Year: 2004

Categories
Technology

The tech that ticks

I am currently working with a small company to create an online store. When finished, I’ll point you in its direction–one of those very rare times when I’ve worked on a site that actually has a public interface I can point people to. Go, me. Go, company.

One decision we made right from the start: you don’t code from scratch when working with a common functionality such as a shopping cart/store front–you use existing code. Among all the many available packages we reviewed, we decided on using an open source PHP/MySQL solution, OsCommerce. One big difference, though, on using it straight out of the box is that I’m cleaning up the publicly accessed pages so they either use the Smarty Template engine, or simple and easy to use function calls that pull in the appropriate data. OsCommerce currently embedd barely wrapped functional calls to the database directly in the public pages, making them, frankly, a real mess for anyone but the most proficient PHP developer.

Once I create the non-business specific wrapper, regardless of what approach I use, this layer will go into the public domain, as a contribution to the open source community. Should be a satisfying effort.

There are other tools built on OsCommerce we could use; in fact, several. But they’re either commercial products with too restrictive licenses, or just about as messy in the public pages as OsCommerce (by ‘messy’ I don’t mean bad; I mean that there isn’t enough separation of the presentation from the process and the process from the data).

In other work, I also have the Rodent Regatta port from WP to MT and from HTML tables to CSS almost done, except for that damn problem with the vertical sizing of a contained element that is floated. I know about using clear:both in an element as the last element in the container, but I’m doing something wrong, it’s not working correctly.

Anyone spot what I’m doing wrong, or what I need to add?

Finally, I’m working with a couple of other people on a different site called the IT Kitchen (no relation to Doc Searls IT Garage–unless he wants to hook up, and he and the garage would be welcome). This site is going to host a two week interactive clinic focused specifically at non-techs, explaining as much about all of this as possible. Not everyone who programs is a professional; and not every non-geek weblogger wants to have others handle their CSS and basic site maintenance.

It’s going to be using a combination of technologies to ensure an interactive element, as well as provide a little something different. Everything will be Creative Commons or GPL licensed, and the static portion of the clinic will get wrapped into zipped files for copying when finished; the wiki and other interactive elements will, hopefully, continue to thrive on. Sort of a Wikipedia for webloggers.

(More on IT Kitchen later this weekend. )

I’m looking for volunteers, geek and non-geek, to help with this. Something like this is only going to work if its community driven. And If I don’t get enough volunteers, I’m going to continue quoting existential philosophers. Many more existential philosophers.

Speaking of existential, I’m finishing up my proposal for O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech Conference. I’m rather fond of it, but the success of the proposal is going to depend on who is judging the entries, and what their current focus is.

Categories
RDF

Not going…not gone

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

As you may have noticed, not only is this site not gone, it’s been picked up, spruced up, and a new background image picked – a barge pushing a load down a river in front of a factory. To me this is the epitome of ‘practical RDF’. Or should I say, the semantic web that sweats. I have also reserved and am now using a new domain for this site: practicalrdf.info. You might want to address your links accordingly. The redirect links are a bit haywired at the moment, but everything should be accessible.

Thanks to kind and generous folks on the Burningbird side of thing, I’ll be able to keep this site going for some time, at least enough time until I pick up another book and kickstart my career again. I have decided that I’m not yet ready to pack it in, and get a job at Wal-Mart. There are still some technology folks out there I haven’t pissed off yet, and this just won’t do.

Categories
Photography

Carpe Diem

“Man is damned to be free.”

Jean-Paul Sartre

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Exclusionary language

Several webloggers have been focusing on the use of language in weblogs and how this can form an exclusionary barrier to women (see Body and Soul, des femmes, and Feministe (as well as here)).

I remember when I brought this up as an issue with Doc Searls and got slapped down rather royally. It’s good to see the issue being raised by others, especially by people as eloquent and resolute as these.

Lately though I find myself less concerned about the use of overt terms such as ‘bitch’ and ‘babe’, or the use of phrases such as ‘real men’. I have found that, for the most part, when these are used within political writings the level of discourse is usually rather primitive and the writing rather dull, so I’m not necessarily offended by being excluded.

Atrios may say that he’s just directing his writing to the opponent using the opponent’s language:

If I say Bush “isn’t a real man,” I’m speaking the language of him and his supporters. I don’t think it’s insulting, but they do. It’s meant to be doubly mocking – hit them where it hurts and mock them for being so stupid as to be hurt by it.

All he’s doing though is coming across as a man who has run out of good arguments and has to resort to verbal pissing. No, I just don’t feel excluded by not being a part of these conversations. The danger is more to the writer then me–they may eventually get around to saying something worthwhile, but by that time lack the audience to hear it.

