Justin's Journal

Get out to vote... but only if you are informed.

Shelley has written a passionate piece about the importance of voting. I agree with her sentiment about voting... up to a point. I believe everyone who is eligible should register and vote but I also believe that a person who votes should be an informed person. Don't listen to those folks who say if you don't vote you don't have a right to complain, that right is inalienable. If you don't know the issues and you don't know the candidates you will do much more harm than good by voting. I encourage you to visit Vote-Smart.org prior to voting. Get to know the issues and get to know the candidates. You have one week.

One more thing, your local elections will have a much more direct impact on your day to day life. Don't ignore those local races and learn what you can about the local candidates. If learning about the candidates is too much trouble then stay home. You'll cause less trouble that way.

A disturbing fact.

Israel says it has 175 would-be suicide bombers in custody. While it is more disturbing that 175 people would be willing to blow themselves up, what's more disturbing is that:

Since Sept. 2000, 83 Palestinians have blown themselves up, killing 296 Israelis on buses, in malls, at gas stations and in cafes.

The Palm OS5 PDAs are out.

Palm may have a product out that will be enough to entice me to upgrade my aging Palm IIIx. Palm OS 5.0 PDAs are appearing and they appear to have enough added functionality and power to give me a reason to upgrade.

OS 5 also natively supports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi (802.11b) connectivity, which used to be aftermarket add-ons. It beefs up security, too, offering 128-bit data encryption and Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology for Internet applications.

Now to decide whether or not to wait six months for a price drop or just jump in now.

Just the facts...

I rarely ask rhetorical questions so when I ask a question I don't like for people to try to infer anything from my asking other than I want the information that I'm requesting. If the question makes you think then, by all means think, but first give me my answer.

phil ringnalda dot com: Now that's ironic

Now this is exactly why I've stayed out of the RSS wars. I publish an RSS 0.91 format version of this journal but it is basically just a summary with enough of each article to give folks an idea of what I'm talking about and to let them see whether or not I've updated with new content. If someone wants to view the entire article I want them to visit my journal to read it, not in some newsreader.

Now please don't take that to mean that I don't support and appreciate the work people are doing on developing RSS standards and writing RSS aggregators and readers, I do support those efforts and I do appreciate their work, I just don't see where it affects me more than making it more difficult for me to decide when and in what version I want to upgrade my own RSS feed. I personally think that allowing encoding in the description of an RSS feed was a major mistake because that seems to be what all the controversy, next to using RDF, is arising from. At this point I wonder what makes using a newsreader different from using a blogroll and a browser?

Just my 2¢ worth.

meryl's notes :: another one's on the way

I just want to congratulate Meryl.

Blogger Hacked

Well, Blogger was hacked and I didn't even know it. I guess I ought to go change a few things.

A change.

I've made a change to this page. It will probably take a few reloads to notice it but I'd appreciate someone mentioning what it is when they figure it out.

That little orange XML Logo thingy.

I really mean no disprespect by this question, but what value?

Credit is not a pissing match.

Pissing matches are hard to understand. Sam Ruby tries to give a morality lesson but not everyone gets it. The problem is that Sam came off sounding a little "superficial and preachy". Personally I think its all a misunderstanding in the difference between receiving credit and receiving compensation. Credit doesn't pay my mortagage payment, though it does allow me to obtain the mortgage in the first place, compensation does.

We've got a winner

It's nice to have my good taste affirmed.

Chevrolet's evangelical marketing strategy debated

I can't understand the controversy. Chevrolet wants to sell cars to christians so they sponsor an event for christians. That doesn't mean that they only want to sell cars to christians and it doesn't mean that they find any other religion or lack of religion to be wrong. Some folks are going to see it that way, though, including some of the christians at the event they are sponsoring... but those people are wrong.

I guess, since the customer is always right, they should now also sponsor an event for jews, muslims and hindus. I wonder if they promoted a jazz festival would the rockers be offended? Folks work too hard at finding something to be offended over.

