Ranting and Roaring

Bob notes unusual treatment for the man accussed of attacking Pierre Pettigrew in the Montreal subway. I’m just shocked that Pettigrew’s actually in Canada, as opposed to be being in Paris with his government sponsored “bodyguard”.

Toronto David Miller comes out against handguns:

Toronto – David Miller, tanned and relaxed after a lengthy vacation in Spain, returned the blood soaked and bullet strewn streets of Toronto to urge ineffective action against gun crime in that city. “Only by taking legal guns away from law abiding citizens”, says Miller, “can we crack down on the violence caused by American guns in the hands of Toronto ”youths”. And only by voting for federal parties that share my political beliefs”, continued Miller (referring to Canada’s left wing parties which have held power for 40 of the last 45 years), “can we clean up this problem”. “Who better understands the cause?”, Miller asked with a laugh. “This isn’t just cynical electioneering over some dead girl‘s body”. When asked about the massive increase in crime that accompanied gun bans in other similar jurisdictions, such as Australia and England, Miller told citizens not to worry: “my family will have police protection 24–7”.

SF Wire reports:

Daniel Craig, the British actor who will become the next James Bond, told MTV.com that the upcoming 007 film Casino Royale goes back to the beginning, but with an update for current times.

“It’s going to be very different from anything else,” Craig (Munich) told the site. “It will have certain elements that will make it a Bond movie,” including Ian Fleming source material. But director Martin Campbell will make certain updates: for example, changing Bond’s card game from baccarat to Texas Hold ‘Em.

Jebus. Why not have him drink beer eat chicken wings too?

[...] The cars are newer, too,” Craig said with a laugh.

Perhaps an F150 or a Camaro?

This one’s for you, Al:

To Bob Ippolito for MochiKit. You rock, Bob.

I want to create a web site^* so compelling, I can get at least 10,000 users to pay by $USD 2.50 a month to get enhanced services. Then Tim and I don’t have to go get normal jobs. The site will provide services for bloggers and joe/jane web user and allow for content creation, sharing, remixing and embedding. The site will use microformats but the users need never know that.

We have 80% of the code written. Now we just have to write the other 80%.

^* actually, several interlinked web sites, but never mind.

Al writes:

David has been writing a lot about microformats and I have to admit it has gone completely past me as I assumed that he was talking about some sort of thingie

Well, ahem, yes. I’ve been kind of aiming my explanation at tech heads. Let’s try a different approach.

Primarily, users interact with the web in three ways:

• with web pages, as a whole
• with hyperlinks
• with forms

For example, we visit pages and bookmark them in the browser. We click on links. We fill in forms.

I want to add a fourth way:

• with parts of a page

We can do much better than just select text with the mouse. For example:

• you should be able to—as a single action—copy this blog entry, the fact that I wrote it and it’s title over to your blog (so you can post about it); not just the text
• you should be able to—as a single action—copy all the identity information I want to share with to your address book; not just my email address
• you should be able to—as a single action—copy something from my calendar to your calendar

The technology to make this happen microformats. However, if we do this properly, you never really need to have any awareness of this, no more than you do of DNS records, TCP, IP and so forth.

Tagged: Microformats, Microcontent

SSH connect dropping every 4 minutes + vi = the Internet hates me. Personally.

I tried to make Apache 2.0, Python 2.3, Cygwin and mod_python play nicely together on my PC so I could locally work on an Ajaxy application. I failed. The problem is mod_python, but unfortunately I don’t have the skills or time to port this to this environment.

I attempted to install the structured blogging tools today. I got the following error message when I attempted to activate the plugin:

 Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in  /home/dpjanes/public_html/wordpress-xxx/wp-content/plugins/structuredblogging.php  on line 273 

Here’s the details:

• WordPress 1.5.2
• A brand new empty installation with a single test post
• PHP 4.4.1
• MySQL 4.0.25-standard
• Hosting on HostMatters
• I can no longer go my admin panel. In fact, I think it’s spinning a process out of control which is likely to make my hosting company very happy!

Oh web, help me out!

