bestkungfu weblog

I have mad kit. This is all of the techie junk I’ll be traveling with in 2004:

• PowerBook (800MHz, 512MB RAM, 40GB disk, combo drive), AC adapter and spare battery
• Nokia 3650 phone
• Cisco ATA 186 Voice over IP box, Radio Shack mini-phone and Plantronics in-ear headset (hopefully, Vonage will support USB-based VoIP in 2004, and I can replace all this with a single USB VoIP handset)
• iPod (40GB)
• Palm Tungsten T
• iConcepts USB HotSync and Charger cable
• SanDisk 256MB SD card (only $45 at Costco. Woohoo!)
• Sony DSC-P7 3.2MPix camera
• Belkin F8T001 USB Bluetooth adapter
• Lexar Media JumpDrive Trio USB Memory Stick/SD/MMC reader
• Apple iPod Dock Connector to USB 2.0 + FireWire (allows me to use my iPod storage with any device that supports USB or FireWire)
• (2) Super-thin Ethernet cables
• Ethernet crossover adapter
• (2) CD-RW discs

I find myself wishing for an AC/car/airplane power adapter with ports for my laptop and phone, but that’s not likely to be purchased until the second half. I also suspect I’ll buy a SD-based 802.11b adapter for the Tungsten, since that would make it a handy-dandy remote control device at home.

So, here’s what I can do with all of this junk. I can read all of my media without carrying around cables. (I do keep two I otherwise don’t need in exchange for speed and recharging.) I can transfer small amounts of data (<256MB) via my SD card to any device with USB. I can transfer large amounts of data (up to 8 gigs) via my iPod. I can access the Internet over GPRS from any Bluetooth-aware device. I can access the Internet on any Bluetooth device via a wired or wireless connection on my PowerBook. I can connect to any wired Ethernet port, anywhere. I can sync all of my Bluetooth devices over the air. I can save TV shows I’ve recorded on my home PC to my iPod for convenience. (Or, I can burn them to DVD.) And, I can have a phone number in Cambridge, Mass., anywhere in the world that has broadband connectivity. (Helpful hint: If you do this, and you go to Japan, unplug the terminal adapter while you sleep. I once got a wrong-number call at 2am from a car mechanic. It’s really hard to explain why you sound like you just woke up in this situation.)

I suppose the most difficult concept to swallow is that I am not the alpha geek of W3C. That title is shared by Masayasu Ishikawa, who wears a utility belt that would put Batman to shame, and Ralph Swick, our one-man audiovisual department, telco, and Semantic Web guru. I am at best a distant third. This is why I love my job.

Congratulations to Tim Berners-Lee, who on Thursday becomes a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Yep. Sir Tim. That’s my director. (See also the CNN article.)

Also receiving props at various levels are Eric Clapton, Kinks founder Ray Davies, tennis star Tim Henman, and 37 players and coaches from the World Cup champion English rugby side.

More in the ping-pong match between myself and Jay McCarthy on blogging, politics, and maybe some new stuff I’ll throw in here.

Jay continues:

So this is the distinct between Delegate and Trustee, and further — at what level should we delegate? I agree that there should not be a vote about every single issue. The best solution, in my opinion, would be to allow a vote whenever the people cared enough to make one. Currently, you can contact your representatives is a very ad-hoc, unreliable, and unresponsive way. I can call and get put on hold, email and not get answered, mail and get a template letter back, protest and be hidden from sight. This is not representative democracy. This is “electing” dictators.

I want to have a say. I want people who claim I’ll have a say when they get elected to give me a say right now. I want to be more than a vote for an idea, I want to be a generator of ideas. I want to be more than a source of money. And I want all of you to be too!

I want my representatives to be responsive, too. But I know that there are limits to what can be accomplished, and that I need to be reasonably patient. Some things take time, and getting 435 of anybody to work together on anything is one of those things. Politicians do tend to ignore emails, form letters and faxes, but that’s because they’re low-effort and easy to manipulate. (Still, most members of Congress count pro and con mail, calls, faxes and emails.) Simply raising the profile of a message to indicate your personal involvement (for example, a handwritten letter) is substantially more effective, and really, not too much to ask for your favorite cause. But this is related to communicating with individual pols, and thus pretty subjective.

I did dream when I was very young of an age where we could just log into terminals and vote daily on the issues of the day. (I think it was because I went to EPCOT Center.) I also dreamed that I would one day be a candidate that takes the opinions of each constituent, weighs them, and impartially delivers them to Congress.

