Home of the Harmonious Raspberry
A Brief Touch of Magic
Oct 29th
Last night I stopped in the Apple Store at Reston Town Center to see if I could play with a Magic Mouse. This mouse doesn’t have any buttons or wheels or nipples but sports a smooth, multitouch surface. It sounds great on paper, but how would it feel in the hand?
Pretty good, actually! Left and right clicking worked as I intuitively expected and scrolling (both vertical and horizontal) were equally simple and intuitive. The only downside was that, at least currently, there is no way to do a “middle click.” That’s a fairly big drawback for web surfing where I frequently use middle clicks to open a link in a new browser tab. That one lack could be a show stopper. I hope not though because I’m still looking for a mouse I can really like instead of just tolerating.
Fortunately, it was a decision I didn’t have to make last night as they don’t have any mice in stock yet (though they are shipping in new macs).
Why I’m Migrating from Flickr to Picasa Web Albums
Oct 27th
I’ve been using flickr for over three years now. In general I’ve been content with the service. It’s not perfect but it has been serviceable and reliable. They’ve added new features. I’ve got over 11,000 photos there. Moving that many photos is a fair amount of work and I’ve certainly been a victim of entropy. I didn’t much want to think about doing it.
But, there have been nagging gripes.
My earliest is that flickr is oriented to the photo, but I tend to work and think in terms of photo sets or albums. Flickr does provide sets but doesn’t provide any way to get an RSS feed of sets. Getting that feed would allow me to automatically create a post here whenever I uploaded a new set of photos. To get around that I wrote a module that used flickr’s API to work around that. However, that code was somewhat brittle and probably would have needed major updates whenever I did a major version update on the website software.
Flickr recently added name tagging but without any automatic face recognition. The UI to work with it was tedious at best, particularly if I wanted to go back and tag all the old photos.
While flickr was among the first to offer geotagging there was no way to get an overview map for the entire set if the set was large.
Flickr’s organizer, while generally pretty slick, had problems when dealing with the nearly 200 sets that I had. Those problems made dealing with collections (groups of sets) awkward.
So, when I decided to move the website from an old version of drupal to a new version of wordpress, this meant that my flickrsync module would no longer be available unless I wanted to port it to wordpress. While that might be an interesting exercise, it was never a perfect solution and had its own scalability issues. Instead, I decided that this was the time to consider other photo hosting solutions.
I decided on Picasa Web Albums for a few reasons:
Foremost, PWA provided an RSS feed of albums and better yet would sort that feed by the “date taken time” rather than the upload time. This kept things in the proper order for what I wanted.
The name tagging interface was better than flickr’s (particularly when the Picasa desktop app was used to do the tagging).
There were some downsides:
Picasa Web Albums isn’t as full featured as flickr. I did give up some functionality but mostly functionality I rarely if ever used. I’m also giving up all the comments and history the photos had on flickr. Also, while flickr provided unlimited storage space, PWA doesn’t.
It’s going to take a while to move things over, especially since I am adding name tags and cleaning up the textual tags, but I’ve got until April until my flickr account needs renewing so hopefully I can get it all done by then. And who knows, perhaps by then flickr will address my major issue (rss for sets) though it seems unlikely because they haven’t yet despite three years of many people asking for it.
Still Here and Changes on the Way
Oct 23rd
I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted, almost a year, but during that time I’ve been busy with the Equality Fairfax website, photography, genealogy, amateur radio, work and most importantly, spending time with Lauri. But, the state of my website finally got to me and I’ve taken advantage of some free time to migrate the site to wordpress from drupal.
I’m also in the process of migrating my phtoos from flickr to Picasa Web Albums. The primary reason for this is that Picasa provides an RSS feed of albums while flickr, after three years, still doesn’t think this is a worthwhile feature. Then when flickr just implemented it’s rather lame face tagging, it provided the impetus to make the change. It’s going to take a while to move everything over, but it’s coming and should make my life a whole bunch easier.
