Chuggnutt!

Category: Blogging

  • Shakespeare

    Over on Peter David‘s weblog is this post about Shakespeare. Since I like Shakespeare, I thought I’d link to it, it’s a good post.

    It’s one of those topics where there seems to be little or no middle ground: either you dig Shakespeare, or you don’t. Those who don’t can be converted, but I ain’t gonna bother with that here—I just thought I’d riff a bit and let everyone make up their own mind.

    Back in college I took several Shakespeare courses: the typical English-course requirement-type class and another titled “Shakespeare in Ashland” which was a hands-on course in which we studied several plays and then went to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland to see them performed. It was a totally great class. All the courses were taught by the same professor, who—get this—had been a cop in Los Angeles before getting his degree and becoming a teacher. He was a cool guy, had a totally pragmatic approach to Shakespeare, not the usual “masterpiece of English literature” approach that turns so many off.

    Speaking of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you ever get the opportunity to see a play performed there, jump all over it. It will likely be the best production of Shakespeare you will ever see, bar none. There’s simply nothing like the experience of seeing it performed live, and performed well—especially if it’s in the outdoor Elizabethan theater. I’ve been there a bunch of times and seen about half-a-dozen plays (Richard III and Henry IV Part I really stand out in my mind), and I’d go back anytime for more.

    And I just checked the 2004 schedule: King Lear (I guarantee this will be awesome), Henry VI (all three parts, a ho-hum set of plays but I bet they do good with them anyway), The Comedy of Errors, and Much Ado About Nothing (another one that will be really good, I’ll bet).

    And finally, some gratuitous plugs for my ebooks: Hamlet Palm Reader .pdb file, and Macbeth Palm Reader .pdb file.

  • Bend WinterFest

    The Bend WinterFest is coming up in a little over a week, from February 5th through the 8th. Just thought I’d give it a mention for anyone looking for something to do in Bend next weekend.

    Me? No, I probably won’t attend. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, I know. I think Bend now has festivals for every season plus a few extra thrown in for good measure; the SummerFest used to be pretty decent, when they had a good beer garden and didn’t limit where you could take your beer (or wine), but when they beer garden selection got much more limited and they wouldn’t let you out of the fenced area (which caused much problems for those of us who had young kids who weren’t allowed inside the fence but had already purchased a beer before finding out you couldn’t leave), the SummerFest itself became a lot less attractive.

    At any rate, for me it’s just too damn cold to be out wandering around Downtown Bend or the Old Mill District watching ice carving or fireworks. But if you’re interested in going, more power to you.

  • The Donner Party

    The January issue of Discover Magazine lists the top 100 science stories of 2003 (according to them, of course), and coming in at number 96 is the story of the Donner Party cannibalism site unearthed (scroll down the page for their summary).

    In case you haven’t heard of the Donner Party, here’s a capsule review: in 1846 a group of pioneers on their way to California were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains by a blizzard. They had a limited food supply that ran out quickly, and survivors were forced to eat the bodies of the dead to survive. Gruesome stuff.

    Anyway, Discover’s recap of the story—that archaeologists unearthed what they believe to be the Donner Party camp—spins it so that the Donner Party tragedy was a “legend has it” type of event—i.e., doubtful that it occurred. Say what?

    This bothered me, so I went to the source: The book Weird History 101 (great book, I highly recommend it) contains several contemporary accounts of the Donner Party from the people who survived: Virginia Reed, daughter of one of the Party leaders; Lewis Keseberg, one of those forced to eat the dead to survive; and Edwin Bryant, not a member of the Party (I don’t think) but who visited the camp in the spring.

    “Legend has it,” indeed. I can understand the importance of scientific investigations of an historic event, but playing off a well-documented incident as questionable as to whether it even occurred just seems awfully sloppy, and a bit irresponsible.

  • Technology Predictors

    Tim Bray is running some good articles on his blog on predicting the success or failure of new technologies. Good stuff. You can find the articles here; the series is still ongoing.

  • Just Another Friday Night

    Long week, and this turned into a pointless post. Interesting. I’ve got some ideas for articles to write, but they all take more energy than I have this Friday night.

    So, a pointless post that’s cluttering up the aggregators and the search engines. Hm. There’s a kernel of an idea in there somewhere.

  • Best of 2003

    As promised, here’s some of my own “Best Of” lists for 2003. All of these are my opinion only.

    Best Comic Books

    • Smax. This limited series isn’t quite done yet, but it’s some of the best and most fun Alan Moore stuff since Top 10 and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
    • Thor: Vikings. This really freaked me out, but I have to admit, it was really well done, even if it’s wack.
    • JLA/Avengers. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but Kurt Busiek and George Perez have done fantastic work here.
    • Groovitude: A Get Fuzzy Treasury. Not a comic book per se, but it fits here. It’s great.

    Interestingly, I can only really remember anything a few months back for the good comics list. That’s kind of dumb.

    Best Movies I Saw

    This is kinda sad, showing you my movie preferences. I guess the best way to comment on this is to say I prefer escapist movies to more “realistic” ones.

