A carnival of technology

I finished Nanowrimo. I’ve learned that I am capable of writing a whole bunch of stuff as far as quantity, but, as far as quality, the result is somewhat lacking. I wrote 50,000 dull, tedious words about a group of boring people who rediscover themselves (but not really). There was more than one night when, a little short on words, I created a meaningless interlude that, though in the same setting and sharing the theme of the central story, had nothing at all to do with the plot. I worked some of those tangents in later, but the whole of his novel was written without a plan and without much care. I guess that the sarcasm and whimsy that I think of as my style take a little bit more work than what I can crank out at that volume. Oh well. I learned some important lessons about writing, and hopefully I’m a better person for it.

Nanowrimo has a word count history, so, rather than let that data go to waste, I plotted it along with the 1700 word per day goal.

Some days I got going pretty good, but those days, as far as the total, only made up for the handful of really bad days rather than putting me over the total goal. I only significantly crossed the green during the last week. I think that was the week when I figured out what I was writing about.

Thursday was Thanksgiving here in the US, and I spent it the way most do: eating turkey with the parents. I did some other stuff over the weekend, including but not limited to watching the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale, with some Alabama friends. Everyone seems to like it, which is why I feel forced to speak out. It blows.

I wouldn’t call myself a Bond expert, and it’s certainly not my favorite series, but I figure that I know my way around a Bond movie, and I’ve probably seen all twenty some of them on TBS at some point. The series is pretty formulaic, but that’s what’s expected from it and the only thing that keeps people coming back to countless more offerings in this long since stale secret agent genre. The cold war’s over, so no one really cares what MI6 is up to anymore. What we want is some dude in a tux who looks cool both while banging chicks and shooting people. Sean Connery was a master of this, Roger Moore was ok at it, Timothy Dalton kind of took the series in a more emo direction (I guess this is closer to what Ian Fleming intended in the books, but no one cares what he thinks), George Lazenby was an unfortunate mistake, and Pierce Brosnan was recently able to bring the franchise back up to near-Connery levels. This new guy, Daniel Craig, has the tough part down cold, but he has none of the charm. It’s just some guy running around in a tux, shooting people in the face. Lame.

There are a couple of neat action sequences at the beginning of the movie, but it stops the action right quick and goes to the casino portion which consists of a totally freaking too long poker game. There are several things wrong with this. First of all, Bond has historically played baccarat, not poker. I don’t mind series trying to adapt and find new ways to keep themselves fresh, but baccarat worked because nobody understands it and because the details were never important. It was like the martinis: it’s just a short interlude between Bond banging chicks and shooting people in the face. No one cares what’s going on at the baccarat table, but Bond sure does look cool doing it. Poker, on the other hand, has been done to death in recent years. Pretty much everyone knows how poker works now, which means that it’s lost some of its mystique and that the writers and directors think it’d be neat to include a whole lot of details about the actual poker hands. It’s not neat. It’s boring. Poker is a boring game, and the use of Texas Hold-em as the game of choice, though it is a casino game, just makes it feel like the writers were pandering to poker fans. Poker in movies works best in Westerns where people are playing real poker and you don’t care about the game itself; you’re just waiting to see who’s going to get shot for cheating or looking funny or whatever. It’s the interactions between characters that create the tension, not the cards, but Bond tries to get us all excited about the money changing hands. Wow, that sure is a big pile of chips, isn’t it? Is that thing the villain guy is doing with his fingers a tell? Who cares! Play a hand and skip to the end!

Another detail from the poker that bothered me was the martini. We all know that Bond likes his martinis shaken, not stirred, but this guy stops the bartender and gives him a whole big list of not-martini things to mix up. It’s pointless, it’s boring, and it’s probably from the book or something. Again, don’t care.

The end of the movie, after what felt like about fourteen hours of a lot of cards and very little shooting people, was a total train wreck. It could have ended several times, but it didn’t and instead kept plodding on, showing us characters I’d long since stopped caring about. I would say that this is the worst Bond movie I’ve ever watched. Bond isn’t cool, just violent and emotionless. The villains are barely developed. I don’t expect another Goldfinger (though I’d certainly like one), but I’d still like a little bit of character, something to hate or fear or anything. There’s not enough cool and not enough gunfire. This movie sucks.