Music industry spins falsehood

Janis Ian sees free downloads helping her bottom line. She makes a lot of sense in her article and points out why the major record labels don't like downloadable music, free or otherwise. The only reason that a record label exists is to get recorded music from the musician to the consumer. When it music is available through downloads that empowers the musician to be their own marketeers. When a record label has an artist who generates over $200 million in sales and turns over less than 1% of that income to the artist then one has to wonder what value that label is providing the artists. If artist can promote and market themselves with free downloads and distribute their music by paid downloads what role is left for the Labels?

SEC to seek Stewart removal

I've never been a fan of Martha Stewart. From all the rumors I've heard I've imagined her to be a very cantankerous woman. Still I wonder if the SEC is persuing her as hard as the news reports make it seem or would they persue these charges against anyone they suspect of insider trading just as hard? The publicity from this mess she is in has already cost her over $200 million in personal losses from the $12 a share drop in her own companies stock. How bad is this crime she's accussed of that this isn't enough punishment for her already... and she hasn't even been found guilty of anything yet. Also, I wonder if she had said that her friend, Sam Waksal, just appeared to her to be under stress so she sold the stock based on observation of him, if this would also be insider trading?

RSS Validator: Vote for your favorite banner

Vote for your favorite banner! For some reason, and I'm sure it isn't because I'm from Tennessee, I like this one.

RSS Validator

Mark Pilgram and Sam Ruby have been busy. They've written an RSS validator and, oh joy, oh joy, my RSS feed validates. Does yours?

Dazed and Confused

This article makes Indonesia's president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, sound more like a fairy tale princess than the elected president of the world's fourth largest country. No wonder there are problems there.

Adding Trackback

I had to give it a try. I've implemented TrackBack in this journal. I'm not sure I understand what all this will be useful for but it was simple enough to implement. Now let me just see if it works.

No, Eldred Winning Does Not Mean That Fox Will Have Their Own Mickey.

Gulfstream asks, Would the public benefit if Mickey Mouse were in the public domain, for example? I just want to point out one thing. If Steamboat Willy is allowed to pass into the public domain by Eldred v. Ashcroft overturning CTEA Mickey Mouse will still be owned by Disney. The only thing that will pass into the public domain will be the movie. Disney has Mickey Mouse as a trademark and as long as they protect their trademark its theirs.

More on the problem with the comments

I've confirmed that the problem with the comments results only when there is no comment file for an entry on the page. The solution I have for now is to create a comment for each entry. That isn't an acceptable solution. The real solution would be to move all the comments into MySQL. That solution is going to have to wait. When I do that I want to move the entire Journal into MySQL, or PostgreSQL. I don't see that happening before the first of the year. I could probably make this move sooner if I went with MT or the Flutterby CMS but I've got some ideas that I want to try on with my own code and the biggest reason for me keeping this journal is to play with the technology. If you can think of a reason for this function to cause the problems that I've described and a solution for the problem outside of changing comment systems, I'd appreciate a nudge in the right direction.

dive into mark/October 17, 2002

Mark wants to know what this might mean in an RSS file:

[admin:feedLink rdf:resource=
"http://diveintomark.weblogger.com/xml/rss.xml"
bdcterms:isReplacedBy= "http://diveintomark.org/xml/rss.xml" ]

I would guess its a redirection to a new feed. It's something that I would like to have available for me to use in my own RSS file.

Edit: I had to change the "<" to "[" and the other end of the tag to "]" to avoid screwing up my RSS feed.

Mad or Angry?

I use to get mad easily. I still get angry but I rarely get mad. I noticed one day that I was getting mad about things that were inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but not getting angry about the things that matter. Things that are inconsequential are other folks opinion, arriving at my destination ten minutes early rather than one minute early, or on time, and who wins a sporting event. I use to get mad over that kind of stuff until I figured out that while other people's opinions are interesting, their actual opinions are beyond my control. I also figured out that to most people 10:00 and 10:03 are essentially the same thing and traffic is going to do what it does. Then I discovered that with sports, there is always next year. Things that matter are the treatment of people and the keeping of a trust. While I've always been angered by poor treatment of my friends and family I've been way too tolerant of the treatment of people that I don't know. I've also been too oblivious of people breaking a public trust. I'm not sure why I'm sharing this right now. It was just something on my mind.