Keith Devens on hAtom:

I can’t decide whether this is a decent idea or a terrible idea. For search engines like Technorati that often do a terrible less-than-perfect job of figuring out what’s what it could help if enough people support it to make it worthwhile, but on the other hand, why not just parse the Atom feed if the site supports Atom with autodiscovery?

Think of hAtom as a microcontent container. Now consider the act of reblogging (essentially what I’ve just done to Keith’s post). hAtom lets me/my tools pull together the content and it’s context (i.e. who posted and and where) and quickly create a new blog entry^*. Now, we certainly could locate the Atom feed—if the post we’re replying to is in the last 10 or 20 the user made—pull the data and so forth, but there’s a certain about of elegant parsimony to just operating on the data we have in front of us.

All this does is duplicate Atom elements in HTML.

Putting the cart before the horse! Actually, the we’re using Atom as it has a well developed naming schema for things in blogs.

I’ve also been putting comments on the blog of Phil Wilson related to the utility of hAtom, especially in light of the difficulty of correct XHTML production.

^* OK, we don’t have this all written yet but let’s do this as a gedankenexperiment!

Tagged: Microformats

I should follow my own advice. I trashed my template doing some stupid stuff and of course I didn’t have a backup. I’m back though, with some clever hacking about.

Shelly Powers:

Four years ago, the name of the game was weblogging; three years ago it was syndication; last year was search engines and this year, podcasting; next year it will be metadata. Companies will fuss and fidget and claim to be first or best, or that they’re only operating in the best interests of us (with an implication that other companies are not). We know better, but we don’t mind because the more dirt they dish up on each other, the more flowers the rest of us can plant.

Tagged: Microformats

Environment and Cancer: The Links Are Elusive:

When Mike Gallo learned he had cancer, a B cell lymphoma, two years ago, his friends and relatives told him that they knew how he got it.

His cancer, Dr. Gallo’s friends said, was obviously caused by the dioxin that he had worked with for three decades in his laboratory. After all, the Environmental Protection Agency classifies dioxin as a probable human carcinogen. And among the cancers that it may increase the risk for, in high doses, is lymphoma.

Dr. Michael A. Gallo, director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences Center of Excellence at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., tells his well-meaning advisers that he does not think so.

“I say, ‘No, I know my blood levels of dioxin,’ ” Dr. Gallo said, explaining that he measured them when he worked with the chemical. His levels, he said, are low. And there is no way to make a leap from such low levels of dioxin to his cancer.

Yet many of his friends and relatives remain convinced.

“That’s the way people think,” Dr. Gallo said. “If you get cancer, there has to be a reason.”

Discuss: this psedueo-science advocated by Dr. Gallo’s friends and others is intellectually isomorphic to Intelligent Design; furthermore, it is more dangerous to society because such beliefs are being used to influence and change policy.

If you’d like to add hAtom markup to your blog (and you do but you just don’t know it yet), try your luck with with hAtom Template Rewriter. It works (right now) with:

• WordPress,
• MovableType (/TypePad), and
• Blogger

It’s strong alpha-quality, so make sure you back up your templates. If you do use this, please send me a note. If you’re using some other blogging system, let me know and I’ll have a look to see if I can do something.

Oh, and install microformat-actions too, so you can see the results.

If you’re running FireFox, Greasemonkey and all that (see here), why not install this script:

• microformat-actions

Once this is installed, all the microformatted content on this page will be highlighted. Clicking on the link will bring you to parsed information courtesy of the Almost Universal Microformats Parser.

I hope to get a Windows/Turnabout version of this script done soon too, once I here back from Reify.

A new family first: Trinity-Anne brought us breakfast in bed this morning! If you must ask, Shreddies on a plate — fortunately without milk!

The BBC reports (þ TimBlair):

An opinion poll suggests Iraqis are generally optimistic about their lives, in spite of the violence that has plagued Iraq since the US-led invasion.

[...]

Interviewers found that 71% of those questioned said things were currently very or quite good in their personal lives, while 29% found their lives very or quite bad.

When asked whether their lives would improve in the coming year, 64% said things would be better and 12% said they expected things to be worse.

[...]

However, Iraqis appear to have a more negative view of the overall situation in their country, with 53% answering that the situation is bad, and 44% saying it is good.