I’m also trying to aggregate all my activity around the web here on the home page. It will show my posts here, new Picasa albums, new YouTube videos, new book reviews at GoodReads and shared items from Google Reader. If I use any other websites that provide worthwhile feeds (e.g. not facebook with it’s useless RSS feeds), I’ll add them in as well.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the new look and pardon the mess while I get things back in order. Hopefully I can get the bulk of structural changes done this weekend though migrating the photos to Picasa will take a few weeks.
The Danger of McCain’s Flight from Truth
Oct 8th
In the last two weeks, the McCain campaign has retreated from issues and turned overtly negative. They give lip service to issues but never follow up with details. They say Obama is wrong but never provide any evidence. Instead they turn to smears and lies. Since there is no requirement for a campaign to tell the truth there isn’t really anything to hold them back. Except for ethics and morality.
I’m not saying the Obama campaign hasn’t had their share of exaggerations and distortions. But, so far as I’ve been able to tell, they’ve stayed on the side of misrepresentation and haven’t been trying to foment fear.
That fear is the real danger of McCain’s tactics. Scared people don’t act rationally and that’s what they want. Scared people want to feel safe and though they turn to the person who instigated that fear, it isn’t in his interest to resolve it. It’s how he came to power and without fear, people will realize there is nothing behind the facade. This should sound familiar. It’s been the way the Bush administration has operated since 9/11.
To make it worse, that fear mongering creates an “us vs. them” attitude that promotes violence. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the statistics for attacks against groups singled out by a political leader.
We have enough problems to solve without adding irrational fear to the mix. If we can’t have a calm discussion then any hope of a solution is gone. That creates the kind of environment in which violent change starts to look like the only answer. If that happens, then our society will no longer resemble the America we want this country to be.
The moral of the story is: when a politician cares more about acquiring power than he does about the methods used to obtain it then that person is a danger. McCain and his campaign (and all politicians) need to hear that message loud and clear.
Sick of Lies
Oct 2nd
I just finished watching the debate between Biden and Palin and rather than the entertainment I had hoped for, it was so full of nonsense that I was disgusted. Pailin’s relentless repeating of lies was just painful. She’s no more a soccer mom than I am. Her failure to really answer many questions was typical political sidestepping and her blatant lies were irritating.
Not that Biden was immune to misinterpreting the facts to make his point. McCain’s flub on Spain was because he didn’t know who the prime minister of Spain was, not because he wouldn’t meet with the Spanish PM. That’s a bad enough mistake for a presidential candidate, but not the one that Biden implied. Still, his sins were of exaggeration rather than Palin’s outright lies.
If American politics has been reduced to simply yelling louder than the opponents then she did well, but if was about showing how your policies would actually help us recover from the disaster of the worst presidency in American history then she was abysmal.
I’d really like to see a debate that has more content than politicians saying, “did not,” “did so” back and forth at each other.
Corporate Welfare
Sep 17th
I find it interesting that the so-called “fiscal conservatives” in our government, who so regularly balk at programs to provide a social safety net for our citizens, are so ready to provide corporate welfare to badly run companies. If they are opposed to welfare and are such champions of the free market, then why not let the companies die out and let the market make it’s way?
The Fed is bailing out AIG and, in return, getting an 80% ownership stake. We have a word for a system where the government owns the companies: communism. Yet, our free market, fiscal conservative government says these companies are just too big to let fail. It seems to me that two possible responses come to mind. One is that if a company is too big to fail then we shouldn’t let a company get that big because then we can’t get rid of it. If we don’t think that restriction should apply then we need some regulation to ensure these same companies don’t do the things that will get them into such trouble.
Instead, we allow them to be stupid and then bail them out when they do. What incentive do they have to not be stupid? There is very little risk and a boat load of money to be made until the music stops. Enough with corporate handouts! True, that the handouts will preserve the jobs of many people who did nothing wrong, but a better solution would be to let the company fail and use a much smaller amount of money to help those people find new work. And enact laws to restrict unrestrained greed that motivates these companies to such insane action.
