Duane Gran’s log of thoughts

There has been some buzz about reviews of the upcoming Internet Explorer web browser version 7. Anyone who has used Firefox/Mozilla will immediately notice how Microsoft is borrowing ideas from its open source competitor. Let’s keep this in mind the next time we are told that open source groups merely mimic good ideas from proprietary systems.

That said, I’ll readily grant that Microsoft innovated and pushed the web in generally a good direction back when Netscape was the preeminent browser, but after they took the lead the innovation dried up. It is as if Microsoft fought for dominance and upon reaching their goal didn’t know what to do with themselves, evidenced by the stagnation of IE 5 and 6. Fortunately open source efforts gave web developers and other technocrats an outlet, but we still had to deal with cross browser annoyances. Unfortunately, there seems no end in sight, per the review’s remark on how IE failed the acid test:

It is in everyone’s best interests that IE 7 (or IE 7a) is fully standards compliant. My car can drive on any public road, my CD player plays all CDs, and my television plays all of the channels. The web is the first popular computer standard that is designed to be accessible by all architectures; and it is important that both content and viewer developers prioritize interoperability.

IE may copy the interface of Firefox and add a few features, but developers for years have been beating the drum of web standards, yet it always seems to elude Microsoft. An anonymous comment on Slashdot gave me pause for thought:

Microsoft’s problem is that they’re caught between two conflicting objectives under a common goal: They need to make sure that the operating system is the defining element of the PC. In order to do that, they try to a) keep the browser competition at bay and b) reduce the appeal of the (standards based) web. These are mutually exclusive objectives. They can’t offer an excellent browser, because that would shift the focus from the OS to the web. They can’t offer a lousy browser, because that would drive their customers to the competition and consequently loosen Microsoft’s grip on the accepted web technologies.

Mediocrity is the design goal for IE7.

The explanation is pretty cynical, but Microsoft does seem to be in a catch-22 with regards to embracing web standards.

Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, so be sure to let the people who maintain your servers and IT infrastructure know that they are appreciated.

Labor’s Big Split: Pain Before Gain

[Y]esterday’s announcement by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters that they were quitting the AFL-CIO was no less stunning for its absence of theatricals. What we know is that the split — which is likely to grow as several other unions announce their own disaffiliations over the next couple of weeks — sunders a union movement that is already weaker than it has been since the 1920s. What we don’t know is whether the new organization that the SEIU, the Teamsters and their allies will form in the coming months can and will do anything to bolster the power of America’s indispensable, if enfeebled, labor movement.

For now, it’s a lot easier to see the damage than it is to foresee the gain.

I consider myself something of a labor/union advocate, but I think in the long run this is a good thing.

The AFL-CIO consolidates unions on the grounds that it broadens the bargaining power, but this has the negative side effect of assuming that they speak for all unionized employees. The original concept of unions was that they were federated bodies that were primarily organized and operated on a plant by plant basis (don’t get hung up on the industrial terminology). The consolidation of unions necessarily meant imposing a top-down structure which resonates too much with the operation of the corporations with which they bargain. The corporations wanted this and a handful of people poised to be union bosses wanted it too. Maybe even a few line workers wanted it, but I suspect most of them were more concerned about workplace negotiations in their hometown, not boardroom negotiations between the motherships.

My hope is that we can return to a federated union model with alliances formed when appropriate. Fears about different unions cannibalizing each other’s member roles aside, they only claim 8% of the workforce, so I think a multitude of unions can effectively target the other 92% just as well. Besides, rhetoric about in-fighting among unions serves the interest of the anti-union crowd and sends a somewhat elitist message that big unions have a prima fascia claim to all workers. There is room at the table for many unions.

This splintering is being spun in several directions, but I’m less concerned about whether it is good for unions as I am about whether it is good for workers. Union membership is really low right now and public perception (as well as public policy) tends toward ambivalence or hostility. Unions rightly deserve credit for the expansion of the middle class in America during the early 20th century. It may be too early to tell, but their diminished role may well explain the decline of the middle class now.

A fantastic interview with Brian McLaren reveals some poignant insight into the mind of a Christian Postmodernist — a term that may signal contradiction to many Christians familiar with the current phase of Conservative faith. While neither McLaren or I intend to craft a litmus test for “real” Christianity, I personally find his views to resonate with the message of service and humility that Jesus espoused. In particular, I agree with him about the appropriate way for faith to intersect with the politics.