    Best Stories I Blogged About

    Most Overrated Technologies

    • OPML. I don’t know what it is about OPML, but I just can’t get into it like I got into RSS.
    • Friendster. Slow, and I have trouble seeing the point.
    • TrackBack

  • Picking up the pace

    Now that the holidays are over, perhaps I’ll pick up the pace again and blog more. I noticed this same trend last year; my blogging nearly died off in November and December. I guess I get distracted by the holidays and rather than blogging, fill my time with other activities when I have the energy, like catching up on reading, putting up decorations, etc.

    On a fun note, my brother and his wife who live in San Diego surprised everybody by driving up on New Year’s Eve. Hadn’t seen them since this time last year, when they got married in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, they have to leave soon—it’s quite a drive back. But it’s awesome while it lasts.

  • TrackBack?

    Jeremy Zawodny had a post imagining a corporate worst-case scenario involving that ubiquitous Movable Type-developed technology, TrackBack. I’d been musing over TrackBack for awhile, and two things yesterday got me looking deeper into it: Zawodny’s blog entry, and the link to my site from Ensight that I detailed in my previous entry.

    I’ll admit, before yesterday what I knew about TrackBack was fairly minimal: it was a way to let sites know when other sites were linking to them (by sites, I suppose it should be clarified I mean blogs)—which to me is basically the equivalent of scanning the webserver’s referrer logs. Hence, I’ve more-or-less ignored implementing it in my own software.

    I’m rethinking that decision now, largely because of the Ensight link. You know how I found that link to me? Technorati. (I would’ve seen it in the Apache logs, sooner or later, but I’ve been behind on those lately.) It occurred to me, though, that if I hadn’t checked Technorati, or if the post containing the link to me had scrolled off of Ensight’s front page and off Technorati, then I might never have known that I had been linked to.

    TrackBack might change that. I say “might” because I’m still on the fence, as far as it goes. I can’t deny that if I had a TrackBack implementation in place, I would have gotten a notification of linkage in this case—Ensight runs Movable Type, which of course runs TrackBack. So I looked into the TrackBack specs yesterday to educate myself.

    Here’s my official “from the fence” opinion:

    TrackBack is a rather ugly kludge, albeit somewhat clever.

    It has its good points, and its bad points. Here’s the good points:

    • The concept. It’s good, I admit it. However, it took a close reading of the technical spec to get it across to me. The most important thing about the concept is that it can transcend the weblog world; done right, this could be a powerful tool for all sorts of Web applications.
    • It uses plain-vanilla HTTP calls to ping other sites. Simple, easy to implement, firewall-friendly.
    • The autodiscovery concept—having your client try to automagically retrieve and ping a site based on the link you give it is neat.
    • Adoption. Almost all Movable Type and TypePad blogs I’ve seen use it, and a good number of other blog tools use it too. It’s got the inertia.

    Now, the bad:

    • It’s too vague and confusing. Prior to yesterday, I only had an inkling of how it worked and what it did, and I’m pretty savvy at this stuff; I just couldn’t grok what exactly was going on when viewing sites that use it.
    • Related to the previous point, the name itself doesn’t work for me, it makes me want to only look in one direction for links (back) while the spec several times emphasizes it’s a peer-to-peer technology (ie., two-way). Too much confusion and vague imagery doesn’t breed a good market presence.
    • The execution leaves me a bit cold. That’s tough to quantify, I know, but it just seems to me to be too Movable Type-centric, and hence too limited to be the real-world peer-to-peer communication framework it wants to be.
    • The autodiscovery solution, while clever, is an ugly hack: embedding RDF into the HTML of a page? Worse, having to surround it with HTML comment tags to avoid breakage? Ick, ick, ick. Seems to me a better solution would have been to embed the autodiscovery stuff in HTML meta tags, like the RSS autodiscovery link you’ll find in many sites (including my own). Even something simple along these lines, like:<meta name="trackback" content="http://www.example.com/tb.cgi?id=1">

      would do. And it would play nicely. I’ve noticed more than once that sites with that embedded RDF cause script errors in my browser.

    So while TrackBack, conceptually, is good, its execution is kludgy and ugly. Because of this, I probably wouldn’t give serious consideration to implementing it on my site… except for the fact that it’s being highly adopted, and as a community-building tool it’s better than nothing at all. Do I want to miss the boat? I don’t know, yet.

    Other thoughts? What do you all think? Is TrackBack good enough? Or could it be better?

  • A Little Ensight

    Jeremy Wright over on Ensight has wrote up some good commentary to my Thoughts on Content Management post from a few days back. He’s hit on the exact points that prompted me to explore this topic: “most CMS’s are piss poorly designed” (which is exactly right; most are piss-poorly designed, I’m just as guilty of this as anybody), and “there is no need to choose how you are managing your content until it is actually time to manage it.” (Emphasis mine.) Right on.

    And, here’s some kudos from Jeremy that caught me entirely off-guard:

    Jon, over at Chuggnut.com, is one of my favourite writers. Balanced, fair and most importantly, intelligent.

    Wow. That’s a damn nice thing to say, Jeremy—thank you! (To everyone else, sorry for the ego-stroking; I’ll try not to let it go to my head… too much.)

  • Support

    Jake over on UtterlyBoring is having some serious back problems and could definitely use some support. So, if you can, donate to Jake, or maybe buy something from his Orty.com store. If things are tight, hey, I understand, just send him some email or link to his site. Every little bit helps!