Jamison Foser writes on the defining issue of our time:

The defining issue of our time is not the Iraq war. It is not the "global war on terror." It is not our inability (or unwillingness) to ensure that all Americans have access to affordable health care. Nor is it immigration, outsourcing, or growing income inequity. It is not education, it is not global warming, and it is not Social Security.

The defining issue of our time is the media.

The dominant political force of our time is not Karl Rove or the Christian Right or Bill Clinton. It is not the ruthlessness or the tactical and strategic superiority of the Republicans, and it is not your favorite theory about what is wrong with the Democrats.

The dominant political force of our time is the media.

Time after time, the news media have covered progressives and conservatives in wildly different ways -- and, time after time, they do so to the benefit of conservatives.

Consider the last two presidents. Bill Clinton faced near-constant media obsession with his "scandals," while George W. Bush has gotten off comparatively easy.

... 

At this point, you'd have to be blind to miss the pattern. Every prominent progressive leader who comes along is openly derided in the media as fake, dishonest, conniving, out-of-the-mainstream, and weak. We simply can't continue to chalk this up to shortcomings on the part of Democratic candidates or their staff and consultants. It's all too clear that this will happen regardless of who the candidate or leader is; regardless of who works for him or her. The smearing of Jack Murtha should prove that to anyone who still doubts it.

Look what happened to Al Gore in the run-up to the 2000 election versus how George Bush was treated then by the media. Gore, the well-qualified candidate, was subjected to an endless barrage of ridiculous stories accusing him of everything from fraudulently claiming to have invented the Internet, to being the inspiration for Love Story. Meanwhile, Bush was making all kinds of nonsense claims for his tax cuts, and his insider trading at Harken was being completely overlooked.

Raven emailed me a link to this story in the Onion: Heroic Computer Dies to Save World From Master's Thesis:

"This fearless little machine saved me from unspoken hours of exasperated head-scratching and eyestrain, as well as years of agonizing self-doubt over my decision to devote my life to teaching," said professor John Rebson, who had already read through three drafts of Samoskevich's sprawling, 38,000-word dissertation, titled A Hermeneutical Exploration Of Onomatopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia. "It was an incredible act of bravery. This laptop sacrificed itself in order to put an end to Jill's senseless rambling."

Nothing like my own Master's Thesis, 3-D Text Objects in the Brown Animation Graphics System, which clocked in at just 8 pages. Mind you, it was backed up by tens of thousands of lines of C code.

AmericaBlog links to a CNN segment on the quacks who claim they can "cure" homosexuality.

Very creepy. Very bogus. And typical of so-called reparative therapy.

I believe that those "ex-gays" who do manage to make a go of it are bisexual rather than gay. In other words, they're no more than 5 on the Kinsey scale.

And I'm not the only one.

Here's a selection of the lies propagated by the Right in the last few years:

• Iraq sent its WMDs to Syria.
• Democrats don't want to wiretap terrorists.
• Mexicans are taking our jobs.
• Scooter Libby has a faulty memory.
• Tom DeLay is like Jesus Christ.
• No one could have anticipated that the levees would be breached.
• We do not torture.
• There is no global warming.
• There is global warming, but humans didn't cause it.
• John F. Kerry is a flip-flopper.
• George W. Bush is a decider.
• Nobody at the White House knows Jack Abramoff.
• Evolution isn't supported by the facts.
• Diebold voting machines are secure.
• Fox News is fair and balanced.
• Mission accomplished.
• No one could have anticipated the Iraqi insurgency.
• The budget deficit will be cut in half in four years.
• Anyone who thinks Dubai shouldn't control our ports is racist.
• No one who thinks we should build a wall along the Mexican border is racist.
• Terry Schiavo wants to live.
• We've turned a corner in Iraq.
• There's a war on Christmas.
• There's no civil war in Iraq.
• The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
• Bush won Florida in 2000.
• Bush won Ohio in 2004.
• We support open, free, and fair elections ... for the Ukraine.
• I earned political capital... and I intend to spend it.
• Losing by 2 million votes in 2000 is a mandate.
• Winning by 3 million votes in 2004 is a mandate.
• The grownups will now be in charge.
• Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.
• Kathleen Blanco never asked for federal help.
• Moral values voters.
• The earth is 6,000 years old.
• We're not interested in banning contraceptives.
• Bush flew F-102s in the Texas Air National Guard.
• Bush is a compassionate conservative.
• John Kerry "outed" Mary Cheney
• John Kerry shot himself in the leg to earn his medals
• Al Gore thinks he invented the internet.
• Bill Clinton was once offered Bin Laden "on a silver platter" and turned it down.
• Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11.
• 9/11 changed everything.
• No one could have anticipated airplanes flying into buildings.
• We have removed the Taliban from Afghanistan.
• The Iraqis will welcome us with open arms and flowers...
• Yellow magnetic car ribbons really help the troops.
• We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here.
• Iraqi oil will pay for the war and the reconstruction.
• Gas prices are high because of librul environmental regulations.
• Drilling the ANWR will lower the price of oil.
• The 'magic of the marketplace' will solve all problems.
• Unemployment numbers have never been so low.
• By far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum.
• Tax cuts increase revenue.
• The estate tax hurts family farms.
• Private Accounts will save Social Security.
• No Child Left Behind will help all children.
• Healthy Skies Initiative will reduce air pollution.
• Republicans are compassionate conservatives.
• Dissent is unpatriotic.
• You're either with us, or against us.
• All options are on the table.
• Republicans are the party of ideas.
• These are not assertions. These are facts backed up by solid intelligence.
• Terri Schiavo is responsive. (Bill Frist on the Senate floor).
• I never said she was responsive (Bill Frist, about a week later).
• Anyone who leaks information will no longer be part of this administration.
• Harriet would be a great justice. I know her heart.
• Terrorists didn't know we could use wiretaps until they read about it in the paper.
• I will restore honor and integrity to the White House.
• I'm a uniter, not a divider.
• The 'CEO' President.
• If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.
• If gays are allowed to marry then heterosexual men will leave their wives.
• Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
• "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

A much fuller list can be found at AmericaBlog.

I've been sporting a goatee for the last two months, instead of my usual full beard. This has necessitated shaving, and I've been using those disposable Bic razors. I haven't been very happy with them. They left my face feeling like I had been making out with a cheese grater.

I bought one of those new five-bladed Fusion razors yesterday and shaved with it this morning. Oh my! Very smooth!

I'm convinced that five blades is marketing hokum and that five blades is probably not really better than four blades. Or three blades. But five blades is certainly better than one.

I have two blogs, my personal blog and my technical blog. The technical blog is a small subset of the personal blog containing posts that are more likely to be of interest to the techie audience at weblogs.asp.net.

Lately, the comments in one post at weblogs.asp.net have been repeatedly spammed with sad little gems like the following:

• "not much on my mind right now"

• "I just don't have anything to say , but shrug"

• "I've just been letting everything happen without me"

• "Basically nothing noteworthy happening right now, but eh"

• "My mind is like a void"

If you click the links above, you'll find that I'm not the only one who's getting this treatment. The spams are clearly generated by a bot, which is generating links to an enormous variety of randomly chosen sites, with no obvious commonality.

Surprisingly, I can find very few discussions of this particular phenomenon, save Nihilist spam and Best Comment Spam Ever. It seems to have been the catalyst triggering PocketNow: Requiring Registration [to Post].

My personal blog is running dasBlog, which has a CAPTCHA implementation, as well as some other anti-spam features. So far, I haven't had a spam problem there, but perhaps I'm just flying under the spammers' radar.

Brian Goldfarb recently sent mail to all the bloggers at weblogs.asp.net, detailing forthcoming changes and improvements (sorry, can't find a public post). There was no specific mention of dealing with comment spam, alas.

I found the SixApart Guide to Comment Spam to be useful, if wordy and Movable Type-centric. They agree with Scott Mitchell on the Worth(lessness) of CAPTCHAs. And this summary of the problem of Comment Spam ain't bad.

I mentioned last week that my parents have no aptitude for computers.

My father emailed me with a list of computer woes; notably, he was getting messages about no firewall. There was no way I was going to get to the bottom of the issue just by email or talking to him on the phone. It's 5,000 miles from Seattle to Dublin, so I can't drop by to take a look at the computer in person--much as my parents would like to have me visit.

