Just minor updatery.

Well, it was a pretty stressful Spring break. I had to spend three days at home shortly after getting hired, and spent most of my vacation head-down working on other people's problems.

People want to know where I've landed, so here's the answer: I'm at IndieFlix, an independent film distribution company, working as their central software guru. They're the ones I got up and running by digitizing their entire library in a weekend rather than a month, and needing only two hundred bucks in Amazon EC2 service to do it.

Right now I'm working on putting together a sister site for them. IndieFlix markets and sells independent films, but it needs input, and so we also reach out to independent filmmakers and indie film fans by hosting and sponsoring indie film festivals, which also gives us a chance to contact both filmmakers and fans who aren't familiar with our service, thus giving us resources for new movies and new subscribers. It's a good win/win all around.

Indie film festivals are communal experiences, so I've been noodling around behind the scenes with ideas of making the whole site more of a social networking toolkit. Not a big one like Facebook or whatever, but more of "There are fans like you who appreciate..." kind of thing, with notification boards: "Jim Smith just commented on Broken Elf, which is one of your favorite films..." and "Your to-watch list and Jane Smiths have a big overlap. Would you like to see what else Jane has on her shelf?" and "We're hosting the release of the new DVD Into the Darkness,shipping in late March 2010! You've listed Andrew Robinson as one of your favorite filmmakers, and we're having a movie club night..." That kind of stuff. Avoiding leaderboards and the like, and involuntary exposure, but also getting mucho social networking into the system.

They hired me as a Django expert, but I pretty quickly became both their AWS encoding expert and their general sysadmin in a heartbeat. They have a home-made deployment scheme that doesn't include database migrations, so I'm working on a Fabric/South replacement implementation. In my copious spare time, of course.

Omaha was gone all weekend, but the kids were great. Of course, I pretty much let them do what they wanted since I'm a very laid-back kind of dad, which isn't the greatest thing in the world, but they're well-behaved most of the time. I tried to make them a lentil and bacon stew one night, and that went over okay (the cornbread I made along with it went down faster), and I fed them steak, potatoes, and broccoli with mornay sauce, and that went down well enough. Pinched the hell out of one finger trying to clean the vacuum cleaner-- hair had gotten wound around the agitator brush bearing, and while pulling it apart I managed to snap the needlenose pliers against my skin, resulting in a huge ugly blister.

Other than that, though, things just kinda proceed as normal.

First, Burke was a liberal, and now Hayek?

It was a stunner to me to realize, while reading through Reflections on the Revolution in France that Burke wasn't a "conservative." He wasn't the anarchist that seemed to take over and lead the French every couple of years while he watched in horror from his armchair in England. He also wasn't the fatalist that most conservatives worshipfully portray him to be, committed to the restoration of the existing monarchy. He was a middle-way political thinker, imploring the French to pick a tradition, any tradition, that had existed at a time of prosperity and stability. It didn't matter which:

In your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe.

Now it surprises me to read that in Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Hayek makes an equally stunning point, namely that universal healthcare is a good idea:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision.

Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance - where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks - the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong... Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken," - The Road To Serfdom (Chapter 9).

I think this is exactly right, and libertarian worshippers of Hayek should re-read him carefully.

For centuries, humanity has been plagued by random disasters that strike either our property or our being. We've learned what to do to protect our property and we've evolved fire and police protection. But those were easy. Health, on the other hand, is something we've only recently come to grips with in the past century, and truth be told it's only in the past forty years that healthcare as a positive power has come into its own. In 1970 a heart attack or cancer was a death sentence: today, it's a manageable medical crisis. We've had centuries to master the economic and communal benefits of property protection (although there are still libertarians who hanker for privatized police and fire protection services), but not nearly long enough to master arguments for the economic benefits of communal health protection.

It's time we did. Because Hayek, of all people, thinks we should. There's an old quote: "Every time someone dies, a library burns to the ground." If we own our own bodies, then healthcare is a property right, and we should seek commensurate communal support in keeping that library from burning to the ground.

Damn reality and it's left-leaning bias

Former Bush secretary Dana "What was the Bay of Pigs again? I shouldn't be expected to know that. That was before I was born," Perino:

It reminds me of something I used to say at the White House when people would complain that we had a communications problem on this or that. Sometimes that was true, but that was usually because we had a fact problem.

