January 31, 2003

Random computing thoughts

/ technology

There’s been a lot of excitement lately about different ways to get one web page to talk to another. To the uninitiated, this probably sounds incredibly weird, but it’s also a very powerful concept. This is accomplished using techniques with mysterious names like xmlrpc and REST. Unless you are an über-geek, the difference between the two doesn’t matter: suffice it to say, there are some pretty well-understood and standard ways of doing this. Sometimes a non-geek like me gets an idea for a way that xmlrpc (or REST, whatever) might be used, but I don’t have the technical chops to write the code. Now, this may be my naïveté (two umlauts and an accent in one post — that’s a record for me) speaking, but I suspect that it would be possible to write a generic universal xmlrpc processor that a non-geek could configure to send out/suck in data to suit. Perhaps even give it a pretty web interface for configuring. This would be pretty cool.

I’ve been teaching myself CSS, and have figured out how to do some pretty slick things with it. It’s very powerful. I can imagine ways to make it moreso, although this would probably drive the wonks at the W3C nuts.

A way for styles to alternate. The obvious use for this would be for alternating color bands in tables, but as long as its kept general, it could be used in all kinds of different ways. The syntax could get kind of hairy: I would propose defining each alternant as a separate style, and then gang them together under the catch-all style that will be alternated something like this: 


.lightgrey {background-color: #CCC;}

.white {background-color: #FFF;}

tr:alternating {styles:.lightgrey .white;}

That would give you a table with alternating rows of light grey and white backgrounds. You might want to do it with three different backgrounds, or where you only alternated every second or third column. Simple — express it like this: 


tr:alternating {styles:.lightgrey .lightgrey .white .white .yellow .yellow;}

Later:It seems they’re working on this for CSS3 the Nth child pseudo-selector

I’ve also been working with some very redundant CSS stylesheets, where there are many similar styles, the only difference being the style name and one number that could be generated algorithmically. If we could use mathematic expressions in the CSS, it would save a lot of redundancy and debugging. I imagine it might be possible to use Javascript or PHP to do this for me (if I were any good at coding either one), but the idea of rolling mathematical expressions into CSS strikes me as appealing.

[Later] How’d that get there? Right when I hit the “post” button for this entry, I noticed that the “URLs to ping” field in Movable Type contained “http://blog.mediacooperative.com/mt-tb.cgi/1293”. I tracked down mediacooperative.com, and it seems to be associated with Ben Hammersly, linked to at the top of the post in reference to getting web pages to talk to each other. I guess this is auto-trackback in action, somehow.

Coffeeshops

/ Austin / 7 Comments

Gwen and I tried out Ruta Maya in its new digs last night, bizarrely located between a strip joint and a country radio station. Nice place though — it’s sort of a hodgepodge of two walls from an old industrial building that have been sandblasted to within an inch of their life, and bridged by the kind of insta-building architecture that usually house welding shops and the like. But it actually feels quite comfortable inside, though a little empty.

In less happy news, Flightpath has a problem.

I’ve been a regular at Flightpath for…a long time. Let’s say eight years for the sake of argument, but it might be nine or ten. It occupies part of what was once an auto-repair shop, When it first opened, it occupied a small chunk, with a large area in back left unfinished. Over the years, the previous owner, Terry, finished out the remaining space in a couple of phases, until Flightpath came to occupy its entire “slice” of the building.

Here’s the problem: The City of Austin mandates that all businesses have a certain number of parking spaces proportional to their square footage (the ratio depends on business type). When Flightpath opened, it was fine. But at some point, its square footage exceeded its available parking. This didn’t become a problem until someone who lives near Flightpath began bugging the city about Flightpath’s lack of parking. Flightpath is a popular place, especially at night, and evidently people were parking in front of this guy’s house. He didn’t like that, discovered that Flightpath was out of compliance with this regulation, and went on a crusade.

The current owners of Flightpath tried to make some creative accommodations for the city’s requirements, but evidently the squeaky wheel kept on squeaking. Last Thursday, an inspector said they had to wall off their back room by Monday. And so they did.

There is so much wrong with this picture that I don’t know where to begin.

  • I have always objected to the parking/floor space ratio requirements. It flies in the face of the city’s nominal policy of–and my preference for–urban densification. For a place like a coffee shop, it creates an added burden in terms of rent. For a neighborhood joint like Flightpath, it is also unfair in the sense that it gets more bike and foot traffic than other locations might. Mine was one of five bikes on the rack today.
  • I have never understood the objection to street parking. It’s a city. Of course people park on the street. It’s not illegal. If you don’t like it, move to the country. Or at least shut up and let us city dwellers live in a real city.
  • Although Flightpath now has about half of its floor space closed off, it is still paying rent on all of it. I don’t know how long it can manage.
  • Flightpath has become a very popular neighborhood hangout, but its ability to do business–and the ability of many neighborhood residents to continue enjoying it–is being threatened essentially by one crank. Flightpath is also noteworthy for being one of the first places in town to install free wireless Internet access.

Flightpath is going to be seeking a waiver on the parking requirement, and at some point, this post is going to be reworded and sent as a letter to the City Council.

Tinfoil hats, part 2

/ current events

I wrote previously about the whacky conspiracy theories that the 9/11 inquiry, and the Bush administration in general, engender. I had another thought along these lines today.

With a budget of $3 million (compared to, what, $110 million spent on Whitewater?), it seems clear the Bush administration doesn’t want the inquiry to get ambitious. With Kissinger as the first appointee to lead the commission, it seemed all the clearer that Bush didn’t want to hear any unwelcome news.

Kissinger’s appointment became an issue largely because of an outcry from the blogosphere. This was reported in the traditional news media. Now we are seeing Kean, his replacement, generating some outcry in the blogosphere as well. Is it possible that the president is gaming the system?

The commission has an 18-month lifespan. Two months have already been shot. Could the administration effectively negate the commission by appointing a succession of controversial chairmen to it and exploiting the resulting outcry? Running down the clock? I know, crazy talk. I don’t quite believe it myself. But still…

Meanwhile, in related news, the Slacktivist has pointed to a brilliant, and disturbingly prescient passage in a satirical book about George I and Gulf War, Episode I.

A big part of the problem is that, since even before he took office, Bush has shown a contempt for the openness and accountability that allow a democracy to function. And why not? His entire life has been a finger in the eye of meritocracy. He has always traded on his name and gotten preferential backroom deals from backslapping buddies. Shoot, he didn’t even win the presidential race, exactly. So it’s no surprise he should be contemptuous. But his predilection for secrecy, old-boy networking, etc, apart from the damage it does to democracy, makes it impossible to resist seeing conspiracies.