Sarcasm?

There are people with whom I have problems distingushing between their being sincere or sarcastic. I'm guessing sincere on this one.

More on that comment bug.

It doesn't appear to be any real bug in that function I mentioned yesterday that is causing my problems in my comment system. The problem appears to be in the way my server is accessing that directory and handling resumptions of a data stream. If every entry on this page had a comment attached to it then things would work for clients using NAT or who are behind firewalls the same way they are working for everyone else but if there isn't a comment file attached to the entry something happens to cause a break in the data stream and clients not directly connected to the internet with their own IP address timeout. I will have a solution to this soon.

Problems with the comment count.

I'm not sure what it is but something about this function:

function commentCount($n) {
if ($file = @fopen("comments/$n.comment", 'r')) {
   $thisFile = file("comments/$n.comment");
   $comments = sizeof($thisFile);
   if($comments == 1) {$comments .= " comment";} else {$comments .= " comments";}
 }
 else {$comments = "0 comments";}
   return $comments;
}

is causing machines behind firewalls to hang and stop displaying the page for a loooooong time. Long enough that the firewall at my office times out and the bulk of this page never gets displayed. You see the header and the sidebar and that's it. The actual blog is missing. I believe Phil Ringnalda may have been the one to write this bit of code so maybe I ought to contact him. It seemed to work fine for over a year so it may be a change in my webhost's configuration that brought this about. Anyway, the point is the comment counts are turned off until I figure out the problem. You can still access the comments you just can't see if there are any comments present. I need to address the entire comment system soon anyway.

Dutch Government Falls

Now, along with everything else happening, the Dutch government collapses. I don't think this is the same as what happens in other parts of the world.

Michelle Malkin on The Sniper

All the experts have spouted off the statistical profile of The Sniper as a young single white male in his twenties or thirties. Suddenly we are hearing eye-witness reports of an olive skinned male, possibly middle-eastern or hispanic. Michelle Malkin says he's a terrorist.

Preserving The Islamic Identity in The West

Gulfstream pointed to an article,Preserving The Islamic Identity in The West, that I found mildly amusing in that my fundamentalist Christian friends could have written the very same article by just replacing the name of the "devil" in this one.

So, for example, one must be wary of schools for within them "the mixing of sexes is not only tolerated but encouraged through the placement of children in multi-gender sporting teams and class groups." And television shows give the impression that "in some sort of sick way.... zina (sex) equates with love and is a 'natural' behaviour."

If things were so serious this could be much funnier to me than it already is.

dive into mark's cycles

Mark Pilgrim's "Further Reading" list has him going around in cycles and he seems to be getting a lot of enjoyment out of it. Beebo seems to think it is all ego, and I don't doubt that that is a part of it but I think it's mainly about seeing the technology work in such a widespread manner. This is something that I'm going to be implementing in a future version of this journal just because I think it's so cool to follow all these links.

Australia urges UN ban on bomb suspect group

Australia wants the UN to declare Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah group to be terrorist and allow the world nations to treat them as such. A lot of folks are going to be declaring this to be an anti-Islamic act but how else does one handle this type of activity? Isn't it better to encourage a group to clean their own house than to jump in and clean it for them?

Duct Tape Effective in Wart Removal

It looks like duct tapes uses are endless. Researchers have shown that duct tape is a more effective method of removing warts than freezing them with liquid nitrogen. I may have to give this a try.

Thoughts on The Sniper

The Sniper didn't shoot anyone over the weekend. He didn't shoot anyone over last weekend either. I've heard several theories over why this might be and several other theories about who this person is. A coworker of my wife who use to be a police officer thinks this is a teenager who has a weekend job or is kept on a tight rein on the weekends. He also thinks that the culprit is very into first person shooter games. Not to make light of the deaths or to take away from the seriousness of the crimes, I've got to admit that the shootings are taking on an air of a teenage prank. It looks like the police may have more information than they have been letting on. I've thought that this must be the case but I also worry that they really don't. I've got to believe, though, that this will be wrapped up before much longer. I haven't heard of any shootings today. I hope it stays that way.