I had tried using the built-in Windows Remote Assistance to troubleshoot issues on their laptop a couple of years ago, while they were on a protracted stay in Cape Town. I had solved the problem, but that had been fairly painful for me. The primary problem was the horrible sluggishness of the connection: they were on a slow dialup connection and the latency is something fierce. Another problem was the fragility of my control: if I dismissed a dialog by hitting Escape, I stopped controlling the remote desktop, and as a longtime vi user, I have certain deeply ingrained reflexes that are hard to overcome.

I decided to try out Joel Spolsky's Copilot. The Copilot service builds on TightVNC. The helper and the person being helped both make outbound connections to a Copilot server, which proxies the virtual session, neatly avoiding all kinds of NAT issues that can arise when you try to make a direct connection through a firewall. It's also supposedly easy to configure, requiring only a visit to the Copilot website and typing in an email address or a 12-digit number, before downloading a half-megabyte executable. It wasn't too painful to talk my father through making the connection, though the first time that he did it, he "lost" the binary and had to download it again. We initially tried the two-minute trial version, but that wasn't nearly enough time to do anything, so I shelled out the $10 for a day pass.

In Dublin, as in Cape Town, he dials up to the Internet on a 56K modem, and that once again proved to be the primary source of pain for me. It seemed a little less sluggish than I remembered Remote Assistance being, but I wasn't about to subject myself to trying that out too. The experience varied between tolerable and infuriating, but there's only so much that can be done at a little over 3Kbps.

The second reason the experience was so painful was that I ended up needing to repair the eTrust installation, and to download a full set of antivirus signatures, and I simply couldn't do it. The eTrust FTP site kept dropping the connection, and the full signature package takes over 20 minutes to download. I blame the FTP server, as I was VPN'd in to his laptop the whole time, so his Internet connection was obviously working. I eventually gave up at 4AM PDT, in utter frustration.

Verdict. Copilot works fairly well, although it can be painful over a dialup connection. I would have killed for a file-transfer facility so that I could send files directly between his computer and mine. $10 for a day pass isn't cheap, but he gets to pay it in future! I use Terminal Server and Virtual PC regularly: both of them provide ways to press all of the Windows keys (Terminal Server, Virtual PC); Copilot doesn't.

I just listened to This American Life on the radio. I am continually amazed at just how good this show is. They find so many compelling stories.

This week, Ira Glass interviewed Gene Cheek, who wrote a memoir, The Color of Love: A Mother's Choice in the Jim Crow South.

In the early 1960s, Cheek's divorced mother fell in love with Tuck, a black man. They lived in a small town in North Carolina, and the miscegenation laws were still on the books. They dated clandestinely, but eventually their relationship become known. The police would stop by regularly to harass them. After she had a baby by Tuck, her own family refused to have anything to do with her.

One day, Cheek's mother went to court, in an attempt to collect child-support payments for Gene from his alcoholic father. When she and Gene got there, they realized that the case being heard was a child-custody case. She was given the ultimatum: give up her infant mixed-race son or give up her 12-year-old son. His father said that he couldn't take Gene in, and neither could his uncle or his grandmother. Gene volunteered to leave his mother, and he was sent to a foster home. He began acting out and was eventually sent to a boy's prison, 200 miles from home, where he spent five years.

Years later, after the ban on interracial marriages was overturned in Loving v. Virgina, Cheek's mother married Tuck.

I was horrified by this story, by the barbarity of it, by the racism. Thank God this can no longer happen.

Yet it does. Gay parents still have to contend with the presumption that they are unfit parents in more benighted parts of the country. Fortunately, Lawrence v. Texas is overturning this presumption, but this issue is far from settled. The bigots are pushing to enact a Federal Marriage Amendment (HRC, Wikipedia) which would certainly affect custody rights for LGBT parents.

A front group for Big Oil is putting out ads denying the reality of global warming, in a pre-emptive bid to undermine Al Gore's new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

The first ad portrays global warming science as a vicious smear campaign against carbon dioxide. The ad, which despite appearances is not an SNL parody, helpfully reminds us that carbon dioxide is “essential to life” because “we breath[e] it out.”

"An Inconvenient Truth" opens in Seattle on June 2nd, 2006.

I blogged last month on Jim McDermott's long-running First Amendment legal battle with John Boehner, the new Republican Majority Leader. The Stranger has a cover story giving a lot of detail on the case.

President Clinton will be appearing at the Seattle Center on June 3rd in a fundraiser for McDermott.