The problem with this is that anyone who takes this path is unelectable. There are patterns in the drawer of every party operative to paint a candidate that’s listening quietly to issues during a campaign as uninformed on the issues. Someone “who’ll do anything to get elected.” An idiot, a hack. Or worse, a liar.

It presumably would take its toll on a candidate, as well. A candidate that’s not hard-wired on at least a few issues is bound to be a mediocre policymaker, at best. That’s why we have debates, instead of just choosing who we think is most trustworthy in evaluating our demands as constituents. Politicians moved into their positions because of a desire to make better policy, for their definition of “better”.

And once in office, the average Representative has 600,000 citizens in the home district. There comes a time when the decision has to be final. I wonder if Jay would be happier with a confederacy, in which state representatives representing a few thousand people apiece have most of the power, and the federal government has limited constitutional powers related to commerce, defense, and settling issues between states.

What can you do to ensure that your voice is always represented in the legislature? Join it. Even then, your results may be mixed. You could find yourself sponsoring a bill that you end up voting against, because it was laden with enough pork or poison-pill riders that it cancels out the benefit you wanted. And sometimes, that puts you in exactly the position your opposition wants. In the case of Max Cleland, a vote against the homeland security bill that he had pushed years beforehand because the Republicans demanded that the new positions be classified something other than civil service jobs cost him his Georgia Senate seat. Cleland sat there, with three limbs missing from fighting in Vietnam, while a chickenhawk named Saxby Chambliss told the people of Georgia that Cleland was unpatriotic and soft on national defense. And Chambliss, with millions in Republican soft money, won.

It’s a horrible environment. Campaign finance reform may help curb such shameless power plays from happening, but in my mind, what needs to happen is for the equation of corporation = citizen to be negated before any real improvement happens.

In June, Thomas C Greene of the Register wrote a description of the House that was so good, I had to blog about it:

(…)Representatives must stand elections every two years and therefore exist in a campaign steady-state, and dare not anger the media behemoths on whom they depend for money and publicity.

Jay responds to my assertion that we would have nuked the Middle East if we’d all taken a vote on September 12th:

This is probably a joke, but I comment regardless. Protecting ourselves from that sort of result is what a division of power and mutual restraint would be effective at. If the country had the right amount of information and foresight, I don’t think that would even be proposed. But if it was, and if it was past, then that horrible country would deserve whatever they got.

It wasn’t a joke. I think that a country which was hurt the way we were would have a visceral response that outmatches the stimulus. I think that if a nuclear remedy were on the table for all to see, we would have allowed ourselves to think our way out of it. That’s not politics, that’s an angry mob with more power than good sense. Information and foresight is not what you get from the guys with the torches and pitchforks.

And I see the allure of Jay’s approach, which is for everyone to demand a redress of their grievances, and have them all individually addressed in good time. But I can’t believe that such a system would be successful, beyond the arrangement we currently have. It’s a wonderful ideal, in which hundreds of millions of informed citizens hash out their issues in informed debate, and enlightened decisions occur. But that is untenable in this country and culture we have constructed. Irrespective of the interest and reasoning power of the population, which is where I think Jay and I are of widely differing opinions, this environment requires good faith from all sides of the debate. Those invested in the status quo would do everything in their power to subvert the will of any voices that are not theirs. Should they succeed in any facet, we will have arrived at a system that is far more open to abuse than this one, I fear.

Or maybe I’m talking past Jay, and he’s saying that he just wants his politicians to listen to him (and others). I don’t have that problem right now with two of my three Congresscritters, who do listen to voters, and tend to respond meaningfully to thoughtful appeals. (The third, Maria Cantwell, isn’t getting high marks from much of anyone around here, that I can tell. And that will shake itself out in due time.) I can see how a number of barriers that have built themselves up over the years could be swept away for the benefit of the voter. I just have to stay on the side of evolution rather than revolution.

I’m stopping now before I get into game theory.

Don Park commented recently on permalinks not actually being permanent, especially when bloggers flip from one app to another. The side effects are usually minor for the author, but the secondary effect is that all of the sites that have linked to them now 404, which is bad on both sides of the equation.

This is more or less why I started writing my own blogging software. I wanted to make sure that I could have absolute control over my content, including my URIs, and mix it up any way I want. I have about three lines of server-side code that gives me a little flexibility with my physical directory structure, but that’s all. Permalinks are neato. They should be respected even when you change blogging apps.

Cool URIs don’t change.

This Washington Post article says that Japan’s biggest export is its culture. The number of people learning Japanese has increased by a factor of almost 25 in the last six years. Anime, cell phone accessories, and sushi are now extremely popular internationally. Certainly, living in a shipping lane on the Pacific Rim, I get to experience a lot of the crossover, and my travel lets me experience the real thing. Japanification has been in full swing for years.

