Zzot!

I guess I never entirely thought it through. The thing is, when I listen to music that I’ve bought, I listen to albums. On the other hand, I’ve been buying music through iTMS. Don’t get me wrong, there are a handful of single tracks that I’ve bought for one reason or another, but I frequently found myself wanting a no single tracks option, either in iTunes or on my iPod when I’m browsing.

Every so often, you’d hear someone like Dave Matthews say that they’re not letting Apple have their songs because they ‘don’t want to contribute to the downfall of the album format.’ I always thought that was nuts. This downfall is caused by the steady supply of albums consisting of a couple good songs and a lot of filler, not by the artists who actually bother to make an album worth listening to.

All that being said, it’s slowly dawning on me that I’ve got my own political reasons to lean towards a particular way of buying music — CDs are better. A CD has good sound quality, no compression artifacts, and you don’t generally have to ask if a particular artist makes a CD that’s compatible with your hardware.

Oh, and another thing — I think the RIAA is wrong. I think DRM is bad for everyone. They should be embracing file-sharing (if nothing else, its a large-scale marketing system that other people pay for) and talking about how to still get artists paid rather than continuing their endless attempt to put every genie that comes along back in its bottle — and now to have the Department of Justice do it for them. Have there been any new movies produced in the years since VCRs became ubiquitous? Yes, a lot of them, in fact.

Technology advances, and business models change in response. No amount of lobbying congress can change this, and even if it could, suppressing technology in favor of one industry’s stability is bad for everyone.

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Any comments I might have previously made about stuff that needs doing around here not withstanding, I pointed the public URL at this site tonight. In the morning (after DNS propagates) I’ll fiddle with the server config so old URLs get corrected. Meep.

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Well, I can’t remember. If you find it, you might as well return it to someone who can really use it rather than, say, me. I think I’ve got this synthetic list in my head of vaguely important items,¹ but beyond that I think I’m just going to work on the process of moving this site over to its final URL. Basically, that involves fixing the DNS server on a friend’s home network (where the current Indecisive webserver lives), since it thinks it is still authoritative, fussing with the Apache config on work’s webserver so this site answers to www.indecisive.com, adding some redirects to fix old URLs, and changing DNS. Who knows when that all will happen, though.

1. For example, there are people I want to tell about the site, but whose sad devotion to Windows would leave their experience wanting until the site works right in MSIE. [↩]

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So, here’s the site, only slightly closer to “finished” then the last time I checked the box next to “Site Info” in ecto. Comments and TrackBacks work, anonymous comments are on (but require approval), and the only obvious ways for people I don’t know to provide feedback are comment on a random entry or send e-mail to whatever address Network Solutions is selling for me (as the owner of the domain) that particular day. The site now almost looks like it should in IE, but I still haven’t touched printing style sheets or the category archive pages.

Now, this…

Brilliant segue, eh? I’ve always been amazed by attempts to tie things together using a segue, but without bothering to come up with an appropriate one — as if saying that is somehow a better introduction to the new topic than just starting in on the new topic.

Anyway, one of my local NPR stations¹ carries Marketplace, and in one of their recent features on the planet’s oil reserves, they referred to a russian proverb that jumped out at me:

Pray to God, but keep rowing to shore.

If I recall correctly, the piece was about technology research to extract more oil from a given field, basically because we won’t know until it’s too late that there’s not much of the stuff left underground. My take on this was, instead, that this sounds like a kernel of old-world wisdom that’s largely lost on our modern society.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for praying to God for help (or jumping straight to the rowing, for that matter) — I just think that one can only completely replace the other for an atheist. My iCal is subscribed to the calendars of at least a couple of religions I don’t practice,² but if God has been publishing its³ meeting schedule from its iCal, I haven’t found the URL — and I can only presume God has other demands on its time.

1. If you don’t get two different NPR stations where you live, cash in your chips. [↩]
2. The reason why is a topic for another day. [↩]
3. Briefly, I find gender-specific pronouns inappropriate for monotheistic divine references. Say that ten times fast. [↩]

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I don’t know what it is. Child-like faith? Some twisted form of optimism rooted in minor failure? Whatever it is, I always get this feeling that there’s still hope for the world when someone makes an announcement and vastly underestimates the amount of bandwidth it will consume. movabletype.org, sixapart.com, typekey.com, and presumably the rest of their sites were bordering on unreachable for much of the day yesterday.

