undisappearing
20:22 - 10 Sep 2009
I've spent the recent months fairly uninvolved in the social web. This wasn't so much a conscious decision, but perhaps an attempt to keep my signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible. Having taken stock of the direction of the distribution of social information, I've decided to try to join the "more is better" school of fish.
In my mind the primary division (though not an absolute one) in social content on the web is between creative (original content, analyses, etc.) and informational (status updates, links). I'm pretty much a lost cause on the first type; some of it takes more effort than my oft-tired brain will allow (this was nearly a much longer post about my thoughts on social content) and I question the relevance of my thoughts on a movie from 2004 that I just saw. In the latter, though, I have been far more conservative than my peers. And seeing as I find their nonces interesting, filtering my own to the degree I have seems less necessary. So with that liberation and my getting accustomed to the not-as-great-as-it-once-was Facebook, I may actually start to develop more of a web presence.
If past experience is any indicator, this will maybe last a month.
welcome to zombocom
23:13 - 26 Jul 2009
So. Dot com. Obviously, this didn't happen overnight. Hence the lack of updates. Many apologies. It was probably under a week of actual working moving over, but when you spread that out over sporadic weekends, it ends up taking a while.
Why the move? Partly just to try something new. My webpages have generally progressed mostly with my experimentation with new things. It started when I was pretty young, just me manually editing HTML, back in the days when you actually had to know HTML to have a webpage. (I may be exaggerating slightly, but I do remember my distaste for GeoCities and my disgust at FrontPage when I ended up having to maintain some of its mess.) The birth of the iframe and of blogging sites allowed a much easier way to update my page, and so a second design was born, not too ugly, but table-based and pixel-perfect back when I didn't know better. Then, in college, not content to keep things easy, I guess, I decided to write my own blogging system from scratch, mostly as a way of teaching myself Perl. I later learned MySQL, and moved my blog database away from the ad hoc file database I had been using. The DB schema changed once after I actually learned MySQL, and I had to add a captcha because of some comment spam, but it remained mostly untouched, with occasional maintenance when the OCF would change something with their servers.
On a whim, or maybe in reaction to an OCF downtime, I decided to do this move. Again, partly to do something new and to see how easy it would be, but also partly because I like the aesthetic of a dot com. (Insert uninteresting stuff about DNS and directories here.) The possibility of reduced maintenance was also a plus. So now we're here, running on Blogger (with some wrangling of a custom layout) and Google App Engine (with the Blogger Data API). Lessons learned? Google App Engine is pretty awesome, but the loss of fine control of the blogging side was a bit jarring. I suppose I could use the App Engine Datastore, but I didn't want to re-reinvent the wheel. I've moved the posts from the previous version of my site over (sorry, I couldn't do the comments), and I'll be trying to set up 301s if I can get the OCF's Apache to cooperate. (In my experience, these things are either really easy or impossible. [EDIT: It was really easy.]) In the meantime, take a look around. If anything seems to not be working, let me know.
language nerd
17:53 - 29 May 2009
Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog wrote a nice post addressing the absurdness of allegations/fears of racial bias surrounding Sonia Sotomayor. It's a good post, but I'm not going to really go into it here. But Goldstein linked to a post by Mark Krikorian for National Review Online about foreign pronunciation that I'd like to discuss, and not just to criticize further. (Though Krikorian seems to care a bit too much.)
It's a topic that's been kicking around in my head for a while from my experiences in foreign language classes. If you took a foreign language class, you might have run into this too -- the first encounter is when you're choosing a name to use in the class. For instance, my name in Spanish would be Adán. (Though I actually ended up choosing a different name.) I'm not sure what is usually done for ESL classes, but the idea of choosing an "English name" seems kind of absurd to me. Making an effort to preserve the original pronunciations of names seems like the norm in English to me. (Even spelling is generally preserved, if the alphabet is close enough.) I don't have enough exposure to current foreign language use to be sure, but it does seem that there is generally some preservation of proper nouns. (I think this preservation, in English and in other languages, may be relatively recent; we retain old imports such as Moscow (instead of Moskva) and Leo Tolstoy (instead of Lev).)
But more interesting, I think, is English's somewhat abundant and seemingly pedantic use of loanwords. Again, we keep the pronunciation (well, sort of) and often the spelling. Based on my limited experience, other languages seem far more likely to change one or both (Spanish hamburguesa, French hamburger). And indeed, I think I remember hearing that certain languages were resistant to using foreign words at all, preferring substitutes in their own language. The differences in attitude regarding loanwords make me wonder about their underlying causes. I certainly think part of it is that English is largely on the descriptivist end of the scale (to the dismay of many pedants), so the words have an easier time getting in. In addition, English is already cobbled together from so many linguistic pieces -- and consequently, the spelling is far from phonetic -- that foreign words don't seem absolutely out of place. Even though I'm not a huge fan of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it's enough to make me wonder if our culture's lean toward linguistic descriptivism and openness to loanwords is somehow influenced by the nature of the language itself. (Would that be meta-linguistic relativism?)
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Incidentally, NRO seems to be Base64 encoding the ID for their posts, even though the unencoded ID is in hex. I'm not really sure why you'd do that, since the hex is shorter and doesn't need any URL escaping.
ken wants your traffic
18:27 - 15 May 2009
As props to Ken (whose devotion to his site reminds that I probably need a redesign of my own), some brief thoughts on ZEN Pinball, which was recently released on the PlayStation Store. Or rather, on the demo. The game looks great -- the graphics are pretty, smooth, etc -- the gameplay is there (though I'd prefer something more analog for the plunger), and the table I played seemed fairly well designed. I didn't play very long, so I can't really comment much on the special events it has, but the layout seems nice, and it plays well (unlike a certain real-life Monopoly table I encountered). That said, I can't really recommend it. The deal breaker is the camera angles. At a real pinball table, you may be moving your head a little, but you've pretty much got two angles: looking at the table, with a little bit of scanning, and looking at the display. ZEN Pinball shows the display as a HUD, and provides six camera angles for the table. The best two are what I'm inclined to call "six-year-old at the table" and "six-year-old at the table, standing on a phone book". With the low angle, you just can't get a good view of most of the table in these views. The other 4 seem to be there in an attempt to make up for this. They don't. So, if you play pinball by staring at the flippers, just trying to keep the ball in play, this game might work for you. Otherwise, I think you might find ZEN Pinball too frustrating to enjoy.
@adamcabrera
17:30 - 01 May 2009
So, I recently started using Twitter. I haven't really formed a strong opinion about it yet, but as with many heavily hyped things, it seems to be over loved by some and too denigrated by others. I think a lot of opinion has been formed as a reaction to the behaviour of the user base, rather than the tool itself. I'm somewhat reminded of Perl (which I like) and MySpace (which I don't). Perl doesn't have to be line noise, MySpace doesn't have to look like a revival of the 90s' web aesthetic as implemented by a brain-damaged monkey, and you don't have to tweet about your bowel movements. But these things are easy enough to avoid in your own use, and as for everybody else, well... hell is other people. (Say what you will of inanity on Twitter, it can be entertaining.)
Personally, I started using it to address the problem of keeping people reasonably updated about what's going on without flooding this blog with short and largely insubstantial entries. Twitter seemed like a natural fit. Of course, this makes me less likely to update here with any reasonable frequency, but it's not like I was doing that much before.