Barbeque and my special rub

I've got some folks coming over tomorrow afternoon for a barbeque. Just a few minutes ago I finished preparing the pork shoulder roast for smoking in the morning. I mixed up about a cup of my special rub and covered this 4lb. roast with the rub, covered the roast with plastic wrap and put it back in ther refrigerator. I really should have done this about two days ago if I wanted a really superb barbeque roast but this will still be long enough for it to be a pretty doggone good barbeque.

I've got a friend who runs "The Deck Chef" website who has some very good rubs for sale but I like my own. If you won't tell anyone else I'll share the recipe with you. Shhh, though, remeber this is a secret recipe.

• 2 T. Sugar
• 2 T. Brown Sugar
• 2 T. Salt
• 2 T. Ground Cumin
• 4 T. Paprika
• 2 T. Chile Powder
• 1 T. Cayenne Pepper (maybe a little bit more Cayenne Pepper)
• 1 T. Freshly cracked black pepper.

Just throw all these ingredients together in a bowl and then mix until the seem to be mixed about as well as they can be. Put this in a shaker of some sort and sprinkle liberally over your meat. It's called a rub but there isn't a need to rub this stuff in, it'll ball up on you and not completely cover the meat. Just cover the meat with it, wrap it up in butcher paper or plastic wrap and put it back in the refrigerator at least overnight. Two days will make it better.

Sometimes I'll add a little rubbed sage to the mixture, other times maybe a little rosemary gets added. If you have a favorite herb go ahead and add it to it. The key that I've found is, though, not to stray too far from this basic rub when playing around with different ingredients. You can add just about anything you want to give it your own special flavor just as long as one or two things is all that you add.

Tomorrow, around 7a.m. I'll get up and go fire up the smoker. Around 8:30 I'll put a cup of wet hickory chips on the charcoal, add water to a pan that will sit between the fire and the meat and then place the meat on the rack. Around 3p.m. the meat will be ready for the finishing sauce and at 3:30 it will be ready to pull from the bone and serve.

Good barbeque requres time... and a few bottles of beer.

ACLU of Kentucky Challenges Local Curfew Law On Behalf of Residents

Think the ACLU is about nothing but stirring up trouble? Think again.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky today filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of four local residents who are challenging a curfew law that allows people to be outside their homes at night only for certain government-approved reasons.

The good town fathers of Cloverport have decided you have to have a good reason to be outside in their city late at night or early in the morning. If I can't sleep and I decide to go for a walk at 2 A.M. I don't think its anyone's business but my own. Thank you ACLU.

Burningbird: The Parable of the Languages

Shelley has written a very weird but entertaining shortshortstory, The Parable of the Languages. Go give it a read.

A just war?

While going through my readings of weblogs and mailing lists I'm discovering that most of the folks that I like to read aren't too happy with the idea of us going back to war with Iraq. I've got to admit that getting into a war is not something that I relish or even feel good about but I'm having a little trouble getting as upset over the idea as some of my friends in the weblogging world seem to be. This has sort of been bothering me that I don't feel as against the war as others, afterall, I've got an eighteen year-old son that could find himself in harms way if this thing turns into something big like a few of my friends suggest it might. Still, in the back of my mind the idea of punching out ol' Suddam had some sort of appeal to me. I didn't know what the appeal was until I read an artcle in the Boston Daily Globe titled, "A just war?" Suddenly I understood my feelings. I am not a George W. Bush fan. I think the little fellow is getting us into a war for all the wrong reasons when all the right reasons are staring us right in the face. I can support a war against Hussein (I refuse to view it as a war against Iraq) because the guy needs to be taken out. He needs to be taken out because he has been developing weapons of mass destruction and his past has shown that he does not hesitate to use them when it suits his purposes. You say there is no proof? That's the major thing I'm disappointed in my administration over and its the main reason I feel that they are persuing this war for all the wrong reasons. My country is not offering up any evidence to back up its claims. The evidence is there and Great Britain has released it but for some reason the Bush administration seems loathe to do likewise. Still, the right reasons are there. What makes this a just war? Sadam has shown that he will not hesitate in dropping biological and chemical weapons on his own people who are unable to defend themselves. He has shown a disregard for borders in his attack on Kuwait. He has shown complete disrespect for the authority of the UN and any resolutions it makes. The man is out of control and a threat to both his own citizens and his neigbors and he's trying to get his hands on the materials to develop his own nuclear weapons. Even though the rhetoric coming out of Washington is crazy on this subject, when giving the facts a good hard look how can this not be a just war.