But they were more hopeful for the future – 69% expect Iraq to improve, while 11% say it will worsen.

[...]

When asked to choose a priority for the new government due to be formed after this week’s parliamentary elections, 57% wanted to focus on restoring public security.
Removing US-led forces from Iraq came second with 10%, while rebuilding the country’s infrastructure was third.

All emphasis mine. If you’re craving a loss for Iraq, you’re running out of time. Note that in the included infographic, there’s little to no trust in the US occupation forces but they sure as hell don’t want them to leave.

Oh, and if you’re all shocked, offended or surprised by this, you probably think all Iraqis are the same. Just to help you out, the importance of the Sunni Arab (aka “the fascist oppressors for the last couple of decades”) population’s opinion should be ranked about the same as whites in South Africa in the 1990s or Germans in the mid to late 1940s. That is, you don’t want to write it off entirely but you do have to realize a certain amount of resentment that they’re not King Shit anymore.

Microformats provide a way to identify systematically “microcontent” (here, here, and here) inside a web page.

Some microformats are hCard (addresses), hCalendar (calendars and events), rel-tag and xfolk (folksonomy/tagged content), hReview (reviews) and a new microformat I’ve been working on for the last few month called hAtom (blogged content). As more and more web pages contain microformatted content, you will be able to do things such as “add this person to my address book”, “add this event to my calendar”, “blog about this”, and so forth.

The hard trick with microfomats is marking up the original web content with the correct information. Right now this is mainly done by hand but a number of tools will be emerging in the next quarter to automate this process.

The easier (though not necessarily easy) part is identifying microformats on a page. I’ve taken this on as a project and am proud to annouce The Almost Universal Microformat Parser.

Now, if you’re not a code geek that’s not too exciting. So I’ve run a number of example for you so you can see what it’s doing:

• Buffalo Bills vs New England Patriots
• an entry from this blog
• unalog.com
• Brian Suda’s Lesser Know Holidays

Greasemonkey is a FireFox “plugin” that lets you change web pages after you’ve loaded them in your browser. If you don’t have Greasemonkey yet, give it a try:

• download and install FireFox 1.5 (if neccessary)
• install Greasemonkey 0.6.4 (or higher)

There’s also a version called Turnabout for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but I haven’t had a chance to play with that yet.

Did I forget to mention I gave a little talk on Microformats at TorCamp last week? Here’s the proof:

Afterwards, my henchmen butchered a cow and Martin Sheen shot me.

Rest of U2 Perfectly Fine With Africans Starving:

Rock band U2, currently on tour in North America, is well-known for its human-rights advocacy, particularly its ongoing campaign to eradicate poverty in Africa. Less known to fans of the Irish supergroup, however, is that the lion’s share of these efforts are made by lead singer Bono. The three other U2 members are perfectly okay with the dismal plight of Africa’s poor.

“Yeah, that Africa stuff is Bono’s thing,” The Edge said. “I don’t mind if he pursues other interests, but I really try to focus on the guitar riffs that give U2 its characteristic sound.”

Bassist Adam Clayton, while “not opposed” to Bono’s tireless efforts to improve the quality of life for impoverished Third World citizens, is apparently too busy to spearhead an anti-poverty initiative of his own. [...] “I don’t have a problem with [Bono] trying to save Africa. Who knows, it might inspire some decent songs. But just as long as it doesn’t interfere with the band.”

[...] “When Bono starts telling the audience how messed up the world can be and how we should work together to make things better, I usually just zone out,” Mullen said.

Playmates’ Drunken Catfight on Denver Airplane Leads to Arrest:

Buried in the middle of Thursday’s Rocky Mountain News was the kind of story that could help turn around declining newspaper sales if it were properly exploited: Two Playboy playmates, Danielle Gamba and Carrie Minter, were arrested after behaving with drunken belligerence on a flight from Denver to San Antonio on Sunday. According to the Rocky, the playmates “were allegedly so drunk on the plane that they were deemed a danger to themselves and others…According to police reports, the women fought with each other and with passengers.” Arresting them was one option, setting up a Jello wrestling pit would have been another.

Scary Go Round has an RSS feed that includes the comics.