I think the Christian community is making an extremely dangerous mistake with this. The mistake is we are going from dissatisfaction to legislation and missing the middle step of persuasion. Now you would think, from our beliefs from the Gospels, that God isn’t just interested in us being focused on the law, but he actually wants to change our hearts. That’s my understanding of how the Kingdom of God works, but we (the church) don’t seem to understand that.

…

So, firstly, I think it’s a gross and foolish mistake of strategy. If we were to take 30 percent of the effort spent on legislation and invest it instead on sensible and palpable persuasion, we would get an awful lot farther.

Secondly, it’s hypocritical, because the conservative religious value always talks about how we want to weaken federal government. They want to weaken the federal government when it talks about the government helping the poor, preserving the environment or doing a lot of other things that I think Christians should care about, and they want to strengthen the government in all these other ways. They ought to at least be honest and say, “We want to strengthen the federal government for our agenda and not somebody else’s.” I think it’s incredibly duplicitous to, in one breath, call for weakening the federal government and then try to use it for your advantage. I’m stunned that people who call themselves Christians would practice that kind of duplicity. It’s stunning. It feels to me like George Orwell.

See also a Harper’s article about the disconnect between the Christian profession of many Americans and their expression of faith.

Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

The article goes on to cite several contradictory signposts in American public policy, such as poverty rates among children, foreign aid and rates of violence. My general feeling is that humans, myself regrettably included, are masters at rationalizing the things we do. As much as it pains me to see someone claim Jesus’ endorsement for Conservative political aims, possibly they feel the same when I applaud Christian edicts of service in progressive public policy. What seems clear to me is that both camps can’t be right, but they may well both be wrong.

That said, I tend to believe that the faithful should operate on persuasion instead of legislation and where faith affects public policy, it should do so to further the aims of serving the most disenfranchised in our society.

XML is a fantastic storage medium for structured data, like configuration files. See a posting from Elliotte Rusty Harold for an example of why in this day and age every configuration file should use XML.

That said, it isn’t pixie dust that solves every problem. In particular, once you intend to integrate data between two groups marking up similar things the fun begins. At the University we do a hands on experiment with humanities scholars where we pass around a recipe and ask them to mark it up. Invariably, if you ask 10 people to do this you will get 10 different markup schemes, all of them with valid differing perspectives on the same data set. XSL transformation technology makes it easier to merge and migrate data, but fundamentally people can see entirely different things in the same data when they devise a markup scheme.

Fortunately configuration files are more straight forward and rarely do we have a need to aggregate and merge data sets. In spite of my skepticism about XML I’ll agree with Elliotte just this once when he says, “In 2005 no new config format should be anything other than XML.”

I’m using up a few minutes of my requesite fifteen minutes of fame in a local news article concerning a Charlottesville technology group called the Neon Guild. This group was most helpful when I was moving to the area, in terms of getting connected with the technology community in town. I have since used it on a few occasions to hire good talent and to connect some other people in interesting ways.

Recently I witnessed a young woman, about the age of eighteen, fiddling with a wireless phone in the darkness of a theatre moments before raising the curtain. She had enough decency to turn off the luminescent device, but she promptly flipped it open when the curtain fell for intermission. It was all the more distracting because I think of the performing arts as an environment where people unplug, but this poor soul seemed to act out with separation anxiety with her digital lifestyle.

I owned a cellular phone in 1993 — long ago enough to call me an early adopter. They were uncommon enough that breaches of general protocol were rare occurrence. Little thought was given to the bad habits encouraged by novelty devices, because portable phone ownership would presumably always be a niche. Fast forward to today and it is a shock to find someone who doesn’t have a wireless phone, from the CEO to the teenager. I share this background because I haven’t always been such a luddite when it comes to communication devices, but as I see exhibit after exhibit of poor manners with gadgets I feel it is necessary to keep a safe distance.

Hence, my shift toward an analog lifestyle is easy to explain: Less is often more. We need less communication overall and expectations of “always available” status in order to value the face-time we share. While I grant that phones and video chat have helped people communicate, it is nearly always in the context of a real personal connection — “my best friends are online” stories aside.

In spite of my chiding, there have been some times when a phone in the wild came in handy, but mostly I witness a sort of verbal flatulence with these devices. Over half of all conversations I unwillingly hear seem self-centered on one’s arrival and location at some point. Back in the day, one would simply commit to being somewhere at a given time and follow through. Any more these devices seem to be little more than a pacifier for adults.