But that’s not all. The article points to the new Centre Pompidou in Metz, France, the design for which was won by Shigeru Ban. (Picture attached.) I’m not quite sure what Japan’s claim to fluid architecture is, since that’s been a trend of late, or what that has to do with a cultural invasion, but it’s pretty.

So, when I asked my 13-year-old brother what he wanted from Japan last month, I expected him to select something like DragonBallZ, or Beyblade (which caused a coworker to scramble around Shibuya for her son’s benefit), or Yu-Gi-Oh! (which was what he wanted so badly a year ago). What did he want? “More candy.” I had sent a small care package of weird Japanese candy from my April trip to Japan, and was happy to send more. It’s funny what’s funny about Japan.

This weekend, I’ve been working on Logme, the software that runs this blog. Slow progress is being made, no doubt related to the fact that I suck at writing software, and am low on the Python learning curve. The current codename is “BAWAIN”, for Blogging App Without An Interesting Name. Candidates for the naming of 0.2 are welcome.

If I finish what I’ve started here, this is what it will do:

• Support for libxml2, DBXML and 4Suite for reading and manipulating the core XML file
• Support for 4Suite and xsltproc for doing the final transformation
• Support for Atom as the common storage format, along with the existing Logme schema
• Output to (X)HTML, RSS, and Atom. Anything else that you want, you can write an XSLT for.
• Support for the Atom, Blogger, Movable Type and MetaWeblog APIs. Also operable via command-line.
• Can be run as a server, or to transfer files to a remote host

I’d say I’m about 10% done with the coding, but I have all week to myself to work on it, so we’ll see how far I get. I really want to get it to where I can use Kung-Log or NetNewsWire to manage my posts before the next milestone. Some features may drop off before 0.2, but this is the way things are moving. Now, let’s see how much of Python’s object-orientedness I remember and/or understand.

Bestkungfu Guy is back. I missed him, kinda. He matches my mood of late.

For some reason, my blue style sheet doesn’t work properly in Mozilla, though it seems to work fine in Safari and Internet Explorer. The weird thing is that it even works in Mozilla once you reload the page you downloaded. I’m stumped. If anyone has any feedback, feel free to mail me at mcmay @ this domain.

Then we were left with what I said.

Jay McCarthy responds to my response to his etcetera:

[P]eople should convince themselves and those interested should be given opportunities to connect to each other to further refine what their own beliefs are. I simply disagree fundamentally (to my assertion that candidates should convince voters on issues -ed.). If something is a truly good policy then the only reason that more people don’t support it is because they either (a) haven’t heard of it or it’s reasons for support, which is solved by discussion tools; or, (b) they have lost faith in the government and politicians to actually do what is best.

Yes. They should. But they do not. And relying on the interest of the people in, say, the nuances of health care reform, or sugar subsidies, or even diplomacy, is destined to disappoint anyone who’s looking to make policy. (In the case of the Bush administration, this is immaterial, since anyone who disagrees is a “focus group.”)

The thing is, few of us are lawyers, and even fewer of us subscribe to the Congressional Record. We do not know — we cannot know — the content and context of the laws being proposed, not to mention the agendas of those involved. Things get twisted around. That’s politics. What we can do, realistically, is follow the people and organizations who represent themselves to match our individual politics. That includes aligning oneself with a candidate, or, say, the Sierra Club, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, etc., in order to have a better grasp of things. Simply reading the paper, or watching TV, is insufficient. I think Jay will agree with me on that. But the point I’m trying to make is that politics are complex by nature.

I don’t think that putting everyone in front of a message board is a solution, either. Half of the country still doesn’t use the Internet regularly, and even fewer use it daily. Jay, you and I are the exception. People will not on the whole voluntarily make time to argue politics on a Web site. Remember also that pegging participation in anything to the Internet is a heavy burden for those who can’t afford computers or, say, free time, which means the current state of discussion skews rich. The use of technology and community in the 2004 election is a good sign, but not a panacea.

Jay continues:

To me this is another example of Matt May’s disbelief that democracy is something to aspire for or that the people should actually be listened to. We want these people to have the immense power of government, yet we accept that they don’t have the time to actually listen to us?

The entire purpose of representative democracy is to ensure that the will of the people is done in a calm, reasoned fashion. People get to make their elected officials listen at the rate of once every two to six years. Certainly, officials who doesn’t listen at all while defying the will of the constituency will be removed in due time — or immediately, if their offenses are egregious. (This has been changed in the last few years in California to “egregious or politically expedient”. So, it’s apparent that not everyone is on board with this deal.)