I was originally going to make a post on Waffle House combinatorics concerning my solution to the hashbrown problem (Waffle House claims 1,572,864 ways to enjoy hashbrowns. Order isn’t the solution. Condiments and the option of ordering them scattered well can bring you up to 3*2^19, even though most of those combinations are really gross), but I got distracted by the fact that I don’t really want to go to Waffle House to find the exact condiments available and by typography.

The World Wide Web Consortium, the de facto purveyors of web standards, have in recent years made a push for putting everything in XML. I don’t think everything should be in XML, but I can understand why they’re doing it. Parsing XML is a solved problem, so we can all just use someone else’s wheel instead of inventing our own, and it’s possible to embed XML documents in one another in some pretty nifty ways. You can drop a mathematical formula or a vector image in the middle of your document without having to switch formats. I had wanted to put a MathML summation in the middle of a web page, but it turns out that everyone’s handling of this really blows.

IE, of course, doesn’t really handle it at all. The whole point of web pages is that we can express complicated typesetting ideas, or even entire applications, in a system-neutral language that is interpreted by particular applications in a means appropriate to the system. In a perfect world, blind people can read a web page on a screen reader using the same source as someone viewing it on a high definition screen. We all remember the browser wars around the time of Netscape 2 and 3, though, so this clearly isn’t and never will be the case. Individual browsers, trying to make the web experience flashier, faster and more fun for their users, apply their own interpretations and deviations from the web standards, and it’s long since gotten to the point that creating a single page that works cleanly across more than one application is a pretty hairy task. IE seems to have become the villain since the reborn Mozilla came around, since IE is more likely to require weird hacks to get around its shortcomings in interpretation. My MARTA map, inherited from dcantrell’s does not actually validate as XHTML since I need to include an extra namespace attribute to make it work in IE. And that brings me to my complaint with the W3C.

XHTML is supposed to the latest web dream, HTML described as a well-formed XML document. It would make sense to me, at least, if this allowed for different types of XML, like MathML or SVG, to be embedded seamlessly inside, but it really doesn’t. The lack of support for even new namespace attributes in their validator really takes some of the X out of extensibility. To do MathML I would need to use a different document type definition altogether, one that defines XHTML as HTML plus some other stuff for MathML instead of XHTML being defined as HTML plus whatever else to begin with. XHTML hasn’t given us a new start; it’s just a new half-supported idea that shifts the problems from parsability to the ability to do the basic things that XML promises. We’ve created a new nightmare.

As for Firefox’s handling of MathML, it’s really not so great. One thing that I would have to do is ensure that the documents are sent not with the MIME type text/html but rather application/xhtml+xml or application/xml. The browser knows how to handle XHTML when it comes across as text/html anyways, so couldn’t it just look at the document and parse it the rest of the way as XML when it sees the requisite markers? HTML and XHTML are supposed to be the same thing nowadays, but some quirk in the legacy code requires an arbitrary change in order to allow for new things. I think that’s kind of dumb.

As for MathML itself, I’m still not sure what to think of it. It’s too complicated to figure out in five minutes or less, but typesetting math is hard. The only way I’ve done it before is through LaTeX, which is ugly and confusing, and I’m not sure that MathML has made much of an improvement on that. From what I’ve seen it’s verbose and confusing instead. Maybe W3C had some really good reasons for doing things in MathML the way they did. I don’t know. I’d just like to be able to use it.

In summary, I hate everything. I sure wish all this Web crap would get its act together.

Trader Joe’s is open in Sandy Springs now. For those of you who don’t know, Trader Joe’s is a chain of grocery stores that’s known for having the ridiculous yuppie food that you might find at Whole Foods but at, for the most part, normal grocery store prices. They also have some amount of normal food there, so you don’t necessarily have to pay five or six bucks for the gallon of organic milk squirted from the teats of uncaged cows; they have the regular stuff, too. This isn’t true for all food items, though, so using Trader Joe’s for a full shopping trip requires either some compromise or being a smelly hippie.