She then goes on to excoriate the current White House's "fact problem" about Mirandizing terrorist suspects (nevermind that this is Bush-era policy) and health care (the thousands who continue to die or go bankrupt from medical crises is a big "fact problem," but for the obstructionist nihilist Republicans and their enablers), but then there's a good reason why her nickname among lefty bloggers is "The Lying Sack of Cute."

[From Kevin Drum, via Brad DeLong.]

I have the strangest dreams...

The night before last, I had a dream that I had lunch with Dick Cheney. It was a remarkably civil affair, clinking of dishware and an elegant setting at a restaurant. I remember complimenting him on his ability to so obfuscate the flow of responsibility that it was impossible to determine who to prosecute for what. He chuckled appreciatively at that.

Last night I had a Code Fairy dream about re-writing Manhunt.com as a single-page RIA.

Wow, just... wow. The stupid, it depresses me

Oh. My. God.

Being a responsible geek constantly updating myself with the latest and greatest, I read a number of blogs and outlets, and while most of what I read is interesting eyecandy I also track back-end development stuff. IndieFlix is thinking about implement some third-party login features, and last week ReadWriteWeb had a good article entitle "Facebook Wants to be Your One True Login."

Being a good article, I bookmarked it on del.icio.us. So did a lot of other developers. Many developers also commented on it in their blogs. The article rapidly floated to the top of Google's index for the phrase "Facebook login."

And then, for many facebook users, the world ended. Here are some of the comments attached to ReadWriteWeb's article:

• All I wanted to do was LOG IN TO MY FACE BOOK ACCOUNT! I don't like this new way! "If it an't broke why fix it?"
• now that you have managed to mess up the whole system how do i get back to login?
• Nothing like being taken hostage on our own computer :-(
• Why wont you let me sign in?
• i liked the old way better what advantages do we have with the new way takes to long to sign in fix it back

There were hundreds of these. In some sense, it's funny, but in another: these are the people who use the software I write, and they're all too stupid to know the difference between Facebook, Google, the Internet, and their own goddamn browser software.

No wonder phishing survives.

Seriously, follow the link to the article and read the comments. You'll be laughing your ass off, and then you'll realize that these people work in office buildings, process your insurance paperwork, take your orders at restaurants, and sometimes handle nuclear weapons. So sad. After about page 5 or so, RWW's big banner warning worked for most people and the stupid stopped, but... gah. 200 or more "Where's my Facebook?" complaints.

Man, I'm terrified I might have to share a polis with these people some year.

Huh. So we're all mentally ill now

I was listening to an NPR article about making binge-eating a DSM-category disorder. The reporter asked one physician what the criteria was for "binge eating." The doctor replied:

The criteria require a clearly unusually large amount of food to be consumed in a relatively short period of time. And typically it is over 1,000 calories.

To meet criteria for the disorder, the episodes are recurrent. They happen at least once a week. They're persistent. The criteria call for at least three months of duration.

The smallest standard adult meal at Burger King is 1,040 calories, so: if you work downtown and you eat at Burger King once a week, you are certifiably mentally ill.

And not because you like Burger King.

The horror of bad website design…

A friend of mine pointed me to the website of CB Richard Ellis, a real-estate investment and management house with a big footprint here in the Pacific Northwest.

Their hiring website is a horror. No, really, go look, unless you’re an epileptic. (Sadly, the effect only seems to be present for Firefox users. Opera, Chrome, and IE6 didn’t show the evil.) Then go read The Federal Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards, better known as “Section 508″, and document how they’re out of compliance. (Hint: Section 1194.21k).

I fully believe it’s possible to design very attractive websites that don’t violate Sec508. CBRE has failed on a galactic scale with this abomination.

If you’re not a Firefox user, here’s the horror: Every input button has this added to its CSS: text-decoration:blink;.

Yes, that’s right. Every input button is set to “blink.” I don’t know what’s worse: that the people who wrote their site thought that was cute, or that Firefox honors it.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com

The most butch website design on the Interwebs

Sharper FX

They do nothing but churches. Black churches, too. Sharper FX is an 11 on the scale of Manliness. Watch some of the Flash splash pages. They’re amazing. I love this site.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com