But laws of physics, specifically relating to space-time, limit the ability of humans to listen to everyone around them. There comes a time when a politician has to make a call, and that’s what we elect them to do. The best we can ask of candidates who need to reach out to voters is that they be honest, confident, and have some convictions upon which we can rely. We can give candidates our opinions, and vote on their stances on them, but eventually, they have to make decisions on a day-to-day basis, and each one is going to upset some group of constituents.

I have a laundry list of problems with the social dynamics of the political scene. Many of them go away when the money is taken out of politics. Some do not. But on the whole, I’m happier with this than I would be with a direct democracy of 280 million people. If everyone voted on September 12, 2001, the entire Middle East would today be a sheet of glass.

Okay, here’s where I have to come clean. I’m a sarcastic bastard. I’d register sarcasticbastard.com if it weren’t already taken. You can call me a sarcastic bastard to my face, and I’ll probably still buy the next round. If you don’t like my writing style, no hard feelings. I wrote a column for a magazine for three years, during which time I was called both a “Misinformed Minion of Microsoft” and an “anti-Microsoft Linux bigot.” In consecutive issues. The point being, I know how to piss off a diverse range of people simply by saying what I’d ordinarily say. I discovered early on that my penchant for getting people’s blood boiling translated well online. Woohoo, I thought, this Internet thing is for me.

I have somewhere between zero and very few personal beefs with people I know online. With these few exceptions, just about anyone is invited to sit down to a beer (or, preferably, a brunello) with me. All are invited, if it’s on them. I don’t take things personally, nor do I intend them that way. It’s easy to say that everyone should just get along, but it’s hard to do, since many people have many interpretations of what exactly it takes to get along. I’ve found that the best approach for me is to stay the course, say what I need to, and smooth ruffled feathers as necessary.

So, recently, I’ve been involved in an increasingly multifaceted debate which sprang from another person’s blog a few days ago. (qq.v.: the first article, the second article) And the discussion has turned in at least one arena from what I said to how I said it.

Ryan Overbey takes my style to task:

The only person I can see who responded to the more substantive points was Matt May at bestkungfu. Matt’s retort actually has a few points I agree with(…). But Matt uses the word “bullshit” over and over again, and closes with a really nasty ad hominem.

Hey, shut up, you! (By which I mean, Overbey makes several good points in his reaction to the thread.) Two issues:

1. The word “bullshit” appears twice, not “over and over”. (It could be argued that its apparent sense of omnipresence is owed to proper placement by the author, but really, it’s only there because I like the word bullshit. Especially when French people say it.)
2. Accusing someone of intellectual dishonesty, particularly when backed by evidence, is not an ad hominem attack. Calling someone an idiot is an ad hominem attack. Which I didn’t do. And never do. (That’s a lie.)

So. My sarcasm is thus far well-covered, and ad hominem is debunked. (I learned both of these things in high school speech and debate, by the way.) Overbey continues:

Bloggers do this all the time. It’s really, really frustrating to read. They need to take a lesson from academics- who have a clear sense of propriety, who make effort (for the most part) to argue with substance and arguments rather than ad hominem and sarcasm. When I pick up a book by someone I disagree with, I always try to read it asking the question “Is there anything in here I can use? Anything strong? Anything correct?” Because dwelling on weak points accomplishes nothing. Lots of bloggers really need to learn this.

Okay. I am, technically, an academic. And I do, from time to time, write academic-ish papers. But outside of work, this site represents what I choose to write and how I choose to write it. Some people like it, and add my RSS feed. Others don’t, and go away. This is the marketplace of ideas, and I as idea vendor get to choose how I offer my wares.

And I agree, bloggers — people, even — should read with a view toward using the knowledge they acquire. However, in this case, I found the argument so profoundly clouded by circumstance and bereft of value that the best thing I could do was debunk it.

Another Christmas has come and will soon be gone. I got the WinTV-PVR 250, the finest personal video recorder board available to the middle class, along with fuzzy slippers, a wallet, a shirt, a tie, and a design book. And we gave money to one stepfather’s ambulance fund, and my dad’s prison book fund. (First, he works at the prison; that is, I don’t have to make an appointment to see him. And second, yes, my mom was a busy lady, and I have more steps than the Plaza di Spagna.)

Tomorrow, we will brave the crowds for the Not Really Boxing Day Sales, in which we hope to buy just about anything, as long as it’s cheaper than regular price. And when I come home, I’ll be working on Logme, adding a front end, slapping together some compatibility with the popular APIs, and maybe throwing in an Atom interface. One can never be too sure. In any case, my work email is off until January 5th, so maybe I can actually get some of this stuff done.