I decided to check out the new location that opened up this weekend, filling the space left by the Movie Trading Company on Roswell Road, mainly out of curiosity and because I had no idea what to eat tonight. The only food I have right now is potatoes, and—don’t get me wrong, I like potatoes—sometimes I want to eat something that isn’t a potato. I’ve eaten some Trader Joe’s products before, and some of them were pretty alright, but some of them were pretty gross. My impression of the store from my meager experience is that you can get some good stuff there if you try, but I have a good chance of not liking the sort of person that shops primarily at Trader Joe’s. Much like a lot of the food, there’s just something a little bit off about that kind of person.

The first thing I noticed about Trader Joe’s was that they don’t have a bicycle rack. No other grocery store I go to has a bicycle rack, so I wasn’t terribly upset attaching my vehicle to the cart return like usual, but I would think that a store selling eggs from cage-free hens with a good education would at least try to encourage non-car transportation. The second thing I noticed is that the handheld baskets are larger than normal. I’m not sure whether this is to discourage the use of a cart for medium-sized loads or to encourage people that normally use the baskets, like most people not shopping for a family who don’t wait a month between grocery trips, to spend more. Either way, I don’t like it. Normal baskets offer me a good indicator of when I should stop buying crap and worry about how I’m going to carry it home, whereas Trader Joe’s gigantors would push me a little past that limit before becoming full. Besides that, that amount of stuff gets a little bit heavy. But whatever, I can adjust to these small annoyances.

I know what their snacks taste like and I have enough fruit around for snacking purposes, so my purchases concentrated on normal food and booze. One of the things Trader Joe’s is known for is the “two-buck chuck” wine (actually three bucks here), a line of wines bottled under the Charles Shaw label from the Bronco Wine company, and since I’m all about them grapes these days, I figured I’d try some. At the worst I’m out three bucks. I also picked up a chicken tandoori something frozen dinner (it was ok, not great), some eggs (not cage free, $1/doz.) so that I can fry the rest of the okra (the only way to eat okra) I bought from Rick’s Farmer’s Market a little bit ago, a bottle of Three Philosophers for less than what it goes for in the liquor stores, a six-pack of Sierra Nevada’s celebration ale (I remember last year’s being quite tasty) to confirm in the cashier’s mind that I’m a drunk (maybe true?), and a box of Irish breakfast tea, since I’m running low. As you probably know, I’m a coffee drinker, but I do enjoy a cup of tea from time to time in the afternoon. I like Irish breakfast since it makes a good, strong cup and has a neat flavor to it without any of the froufrou citrus and spice crap they put in a lot of green teas. I also get a kick out of the idea of a tea being blended with a particular ethnicity in mind, and I read somewhere that everyone who drinks Irish breakfast drinks it for breakfast except for the Irish, who drink it whenever they feel like, so I’m apparently perpetuating some kind of stereotype four generations down. Eh. The box of tea is ridiculously huge with 80 bags. Even when I get into a big tea kick, my usual purchase of 25 from Twinnings lasts me about a month. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with this amount of bulk, but, again, I’m only out three bucks if something goes wrong.

As for the wine, I guess I’m glad I’m only out three bucks. I got the shiraz, since I’ve enjoyed quite a bit the ones from South Africa and Australia that I’ve tried of that variety, but this stuff certainly isn’t anything special. It’s a little too sweet, a little too plain, and it has a kind of funky aftertaste, something that makes me think of dirt and kerosene. Sure, three bucks is hella cheap, but a couple dollars more can buy a lot more enjoyment.

You probably know about that firefox extension I made a while back to modify the browser features that annoy me. Last week I decided to submit it to addons.mozilla.org mostly just to see what would happen. I figure that sites like mozilla’s and freshmeat are places I go myself when I can’t find what I want in a simple google search, and maybe more than three people out there are interested in disabling autocomplete popups and such.

What ended up happening was I filled out the funky little web form, placing all the useful details in the comments to reviewers and forgetting to include anything explaining the features in the comments to users. After a few days of sitting in the queue, my extension was approved, I got a page (NB: NSFW language in comments), and I soon after received three comments pointing out that I didn’t really explain myself. The first guy, by far the angriest, mentioned this pretty directly in a short screed against myself and the mozilla.org moderators, but the second guy found the README and posted its entire contents, so the third guy really had no excuse for not knowing what the extension does. I’ve since fixed the description, but the comments are a helpful reminder to me concerning placement of documentation as well as being a source of amusement. I’ve had 278 downloads so far, so maybe one or two people amongst the various humans and bots who blindly download everything are getting some use out of it.