It is the subtle language of exclusion that worries me more. It is the language of Hemingway and Kerouac, and a society that praises such coming from men, but would condemn the same from a woman.

It is the secret handshake, the spirit of mano a mano; it is the weight placed on the origination, not the words themselves; that and not being told that one must press, ever so slightly, one’s finger on the scale to get full worth, or one’s side ends up light.

It is the language of Kierkegaard, who wrote:

It is the man’s function to be absolute, to act absolutely, to express the absolute; the woman consists in the relational. Between two such different entities no real interaction can take place. This misrelation is precisely the joke, and the joke entered the world with woman.

It is the same Kierkegaard who, with devestating skill, captures the essence of the language of exclusion:

History throughout the ages shows that woman’s great abilities have at least in part been recognized. Hardly was man created before we find Eve already as audience at the snake’s philosophical lectures, and we see that she mastered them with such ease that at once she could utilize the results of the same in her domestic practice. […]

As a speaker, woman has so great a talent that she made history with her own special line: the so-called bed-hangings sermons, curtain lectures, etc., and *Xanthippe is still remembered as a pattern of feminine eloquence and as founder of a school that has lasted to this very day, whereas Socrates’ school has long since disappeared…And when the rabbis forbad [women] to put in their word, it was solely because they were afraid that the women would outshine them or expose their folly. In the Middle Ages, the countless witch trials sufficiently showed the deep insight woman had into the secrets of nature.

Bloody marvelous. One almost doesn’t mind being so completely skewered when the act is accomplished by such a rapier wit. Phrases such as ‘’pussy boy’ and words such as ‘bitch’ seem crude and uninspired by comparison.

*Xanthippe was Socrates wife, and seen by him and his friends to be a shrew. He is reported to have said of her, I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else.

(Recommended reading on Kierkegaard and feminism is the paper Kierkegaard and Feminism: A Paradoxical Friendship. More on Xanthippe here, and more on the history of misogyny in literature here.)

Categories
Critters Places

Sound washing around you

My broadband is out this morning and I came down to Panera Bread (St. Louis Bread Company) for a latte and a small loaf of asagia cheese bread. I’m finding it pleasant to catch up on my weblog reading and email, sipping good coffee from a large, white china mug, and nibbling at my excellent treat. More, I’m enjoying the noise around me as I type away. I miss this by working at home–not the direct interaction with people, which is nice in its own right but is a different thing; the background sounds of people chatting, washing around you like a gentle river.

Yesterday, I spent several hours happily working on the CSS for a couple of different sites, discovering that I really enjoy tweaking and fixing other people’s pages more than my own. So many hours in fact that I was late to get out for my evening walk and had to rush down to the park in the twilight. When I got there, the last people were leaving, carrying flashlights to light their way. It wasn’t so dark that you couldn’t see the path but I cut my walk short to just the one path, and only one lap.

The nice thing about walking in the dark is that all the energy of your mind that’s normally directed to your eyes can get re-directed to your ears and you’re treated to a symphany of night sounds you just don’t hear when the lights are on. Various chirps and breeks and clicks, not to mention rustles of sound in the leaves and the bushes. An occasional something falls down, probably seeds or loose branches. I would never walk at night in the woods on uneven ground, but you’re okay in a park near the city. At least, this park, in this part of the city.

Except for the webs. In the dark you can’t see a newly spun web, and there’s few things worse than walking into a web. I brushed convulsively about me to make sure I had picked up no spiders and hastened my steps as if to get that much further from what is probably a teeny, tiny arachnid.

“Ewww, ewww, ewww, ewww!”

The late night forest sound of a woman running into a spider web in the dark.

Headed back to my car past the pop machines I stopped suddenly when I spotted a large racoon in front of me, it’s back to me as it snooped around looking for dropped food. It reached the end of the machines and turned back, spotting me as it turned. Its reaction was hilarious, as it tensed up and the fur around its neck fluffed out and its eyes popped. If a cartoon bubble had appeared out of nowhere above its heads with the word, “Eeeek!” in it, I wouldn’t have been a surprised. I shouldn’t have laughed, human laughter can be a frightening thing to an animal, but couldn’t help myself it was that funny looking. Scared the poor thing away.

This morning I was going to write about a couple of articles I found on the CBS memos and Iraq, the Missouri voters, and ‘man speak’, but there’s something about sipping a latte in a white china mug, listening to the murmer of happy, active voices around me, all against a background of soft jazz that just makes you want to write about something experiential.

No wonder poets spend so much time in cafes.