Star Wars Trilogy DVD Set

The original Star Wars Trilogy is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com for 40% off. I still haven’t bought Episodes I and II so that if Lucas decides to only release them along with III in a boxed set I won’t have to buy them again. Usually, though, I prefer to have the original release rather than boxes or collector’s sets.

The Old Dominion

After much, much deliberation, Katherine and I have decided to stay in the DC area and she has accepted her offer from the Industrial/Organizational Psychology doctoral program at George Mason University.

TypeKey and the Benefits of Centralization

The internet’s all a-tizzy over this new TypeKey hoozitz. While I understand the worries over security and downtimes, there are some areas where centralization can provide useful tools.

TypeKey is Six Apart’s upcoming solution to comment registration and hopeful comment spam panacea:

TypeKey is a free, open system providing a central identity that anyone can use to log in and post comments on blogs and other web sites.

The main uproar centers around people not liking the idea of having to trust one central service with their comments. What if someone hacks in and steals everyone’s email addresses? What if the server crashes and I can’t leave any comments? What if Six Apart decides to translate all posts into Newspeak? Doubleplusungood!

A useful feature of LiveJournal, a centralized weblogging service, is the “friends page”: one single location that tracks the most recent posts of everyone I’ve designated as my “friend.” Since every entry is hosted and managed by LiveJournal, a fresh page can be whipped up automatically every time a new post goes live. This sort of setup is very hard to accomplish across decentralized pages (though kwc’s movabletypo has it going).

Weblogs are great at facilitating broad discussions but bad at keeping them going for very long. On most pages, once an entry gets a little old people forget to go back and check for comments. Great discussions die long before their prime just because they fall below the page break. Decentralized solutions like notification emails or post-by-post XML feeds don’t scale well if comments flood people’s inboxes or they have to manage hundreds of feeds in their newsreaders.

I’ve made a hasty mockup of a way that TypeKey could solve this. The server could keep track of every post I comment on using my TypeKey login and build a page that lets me monitor activity on those entries. It could even generate a single XML feed of comments on all the entries I’m watching. I’d only have to go to one place to monitor my online conversations and I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping track of every little discussion I’m interested in.

Six Apart hasn’t announced any plans for this, as at the moment TypeKey is aimed at helping site administrators and not users, but it’s a tool they could certainly offer. I strongly believe that the biggest failing of weblog discussion is that it’s too hard for people to keep track of comments across all the pages they read. A simple, centralized tool could fix all that.

Zombie Government

Having seen the other movie about people rising from the dead this weekend, I realized that our society is dangerously unprepared for zombie attack. When Independence Day came out, a slow news week resulted in a story that the United States government had no plan in place for how to handle an alien invasion. That’s right, were the planet to be invaded by aliens or overrun by the living dead, our government would just be improvising.

With this in mind, it will be very important that we surviving citizens have our heads in the game while FEMA figures out what to do. Zombie movies teach us that not only will we be fighting against scores of walking corpses, but also against power-hungry alpha males who will screw over small groups of survivors at the earliest possible opportunity. This can be prevented, but Americans must be prepared. What we need is a basic understanding of government so that we’ll be able to rule ourselves as we move from refuge to refuge, first in small packs and eventually, God willing, in small communities which will be responsible for rebuilding human society once the zombies have all been rounded up and burned.

At the first calm moment, the group should be called together to agree on the rules. Since anyone could be eaten by the undead at any moment, leadership will be important but fleeting. As such, government should be simple and justice harsh.

I propose the following rules for government:

1. All Living People shall be free to do anything they please, except to cause harm to another Living Person.
2. Anyone who has been bitten by a zombie or accused of such shall be confined to a secure, guarded cell until such time as:
   1. He has survived long enough, as determined by a majority vote, that it is unlikely he has been infected,
   2. He dies and rises again as a zombie, or
   3. He dies and does not rise again.
3. Any Living Person who becomes a zombie shall be killed immediately.
4. Punishment for all crimes shall be exile.

As you can see, Article 1 defines the law of the land, and there is only one crime: harming another person. (This is the “Harm Principle” espoused by John Stuart Mill.) Passive actions like leaving gates unlocked obviously lead to harm and as such are illegal. If a loved one gets bitten by a zombie, it can be tempting to conceal that bite from the rest of the group. As this will inevitably case the group harm, concealing a zombie bite is also illegal under Article 1. The Harm Principle also protects innocent citizens from attack or rape by others in the group.