And stop calling yourself a fiscal conservative if you think that these types of actions are a good idea. If we must have welfare, then it should go to people and not companies.
Is the Media Doing Its Job?
Sep 16th
As the news media enters a frenzy of action heading towards the November election, I am left wondering if, collectively, they are doing their jobs properly. Not that I’m accusing most journalists of bias, but I am wondering if they report on the actions of politicians differently than they report on other types of news.
It seems to me that when a politicians stands on a stage and makes a claim, whether it’s about an opponent or a a group or an issue, the media has some responsibility to validate the claim before they report it. Otherwise they are not reporting news; they are becoming proxies of the politician’s campaign. Politicians know that the statements they make don’t need to be true. They do know that if they proclaim them loudly enough and often enough that the statement will take on a life of their own, even after the truth comes out. To allow this practice to continue in the misguided application of “reporting the news” does a major disservice to all of us who are trying to actually learn what is going on.
I’m not talking about policy decisions but about claims of fact, of history. If a politicians says his or her opponent did something, the media should validate that claim before they report it. If the claim is true, then report it. If the claim is false, then it seems to me the story is the lie (or mistake). Granted, there is a lot of gray area there but there ought to be more to journalism than putting a microphone in front of a politician.
Take some of the hype out of the process. Stop being used and start doing your jobs as journalists!
Thoughts on Palin
Sep 8th
Although most people seem to think of me as a partisan supporter of the Democratic party, I’m really an independent. I don’t vote based on party affiliation but based on positions. In practice, particularly in presidential elections, I’ve generally voted against a candidate rather than for one. In practice, the Democratic candidates have been the lesser or the two evils and, for president, I’ve never been able to vote for the Republican candidate.
I’ve already blogged about McCain’s having lost my vote. And, indeed, he’s done nothing to change that. Just how the Log Cabin Republicans can endorse him based on his atrocious record on LGBT civil rights issues is beyond me. But, that’s not the point of this post. The point is Sarah Palin.
Until last week, I’d never heard of Sarah Palin. That’s probably true for most people in the country. This isn’t, on its own, a bad thing, but it does mean that some education is necessary. When I do that education, the report card I come up with doesn’t get a passing grade.
Her record on LGBT issues is as bad as McCain’s. It is possible that her religious views, which are rather extreme, would negatively impact the country.
Some have said that her family should be off limits and, in general I agree. However, when she is on record as supporting abstinence-only education and also has an unwed pregnant teenage daughter, I can’t help wondering if she should be asked, “So, how about that abstinence-only education? How is it working out for your family?” It is clear that abstinence-only education doesn’t work and her own family is part of the proof.
She is praised for carrying a Down’s Syndrome baby to term and for not having an abortion, but this praise may be misplaced. Though I can’t find the reference at the moment, I recall reading that the information wasn’t known until the fourth month, after an abortion would have been legal making it a moot point. I don’t mean to belittle her choices or her family’s difficulties. Raising any child with special needs is a challenge and those parents with such children deserve our support. But, let’s be clear that this has nothing to do with the debate about a woman’s right to control her own reproductive destiny.
As mayor of a small town, it was written that she, a “fiscal conservative,” oversaw the biggest expansion of city government in the town’s history and left the city in debt that didn’t exist when she took office.
On the positive side, it is remarkable that both our major parties have had women involved in presidential politics. Unfortunately, Ms. Palin, was selected as a political tool to reach out to the most regressive parts of our society and not because of any particular qualifications. If there was any truth to McCain’s claims about Obama’s lack of experience, he lost the right to use it with this choice. Palin is less experienced than Obama and has arguably been a less than capable leader.
The thought that this woman could become president if McCain dies is sobering. Though little is known about her yet, she seems to represent the worst of what the most regressive parts of our society want.
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