Month: February 2010

on blog commenting

One of the interesting things about blogs (to me) is that they're supposed to be a bidirectional communications mechanism. There are asymmetries, of course — the blog owner has the soapbox and the megaphone, and commenters are (rightly) guests in the blog owner's virtual house, as it were, with the rights and responsibilities that pertain thereunto. But generally the people who read the blog are supposed to be able to talk back — comment on, elaborate on, disagree with, or otherwise emend the original post. I've been a little disappointed that the Iron Blogger participants haven't commented as much as I expected on each other's blogs. Some of this is I think because not all the posts are necessarily comment-worthy. I seem to be the only blogger writing consistently about science fiction, and if the other people involved are less interested in the aspects of SF that interest me, it makes sense that they don't have anything to say when I go on about it. In the same way, I don't have a whole lot to add to the discussion of a grotty Linux kernel issue.

I think some of it is also that we're more likely to follow up with each other on MIT's zephyr system than in the blog comments — it's one of the perils of us being relatively close socially and sharing a common forum like zephyr. Also, at least for me blog comments don't integrate nicely with my existing attention-management mechanisms (mostly BarnOwl), so they're out of sight and therefore out of mind. Oh, and we're hosed.

At any rate, in the spirit of discussion, and since writing these comments took up much of the time I'd allotted for writing a blog post, here are a few of the comments I've left recently on other blogs, mostly but not exclusively Iron Blogger blogs. Go, read the posts, and chime in in the comments if you have something to add!

remains of the week

…or, five things make a post.

This week for me was very full of very little of import to the wider world, so here's bits and pieces of stuff:

  1. I'm playing around with ikiwiki as the potential new backend for my blog and liking it a fair bit. (I know co-Iron Blogger spang uses it for her site.) It bills itself as a "wiki compiler", which seems not quite right — or at least I'm using it as a more general web site compiler — but it's impressively effective for something which generates static pages and uses only a cookie and a CGI script to do all its interaction with the user. It's backed by pretty much whatever version control system you want, which plays exactly to my kinks in software design — I chose Git. I may at some point roll my own database-backed comment module, because the current file-backed one feels a little clunky, but for the moment I'm still working on more basic things. Web design is hard; good web design seems fscking impossible. Also, like, free time. I'm going to get the site looking halfways decent and then figure out how to move all my data (and URLs, and and and) over from Blogger. But I have a site that's stored in a Git repository and updates when I 'git push' to it, and that makes me really happy.
  2. I finished the latest Asimov's on the T some time this week. I gave it to an acquaintance who was looking for reading material, so I'm just doing this from memory and the preview of the issue posted on Asimov's web site, but here's what I thought of the stories in it. (Since I'm trying to put my thoughts together for Hugo nominations this year and finding it frustrating to remember everything I read, I figure if I do it here I'll have something to consult come next year. I'll try to go back and do the first couple issues of the year in a bit. It's mostly for my own use, but I figure other people may be interested too — if you have thoughts on the stories, feel free to chime in. 🙂
    • "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down", by William Preston (novelette) — a really wonderful deconstruction of pulp/superhero/superspy stories, well-written and thoughtful; definitely potential Hugo material.
    • "The Tower", by Kristine Katheryn Rusch — the novella (novelette); it didn't grab me, so I didn't read it.
    • "Blind Cat Dance", by Alexander Jablokov (novelette) — gene-modded animals and the people who manage them, and manage each other; interesting ideas, an arrestingly wrong protagonist and other interesting and well-developed characters. Hugo potential.
    • "Centaurs", by Benjamin Crowell (short story) — Bleh. Hormones IN SPAAAAAACE. One-dimensional teenage protagonists, including a not-very-convincingly-rendered damsel in distressteenage girl. Its only saving grace is that it didn't have the expected ending, but that wasn't nearly enough to redeem it for me.
    • "Ticket Inspector Gliden Becomes the First Martyr of the Glorious Human Uprising", by Derek Zumsteg (short story) — this one was amusing and included some trenchant observations on public transit. It mostly casts tensions of our own time into SFnal terms, but it does so without heavy-handedness. I'm not sure it's Hugo-worthy, but it made me smile.
    • "The Speed of Dreams", by Will Ludwigsen (short story) — a cute and amusing story told by a well-realized 8th grader as her science report, with an icepick of an ending. I still can't figure out what I think of it.

  3. Now I need something new to read on the T. The April/May Asimov's should be up soon — I need to check Pandemonium for it — but in the meantime I'm reading Valentine, written by Alex de Campi and drawn by Christine Larsen, a comic about two soldiers in Napolean's army in its harrowing retreat from Moscow who are entrusted with the future of magic on Earth. It was featured in a Big Idea piece on John Scalzi's web site and caught my eye. It's primarily being distributed for mobile devices, which is actually a pretty pleasant way to read comics, so I'm reading it on my G1 (though it's also available for iPhone and a bunch of other formats). You can download the first issue for free on the Android Marketplace and buy the next three for a buck apiece. Each one is about a T ride for me, and I'm enjoying it so far. Suggestions for other things to read on the T — which is to say short things, especially fiction — would be welcomed. 🙂

  4. MITSFS got the microfilm scans back — thanks to NESFA for funding the project! They look good — obviously the covers don't come out, but they didn't in the microfilm either, so that's not a loss, and the text is crisp and eminently readable. Now to figure out what to do with them… (My next MITSFS project is probably to find the legal people to make the Google Books thing happen? Gah.)