As it is quite possible that members of the group will get bitten by the undead, Article 2 requires that they be quarantined for the safety of the rest of the Living until they’re sure the accused is not going to become a zombie.

Inevitably someone in the group is going to turn. Article 3 reminds everyone that the zombie is no longer the person it was and should be dealt with quickly.

The government structure is simple to allow maximum freedom for everyone. Only those laws that are absolutely necessary are in place, and as such must never be broken. Per Article 4, the only penalty for breaking a law shall be exile. The severity of such a punishment should communicate how important it will be for everyone to adhere to the law. The group’s life will often depend on being able to trust each other to keep them safe.

This set of laws will serve populations of any size long enough to get them to safety, meet up with other groups, and establish secure settlements. Once a sufficiently large population has been gathered it may abandon Article 4 in favor of a court system with more than one type of punishment. The ideal way for them to do this will be to create laws as if under a Veil of Ignorance. This theory of John Rawls dictates that people framing a government should create laws without knowledge of the demographics of the society they’re going to be living in so that all laws are equitable for all people. Indeed, they will have no way to know what their own population will be like, as new survivors will be showing up constantly, changing the makeup of the society daily.

With a little preparation and good leadership, we’ll get through a zombie attack with our BRAAAIINS intact.

A Review Less Ordinary

Browsing on Amazon today to find something to buy along with The Matrix Revolutions to qualify for free shipping, I noticed this DVD recommendation. I guess Amazon’s script for pulling movie reviews didn’t figure out that a blurb calling a film a “surprising disappointment” wasn’t the best way to sell it.

I actually happen to like A Life Less Ordinary a lot. In fact, in addition to the amusing coincidence that he has the same name as my next door neighbor, I’ve liked every Danny Boyle flick I’ve seen (those being Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary, and 28 Days Later.)

MT Wishlist

With MovableType 3.0 on the horizon, and with prompting from Kottke’s new integrated design, I’ve been doing some thinking about what weblog software doesn’t do. Here’s a short list of some features I’d like to see in the next generation of personal publishing software. Most of these can be done with clever hacks, but the fact that the hacks exist shows that there’s a need that isn’t being met.

Customized Fields

Separating posts in different categories is often not enough for many people. Suppose I write lots of movie reviews on my page. Putting them all in a “Film” category would useful, but I might also want to group them as “Drama,” “Comedy,” “Action,” etc. While MovableType currently allows posts to be assigned to multiple categories, what I really want in the above scenario is the ability to assign subcategories. The most logical way to do this is to create a weblog just for movie reviews. There are two major roadblocks that prevent this from being an easy solution. The first is a lack of customizable fields, and the second is that there’s no way to stitch multiple weblogs together on the same page.

A basic weblog uses just a few fields, such as entry title, entry body, and category. More complicated setups might have extended entries and keywords. Every different weblog has its own unique configuration, and weblog software should adapt accordingly. A book review post might need fields for author, publisher, ISBN, summary, review, and rating. A movie review post might include actors, IMDB links, etc. A linklog might contain fields for link destination, commentary, and attributed site. A blogrol could contain a person’s name, site name, site URL, one-line bio, XFN data, and FOAF link. The config screen for each of my weblogs should let me define and name fields specific to that weblog, and create a template tag for that field, like <$MTCustomFieldISBN$> or <$MTCustomFieldvialink$>.

Pages Containing Multiple Weblogs

While it makes sense to put different types of posts into different weblogs, there’s no easy way to have all of those posts appear interspersed together in chronological order on my main page. Currently, MovableType assumes that the weblog is the basic building block of a page. TypePad allows extra stuff like TypeLists and photo albums to hang out on a page’s sidebar (and really, TypeLists are just stripped-down weblogs without archives, comment systems, or XML feeds), but doesn’t let you integrate this information in with full-fledged posts. Suppose I wanted to keep a moblog but wanted its photos to show up inline with my text posts. What I see is a move away from weblog-centered pages to pages whose content can include posts from any local source. Archives could be similarly organized and both integrated and segregated, so that users could view everything posted in a April 2003, or just photos from that month, or just posts in the “Romance” category whether they’re books or movies.

RSS and Atom fields should be available for all posts within a single weblog and for all posts on the entire page.

