One for the lazyweb: better javascript e-mail obscurifier

/ technology

I’m currently using a javascript to generate my e-mail on this page in a way that spambots apparently can’t detect. Described in brief, it spits out a mailto link, with my account name, then an encoded at-sign, then my domain name. This is all hard-coded into the script (have a look).

Although I lack the coding chops to make it work just right (much less make it elegant), I’d like to generalize this to work as follows:

The script is called with two or (optionally) three parameters. The first parameter is the account name. The second is the domain name. The third is the text (or image tag) that will be used for the link text — something like “mail me”. If the third parameter is not present, the e-mail address itself is inserted as the text.

And it would be great if there were a plug-in that inserted this into Movable Type so that it automatically re-coded e-mail addresses in the main content and in comments.

Ryze

/ tidbit

Somebody (not even sure who) pointed to the nifty graphic at Ryze. The graphic shows relationships between blogs, based on their blogrolls (I think). Interesting to see how they cluster around a few stars. A map like this suggests that a better word than blogosphere, blogistan, or blogiverse would be blogalaxy.

Ryze, btw, seems like an interesting site for aggregating affinities.

An early spring

/ Austin, personal

The new year is only three days old, and despite a mild freeze last night, it feels like spring. I noticed the mountain laurel outside Gwen’s place was covered in buds this morning. When I got home, I discovered that, despite my utter lack of care for the garden, the iris, rose, and skyflower were all in bloom.

The “akemashite” in the Japanese new-year’s greeting, akemashite omedetou is a homophone for the word for “opening.” That seems especially apt right now.

GeoURL

/ net stuff

home.jpegGeoURL is another snazzy way to create a linkage between Internet and physical geography. It helps you create a couple meta tags expressing your meatspace coordinates, which you stick in the header of your blog. You then ping it, and it adds you to its list. This could help make some interesting things possible, apart from just figuring out who your real-world neighbors are in the blogosphere.

This also led me to the ACME mapper, which showed me a 1 meter-per-pixel image of my street, shown here.

Audio ads on the web

/ net stuff

Well, this is a first for me. This page played a sound clip when I hit it, a guy saying “This column is brought to you by 3M.”

It’s a good thing I have a fast connection, or I would have resented the extra download time. As it is, it was pretty jarring. If this catches on, it is going to create an entirely new form of annoyance on the Internet.

Yecch.

Adaptation

/ movies

Saw Adaptation yesterday. This is an amazing movie. Multi-layered and turned in on itself, like a deck of cards made out of curled wood shavings, even the title is multivalent, referring both to the process of adapting a book to the screen, and adaptation in the Darwinian sense.

The movie tells the story of Charlie Kaufman’s efforts to adapt the book The Orchid Thief to the screen. Many of the characters in the movie are real-life people, behaving (we imagine) pretty much as they do in real life. Some are real-life people, but behaving (we imagine) very differently than they do in real life. And at least one major character, Donald Kaufman (Charlie’s identical twin brother, both played by Nicholas Cage) is completely fictional. It’s hard to know where reality ends and invention begins.

Although the movie winds up throwing off the Orchid Thief entirely, it manages to depict a fair amount of it, plus a fair amount of its writing by Susan Orlean, but ultimately of course is about the screenplay writing by Charlie Kaufman, who is the major character (who is obsessed with Susan Orlean, who is infatuated with John Laroche, the real-life figure at the center of Orchid Thief). And while Charlie is intensely absorbed with himself, hateful of himself, and paralyzed by both of these, Donald is all the things Charlie isn’t: oblivious, carefree, shallow, extroverted, forward-moving, but capable of occasional flashes of insight.

Donald is following his brother’s example by becoming a screenwriter, but follows a seminar’s recipe for genre writing and forges ahead, unreflectively (“My genre’s thriller. What’s yours?”). Charlie’s progress on the screenplay is thwarted by the lack of action in the story — while trying to carry over the book’s fascination with the wonder of flowers, he finds it’s hard to make a movie about flowers. He tries to re-focus it on Susan Orlean, but fails in that he is too awkward to even introduce himself to her. He becomes practically unglued when his brother’s screenplay (which was finished halfway through the film) gets an enthusiastic reception, and it is roughly at this point that the movie veers way out into left field, leaving behind Charlie’s constant inward obsessing for something else. As if Donald had hijacked Charlie’s typewriter. The movie shifts into high gear, clips along, and crashes to a halt. Charlie takes control of his typewriter back. Time lapse showing the wonder of flowers. The end.

