouldn’t I be thinking about entirely new approaches to the basic challenge? I keep a blog, and I write Web articles on various topics, both using 1999-era tools. LiveJournal has been a useful mirror, and I adopted it almost entirely to provide an RSS feed for Contra. (The comments have been fun, and were something of a surprise.) I don’t really need LiveJournal for that anymore, as hosting services with preinstalled and house-supported instances of blogging tools like WordPress are common and cheap. (I just got an account with one and am testing a few things. More on this in coming weeks.)

CMS packages are one alternative approach that I’m looking at very closely. Blogging is either built-in or supported by plug-ins, and management of static articles is basically what CMS systems are for. It’s an embarrassment of riches out there; my biggest question now is which one to choose. Drupal is more secure than Joomla, but from what I’ve seen it takes a lot of work to change anything, most of which is hand-coded PHP or CSS. Now I’m no expert at either, but I’ve played with both and I’m a quick study when I know it’s worth my while. What I barf on is what I always barf on: Too much work per unit result. Hand-coding is fun (and addictive—definitely been there!) but it wastes my time, and at 56, you reluctantly start counting the years you have left.

I know less about Joomla, but it looks like it has more visual tools, more plug-ins, and more available themes. The themes are CSS and thus easily altered by a very cool sort of object-oriented programming for content markup. CSS is fun, if you don’t get deranged about seventeen-box fluid layouts. I tried it back in 2001 or so, and set it aside because the spec was twenty miles ahead of the rendering engines. There are still some weird little issues—the CSS greasy eminences do not like the HR tag at all, and deprecate it mortally in favor of peabrained hacks like making the lower edge of a paragraph box visible—but b’gosh and begorrah, you can render the same code in the major browsers these days and it all looks pretty much the same. I guess I really should abandon table-based layouts.

My fundamental objection to CSS remains: There’s no reason not to drag text boxes around on a display and then have the software compile your design to XHTML and style sheets—except the software to do this doesn’t exist yet. I still have a couple of things to test, primarily Style Master and especially iStylr, but even the formidable Dreamweaver CS3 is still basically an HTML table-basher. I’ve been doing that for seven years now and it’s a nuisance.

I may hand-code a fluid equivalent to my canonical table-based Contra layout for practice if nothing more, but the ultimate solution is probably an all-purpose turn-the-crank Web content management system, even if what I want doesn’t quite exist yet. Sooner or later, it will. Time to crack the mold (as venerable and useful as it’s been) and stop being a fossil.

One Ebook Reader Inside Another

Aug 10th, 2008

by Jeff Duntemann.

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The programming tracks at Denvention 3 didn't get me terribly fired up to see them, and that was evidently a common reaction. Instead, I spent a lot of time with friends camped out on couches talking tech. Intense discussion went on about ebook readers and what they ought to be, along with much flashing of Kindles and Sonys and iPhones—which, I might suggest, would make reasonable reflow readers if a Certain Somebody of Inconsistent Insight wasn't so convinced that nobody reads anymore. (And if Apple didn't reserve the right to reach down to your iPhone and nuke any application it doesn't like…) So it may be time to outline what several years of thinking (and a certain amount of messing with various reader thingies that I have owned, borrowed, or simply beaten on) have converged to, in my own vision of an Ideal Ebook Reader.

The shouting war between those who want to read fixed pages and those who want to read reflowable text is pointless, and after awhile, silly. There is more than one possible view of a document, and as with suits and dresses, some documents look better in certain views than in others. A novel or nonfiction volume lacking illustrations can be read reflowably on a small screen. Anything with useful page structure or significant illustrations requires a genuine page view. Page views require large displays. There's no getting around that. On the other hand, the conventional wisdom that you must have either a full-page view or a pocket-sized device is also dead wrong.

Envision this: A rectangular block roughly the size and shape of an iPhone. It's really a storage module, with an SSD of a decent size. (I'd suggest at least 32 GB for starters.) The storage module has some minimal intelligence, and a battery. On one end, there's a high-bandwidth serial connector. USB 2 isn't quite broad enough. ESATA would work, or whatever comes after USB 2. Now, note well that the storage module is not only a storage module. It has an display and touch controls, and a renderer for reflowable ebook text, as well as a viewer for images and videos. It may also be a cell phone; certainly, there's room for the jelly beans in something that size.

Now envision a second, larger device, which is basically a tablet, or a convertible clamshell. It isn't necessarily a competitor to a full-featured laptop or Tablet PC, but something more resembling a 10″ or 11″ netbook, with enough processor muscle to handle Web browsing, email, and light text/spreadsheet manipulation. It has a slot for a removable drive…and the storage module I described above plugs into the slot. The tablet uses the smaller module for its data storage, but the data storage device itself can operate independently, as a pocket ebook reader or even a cell phone. No sync problems: There's only one SSD for both devices. But when you don't need the tablet reader, you pop out the pocket reader and stick in your pocket. If you have an idle moment, thumb it on and read another chapter from The Molten Flesh. Or call ahead to reserve a table at Chez Geeque.

What we basically have here is a GSM-equipped pocket reader that “wears” a larger tablet reader for the sake of its display and battery, and possibly its keyboard. The two devices (tablet and pocket reader) don't necessarily have to be made by the same firm. The two physical form factors and interface mechanisms should ideally be an independent hardware/software standard, so that people could choose one device or another from several vendors, mixing and matching tablets and pocket readers to fit their own preferences. Not everybody may want a pocket reader, so a “dumb” storage block without a display would be possible, and cheaper. Putting GSM on the pocket reader would allow the pocket reader to be a cellphone, and the docked assembly to work like a Kindle.

I don't know how likely this is, and I know it's not going to happen next week. I just need to make it clear that this is what I want, and what I think might serve the needs of the greatest number of ebook people in the greatest number of ways. I do know that getting into the either-or mindset is a trap, for ebook readers or anything else. We are engineers. We solve problems. And sometimes one solution lies inside another.