Update: The We The People event will be held from 5:30-7:30pm at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. Tickets can be ordered here. I just ordered tickets for Emma and me. See you there.

My opera education continues. Tonight, we saw Seattle Opera's production of Verdi's MacBeth.

I used to be very familiar with Shakespeare's MacBeth, having studied it for two years in preparation for the Leaving Certificate (the major examination at the end of Irish secondary school; effectively the entrance exam for university).

Verdi's opera of MacBeth truncates Shakespeare's plot, concentrating on the tragic flaw of the MacBeths. Their shared ambition, feeding off each other, both impels them to power, and leads to their ultimate downfall. The opera was written during the Risorgimento, when Italy was trying to break away from the Austrian empire, and doubles as a thinly veiled appeal to Italian patriotism.

I had more fun at Cosi Fan Tutte, when we saw it in March. The music and singing was fine in MacBeth, but I did not care for the monochromatic costumes and sets, which reminded me of Mourning Becomes Electra. The cast looked as if they had stepped out of a daguerrotype of a funeral. There's no fun in Verdi's MacBeth. Shakespeare's tragedies are always leavened by some comic doings, but not Verdi's.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a C++ routine to parse decimal numbers using the overflow detection principles of SafeInt. I couldn't find anything in the libraries that actually did a good job of checking for overflow.

Briefly, to see if unsigned values A+B overflow, check if (A > MAX_UINT - B). Similarly, A*B will overflow if (A > MAX_UINT / B).

 // Convert a string to an unsigned. Returns 'true' iff conversion is legitimate.
 bool
 StringToUnsigned(
     const string& str,
     unsigned&     rUint)
 {
     rUint = 0;

     if (str.empty())
         return false;

     for (unsigned i = 0;  i < str.length();  ++i)
     {
         if (!isdigit(str[i]))
             return false;

         // Check for numeric overflow.
         if (rUint > numeric_limits<unsigned>::max() / 10)
             return false;
         rUint *= 10;

         unsigned d = str[i] - '0';
         if (rUint > numeric_limits<unsigned>::max() - d)
             return false;
         rUint += d;
     }

     return true;
 }

While debugging this code, I noticed something interesting. 0xFFFFFFFF divided by ten (0xA) is 0x19999999. This pattern holds for smaller and larger sequences of 0xFF...FF too: 0xFF/10 = 0x19; 0xFFFF/10 = 0x1999; and so on.

I'm not sure how to prove this, but I can prove the closely related result: 0x19...99 * 10 = 0xFF...FA:

 10 * N         = 8 * N  +  2 * N
 10 * 0x19...99 = 8 * 0x19...99  +  2 * 0x19...99

 0x199...99     =   %0001 1001 1001 ... 1001 1001

 10 * 0x19...99 =   %1100 1100 1100 ... 1100 1000
                  + %0011 0011 0011 ... 0011 0010
                =   %1111 1111 1111 ... 1111 1010

A mildly curious result of no value, but it amused me.

Amy Sullivan has a piece in the Washington Monthly about the little-sung successes of the Democrats.

Apparently, there is some strategy and coordination going on in the Democratic leadership, despite what the press might lead you to believe. The Dubai ports deal blew up because Schumer kept calling press conferences about it, though Schumer has hardly been credited with lobbing the grenade. Murtha was not left out in the cold by Pelosi and other Dems; it was a deliberate strategy to prevent him being labeled as a token hawk. And the Dems managed to kill Bush's privatization of Social Security, by disciplined attacks on Bush's "risky" proposal. Their not offering a counterproposal was deliberate: it meant that they couldn't be pressured into working with the Republicans to form a compromise.

The press have written little about this, and that's the real problem.

On a related note, here's a post about what the Democrats would do if they regain control of the House of Representatives:

• Raise the minimum wage for the first time since 1997;

• Fully implement the recommendations of the bipartisan panel on homeland security after the 9/11 attacks;

• Reinstate the lapsed rules that require increases in spending to be offset by spending cuts or tax increases, to prevent the deficit from growing further;

• A real security plan.

I sometimes joke that I must be adopted because my parents have no aptitude for computers. I could make a similar joke about writing. Many of my immediate family, despite decent educations, seem to be incapable of writing a simple English sentence, much less a coherent paragraph.