One of the bots is apparently a site called Softpedia. I just received an email from them informing me that they’ve certified rmannoy as being “completely clean of adware/spyware components,” and they are “impressed with the quality of [my] product and encourage [me] to keep this high standards [sic] in the future.” So fear not, fair user: I’m not keeping track of how often you refresh Fark while saving you from browser popups and unwanted META refresh directives. Web browser people are weird.

On the nanowrimo front, I had a few bad days last week, but I’m starting to catch up. I’m about half a day behind in words, having just now crossed the halfway mark. With tonight’s work in progress of 750 words, I have a total of 25594, putting me at 656 behind if I hit today’s 1700 word goal. I figure I still have a shot at this, but Thanksgiving next week is probably going to be a little hard.

I expected the Topeak support system to email me, but I guess it doesn’t. My support ticket received a reply at 14:06 on Monday, and Topeak will be sending me sending me a new tool.

David,

I will gladly replace the tool for you under warranty. I have placed one on
back order for you and we ship it out shortly.

Thank you, Rob

So, great. Hopefully this one holds together.

I guess that Mozilla released another version of Firebird recently. This one bumps the major version number, so it must be all kinds of better. For example, “Extensions” are now lumped in with themes and called “Add-ons,” and none of the ones that you had before work because extension developers are tired of trying to figure out all the dumb crap that Mozilla pointlessly changed. Well, one of those developers took a half-hearted shot at an upgrade: rmannoy 1.1.2 is now available. This one has actual code changes, so you can’t just modify your local copy of the install.rdf and expect things to work. I’ve updated update.rdf, so using the auto-update thing might work.

And now for a handy Firefox tip. You know how when you go to install an extension, it won’t let you do anything for five seconds, and if you lose the window’s focus the timer starts over again? Man, that’s annoying. It’s like Schilly wrote the extension installer or something. Anyhow, I was going to try making that window less annoying and adding that as a feature to rmannoy, but I found that there’s already a way to disable the timer and just let you freaking install whatever you clicked on. In about:config, set security.dialog_enable_delay to 0. Apparently annoyance is an essential element to a secure system. Enjoy.

I’m still about 1000 words short of tonight’s nanowrimo goal. I’ve pretty much given up on a having a plot, instead creating a series of character studies with a theme of routine and the death of creativity, probably inspired by an xkcd cartoon. If I were to start over tonight, I’d probably go ahead and change the setting to Atlanta instead of some city in an unspecified nowhere, since I’ve already created pale Doppelgängers of both MARTA and Ken Cook. I’ve only ever found two weathermen memorable: Ken Cook for WAGA Atlanta, since he has a cool mustache and a charisma that makes me believe his every word on the study of meteors, and Dan Satterfield for WHNT Huntsville, since he always went totally nuts every time there was lightning in the summer (There might be a tornado! Panic!).

The first time I used a bus in Atlanta was in 2000, taking the route 10 CCT bus from Arts Center station to the Cobb Galleria in order to attend the last Atlanta Linux Showcase. I remember asking a fellow rider how far it was to the Galleria about 30 seconds before pulling into the transfer center (his response was a chuckling but friendly “It’s right here!”). My buswise inexperience left me confused and a little frightened about the whole process. Trains I could handle, since, though they seemed to follow no particular schedule, they were reliable in that they always arrived as long as the station was still open, and Cobb County was, and perhaps still is, outside of my comfort zone, even though at the time I had little understanding of the different counties that make up metro Atlanta. I was afraid that I would become stranded by an unfamiliar bus somewhere out beyond the reach of accessible transportation. I also remember being not too clear on the concept of fares and the distinction between the MARTA and CCT systems. On my return trip, armed with a pocket full of tokens, I was forced to ask for aid from people sitting on the curb after learning that I needed $1.25 to ride. I want to thank that guy waiting for a bus for giving me a dollar; I was pretty desparate, and I don’t know what I would have done without it. If you, fair reader, happen to have given money to a shabby-looking bus-riding student in October of 2000, I probably owe you a buck. Thank you.

