I guess Joe Crawford really liked the email submission I sent him containing my post about the Chargers, the stadium issue, and its impact on our community, because he gave me posting privileges at sandiegoblog.com. Regardless of how many others he’s given posting abilities to, I consider it a real honor. It also means, of course, that I have to start writing more about living in San Diego, which inevitably means writing more about local politics. Hopefully it will make up for the frustration that I felt after being caught by a local news team, fastidiously pressed reporter, microphone, camera and sound crew and all, in front of my local Albertsons just after the news broke about the city’s pension scandal and attendant financial morass, and demurring from giving tv-ready quotes because I hadn’t properly assessed the information and considered its implications.

It is also a great opportunity for me to expand the readership of my blog, if I want to follow that path. In the blogging world, politics is the equivalent of Internet porn. But, I guess, it’s a reflection of my interests and leanings that I even think such a thing. I’m sure there are plenty of power bloggers out there that never talk about politics – in fact, I religiously read one – Wil Wheaton. And there’s the namesake poet who has an enviable PageRank, even if, in my philistine perspective, his poetry is crap. But all I see referenced in Newsweek are the political ones – oops, my bias is showing again. I don’t know if it’s ironic or revealing that most of my traffic is generated by my technical posts, but politics is my guilty pleasure.

I’ve wandered a bit from my original topic, but I guess there’s one thing I want to be made clear – I’m proud to call myself a San Diegan.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Politics, Posts About Me, Society at 21:22 PST

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Ever since confronting the Union Tribune’s foreboding headline today, I’d like to point out that whether the San Diego Chargers are going to leave our town is an issue that ought to get the juices flowing in all concerned locals, and that SD bloggers really ought to be posting their thoughts about it. Personally, there is no way to express the dismay I feel at the idea of losing the Chargers, especially since they appear to be in an effective (if sometimes stumbling) team-building mode that could make them one of the power players, and quite possibly a dynasty, in the NFL. I know a lot of people are still hurting about the Padres rip-off – how they parlayed a single year’s World Series bid into a taxpayer-financed treasury raid for a new stadium and then traded off their power players – but we stand to lose a lot if we let the Chargers go.

This issue embodies a lot of things that can get people worked up – local politics, incompetence, muckraking district attorneys, and even corruption that have lead us to be called “Enron-by-the-Sea“; environmental issues (who let those tanks farms leak all that stuff into our soil, and in South California?); sports, and the corollary – are sports too violent; public finances, or the lack thereof; and the national and international identity of a community that is seen by many as living in paradise, a cutting edge technological powerhouse, an overinflated real estate market headed for a bursting bubble, a place hurt by a confluence of non-locals, and even the drug-trafficking Miami of the Left Coast! Who could turn from sinking their teeth into such a juicy issue and the fallout, whether from jealousy (I walked the dog last night, in the middle of January, in a t-shirt and shorts) or pride?

I issue a call to arms for all San Diego bloggers – write what you think, criticize the others’ opinions, and most importantly, link and trackback to them!

Posted by Greg as Current Events, Football, Politics, Society at 18:47 PST

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Turns out that’s not so easy to do – see earlier post. I’m trying to be more disciplined, but surely I can give myself a fifteen minute break every day or so – as long as it’s just fifteen minutes. This blogging thing can be addictive.

I noticed recently that 2006 is the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Australia by Europeans (the people who have gotten to write most of our history.) I was fourteen when I emigrated from Australia, so I never got the high school history, and a lot of details escape me. Of course, if you Google australia 1606 you get a Dutch site – I just can’t get away from them! Interestingly enough, I ran into a business associate just recently who said the same thing.

I’m no longer living in Australia, so I won’t get to see the reaction of the indigenous population to any celebrations of the event. If it’s anything like 1992 was in the Americas, I would expect some disgust and loud protest. But how can you blame them? After all, they still haven’t gotten credit for being the first people to discover America. Not to mention, of course, the abysmal treatment the Aborigines received at the hands of the Europeans – well into the twentieth century.

Posted by Greg as My Website, Posts About Me, Society at 18:53 PST

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Well, the consensus is that it would be best to create a new plugin from scratch, which I agree with, but the trouble is the time it’s going to take. I would want to do it right, which would take a while. I figure in the meantime that I should publish my WP-UserOnline hacks as soon as I’ve finished the documentation, which the guys can test out. It may also give them ideas for what should go in my project.