In reality, Charlie Kaufman was the scriptwriter for Being John Malkovich (the shooting of which figures in Adaptation), and while the central conceit of BJM is whackier, the involuting and evoluting structure of Adaptation winds up being just as much fun, and perhaps more of a neat trick, intellectually speaking.

Happy new year

/ personal

Happy New Year

A new year, and let’s hope, a better one. 2002 was a tough year for a lot of people. I have little to complain about myself, apart from slow translation work. Funny, though, how money — or more accurately, the lack of it — tends to get in the way of so many things. Apart from that, it was a pretty good year. I did a little travelling (though not as much as I’d like). My health was good. And I met Gwen, the high point.

My new-year festivities were spent with some friends. Uncharacteristically for me at least, we assembled at a restaurant on 6th, which was festive enough, had dinner, and then moved on to Club de Ville, where we rang in the new year. My allergies were getting the better of me, so Gwen and I called it a night shortly after. We were travelling by bike, and still wound up in bed by 1:00 AM.

The next day we got up comparatively early, and had an excellent but simple breakfast on Gwen’s stoop, enjoying a very bright, warm morning. We decided to go for a walk to enjoy the day, and then a movie, both of which we did. When out walking through Pease Park, we got to a point where the trail was closed, so we rock-hopped across Shoal Creek. I made it across quickly and easily (moreso than some other people crossing at the same point), and after I was across, realized that this was noteworthy. There was a time when either my adductor/abductor muscles in my left leg were too weak, or I was too unconfident of them, to have hopped across so easily. This felt good.

War

/ current events

When I studied ethics in college, one of the big issues was the question of whether motives or actions were of greater importance. If I remember correctly, Kant said “both.”

The impending war with Iraq demonstrates that Kant was right. It may be the case that making war on Iraq is the right thing to do, if done for the right reasons. I am convinced that the USA’s reasons for a war are not the right ones.

What would be a good reason for war? That Saddam is a threat to American interests and to his own people. Both of these are true.

Why is the USA so intent on war against Iraq? The reason given by the Bush administration is pretty much what I just wrote above. What are the real reasons?

My guess is that the Bush administration is using war on Iraq as a proxy or distraction for the war on terror (I’ve always objected to that term — it’s not a war any more than LBJ’s “war on poverty” or Nixon’s “war on cancer” were wars), which doesn’t seem to be offering any positive results. Indeed, success in a war on terror is defined by an absence of news: no structures blown up, no suicide bombers, etc. Hard to make the case that you’re doing a good job. Not as marketable as a good old-fashioned war.

Another analysis — which I don’t quite buy — is that it is being done at the behest of the Israel lobby. While I’m sure Israeli politicians will be delighted to see Iraq get a good smiting by the USA, I don’t get the impression that they had been agitating for it before the Bush administration made it a priority. And, although the Israel lobby probably does have disproportionate influence (especially given the unholy alliance between Israel and American fundamentalist Christians these days), I’m not convinced that it’s influential enough to push America into a war.

And there’s the old standby, oil. I’ve read reports that representatives of major oil interests from the USA, Britain, Russia, etc, have already met to decide on how they will carve up a postwar Iraq. This is plausible. And while a war will probably be hard on the economy overall, it will be great for certain sectors — obviously the military-industrial complex, but also oil, which will be much more expensive while the war is going on.

And I do believe that Saddam’s threat to American interests is on the list, but pretty low on it. It’s not a credible justification. He’s not significantly more of a threat now than he was before Bush started making all this noise about him.