  5. I just spent 45 minutes being interviewed by my housemate on my IM habits for his UI design class. It was amusing. Also apparently I have a lot of things I pay attention to. 🙂

Edit 2010-Apr-08: Added story lengths, tagged as asimovs.

link salad

A little bit of link salad:

  • The Daddening of Video Games — article about how video games are starting to focus on the experience of parents, which I hypothesize has a lot to do with the aging of the hardcore gamer populace. It's interesting from a media studies perspective to watch gaming quite literally growing up (via Penny Arcade).
  • SCE_HeavyRain, the blog of the writer-director of Heavy Rain, a new video game that looks to be pushing the form-as-art vastly further than anything before. It's fascinating reading. He sounds as stressed as I feel (also via Penny Arcade).
  • This post on what happens when Google stops sending "I'm Feeling Lucky" searches for 'facebook login' to the Facebook login page (answer: hilarity ensues) led me to this excellent post on designing to counter learned helplessness, which in turn led me to this post on designing web forms to be spam-proof without CAPTCHAs.
  • As a coder, these kinds of things — cf. the recent Google Buzz privacy debacle (link sadly down right now) — frankly terrify me. If code I wrote fucked up and exposed personal information in a way that got them killed by a vengeful ex, which is not unfathomable, I'd feel just as responsible as if I'd been more directly at fault. Considering how interconnected modern services, especially social networking sites, are, how many unintended side effects you have to be watching for constantly, to say nothing of actively hostile users, it's almost a wonder this stuff doesn't happen more often. I don't know that there's a good way to mitigate these kinds of privacy leaks — not putting any information on the Internet, even privately, doesn't help when other people or organizations put it up for you. I'm well aware that it's in many ways a privilege of being white and male that I can be as public as I am.
  • Google Buzz actually looks really cool — the closest thing to MIT's Zephyr for the web I've seen yet. It's a shame many people's introduction to it was so frought with problems.
  • Annoyingly, Blogger has decided to discontinue FTP support on their service, which is how I've been publishing this blog (though thankfully they've pushed back their original March 26 deadline to May 1). This amounts to an ultimatum — switch to hosting my blog on Blogspot, or find another software package I can host myself. I haven't yet found a piece of blog software that I like, but I'd love to hear suggestions.

    (I've got two interlocked problems, really. One is the problem of finding blog software I like. WordPress is out, because I don't want to deal with the upgrade treadmill. Hosted by me is really important, because I want to own my data, and ideally I could port the entire site to whatever software I switch to. The other problem is that most of the HTML for this site hails from about ten years ago, tables and embedded formatting and all, but I like the look and don't want to lose that. Migrating the bad old HTML to a new piece of blog software isn't an idea I find appealing. So I can either spend the time (which I don't have) to port it to CSS and modern HTML, or I can spend the money (which I don't have) to get a freelancer somewhere to port it for me. My CSS is somewhere between rusty and nonexistent, so I've mostly just tried to ignore this problem, but unfortunately it doesn't see to be going away very fast.)

new online pinkdex!

The new online Pinkdex[0] software that I alluded to in my very first blog post after my hiatus is finally up and public, after Inventory, a memory upgrade for the server, and a lot of swearing at Git last night. Poke it, prod it, tell me if it breaks or doesn't do what you expect. (Known bug, fix postponed for version 2.0: authors need to be entered as lastname, firstname.)

It's built using a lightweight Python web framework kcr developed, based on webob and the Tempita templating language. It's kind of an instance of the webob do-it-yourself web framework, and it's pretty nice to work with.

It's been a while since I last did web programming, but it was still pretty straightforward to write — I got it to 90% functionality (which is to say all the functionality of the old grep-based version) in a couple days over finals week, and then the intervening two months was all the fiddly little details, mostly refactoring the display code out of the logic and tuning the database queries. My favorite feature is the series view (see eg. Discworld), which lists the books we have (which is most of them) in the order we think the series is in.

I'm trying a deploy strategy based on Git that I developed last night, where I have a production branch and a testing branch and move code between them, but Git doesn't handle tracking and propagating changes to files which have been renamed over top of another file, which is so far essential to my strategy, so I'm not sure how successful it is right now. It seems like it should be a clever idea, so I'll keep poking at it. I'd be curious to hear if other people have tried similar things. (A friend informs me that this failure is a bug in Git, so hopefully it will be fixed eventually, and then maybe my strategy will work better.)

[0] Generally, 'the Pindex' is the name of the catalog of books in the MITSFS Library, and specifically it's the name of the printed catalog indexed by author name (the others being the Titledex, Seriesdex, and Gooddex). It's named after Marilyn "Fuzzy Pink" Niven née Wisowaty, the first person to maintain it, who was known for her fuzzy pink sweaters.

we don’t blog

It was ironic to read, a couple hours before the first Iron Blogger meet-up at the Cambridge Brewing Company that we don't blog ("we" meaning people under the age of thirty, which is to say most of the people doing Iron Blogger).

According to a just-released Pew Internet study, as summarized in the above RoughType post, "In 2006, 28% of teens were blogging. Now, just three years later, the percentage has tumbled to 14%. Among twentysomethings, the percentage who write blogs has fallen from 24% to 15%. Writing comments on blogs is also down sharply among the young. It's only geezers – those over 30 – who are doing more blogging than they used to."

Apparently we're all weirdos, or something. But I think we knew that already. Free beer with other weirdos never tasted so good. 🙂