Vincent seems to think that getting visitors to register is a good idea, and that distinguishing the registered users from the casual visitors is a way to motivate people to do that. I’m not quite sure I agree with that position.

The old WP-UserOnline plugin didn’t use registered users – it used the ‘comment_author_’ cookie. If you look at my last post, you’ll see a couple of comments posted by me saying “Give me a cookie”. That’s because I was using FC4 at home, which I still haven’t set up completely, and Mozilla didn’t have a cookie stored for me. In fact, I had to post a second comment to get a cookie for when I was logged on as root, which I did to grab the bookmarks out of my WinXP partition (I haven’t finished tweaking my fstab yet, and only root can access the ntfs partitions.) I’m sure the author had a good motivation for choosing to use the comment_author_ cookie, and I’m sure it was because he didn’t expect visitors to routinely register when they go to blogs, even ones that they visit a lot. But if someone was interested enough to leave a comment, he or she got a cookie that identified them later.

That strategy isn’t perfect, but I think it’s a lot more practical than expecting visitors to register when they visit your blog. Personally, I hate registering, and I’ll only do it if it gives me a distinct advantage. Even without customizations, you can understand why someone would want to be part of the community at Slashdot or SourceForge, but do they want to do it just to see one article at the West Chester (Pennsylvania) Daily Local News, or to read and post a comment on anything less than a top 100 blog? I don’t think so. They probably arrived there from a search engine, and they don’t even know if the article or post contains the information they’re looking for. They have 2,000 other hits, so why bother? Just go back and try the next one. This is why I use the BugMeNot extension for Mozilla. Besides, do you remember what it was like to register at a WordPress site? It’s much more of a hassle than filling in your name, website if you have one, and email to post a comment. The entire WordPress registration system needs to be rewritten or bypassed. Vincent points out that he took pains to prominently position a login box in his sidebar – that’s great, but to really encourage logging in we need a cookie system where you get that little “Remember me on this computer” checkbox and an automatic login when the visitor returns.

An alternate strategy is to use a single sign-on registration system, such as MSN Passport or TypeKey, or the less rigorous identity system OpenID; all of which I have actually signed up for, but don’t necessarily like. Of the three, OpenID is less oppressive because it is open source and uses a decentralized verification system. However, it’s not for the casual net surfer – you have to have a website, and you have to be able to insert the appropriate meta tags in your root page. This is an evolving situation – website operators want to verify the identity of their visitors, but a huge founding principle of the Internet is anonymity, and lots of people just don’t want to give it up. So far, no dominant identity verification system has emerged, but I see that eventually changing. Historically, in the struggle against personal privacy and public accountability, the tide is slowly and inexorably moving towards the individual surrendering his or her freedoms. This is why I regularly read the RSS feeds from Bruce Schneier, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and DRM News, and am a card-carrying member of the ACLU, even though I consider myself a conservative; although my definition of “conservative” falls more in along the lines of the traditional Burkean conservatism than those damned religious zealots who have tried and apparently succeeded in rewriting the definition of conservatism, at least in the United States. (Oh crap, I’ve gone on in this vein long enough that I will have to tag this post with Politics as well.)

I’m not aware of any plugins that would extend this capability to a WordPress blog. [Revision - there's a WP OpenID plugin here - it looks a little clunky, but that was 4 months ago.] I’ll have to look. But I was thinking of something else. I’m also interested in visitor tracking – at first because I was curious (and wanted to demonstrate to my friends that I knew when they came to visit), but then because the practical considerations of running a website that attracts visitors requires that you know what draws people to you – how you are positioned in search results using terms appropriate to your interests (search engine optimization), how long visitors stay, if and where they go elsewhere on your site after that first hit, how many incoming links you have, etc. Vincent knows what I’m talking about, because he is interested in “building a community around your weblog.” Since I’m a really cheap bastard, it’s notable that of all the bells and whistles my hosting service tries to lure me with, one of the few extras I have purchased is the extended traffic reports, which also gives me access to server logs. I’ve also been trying out free web-based services, even though it slows down my pages’ load time, and delivers my personal traffic information to a company who’s corporate interests are not likely to be the same as mine. I just thrive on this information, and it affects the content I end up putting up – I am more likely to blog on a subject that I have learned draws more traffic. But I was also thinking about writing a plugin that would track my visitors for me – catching and storing the particular information that I am interested in, and giving me the detailed read outs and spiffy features on my blog for the visitors – such as a world map with pins showing where my visitors come from. I love Sitemeter’s Recent Visitors by World Map, even though it looks like an open source project rip-off, and I’ve signed up for and started using my Google Maps API key so I can play with that little toy.