Flip-Flops At White House Cause Stir

Before visiting the White House, Kate Darmody carefully planned her outfit. She bought a sundress from Ann Taylor. She put on a strand of white pearls.

And then she slipped on flip-flops to meet the president.

Sometimes when I write about issues of fashion, which necessarily touch upon etiquette, it may seem that I split hairs, but this example seems pretty clear. Who, in her right mind, would wear beach shoes when visiting the President? To be blunt about it, someone who is careless and thoughtless about personal appearance would do such a thing. The White House has a photo online. To be fair, he also visited with a team from the University of Michigan who in their own right, wore shorts. God help us all.

The fact that the above linked article saw it fit to consult with a shoe fashion expert (yes, such a title does exist) says it all for me. A self-evident decision to not wear beach clothing to the White House has now become a matter of debate. In case it seems like I’m harping about an isolated incident, consider that “Of the nine women in the front row with the president, four wore flip-flops.”

As it turns out, my fellow stiff-collared friends at Andy’s Fashion Forum have picked up on this as well.

Update (10/10/05): I’m not the only one to pick up on this strange fashion trend among the college-aged. Jen Sorensen, a Charlottesville-basic comic artist, has penned some nice satire about how flip flops have ascended into couture status items.

Read a charming anecdote from Elliotte Rusty Harold on how he suggests that Apple should test software:

I graded a recent applet homework for my Intro to Java course on Safari 2.0 using Java 1.4.2 (not the recent update). 4 of the 20 assignments managed to crash my browser at least once. If Apple wants to debug their VM, they could do worse than ask a bunch of undergraduates to write some applets. I suspect the students tend to do things no experienced programmer would be likely to do, and hence uncover bugs that would normally be missed.

This reminds me of a professor I had back in college for a database design/programming course. We were tasked to write our own database and demo it in front of the class. He had the uncanny talent of instructing the student to enter in bad data or to press buttons out of order to corrupt data and to crash the program. Needless to say, my program failed badly, along with most others.

Therefore, to follow on to Elliott’s clever suggestion, after Apple recruits undergraduates to write applets they should find a pernicious instructor to walk said applet through its paces.

Matthew Kirschenbaum has written a thought provoking proposal for scholars to chime in about ways that blogging technology has actually paid dividends in their academic pursuits. This is in response to a controversial Chronical article that has made the rounds as of late.

Language Miniatures 124: The pronoun ‘y’all’

Something odd seems to be going on here. Whether we think it should be that way or not, the fact is that southern speech is the most strongly stigmatized dialect in the U.S. And yet
it is a ’southernism’ that is indisputably spreading far outside the South. As it does, it is clearly losing its status as a distinctly southern form. A former hallmark of southern speech is more and more being used by persons with no roots in the South.

How do y’all like that?! As a reformed southerner, I think it would might help a little, but I doubt if the yankees will be able to apply the proper twang and intonation. :)

After living in Charlottesville for almost three years I finally got around to riding the CTS Free Trolley from the University to the Downtown Mall. In a word, it is an excellent service that more people should know about. I’m a little embarrassed that I waited this long to use it. I think I’ll spend more of my lunch hours downtown from now on.

I’m a big fan of European style dining, both in its cuisine and the pacing of meals, but an MSNBC article about ten great American foods gives credit where it is due. In particular, they mention Virginia’s Smithfield Ham, of which I’ve had harsh words concerning their labor practices, but they do make great ham.

I read an informative essay from Casey Software about the alarming rate of failed software projects in large companies. The author makes the astute point that as a small company he couldn’t imagine blowing 20% of his budget on failed projects. I’ve been there as well, as a small business owner. This lead me to think about reasons what could be done to make software projects more successful in large organizations.

Small companies can’t afford to leak 20% of their budget, but large companies do this routinely because, by their nature, they build very large systems. Big hairy systems that integrate all the one-off requirements for the idiosyncrasies of many departments and acquired companies are prone to failure. Add to this the sanitized user experience of a one size fits all approach and many people simply don’t want to use the IT system. That is no way to get user “buy in.”

Maybe part of the solution is intelligent decentralization. By this, I mean to allow smaller units in an organization to build (or buy) their own software, thereby gaining the benefit of smaller projects, while interoperating with a larger IT framework and vision. Substituting a top-down viewpoint of IT in large shops with a distributed “play together” model may be the best of both worlds.