People Are Strange Dept.

There's something about cremation that makes one believe that the folks that give up their dearly departed to be cremated that they might understand that their loved one is no longer in that body. Why, then, are people shooting at Ray Brent Marsh? I do understand the families of those folks whose bodies were just laying around up their in Noble, Ga being upset but upset to the point of sniping at Mr. Marsh?

PUBLIC HEROES - COMIC BOOK CHARACTERS AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

Mark found an extremely interesting article dealing with public domain comic book characters that shows exactly how important the public domain is in the creation of new works.

Justin's Blog Feeds

I just added a form box to Justin's Blog Feeds that will allow you to put the URL of your own list of RSS feeds so you can use it as your own personal aggregator. Let me know what you think of it.

Republicans seek to keep Torricelli on N.J. ballot

As little as I like what the Democrats have pulled in switching candidates in New Jersey's Senate race, I like the Republicans taking the matter to the US Supreme Court even less. Heck, why do we even bother to vote? Why not just let the courts pick our elected officials for us.

Sniper in Maryland

Police are searching for a sniper in Maryland who they believe has killed at least five and probably six people. It's really amazing how vulnerable we are and how much we depend upon the common descency of others in order to exist as a society. This became overly apparent to me back in August of 1966 when I heard the news stories of Charles Whitman taking a position in the belltower at the University of Texas in Austin and plinking away at folks down below for over an hour before being gunned down by a policeman who managed to push himself by Whitman's barricade.

What causes people to do stuff like this? Frustration. It's an inability to cope with the little roadblocks that life throws up in front of you. This stuff bottles up inside of a person and eventually has to come out. How it comes out is going to depend a lot on what you learned was acceptable outlets of agression way back when you were a child. Charles Whitman was raised by an abusive father and a mother who accepted the abuse for years and years before divorcing him after Charles was a grown man. His diaries gave evidence that he continually thought of himself as a failure and was growing increasingly frustrated over the years.

The Maryland shooter will eventually be caught. Investigative techniques are just too good anymore for someone to get away with as open of a crime as these are. When this person is caught, look for it to be someone who has had a number of roadblocks thrown up in their face and who came from an abusive background.

The next new thing...

Dan is looking for the next way to represent data while Shelley seems to believe she has found it.

dive into tilde

Mark Pilgrim often has very interesting things to say. I'm not so sure that this is all that interesting but he has managed to document more information about the tilde than I'll ever have need to know.

Bush's real goal in Iraq

Jay Bookman believes he has figured out Bush's real goal in Iraq. I'mnot so sure I can go as far as Jay is going but there does seem to be more to this than just finding and destroying Weapons of Mass Destruction^®

Breast Self Exams Don't Work?

The papers and online news resources are reporting a study concerning Breast Self Exams ( BSE) indicating that they may not be beneficial in detecting cancer at an early enough state to reduce the risk of death. It's hard for me to imagine that BSEs have no value so why is this getting all the air play?

GOP battles Dems on Torricelli ballot

I guess it should be expected that the Democrats would find some way to get the courts to change election law for them after this past Presidential election.

The New Jersey Republicans argue that by replacing Torricelli's name because the New Jersey Democrat in his own words "vowed he would not be responsible for the loss of Democratic control of the Senate," would open the door to having any candidate bail when the polls looked bad.

The Republican's shouldn't be surprised by this since they got into the White House this past election through the court system.

Eldred v. Ashcroft

A couple of days ago I mentioned the upcoming hearing before the Supreme Court over whether or not congress has gone beyond the definition of limitied in the CTEA. A website has been set up to keep folks appraised of what's happening.

A year ago today...

A year ago today Mark Pilgrim was called into his bosses office and told to shut down his weblog. It seems they were embarassed by the brute honesty in his writings about his conquering an addiction.