So to complete the lead-in, I’m thinking about using using visitor recording and fleshing it out with something more subtle, perhaps more Machiavellian. I don’t think we can count on any significant portion of our traffic to come from registered users, no matter how attractive we make registration. Because most surfers have dynamic IP’s, we can’t track visitors on that alone. Cookies might help, but without the visitor’s cooperation, we can’t get a name to go with the cookie, even if we can get past the increasing precautions against cookies thanks to the spyware problem. We could try to match any new visitor against our record of past visitors, using not only cookies and ip addresses, but also useragent strings, ISP and geographic information looked up on the ip’s, and ephemerals such as language settings and monitor resolution. We could generate a fairly high probability of recognition after a few visits, and it’s the repeat visitors we care about. Of course we would need a good privacy policy and notifications of the fact that we’re trying to place cookies, and why. What about redirecting a suspected repeat visitor to a page set up to invite him or her to register – not in the WordPress sense, but a quick-and-easy and in-your-face way, for our own tracking and recognition purposes. But what benefit can we offer them for registering? Registering in forums is expected, and there is a recognized advantage in getting credit for what you have to say; or the alternative – the community recognizing someone who doesn’t have anything to say that’s worth listening to. (Besides, in most of them I get to put up my spinning skull and crossbones image as an avatar.) But a forum is by nature built on a sense of community – people coming together to seek answers, ask advice, share knowledge, or show off their expertise. What sense of community does a blog have? After all, it’s just a public journal, isn’t it? It’s more an interrupted monologue than a dialog. If you peel through all the layers of reasons and rationalizations for a blog to exist, does it ever come down to anything else at the very core other than a search for external validation of self? Does showing a list of names on our site do anything other than prove that we’re interesting? How do you build a community around that?

Real participatory websites have a reason for being, most of which I already described. And they’re usually not blogs, except for the top rated ones, when they are actually a discussion group set up and led by a controlling instigator. WordPress is supposed to be a blogging tool, and if you want to set up a website for, say, a local chapter of a non-profit professional organization or a high school extracurricular activity, you should probably be using some other software. (And if you know something better for either of those applications than the lumbering Mambo, please let me know!!) I don’t see a need for a chat room in a blog. Yes, I met my wife in what was essentially a chat room, but kids nowadays keep their IM client open whenever they’re on the computer, and it seems to me that a chat room is extraneous. I could be wrong – throughout the day today I kept seeing Vincent on my site, and several times I felt the urge to tell him I was working on such-and-such, or to kid him about looking over my shoulder, and I only had the options of posting a comment or contacting him through email. I guess there’s been many times I saw someone on my site and wanted to say something to them and didn’t even have their email. Unfortunately, a PHP controlled, database rooted, dynamically-generated website relies on the visitor either refreshing the page or clicking on a link to another site page to get new information. It’s kind of hard to shoot them a message that way.

I guess I sound like I’m trying to talk myself out of this, but that’s not what I mean. There are still plenty of technical challenges and learning experiences waiting for a project like this. But no matter how perfectly I could design, code and implement this, it would mean nothing if it relied on a premise that was unsupportable. You would end up with a feature that showed yourself, maybe one or two groupies, and a whole lot of Guests, even when you had high traffic. Although that might be ego-stroking for the blogger, it’s not really different, other than in style, than the existing plugin.

Posted by Greg as Politics, Programming, Society at 12:11 PST

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I made reference earlier to reading the Interdictor blog back when Michael Barnett was writing it, documenting the tragedy in post-Katrina New Orleans before the media found out about it. I didn’t mention that I was reading it every day and was captivated by the description and admiring Barnett.

So I was trying to find out what was happening to him since he was rotated out and stumbled across a series of posts discussing his past. It was quite disillusioning. There are accusations of Barnett as not only a producer of Internet porn but an actor, that his best friend and boss is a serious cybersquatter, and that so many of the customers he was struggling to keep on line were porn sites. Maybe the last two are a reality of the Internet today, but the direct porn involvement is disheartening. I’ve known some people in the porn industry, and while I would hesitate to brand them as scum, they did not impress me as business people filling a consumer demand; they were more hedonists who reveled (even if they were astounded) in finding a lucrative means of continuing their debauchery.