One relative writes emails that are bereft of punctuation: neither a comma nor a full stop (period) is to be found. Capital letters occur, but too randomly for my liking. And everything is linked into one paragraph, no matter how long or disjointed. Yet, I've received adequately punctuated handwritten letters and postcards from him. I attribute his email slovenliness to a combination of laziness and hunt-and-peck typing. Whatever the cause, it reflects poorly on him.

John Scalzi has some Writing Tips for Non-Writers Who Don't Want to Work at Writing. Here's the summary:

0. Speak what you write ... If what you're writing is hard to speak, what makes you think it's going to be easy to read? It won't be. ...

1. Punctuate, damn you: For God's sake, is it really so hard to know where to put a comma? ...

2. With sentences, shorter is better than longer.

3. Learn to friggin' spell.

4. Don't use words you don't really know.

5. Grammar matters, but not as much as anal grammar Nazis think it does.

6. Front-load your point.

7. Try to write well every single time you write.

8. Read people who write well.

9. When in doubt, simplify.

10. Speak what you write.

Go read the whole thing.

I found some useful links in the comments that follow Scalzi's Tips:

• One Simple Rules: Use the Active Voice

• Commas, Commas, and More Commas, for when you've mastered the preceding rules.

And here's a few tips of my own:

• One thought per paragraph. Run-on paragraphs offend me and annoy me. If a paragraph has more than four sentences, it's probably too long.

• Pick up something that was written by a competent writer who you enjoy and analyze a page. Why did they choose to break sentences where they did? Why are the commas placed where they are? Do the paragraph breaks make sense? What about the word choice? Did it clearly and succinctly convey their ideas, their tone? (Hell, just analyze this post.)

• Think before you write. Before you dive in headlong, what is it you're trying to convey? This doesn't have to take you very long. A few seconds before a short email is enough.

• Reread what you wrote, before you send it off. Revising mistakes is so easy on a computer that you have no excuse for not bothering.

This isn't enough to turn you into a professional writer, but it will make a marked improvement in what you write.

David Neiwert writes:

Go smugly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in stonewalling.
As far as possible, leave no chance of surrender
and be on superior terms to all other persons.
Speak your truthiness loudly and garbled;
and never listen to others,
especially not the wise and the well-informed;
they can all just go to hell.

Rest here.

President Al Gore on Saturday Night Live, spoofing the disastrous six years of Bush.

I first started blogging at EraBlog in February 2003, during the run-up to the Iraq war. EraBlog never really took off and now seems to be experiencing technical problems.

I'm reposting all of my original posts. I've cleaned up the links, where possible, and added an image at the top of each one, but have not otherwise modified the posts.

As you can see, Iraq weighed on my mind. And I was fucking right! Going to war was wrong, and even then I (like many others) could see that the case for war was lacking.

2003/02/07: Casus Belli

2003/02/07: Pencil Carvings

2003/02/07: State of the Union

2003/02/07: Hasbians: Bi for Now

2003/02/07: Barbara Lee: Public Enemy Number One?

2003/02/08: Bush-Iraq parody of Nigerian spam scam

2003/02/09: Casus Belli II

2003/02/09: TiVo

2003/02/09: Powell at the UN

2003/02/14: Patriot Act II

2003/02/14: Hans Blix reports to the UN

2003/02/14: Seattle Peace Rally, Sat 15th Feb, Seattle Center

2003/02/20: The Seattle March

2003/02/21: MSNBC's The Savage Nation

2003/02/24: Why Nerds are Unpopular in American high schools

2003/02/26: Why God is a Computer Programmer

2003/03/04: Irish Personals

2003/03/12: The Onion does St. Patty's Day

2003/03/17: Candlelight Vigil for Peace

2003/03/18: How Bush made enemies of our allies

More to follow tomorrow.

I remember about two years ago, before a trip across the Atlantic, trying to find websites that had street maps for London and Dublin -- and coming up nearly empty.

Now, a year after it became available, I notice that Google Maps covers Ireland and the UK. Unfortunately, it does a piss-poor job of finding locations: try typing anything more specific than Dublin into the search box.

Google Maps now provides a basic ability to get directions between cities.

Some other map links:

• Irish sightseeing

• Maps of Ireland and the UK

• Via Michelin: driving directions

Via Bootboy, a video of "Jesus" singing Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive.

