I just installed Zoundry’s Raven blogging client in portable mode–I don’t see any reason for it to be installed in any other way–and this is a test post. Bloggar was a little disappointing; for example, I still don’t see how to add tags to an entry locally. So the search for a client goes on, and this post will include an image to see how well image uploading works. A WYSIWYG editor is good, and should allow images to be flowed within text in various ways. I don’t know about borders–will have to try them, since Raven supports them. The issue of how well Raven posts to multiple blogs is yest untested, but if it passes the image-upload test, that’s the next thing to look at. So far it’s pretty impressive.
Testing Zoundry Raven
Test Post from W-Bloggar
This was posted from w.bloggar, a free Windows client-side utility that works something like Semagic, through the XML-RPC API. It may have the ability to post to both WordPress and LiveJournal from a single item edited offline, which would be just about ideal for my needs. We will see. The next step will be to see if it can post the same item to both WordPress and LJ.
This item will go away (or be radically rewritten) once I figure out how it works and how best to use it.
Odd Lots
- Foxit Software (which sells a line of very good PDF-related software, including the Foxit Reader, which I use daily) has announced an e-ink based ebook reader, the eSlick. The device isn’t being shipped yet, but there have been some early reactions in Wired and other places. I’m interested because Foxit is unlikely to claim (as most ebook enthusiasts do) that PDF is the spawn of the devil. Worth watching.
- The Loopy Idea of the Month comes from two Ohio academics who have recently patented the notion of collapsing hurricanes by flying around them in supersonic aircraft and (somehow) using the sonic boom shockwaves to scramble the storm. Apart from the fact that supersonic aircraft use fuel at a prodigous rate, I still don’t quite follow the physics of how this is supposed to collapse the storm. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
- Jim Strickland passed a long a detailed how-to for extracting metallic titanium from white pigment. The process is straightforward, if (as it must be) highly energetic. I think the stickier question is working the titanium after it’s been isolated. Titanium is difficult to melt and very difficult to machine. I have a piece in my curio cabinet, and I’m very glad I don’t have to make anything from it.
- Many people sent me the latest version of the old joke that “If Programming Languages Were Religions…” most of them lamenting that my favorite language—and my favorite religion—were not included. So it goes. I’m guessing that Pascal, like Catholicism, is patient: There will be only one programming language in use in the hereafter, and it will not be C++. You’ll have to go somewhere else for that.
- The Wall Street Journal tells me that the RIAA is abandoning its mass-lawsuit strategy of copyright enforcement. It hasn’t worked at reducing music piracy, and its sole effect was making the music industry bigshots look positively evil. One can only wonder why it took so long to figure this out, and whether the damage can ever really be undone.
- Here’s a wry peek at what we may see come out of the Big 3 bailout. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link. Have you driven a Pelosi lately?
- Also from Pete comes word that Werner Von Braun wrote SF. This actually looks pretty good—gotta love that cover!
Is Everybody Happy?
I just ordered two books: Gross National Happiness by Arthur Brooks, and The Big Sort, by Bill Bishop. The books are part of my long-term research into why we think and act the way we do. I’ll report further next year when I summarize my thoughts so far, but sniffing around online for reactions to Brooks’ book has raised an interesting question: Can we in fact measure happiness?
I don’t always agree with Arthur Brooks, but I admire his willingness to bring up issues that seem calculated to infuriate liberal opinion-makers—and back his opinions up with reasonable research. One of his controversial positions in Gross National Happiness is that happiness appears to correlate with intensity of religious feelings. Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson challenges that thesis in his blog, and whereas it’s a reasonable counterpoint, one of the comments below Wilkinson’s essay hit the whole problem between the eyes: People belonging to deeply conservative religious organizations are pressured, sometimes intensely, to say that they’re happy. (The commenter claims to be a lapsed Evangelical.) This maps with my own experience dealing with the conservative Catholic fringe, and yet the truth is that a lot of these people seem to me to be not only deeply unhappy, but on the thin edge of panic.