Raves | Permalink | 1 Comment

Ignore what I said before about the site being almost done and getting thrown out for the world to see over the past weekend — clearly I didn’t know what I was talking about. That being said, the day is getting closer.

I’ve started using a semi-clever solution to some of the MSIE problems. Quite a few of these relate to what the standards refer to as generated content. On a simple web page, the bullets in a bulleted list are generated content. The problem with my layout is that MSIE doesn’t understand the CSS attributes I use to add other generated content to the layout. So, since this appears to be an MSIE-only problem, I’m using an MSIE-only solution — Conditional Comments. It’s not that I’m a fan of proprietary HTML extensions, I just love the irony of using “downlevel hidden” markup to work around things “uplevel” browsers can’t handle.

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I’m seriously thinking I’m going to declare the site close-enough tonight, in spite of the following:

• General problems
  • Still haven’t decided on anonymous comments
  • Still no feedback mechanism
  • Category template hasn’t been touched
• Style sheet problems
  • @media print
  • MSIE rendering of site spectacular failure

Some of these will get fixed before, during, or after such changes (i.e., but still this weekend). Also, there are a number of strange, uninteresting DNS related details that will need attention. The webserver should be reconfigured to redirect the staging URL to the real one. And… probably some other stuff too.

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Over the past weekend, I largely re-implemented the layout of this site. This is largely a summary of the way things are, and to a lesser extent, the way things had been previously. If you’re curious, this particular post is more of a brain-dump than a colophon, so expect my usual tenuous line of thought.

Software

The site runs on Movable Type, although I’m not a big fan of revealing exact version numbers of software used — while security through obscurity is a practice I generally frown upon, I also try to avoid deliberately setting up a race condition¹ between NetNewsWire telling me to update and other people searching for holes to stick things through.

I don’t directly interact with Movable Type very often — I’m generally looking at Ecto when I write my sparkling prose, Vim when I edit my templates, and mt-rebuild when rebuilding the site after editing my templates.

Formerly, I had been editing my templates in Dreamweaver and running another copy of Movable Type locally, but that’s a lot of extra work, given how I generate HTML. Besides, I really don’t care enough about the details of MT’s data directory to figure out why I couldn’t just copy it across.

Features

Comments are still off. Pings are still off. This is going to change soon-ish. Currently, I’m hesitant to turn either on until I’ve actually moved the site over to its real URL, although I can’t say I’m sure why. Here’s a list of specific things that need fixing first:

• There’s text somewhere around here saying I only use underlines in link text, but that isn’t reflected in the current style sheets.
• I haven’t decided if I want to allow anonymous comments.
• There’s no feedback mechanism anywhere. For the moment, everyone who I’ve given the URL knows my real personal phone number, so that’s not really a problem (although I don’t know how Teoma found me). I’m leaning towards randomized, rotating mail aliases and mailto: links.
• The last time the stylesheets properly defined the printed form of the site was I-can’t-remember-how-many-versions ago.

Vapor

I keep telling myself that I’ll code all the bits needed for this kind of site myself one day. No, really. The most recent justification I use in these moments of delusion is that the sites we build for clients use most of the same pieces, and I might as well capitalize on this fact and use my personal website to pick nits out of our shared code.

I have a fair number of friends who either IM me with good blog entries or are introspective enough to make for decent reading that I’m likely to preach to about blogging, so there’s a hidden subtext to this site, if you’re into reading chewing gum wrappers searching for enlightenment.

There’s nothing going on here to help me keep track of how much interest the world is taking in the place, and that needs to change eventually. This may (or may not) take the form of an ugly conglomeration of a server-side cron job, web services, and hidden links with accesskeys that normal people only discover by reading the HTML directly or scouring my About section for every minute detail.

1. race condition: A CS term for undesired behavior caused by an unexpected dependence on the exact timing of other events. [↩]

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