House Rejects Cuts in Amtrak Budget

The House yesterday rejected a proposal to make deep cuts in Amtrak’s budget, a blow to administration efforts to force major changes at the beleaguered passenger rail system by withholding federal funds.

This is very good news. In my neck of the woods this is particularly important, as noted in a Daily Progress article:

The cuts would have forced Amtrak to shut down two of its long-distance lines, the Cardinal and the Crescent, which are the only passenger trains that run through the Charlottesville station.

Roughly 36,000 riders pass through the local station each year, according to Amtrak estimates. The Cardinal runs from Chicago to New York three times a week in each direction; the Crescent runs daily from New Orleans to New York in both directions.

It looks like we avoided the axe this time, but every few years this comes up. I’ll confess a certain amount of sympathy with the “slash Amtrak” crowd when I hear of some dreadfully costly lines. The article mentions some that have a subsidy of over $400 per passenger. In some cases you buy each person a plane ticket for less. I really can’t defend such a subsidy as making sense, but I wonder if there are ways to make rail more attractive to use?

The first thing we could do would be to give priority to passenger rail. At present, freight rail gets priority. This means that passengers often sit idle for periods of about 15-30 minutes while a freight train get the right-of-way. This is pretty bad public relations and may well discourage people from using trains. I also think trains could become an attractive alternative, given their more sensible security policies. I could see Amtrak running a “leave your shoes on” campaign to lure people who are tired of jumping through TSA hoops, legitimate or not.

Last weekend I heard an interesting radio program concerning transportation issues in Central Virginia. I’m coming to a view that our problem is systemic. In America we build communities and then try to figure out how to address the transportation needs. This inversion of responsibility permits all sorts of sprawl and inefficient land use. If the transportation costs of building a community were placed on the developer, and by extension the people who plan to inhabit the homes, we would see less cul-de-sac neighborhoods in exurbia and more high density housing near the urban ring. As long as developers can walk away from transportation responsibilities, thereby leaving it to the public, it simply won’t get done right in my opinion.

Every few months I read about some sort of development proposal that would add hundreds of homes with one entry/exit, hung off of a main road. The problems with this approach are inevitable and inclusion of a traffic light is a band-aid solution. Extension or expansion of public transportation is rarely considered afterward, and as far as I can tell, it is never made a precondition to build.

Contrast my reflections on Italy with Coyote Blog’s impression back from France. We both felt overwhelmed and impressed by the art, but came away with dramatically different views on transportation. He doesn’t like European cars while I do. His claim is mostly about safety, saying the he “would feel safer in a golf cart than some of the cars here [france].”

I beg to differ, and it so happens that a Bureau of Transportation Statistics report (pdf) lends support to my suspicion. Page six of the report lists a table showing that traffic fatalities have decreased in the United States by 27% between 1975 and 1998 while in France they have decreased by 42%. However, I realize that a decrease alone doesn’t mean that driving is safer in France. As it happens, a International Road Traffic and Accident Database report (pdf) shows in this one page graph that US fatalities per 100,000 population is ~15 while in France it is ~11.

I have several theories for why this is so, but I’ll leave that for another time.

The Tour de France has begun, as of July 2. The month of July is always a little special to me because of the Tour. Cycling is a fascinating sport, filled with intricacies and various races within the race. I understand a certain amount of boredom to the newcomer, but the first time you witness a bold breakaway on a mountain stage you become hooked. Updates are available online via CyclingNews.com or the Outdoor Life Network (OLN) on cable.

Better yet, the first time you ever do it yourself and then you are a lifetime fan. The sport is rather personal to me since I used to race for a team at the amateur level. It is truly a grueling sport, but these days I ride for fitness, not competition. It isn’t practical to train 15-20 hours per week these days, but I think fondly on days past when I raced. Now I live vicariously through the professionals in the Tour.

The 12-minute Windows heist

There is a 50 percent chance your unprotected Windows PC will be compromised within 12 minutes of going online, says security vendor Sophos.

This, among other reasons, is why I don’t use Windows in lieu of a wonderful Mac. When I use a Windows machine it always feels like I’m borrowing someone’s computer, but when I use any Mac it feels like mine. I can’t explain it, but the Mac just feels right. It also helps that it can run for more than 12 minutes without getting hacked.