So if we do go to war against Iraq, it will be mostly for the wrong reasons. This will lead to doing the wrong things, such as shortchanging higher priorities (like that war on terror) and prosecuting the war in a way that might not lead to the best outcome in terms of American security overall, but might be best in terms of oil interests. And almost inevitably, the rebuilding of postwar Iraq will be cursed by American short-termism and by American appeasement of Saudi Arabia. (Institute a real democracy? Don’t count on it.) And so on.

Why blog?

/ meta-blogging

I was recently asked

I’m writing a piece for the Chronicle about Austin bloggers, and I was hoping that some of you could share your thoughts with me about why you started blogging, and your perception of Austin’s blog community and its relation to Global Blogistan, that sorta thing. And for that matter any other thoughts you might have that seem relevant…?

Here goes

  • I started blogging because other people were doing it, and it seemed like fun. I’ve had a website since long, long before I started blogging, and would occasionally post a rant there, but I wasn’t using any kind of specialized tool for it — just hand-coding HTML. After a while, I got to a point where I had enough rants backed up in my brain that I felt like I really needed to start blogging, just to loosen that blockage. This was shortly after 9/11, so there was probably a lot on everyone’s mind around then. The funny thing is, looking back on my earliest blog entries, it seems clear that I didn’t get around to setting down all those ideas.
  • I haven’t made a methodical survey of other Austin-area bloggers, but from what I have seen, they seem to be similar to the blogs I see everywhere else: they tend to focus on news, technology, and the authors’ own lives. And, to some extent, on blogging itself (metablogging). And on the intersections of these different elements.
  • I don’t see Austin bloggers as having a very special place in the blogosphere. Austin does have some distinctive qualities, with the music, the tech industry, and the local culture, and I suppose that comes through in blogs to some extent. But I haven’t seen as distinct a sense of place in Austin bloggers as in, say, New York bloggers — or to get even more specific, say, Brooklyn bloggers. Although technology is obviously a part of Austin culture, for whatever reason, blogging (which doesn’t really require much in the way of technical chops) hasn’t achieved critical mass here, the way I’ve seen it do in NYC, where multiple people will routinely blog about the same party, and point to each others’ posts. It may have something to do with Austin’s low population density.
  • Other thoughts: Some people seem to think of blogging as solipsistic, narcissistic navel-gazing. And many blogs are that way. But many other blogs are written by people who are knowledgeable and passionate about their subjects, and blogging provides them with a medium they otherwise wouldn’t have. And the Internet’s qualities of speed and bidirectionality mean not only that they can publish at will, but that others can take on these ideas in the blog comments or in their own blogs, refuting or corroborating the author’s point, or shining a different light on it. When one person’s blog entry becomes the subject of many others, you can tell there’s something interesting going on.

I’ve long felt that citizens in democracies have a duty to stay informed. With the extreme concentration of conventional media ownership today, we are getting to a point where citizens have a duty to participate in blogging — at least as readers, so as to stay exposed to views that haven’t been homogenized by commercial interests, and ideally as writers, so that we as individuals can learn firsthand what we as a society are thinking.

Supercard

/ technology

For the past few days, I’ve been wrestling with the problem of creating a simple order-tracking system for my side business lately, and after trying out a few different candidates, I felt as if they’d all take too much work to get something that was almost — but not quite — right. I sighed wistfully “I could build exactly what I want in Hypercard.”

Alas, Hypercard is a mothballed product. You can still buy it (somewhat to my amazement), but it hasn’t been updated in years, and certainly doesn’t run under OS X. It does run under OS 9, but I haven’t installed that.

So it was with great hope that I started fooling with Supercard today. Hope that was dashed. Supercard seems like a decent product in its way, but it’s just different enough from Hypercard to make some things that were easy in HC to be like pulling teeth in SC — as if it is trying to emulate HC in a superficial way without really partaking of its more fundamental structures. It lacks some of the handy coder features that HC had — that allowed you to watch variables as a script executed, shortcuts to break into certain script-editing windows, etc. It also has some minor but infuriating bugs. The differences and shortcomings are just enough to make me throw up my hands in frustration.

Maybe I’ll re-install OS 9 on my machine, just so I can run Hypercard.

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