More than two years in the making, Vim 7.0 is finally out!

(Vim is Vi IMproved, an enormously enhanced version of the classic Unix editor, vi.)

The main features of the 7.0 release are:

• Spell checking

• Omni-completion (Intellisense-like)

• Tabbed pages

• VimL script language now supports Lists and Dictionaries

I'm going to take credit for some minor features of Vim 7:

• Making Vim build with VC5-VC8

• The Win64 port

• Syntax highlighting for FlexWiki

WikiPedia summarizes the history of Vim. This enabled me to pinpoint when I first became a contributor to Vim, back in December 1995. I cleaned up the original, rather buggy port of Vim 3.0 to NT, and posted it to the comp.editors newsgroup. Bram invited me to merge my changes into Vim 4.0, which was then under development, and I became the owner of Win32 Vim for the next couple of years.

I saw a video clip of so-called Russian Climbing at work today. It turns out that it's an extreme sport of French origin called Parkour or Free Running.

Parkour is "the art of forward motion in spite of obstacles". Its practitioners (traceurs) run around urban landscapes, performing Jacky Chan-like leaps, rolls, stunts, jumps, and flips.

The excellent HowStuffWorks.com has a good introductory piece on Parkour.

There is a local group of traceurs, who are written up in a P-I article. Their website is Washington Parkour. It seems there's a "jam" every Sunday at noon at Seattle's Freeway Park. It sounds like a photo-op to me.

Three years ago, one of our must-watch shows was Fire Within, a documentary on the making of Cirque du Soleil's Varekai show. It followed a set of would-be performers in the eight months leading up to the premiere of Varekai, as they train at the Cirque's school in Montreal, developing potential acts. Some of them make it, some fall by the wayside.

Varekai has been on tour ever since, and it just opened in Seattle. We saw it tonight. Very little of the original show survives; mostly, the aerial strap act with the twins, Kevin and Andrew.

I recommend it. Varekai is a visual spectacular, with all the familiar elements of incredible acrobatics, clown acts, and bizarre costumes.

Two young Chinese boys twirling pots on ropes; hunky twin men on aerial swings; a team of acrobats twirling each other on their feet; a spotlight-loving sleazeball crooner; acrobats hurtling off a giant swing; and a human pretzel of a contortionist. Quite the show.

Someday I have to post the photos that I took of the Zip Zap circus school performing at the Cavendish mall in Cape Town. Some of the best free entertainment that I've ever come across.

A lot of anti-war music and videos are appearing of late, and about time too.

Via AmericaBlog, I learn today of Jackson Browne's new anti-war video, Lives in the Balance.

There's also Pink's song Dear Mr. President.

Not to mention Neil Young's new album, Living with War. You can listen to the entire album online.

And the Dixie Chicks' forthcoming album, Taking the Long Way.

Today (May 6th) was our sixth wedding anniversary. In some ways, it feels like only yesterday. In others, it feels like we've been together forever.

Six pretty good years. Lots of good memories. Quiet times. Happy times. Travel together. Staying home together. Going out together. Mixing with our friends.

Not perfect years. I'd change a few things if I could, like Emma's health and her two long periods of unemployment. I should have quit Microsoft months before I did in 2004.

We celebrated by having some friends over for dinner. Raven came with Mr. Raven. Muhsin and Banu, newly back from a long trip to Turkey, came too. I made Afghan Chicken. It was a little dry this time, but it was still a big hit. Emma hurt her foot last week, so I did all the cooking.

Tomorrow morning, we're going on the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train for brunch.

Here's an interesting Campari ad, where things are not as they seem. Worksafe, but only barely.

Some background from Campari: The Secret

I hang out on the SourceForge-hosted inkscape-user mailing list, where I pick up useful tips for the Inkscape SVG editor (vector drawing program).

For months, the list has been plagued with spam; largely because anyone can send to the list. The policy has been not to require new users to sign up for the list before being able to send questions. This is commendably friendly and user-centric, but the spam has become a real annoyance.