I did some checking of the facts and found direct links between the Interdictor and the sites mentioned. The sites are unresponsive or gone now, but the Wayback Machine held records. Particularly depressing is his buddy’s successful manipulation of the system to place the Interdictor blog in the public eye. Again, maybe that’s the way the Internet, and by extension, the mainstream media, works nowadays.

Now, I’m far from an anti-porn crusader, let alone a moralist, but I’ll admit to some disdain for the people who satisfy and profit from my and others’ more base desires. Perhaps that was reared into me, but it was reinforced by exposure to the industry. On a philosophical note, I would say that there is nothing wrong from accepting and acknowledging the dark side of ourselves; but that should not prevent us from using judgment and striving to be better. The word for that (at least, before it became totally associated with its racial aspect) is discrimination (sense 2.)

Of course, I’m old enough, and have been involved enough, to lay claim to some indignity about the commercialization (in particular, saturation by porn sites) of the Internet. My first modem, purchased back in 1983, was 300 baud. I met my wife online in 1992, when the World Wide Web had technically been invented, but wasn’t yet a big deal. Yes- those aren’t “founding fathers”-type dates, but I think they should earn me some street cred.

I don’t think this issue is ever going to hit the mainstream media – the effect of the Interdictor’s blog has been fixed and anything else will be just a footnote in history. And I actually wish Michael and Crystal well – but I won’t be checking up on them anymore.

Posted by Greg as Current Events, People, Posts About Me, Society at 19:20 PST

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Do you want to know how much it really rains in San Diego? I mean, I was thinking about writing how if it was raining, I’d wait half an hour and then go do what I needed to do, but it didn’t sound credible. So how’s this – I was just at the local Walmart, and they don’t sell rain jackets. Not a one. Men’s wear suggested sporting goods, and sporting goods directed me to the single stand that displayed rainwear. A bunch of umbrellas and some 88 cent ponchos.

If I could advocate this place for any other motorcycle riders, this is how I’d do it. Unless you’re freaked out by lane-splitting. Don’t worry, you get used to it.

Posted by Greg as Posts About Me, Society at 21:44 PST

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In the spirit of separating technical from personal material, I stopped my last post and started this one.

WHAT THE HELL HAS HAPPENED TO POTLUCKS?

Tonight we had a potluck dinner for the Band Boosters. I’m sort of looking forward to being active in the Boosters. I remember coming home from college in that aloof, jaded way that college students come home, and being secretly impressed at how excited my parents were to go to the band events for my younger sister and brother; and later, how they expressed a feeling of emptiness when the youngest graduated from high school. I was looking for that sense of community that I’ve been missing all these years since I left the church.

So when I got the announcement that there was going to be a potluck, as much as I would deny it, I was a little excited. It was set the day before payday and things have been tight lately, so I was stressing just gathering the materials, but I got an unexpected rebate check in the mail and at the last minute I was able to get what I needed.

I’m pretty sure that I haven’t been to a potluck since high school, but I still have strong memories of the way my mother used to throw herself around the kitchen in preparation for them, trying to out do herself. I remember the intimacy of those gatherings, eating each other families’ cooking. Sure, I used to take what most appealed to me, but if there was one of those dishes out there that everyone else seemed reluctant to touch, I would take a scoop just so the person who brought it wouldn’t feel as bad.

By luck, we drew a main course, and I was up late last night (well, mostly because of installing FC4), and had put on a pork roast without knowing exactly what I was going to do with it – I figured I could turn that four-pound roast into something for 15 people. But at one o’clock in the morning, while I was carving it up to put away, I checked and found I only had two and a half pounds of meat. So today I worked through lunch, left early, stopped at the store to pick up more ingredients, came home and started cooking. I broke out the big pot and made sweet and sour pork from scratch. I’d never made it before, but the recipe looked simple, and I was encouraged as I got into it that the sauce actually tasted the way it was supposed to! It actually came out ok – the real sweet and sour with pineapple and carrots and green peppers; not that battered, deep fried stuff they serve here in Chinese-American places for people who don’t know better (can you tell that I’ve actually been to China and eaten the food?)

So Chelsea and I came traipsing up to this “potluck dinner” with a real pot filled with homemade food, and I had to push a bunch of pizza boxes and bags of supermarket fried chicken out of the way to find a place to set it down. It was only my reminiscences, my feeling of superiority, and my righteous indignation that kept me from being totally crestfallen. To top it off, a parent of one of the other girls in the color guard complemented me on my dish and said that she had to go back for seconds. I brought the barely-touched pot back home. At least I discovered that she was gracious.

