afongen

The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities web site is getting a much needed redesign this summer, and for the first time the implementation is being done by the internal web team instead of a design firm. This means that for the first time, little things like accessibility and web standards will be paid some attention. Yes!

In preparation for this, I’ve been going through a copy of the “Strategic Communications Plan” furnished by our Public Affairs department, who are responsible for the site. Some of it is actually quite interesting, but it felt really, really weird to be reading both that and the latest Dr. Dobbs Journal on the bus this morning.

No, scratch that. Dr. Dobbs had nothing to do with it. It’s just plain weird to be reading something called a “Strategic Communications Plan.”

Strange that keeping track of dates would be such a pernicious programming problem. But it sure seems to be.

A few months ago on Perl.com: The Many Dates and Times of Perl. More recently, on OnJava.com: Making Sense of Java’s Dates.

I forgot, when i first came across it (via Rafe Colburn, I think), to point to this wonderful piece tracing the history of the Bush administration’s self-contradictory statements on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Seeing it published in today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune reminded me to send you that direction.

Along the same lines, the piece they did on The Daily Show a few weeks ago: Bush vs Bush. Masterfully done.

PHP offers choices in syntax for control structures. You can do this:

if (expr) {
    statement;
}

or this:

if (expr):
    statement;
endif;

I am none too fond of the latter. Especially when the programmer whose code I have to edit doesn’t consistently indent a damn thing. At least with curly braces I can use a decent text editor to indicate matching braces. Compound this lack of proper indentation with code blocks that are way too big to keep track of so it’s hard to tell to which if an endif belongs and you’ve got yourself a mess.

Or rather, I do.

Grrr…

Nukes: the Open Source Java CMS.

For a while the folks at JBoss were running PostNuke. Beyond the expected questioning of why the web site for a Java application server was running on PHP, they found that some unfortunate design decisions meant that PostNuke didn’t scale.

Ultimately, it didn’t work with PHP, so we decided to pull the plug on the PHP web site and put all we had learned about system design for scalability in four years of J2EE in JBoss (including EJB) to the test. Could we port the Nukes engine to J2EE? We did just that.

Nukes was born.

If we had a chance in hell of using JBoss at work, I’d actually be excited about this. Instead we’re almost certain to go with another application server, for better or worse, and I think we’ll be stuck with its CMS. So instead I just read the article with interest.

I have no idea how it happened, but somehow The Daily Show managed to get former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to appear for an interview with Jon Stewart.

Confession: I love Jon Stewart’s interviews. He’s no Terry Gross, no, but given the constraints he works with (just a few minutes on the show, the fact that the show is first and foremost a comedy), he can pull off some really interesting interviews.

The Albright interview was good, albeit hampered by Stewart’s need/desire to cover a whole lot more than is possible in the short time frame their format allows:

• Albright’s recent study that shows how profoundly the world hates and fears the US (and, she made sure to point out, that the US isn’t too fond of the rest of the world, either). This should be no surprise to anyone who’s barely conscious. An interesting note is how much the situation has worsened in the past two years (again, little surprise). Stewart asked
• Albright discussed her experiences in North Korea, and although she did not outright criticize the Bush administration, I got a real sense of how badly things were bungled things by not picking up where she’d left off. As she explained, North Korean leaders were under the impression they were dealing with the United States, so when the newly elected Bush administration didn’t really do anything, it was confusing and damaging. Scary.

Granted, Madeleine Albright can hardly be speaking from an unbiased perspective, but I credit her for being reasonable and intelligent. Except that she chose to appear on a fake news show, of course. :)

This rant is a bit late in coming, but I finally got sick of hearing people complain about the iTunes 4.01 update. Oh boo hoo, Apple disabled the ability to stream music across subnets with iTunes. Those dirty, rotten, greedy, freedom-hating bastards.

I’m sorry, I have no patience for that attitude. Yes, being able to listen to music streamed from home while sitting in a coffeehouse or at work is pretty damn cool. Certainly falls within the realm of personal use, and I’m all for it. But obviously it was causing more of a legal hassle than it’s worth. What did you expect? All Apple did was remove the far-too-easy point-and-click means to do it. Guess what? You can still set up Apache to serve up those files. Drop a few bucks and you can use Andromeda to stream your music. And obviously, you can still use iTunes to stream within your own network. So what’s the problem?

I have to say, though, that the hullaballoo has given rise to some amusing conversation amongst the Windows users at work. They never quite seem to have their facts straight.

Update: Whew, could I sound more bitter?

Interesting. Among other things I’d rather not discuss for fear of frothing at the mouth in anger and disgust, the 2003 Minnesota Legislature passed legislation requiring all state employees to be paid 100% by direct deposit. Period.

Well, it doesn’t piss me off, but it is an interesting step.

Here’s the book I’ve really been waiting for: Practical mod_perl was just released. If the sample chapter, “Coding with mod_perl in Mind,” is any indication of the quality of the rest of the book, I will be in heaven.

Customers who shopped for How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft’s Cult of the Puzzle – How the World’s Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers also shopped for … Girls of Topless Volleyball.

Heh.