One of the Inkscape developers finally said that, if a dozen or more people said "yes, restrict posting to list members only" and no-one opposed it, he would lock the list down. I attempted to vote yes and got the following rejection letter from SourceForge:

 <inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net>:
 66.35.250.206 does not like recipient.
 Remote host said: 550-Postmaster verification failed while checking <george@reilly.org>
 550-Called:   205.158.62.206
 550-Sent:     RCPT TO:<postmaster@reilly.org>
 550-Response: 550 <postmaster@reilly.org>: User unknown
 550-Several RFCs state that you are required to have a postmaster
 550-mailbox for each mail domain. This host does not accept mail
 550-from domains whose servers reject the postmaster address.
 550 Sender verify failed
 Giving up on 66.35.250.206.

Such irony! I had received a similar bounce a few days before from the FlexWiki-Users mailing list, which is also hosted by SourceForge, when I announced Vim Syntax Highlighting for FlexWiki.

I don't own the reilly.org domain. It (and thousands of others) are owned by NetIdentity. I had an exchange with their postmaster, who said in part:

I did talk to sourceforge. They claimed it is an essential part of their spam filtering process to reject domains that dont have a postmaster mailbox.

I've tried that (at least on a test basis) myself and with all due respect to them, it is passe' ... doesnt work too well. And it has the added "advantage" of having to connect back to the sending mail domain every time to see if a postmaster for that domain exists. This holds up email and creates additional smtp connections - and hence even more load on mailservers, in the case of domains - with postmaster up and running - that are forged into spam.

I did suggest a few more rather efficient (and practical) filters they could use, but well, they didnt respond to those

He has since added a postmaster mailbox for reilly.org, so I can post to SourceForge lists again.

The Inkscape vote passed, of course. Only subscribers can post now. Non-subscribers can also use a webform to send questions, so it's not a big impairment.

We use FlexWiki at work. It's an ASP.NET-based wiki, a low-overhead, organic way of sharing knowledge.

The only built-in means of editing a page in FlexWiki is to type into an HTML textbox, which is a horrendous user experience. There's no WYSIWYG feedback showing you whether you've got the wiki markup right.

Back in December, Emma and I went to the Oregon coast for a week. We had no Internet access and long dark evenings, so I spent quite a bit of time on my laptop, working on a couple of projects. One was a new theme (skin) for DasBlog, which I didn't finish to my satisfaction. I really ought to get back to that.

The other was Vim syntax highlighting for FlexWiki, partially because it's useful in its own right, partially because I wanted an excuse to learn the arcane syntax highlighting mechanism in Vim.

As you can see in the picture, syntax highlighting makes the wiki markup a lot clearer than it would be in black-and-white.

I got it working satisfactorily in December, but I didn't get around to releasing it on the Vim scripts repository until last week. The week before, Bram had issued a final call for submissions of scripts for Vim 7.0, which galvanized me into releasing it as the FlexWiki Plugin for Vim.

Bram has included it in the most recent beta, Vim 7.0g, after I made a few changes. Those changes have not yet been propagated into the standalone version, but I'll try to do that later this week.

Some recipes from the back of a bag of Trader Joe's Southern Greens Blend (Mustard Greens, Turnip Greens, Spinach, and Collard Greens).

Simple Greens -- Serves 4

Saute garlic and onion in olive oil in a pot large enough to hold greens. Add vegetable broth and tomato juice. Bring to a boil.

Add greens and seasonings. Cover and cook over low heat for 35 minutes or until tender. Sprinkle with parmesan cheese and serve.

Mediterranean Greens -- Serves 3-4

(Note: The original recipe called for half a cup of each of the three types of olives, which we found overpowering. I've halved the quantities to one-quarter cup each.)

Combine olives, sun-dried tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, and pepper in a large pre-heated skillet. Cook over high heat for 6-8 minutes, until boiling. Blend in roma tomatoes and heat 2 more minutes. Add greens and broth and continue to cook for 25-30 more minutes. Stir in pine nuts and salt to taste. Serve at once as an accompaniment or spoon over pasta and serve as a main course.

Louisiana Style Greens & Sausage -- Serves 3-4

Over medium heat, cook onions in olive oil until soft in a 4 quart pot. Add the sausages, greens, and chicken broth, stirring to blend all ingredients. Simmer gently over low heat for about 35 minutes or until greens are tender. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

I found this recipe for dressing on the back of a bag of cole slaw.

Mix sugar, ground celery seed, and milk into mayonnaise. Add cider vinegar and whisk until smooth. Add to cole slaw.