Built-In Text Education and Validation

Daring Fireball’s SmartyPants is great. It and Amputator should be built into MovableType and be turned on by default. Encoding ampersands would solve validation problems for most pages. Furthermore, though templates can be easily coded to output valid HTML, a page is only valid if the content of its posts are valid as well. There should be an option to “validate and publish” that will return markup errors before posting an entry if any are found. [Note: a per a strand from Daring Fireball, a post cannot actually be valid on invalid, just well-formed or not. Still MT could check so make sure start tags have end tags and such.]

Cruft-Free URLs

MovableType should automatically generate cruft-free URLs.

Spam Protection

All email address should be automatically hidden from spambots using an approach similar to (or licensed from) The Hiveware Enkoder.

Link Stripping

Comment spam is a problem. Instead of blacklisting IP addresses, we should blacklist link destinations. Links to known porn sites in comments should either be banned or stripped down to plain text.

The Charter Tele-Robots and I

For weeks now I’ve been getting occasional automated messages from Charter Communications telling me that I am scheduled for new service installation the next day. I’ve been ignoring these calls and assuming that whoever is actually supposed to be getting the new service will eventually get sick of their installation man not showing up, call Charter, and provide them with the correct phone number. This week I’ve gotten seven such calls, including four today. Charter doesn’t service my area, so I’m positive that it’s their error and not mine. The message gives a phone number that I can call if I have questions, but I can’t call it from my phone because they don’t service my area and somehow have their phone system set up to reject incoming out-of-area calls.

Charter’s website does not provide an easy-to-find customer service number. I eventually found one, and talked to a very confused woman who normally assists custmers in Wisconsin. Being that I don’t even know what they think I’m supposed to be signing up for, she had no idea how to fix the problem.

My phone number is registered with the National Do Not Call Registry, but since these calls aren’t marketing calls, I can’t threaten file a complaint with the FCC on those grounds.

I’ve used their email contact form (providing my law firm email address for extra oomph) so we’ll see what happens next.

MMS: It's Hard to Get the Picture

Having a high tech camera-phone is fun, but I haven’t had much success actually sending my bad low quality photos to other people. MMS does not seem to be implemented in any standard way from one carrier to another. This is bad. It means that you can’t really be sure your recipient is going to see your message correctly, and to even get it to them at all you have to know both what company they use and how that company’s phones handle incoming pictures messages. All phones that can handle picture messages also do email, but all mobile carriers charge different rates for email than they do MMS. So you can’t reliably send a picture message to an off-network phone, and if you want to email it to them instead the price of that email won’t be included in your picture rate. Plus there’s the problem that you have no way to know if the recipient has configured email on his phone anyway.

I did a quick sweep across the various mobile providers’ websites to drag up some information on why my picture messages always bounce back, and here’s what I found:

T-Mobile

I have T-Mobile, but I’ve been unable to send photos to Gabe even though he does, too. My guess is that you have to send pictures to their T-Mobile email address and not just to their phone number. T-Mobile’s email format is: 5551234567@tmomail.net. Their website has very little information about picture messaging, and doesn’t mention compatibility with other service providers.

Verizon Wireless

Verizon’s website says that its phones cannot send pictures to non-Verizon phones. I’m not sure that this is true in practice, but it would surely work using standard email if their MMS format fails. I wasn’t able to send a picture to Chris White using his phone number, so again I suspect that if it works at all messages have to go to their Verizon email address: 5551234567@vzpix.com or possibly 5551234567@vzwpix.com.

AT&T Wireless

AT&T’s website makes no mention of compatibility with other networks. It says that messages can just be sent to an AT&T Wireless 10-digit phone number, but doesn’t say if off-network pictures should go to the phone number or to an email address, nor does it provide a format for such an address.

Cingular

Cingular’s site does say that picture messages can go to other networks’ phones, but disclaims compatibility. It also doesn’t mention if it prefers 10-digit numbers or email addresses.

Sprint PCS

Sprint PCS Vision sends pictures as images embedded in HTML, so I’m guessing that most non-Sprint PCS phones have very little chance of getting the picture.

The problem with all of this is the compatibility snags harm the technology, but no provider has a great need for standardization. They’d all prefer you just get all of your friends on their network where interoperability can be assured and bandwidth costs are low. And since corporations tend to pick one service provider and stick with it, the cash cow professional market has very little sway in pushing for standards adoption.

The good news is that posting to webpages from cell phones is very easy. TypePad is doing great things in this field (though the term “moblogging” has to go), as is Text America. Of course, for the moment all that means is that it’s really easy to post crappy, grainy pictures to your website (here’s mine!), but it’s good to set up the infrastructure before camera-phone technology matures.