Why this should be is a subject I hate to broach at all and can’t even attempt right now, but set it aside for the moment. The real flaw in Brooks’ research may be that asking a person if he or she is happy is not a useful way to measure happiness. I see research summarized online indicating that the people in Nigeria are the happiest people in the world, though more recent research tags the Danes. The summaries understate the obvious: Happiness does not mean the same thing to all people. Worse, there are cultural pressures in a lot of places to fit in and not make a fuss (Japan comes to mind) and heavy pressure in religious and other tribal organizations to claim that the tribe provides everything they need to be happy—leading their adherents to make the statements that are simply expected of them. It’s like the ritual answer to the seminal rhetorical question, “How ya doin’?” People who answer something other than “Great!” don’t really understand the ritual.
It might be more useful to measure happiness by way of things like public civility, rate and tenure of marriage, incidence of alcohol and drug abuse, and so on. If research must be based on questionnaires, it may be possible to approach the matter from the other side, by asking more oblique questions about feelings like satisfaction, pain, sadness, or enthusiasm, or at least things that are not obviously a part of cultural or religious scripts. The truth may be that the whole question is meaningless; after all, what is the objective experience of the color red, or the taste of dry wine? We all experience the world differently, and we interpret that experience for ourselves through the lens of our culture and the social structures that are the most important to us. If we badly want to be part of a sophisticated social culture, we may choke down a crappy bitter Cabernet and praise it to the ceiling even if (to us) it’s (red) swill, because that’s what the cultural leaders and our “initiated” peers expect. This is a very deep well of inquiry, and I will be writing more about it in months to come.
We’ll see what Brooks has to say when the book arrives, but I’m suspicious of the premise, even though I would be happy (as it were) to be proven wrong.
Red Swill and Warfarin
Today’s entry is about classic rat poison. Or maybe a Georgian folk band. (From our Georgia.) Or perhaps the mis-persistence of memory, mine specifically. And certainly about the power of true names.
Hokay. Calling all Baby Boomers formerly of Chicago: Do you recall seeing signs tacked to the wooden power poles in the alley, warning us that the City of Chicago had set out “Red Swill and Warfarin” to combat rats? The memory came to mind in an odd way: I had remembered my writer friend Chuck Ott casually remarking, some time back in the 70s, that “Red Swill and Warfarin” would be a great name for a fantasy thief and his barbarian sidekick. The signs were a commonplace when I was ten or twelve. And whereas it’s been my experience that absolutely everything has been mentioned somewhere on the Web at least once (and thus findable via Google) I found nothing about “red swill and warfarin.” I did find a decent folkie band in Macon called Red Swill. I found plenty about warfarin, which is a medical anticoagulant that was toxic in rats until the rats ate a little too much of it and started developing tolerance in the 1960s. But no mention of the signs, which all my Boomer friends knew as just part of the alley background in our home town.
Pete Albrecht mentioned on Skype last night that there is an herbal called red squill that is toxic in large doses, and (significantly) an emetic. That’s a big deal if you’re a rat, because rats can’t vomit, and emetics put them into convulsions. Aha! So we do find mention of the thief and his barbarian:
It was the spring of 1967 [in Lincoln Park, Chicago] when I came up with a plan. Spring was when they baited Pearl Court with Red Squill and Warfarin, and every few days you’d see a dead rat lying there. Many of them were decomposing and maggot-eaten but one day I found one in perfect condition. I picked up that rat by the tail and put it in a shoebox. I took it to my grandmother’s house, the back yard of which adjoined Pearl Court, wrapped the box with brightly colored paper and tied it with a shiny ribbon. I then took it over to Robin’s house a block away. He wasn’t home, but his older sister was outside with some of her friends. “Hi, Debbie,” I said in as casual a tone as I could muster, “I have a present for Robin. Please give it to him and make sure you tell him it’s from me.” The next day in school he approached me, grinning like a jackal, and spoke his first, but not last words to me. “Thanks for the present!”
Yet another example (in my long list) of the truth that if you don’t know what something is called, you can’t find it. The last time it was coupler nuts, but the nice man at Ace Hardware looked at the sample I had found in my junkbox and took me right to them. The time before that it was golabki. (I know a few Polish words, but can’t spell them.) This may be an unsolveable problem, or at least one with no general solution.
And while I’m at it, here is more than you probably wanted to know about all the various concoctions used to kill rats. Bad beer with a little food coloring might work too, but I’ll leave that experiment to others.
Mikogo Over Skype
Yesterday I discovered Mikogo, a Net meeting/remote desktop technology that would be a lot like VNC and the others I’ve played with, except that it can be configured to piggyback on Skype. There is a Mikogo Skype “extra” (what Skype calls its plug-ins) and I will be using it to give a remote lecture on Carl & Jerry to the Southwest Ohio Digital and Technical Symposium on January 10, with the help of Jay Slough K4ZLE.