When I was a teenager attending one of these, my eyeballs would have been locked in on any pizza ahead of me as I patiently waited my turn in line. But of course, there never was any. In that tough, transitory stage in the late seventies and early eighties, when a wife with a full-time job was just starting to be the norm but no husband could be expected to cook a meal or run a load of laundry more than once in a blue moon, the potluck dinner was the true test of the supermom. Any mother showing up with store-bought food would have sunk immediately to the lowest rungs of the social ladder.

There’s something about that that I miss. Not the unequal distribution of household chores between the sexes and the supermom expectations that were probably the single biggest impetus towards the rise of modern antidepressant drugs. No, I’m the dad that did all the cooking, remember? I think what I miss is the quality, as defined in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, go read the book. It will make your life better.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, Posts About Me, Society at 02:03 PST

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I’m putting in a little overtime today, writing a report for some work I’ve done recently at the fuel supply facilities for a US Navy submarine base, and I was having trouble recalling where some of the test points were from my notes and what they might have been connected to. So I call up Google Maps and selected the hybrid map-satellite view. I was impressed that the maps included the names of the streets on base – most maps don’t include that – but was also interested to note that the image included a picture of a 688 class nuclear submarine tied up at one of the docks.

I have to wonder about the implications on national security on such offerings. True, without date information on the images, operational security is probably not being compromised; and the resolution is not good enough to make out any ongoing sensitive operations. But what about other sites and other possible images? Has Google caught an image of some super-secret test platform sitting out at say, China Lake? I suppose that sensitive defense operations still practice satellite security – conducting vulnerable operations only when known reconnaissance satellites aren’t overhead. But what about vulnerable infrastructure? Could terrorists gain enough information about a refinery or chemical processing plant to penetrate and cause something like the 1984 Bhopal disaster? What about water treatment plants?

Frequently in my career I’ve worked in refineries, on transcontinental fuel pipelines, and chemical and water treatment plants. One summer in college I even worked security at a refinery. And of course, the US Army spent quite a bit of money training me as a Sapper Leader. So I’ve had a little practice seeing vulnerable facilities and how those vulnerabilities could be exploited. I have to say that I’ve seen a significant increase in awareness of security since 9-11, and better practices, especially in information security. None of these places is impervious to penetration; but then, nothing is. There’s a cost/benefit evaluation that needs to be employed, and until a major infrastructure strike occurs, most of these places are going to be overlooked or under secured. I’ve just noted that civilian operator awareness and concern has improved, and that’s a very good thing. Somebody who gave a damn about whether a door was supposed to be left open or not, or spoke up when he or she saw something unusual, could make the difference between success and failure of a terrorist operation.

Posted by Greg as Posts About Me, Society at 15:23 PST

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My wife asked me a week or so ago whether Penn & Teller’s Bullshit program was still on Showtime. Surprisingly, I remembered the question, possibly only because I hadn’t seen it in a while and liked it myself, and saw that it was on on Friday. The topic caught my attention – this episode was on circumcision.

I’ve been opposed to circumcision for a while now, but as a personal issue. If I try and remember how that started, I’ll probably never get to finish this post, so I’ll skip it for now.

I was interested, so I watched the show. I have found that I am in general agreement with a lot of P & T’s opinions, which can make watching their show a little boring – as in the “yeah, I know that” sort of way, but this one had a lot of good information. I never realized that there is a strong movement in the US to persuade people against routine circumcision, and that various medical societies (notably in countries with a history of circumcision) have prepared position papers on the subject, all against it. Some consider it a human rights issue and on par with female genital mutilation. The history was interesting, too. The US is very different from much of the rest of the world in its practice of circumcision, and it turns out that a lot of it is due to social zealots like Kellogg and Graham back in the 1800′s who thought it would help prevent masturbation.

But the most dramatic scenes for me were of babies getting circumcised. I don’t know how any parent could possibly permit it after seeing something like that.

My wife asked me my opinion when Boo was born, and I was pretty strongly against it. She had seemed surprised and a little concerned about Boo’s fitting in in the future, but she respected me and Boo was never circumcised. I am so happy about that now. There’s a lot of information about the topic out there on the web – any expectant parent should at least look into it.

I have actually mourned for my foreskin. Having no memory of it, it’s hard to appreciate what I lost, but the biggest thorn in my side was that I never had any choice in the matter, unlike other very important issues like baptism.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, Society at 10:50 PST

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