Georgia, like many states, has a big ugly mess of a constitution. This is bad for anyone trying to understand the thing, but it’s good for providing an obstacle to legislation. Powers in Georgia are structured in a “home rule” fashion, giving the most power to counties and cities. This structure has its own pros and cons, some of which I’ve discussed here, but most importantly for this Tuesday, it means that if the General Assembly wants to do something really dumb, they need to get everyone to vote on it.

There are three amendments on the ballot for November 7th, 2006. The full text of amendments doesn’t appear on the ballot, so voters are given a short summary instead. There are some laws restricting the content of the summary and the amendments themselves—the summary has to fully describe the entirety of the amendment, only one issue can be voted on a time, stuff like that—but some of them still come out pretty confusing. For your convenience, here are links to the text of the three amendments being voted on this Tuesday and my opinion on each:

HR 1306, condemnation of property. “Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to prohibit the use of eminent domain by certain non-elected authorities and to prohibit the contested use of eminent domain except for public use as defined by general law?” The summary is actually fairly descriptive, but I think it’s still trying to trick people. You probably remember that mess in Connecticut where a city used eminent domain to redevelop a neighborhood and the US Supreme Court decided that this was ok. The Georgia General Assembly is hoping that you remember, too. The Connecticut case was over the definition of public use, which is something this amendment doesn’t address, it having already been adequately defined elsewhere. What it does do is take the power of eminent domain from non-elected authorities such as that big one that’s trying to expand into Roswell and Alpharetta, MARTA. I think this is an effort to create another obstacle for MARTA expansion. Use of eminent domain in cases like these can already be stopped by local governments—the Tucker-North DeKalb line, which could have provided an El Torero stop, was stopped in 1999 by neighborhood groups who believed the line would divide the communities it crosses. So I think this amendment is a bad idea.

SR 67, Fishing and Hunting. “Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to provide that the tradition of fishing and hunting and the taking of fish and wildlife shall be preserved for the people and shall be managed by law and regulation for the public good?” That’s actually the full text of the amendment, as well. I have no idea what this even means.

HR 1564, special license plates. “Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended so as to authorize the General Assembly to provide for special motor vehicle license plates and dedicate the revenue from such plates for stated purposes, including dedications for the ultimate use of agencies, funds, or nonprofit corporations where it is found that there will be a benefit to the state?” Honestly, I thought that they already did this. I guess that my point of confusion was the “Share the Road” plates, the fees for which I thought went to Georgia Bikes, but a little research shows that they actually go to the Governor’s Highway Safety Program. As far as the amendment, whatever. It’s redirecting the extra fees for special plates, not giving state funds to non-profits, so I don’t really see a problem with it. People are going to find ways to advertise their positions on abortion and dolphins with or without the plates, and hopefully these things will look better than bumper stickers.

Remember that chain tool I mentioned a little while ago? It blows. The idea behind a chain tool is to hold the chain in place while you drive a metal pin through a rivet in order to break a chain open or push a rivet back to close one. It’s basically just a bit of structure around a pin attached to a screw allowing you to apply a lot of pressure to a small area. I replaced my old and busted chain today with a new hotness, and in the process I broke off the metal protusions that go through the links to hold the chain in place while you’re messing around with the screw on top. This is the first time I’ve replaced a chain, so it’s quite possible that I did something stupid, but I don’t yet think that this was my fault. Here’s the trouble ticket I submitted to Topeak, number 4FBD6F, grammatical errors I didn’t notice until just now and all:

Dear Topeak,

I recently purchased a droid chain tool, SKU #TT2041, from nashbar.com. I was
able to use it to remove extra links from a new chain with no problem, but when
I broke the old chain off of my bicycle, one of the fins that holds the chain
in place broke off. I continued to use the tool, since my bike at this point
had no chain, and as I used to reassemble the new chain, the other fin on the
same side also broke off. Is this a known problem for this tool, or did I have
the misfortune of receiving a bad one? I don't belive that I was using the tool
incorrectly. For both removal and installation, I position the chain in the
tool so that the end of the chain farthest from the tool's pin was near the
bottom of the tool. Is there any way that I can get a replacement for the tool?

Topeak is owned by Todson. Todson is also the parent company for Onguard bicycle locks.