Jay and I gave it a spin yesterday to make sure we could connect during the Symposium in January, and in addition to working well, Mikogo was mighty cool. You install the extra from the Skype Extras menu, and it comes down the same way that other Skype extras do. Once installed, you can create a 1-to-1 or 1-to-many connection with anybody else who has the Mikogo Skype extra running. Skype handles the audio, and where the connection is between two machines, the “presenter” (the machine that provides a screen echo to the other) can be switched back and forth at any time. Mikogo has a simple whiteboard feature that allows the presenter to draw lines in various thicknesses, colors, and shapes on the screen. It also has the option of remote control, so that the non-presenter can use the mouse and keyboard on the presenter’s machine. Pete Albrecht and I plan to try using Mikogo over Skype to allow me to control Pete’s big Meade telescope from here in Colorado, at least when it stops raining in Orange County.
I don’t have a great deal of experience with the Mikogo system yet, but after an hour or so of solid connections with Jay and with Pete, I can say that it’s well worth trying if you have any use for that sort of thing.
WordPress Tags and Categories
Contra is moving to its own domain January 1, and will become a WordPress install as of that date. (Posts there now are all test posts and will be deleted before it goes live.) I’ve been studying WordPress and configuring the install to do what I need it to do, and although it’s taken some time and some fooling-with, long-term it will save me a huge amount of effort, compared to the hand-editing I have done now for over ten years.
One of the interesting features of WordPress is that it supports both tags and categories. A lot of people scratch their heads over that, but when I saw it I understood it immediately. Tags and categories both apply a text string to a post. The differences from a content management perspective are minor: Categories are predefined and applied via a drop-down list, but you create tags “on the fly” at post-time. You can use tags and categories interchangeably if you want, but using them together allows an interesting sort of two-axis classification of posts. One axis (best handled by tags) describes what a post is about: politics, religion, publishing, Linux, Wi-Fi, and so on. The other axis (best handled by categories) describes the shape of a post, in the sense of a literary form: idea pieces, reviews, rants, travelogs, memoir, and so on. The increase in precision is delicious: Not all posts about wine are reviews—I’ve done at least one wine rant and will probably do more, and wine travelogs are possible—but if you’re more interested in reviews than in rants, selecting the “reviews” category and looking for the “wine” tag will get you exactly what you want.
Both categories and tags work best when used sparingly. Five hundred tags each used once or twice are not only not as useful as keyword search (which is available in WordPress) but less useful, because after awhile we forget what tags we’ve created and create new tags that are so similar as existing tags as to spawn serious search entropy. (I had this problem on LiveJournal more than once.)
Categories in particular should be few and distinct. I brainstormed with myself a few days ago, jotted down as many category identifiers as occurred to me, and then ruthlessly winnowed the list down to a predetermined limit of ten or fewer. The eight categories I settled on are these:
Daybook: Everyday activities; “Dear Diary:”
Ideas & Analysis: Commentary on news plus ideas and speculation
Memoir: My personal history
Odd Lots: Short items presented without much discussion
Rants: Complaints and other over-the-top material
Reviews: Evaluations of products or services
Travelogs: Where I went and what I saw/suffered/learned in going
Tutorials: How things work and how to do them
I also have a tags list that runs to a little over fifty right now, and includes all the expected keywords describing my many interests, like religion, publishing, ebooks, dogs, hardware, ham radio, psychology, and so on. I spent a sobering half an hour meditating on my accumulated tags list in LiveJournal and threw most of them out. I’m going to try to keep myself to fifty tags or fewer and don’t expect a great deal of difficulty creating the list. (I’ll post it once I consider it reliable.) This sort of thing is called a “controlled vocabulary” in information science circles, and the trick, of course, is to keep it controlled.
LiveJournal will continue to be a mirror. One unanswered question is whether I will attempt to import LiveJournal posts to WordPress. This apparently can be done, though I haven’t tried it and understand that it could seriously mess up my newfound tag discipline—and require me to categorize several hundred posts. I may import but only selectively. Research continues.
Scanning Some Personal History
We live in a wildfire zone, and there’s not much to be done but make it easy to run if we have to. That leaves everything we have to go up in smoke, and while most of it is replaceable, a good deal isn’t. The worst of it is our photo album set and our boxes full of loose photos and slides. I’ve been scanning them as I can, but it’s a slow business and may not be done for a long time.
It has been a good opportunity to look critically at the photos as they come to hand one-by-one, and decide which are worth keeping come hell or high water (or a wall of fire) and which are not. People rarely throw away the bad ones, even when they’re out of focus or virtually identical to three or four others on the roll. I’m so used to nuking lousy digital camera shots that I was surprised that so many bad slides remained in the boxes, including a few that were so out of focus or exposure that it was difficult to tell precisely what they were. I guess I figured that they were paid for and therefore could not be wasted, like the last few ounces of a huge pile of heavily spiced pasta that you can’t bring yourself to eat but can’t bear to put down the disposal.
In going through a box of slides, I realized that I was only scanning about a third of them. The rest were bracketed attempts at excellence that missed the mark or just plain booboos. (Having a small light table to preview the slides certainly helped.) I had to smile when I realized that I only keep about a third of my digital camera photos too, depending on what they are. I do better at things that sit stock still than I do at QBit and Aero tearing around the house or trying to do tricks.
So in fits and starts, Carol and I are preserving an era of our history together that isn’t in the photo albums, because (for the first three or four years) we took slides almost exclusively. It’s startling to see myself as an adult with hair, given that it’s now a small and shrinking percentage of my life, basically, 1970-1985. (The photo here is from the backyard of our first house in Chicago, the summer of 1978.)
Sunrise Surreality
When the sun comes up, the eastern horizon is sometimes clear while the rest of the sky is overcast. This can make for some interesting color effects, especially on the tall pines immediately across the street from us. The photo here was snapped perhaps five minutes after the sun broke an unusually clear horizon.
Odd Lots
- Carol and I just finished the bulk of our Christmas cards. The cards we bought this year had little sparkles glued (badly) to them, and as we processed the 70-odd cards going out, the cards began shedding, and sparkles are now showing up…everywhere. I’m looking down at my shirt cuffs right now, and they’re blazing like a disco ball. Next year: No sparkles!
- Illinois’ illustrious governor will soon (we hope) be matriculating to the Governors’ Wing at the Joliet Correctional Center, and I am displeased to announce that he went to my high school. In fact, he was a freshman when I was a senior, and his sneaky little face is in the Lane Tech 1970 yearbook. Pete Albrecht was also a freshman that year, and narrowly missed out on the cooties inherent in having a future felon governor in your homeroom. Pete tells the story at greater length (with scans from the yearbook) over at InfoBunker. (Scroll down to the December 9, 2008 entry.)
- David Beers passed along a link to what might be the absolute worst idea of 2008: Google Code’s research project aimed at allowing x86 native code to run in a browser. Hoo-boy. My question: If the Cloud is so great, why risk being pwned at native-code speeds? (And isn’t this what Java is for?)
- Google Books has very recently posted back issues for a number of venerable magazines, including Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, CIO, Ebony, Jet, New York, Vegetarian Times, American Cowboy, and who knows what else. (I don’t see a master list of magazines.) The PM collection runs from 1905 to 2000, and isn’t just a scattering of issues, but damned near all of them. So what was PM’s cover story the month you were born? (Mine? “Mermaid Theater.” Wow.)
- Alas, you can look at the Google Books magazine back issues, but you can’t save them to disk or print them out. Or can you? (I haven’t tried this yet.)
- The wonderfully named Nevada Lightning Laboratory has managed to transmit 800 watts of power across five meters’ distance, besting the previous record of 60 watts across two meters, set by MIT. The technique is not new, and was patented by our boy Nikola Tesla 100 years ago. Very cool, but are my wire-frame glasses going to melt when I step into the field with my Tesla-powered laptop?
- This Friday’s full Moon happens only four hours from Lunar perigee, and is the biggest of the year, 14% greater in angular diameter (not especially noticeable) and 30% brighter (way noticeable!) than the apogee Moon we saw earlier this year. That’s bright, it’s high, and if you’ve got snow all over the place, midnight will be knee-deep in moonshine. (Not that kind.)
- 200,000 inflatable breasts got lost on their way from China (where there is evidently an inflatable breast factory) to Australia (where they were to be polybagged with a men’s magazine) and have only recently been found in Melbourne. Just thought you’d like to know.
