ARTS & FARCES internet

Here we go again. Major changes coming. This is the 11th major update to www.farces.com since February 1993. Hopefully you won’t notice anything different for a while.

The back-end is all done and I’ve had about as much as I can stand of MySQL, PHP, and ExpressionEngine. The site is now running ExpressionEngine 2.1.0, and either this has to be the most excruciating upgrade ever or I’m getting older and crankier. Let me just say, dumping and importing databases is within my comfort zone; dropping and importing tables within that database is pushing it; modifying the actual database is way over the line.

This update experience is precisely why I ceased doing IT consulting work eight years ago. The various disciplines within user experience design are all much more within my comfort zone, and I’m finding that things I know are starting to get pushed out by new things I’m learning.

I had hoped to have the front-end finished by now as well, but no such luck. Someday soon.

Whoa, the new image picker in the editor sure is snazzy.

Anyway, there’s almost certain to be some breakage; please let me know by using that Feedback link in the upper right corner (it won’t be there for very much longer).

As Dave Winer notes, marketeers have been selling us this particular bill of goods—that anyone can program software by writing English sentences or dragging icons around—since the days of Cobol. Now comes Google with the same promise, updated for mobile devices, with its Android App Inventor. That its web page fails to render properly in Safari is not a good sign.

Dan Gillmor writes, “but from what I can see this is going to be a seriously big deal if it works as advertised.” The problem is, these things have never worked as advertised. Nonetheless, Gillmor writes he’s “going to start working on an app for the journalism marketplace, a project I’ve wanted to do but couldn’t get going with because of the cost.” Godspeed, Dan, but I’ve seen this movie before. Anyone remember the name of Danny Goodman’s personal information manager HyperCard stack? Gillmor notes that App Inventor is built on Scratch, a programming language for kids developed at MIT. Apple, predictably, rejected Scratch for iOS.

Steve Lohr, writing for the New York Times, reports that App Inventor “has been under development for a year” led by Hal Abelson (one of my heroes) and has been tested with “sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students, and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.”

The fruits of the initial users can at best be seen as minimally useful applets. A program that sends a text message every 15 minutes informing a list of friends of the sender’s current location. A program that auto-replies to text messages. And a program that’s the software equivalent of the “help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” gizmo.

Censorship

Centre County (PA) Judge Thomas King Kistler ordered the Centre Daily Times and the Daily Collegian (Penn State’s student newspaper) to delete news stories about two defendants from their websites. The defendants’ lawyer “was concerned the media’s First Amendment rights to free speech were trumping his clients’ rights to have cleared records,” according to Genaro C. Armas writing for the Associated Press. The judge for the other three cases, Centre County Judge Bradley Lunsford reversed his original order to expunge the stories. Neither US federal nor Pennsylvania state law require newspapers to change archives that are factually correct. Sara Ganim, writing for the Centre Daily Times, reports that Kistler later met with fellow judges, district attorney, and the defense attorney and rescinded his expungement order.

ESRD

Apropos of nothing, but it fits as well here as any of the other categories. Jeremy Messersmith is one of the best under-the-radar songwriters to come down the pike in quite a while. He was on Minnesota Public Radio this week; here’s a video clip of him singing “Organ Donor.”

Internet

Last month Twitter reduced the number of API calls allowed for third-party applications from 350 to 175 per hour. This week Twitter third-party vendors reported that the the number of allowed API calls was reduced to 75 per hour. What that means is that Twitter is throttling its servers—if you follow a lot of people on twitter, or only a few really prolific ones—you can’t keep up with the stream. As Ryan Singel aptly writes for Wired, “... take this as another reason why communication services work better as open protocols—like email—not as proprietary platforms like Twitter and Facebook.”

Media

One of the stupidest newspaper headlines ever run is indicative of how truly far the Star Tribune has fallen: “15 homicides aside, serious crime drops on North Side.” To think that I can remember when the Star Tribune was one of the best papers in the US is simply stunning.

It took three months, but I’ve finally found a replacement laptop backpack. As I wrote earlier, my almost-four-year-old Booq Boa XL blew a zipper last May. Booq failed to honor its warranty and I’ve been searching, off and on, ever since for a non-Booq replacement.

I’m tough on my bags, but I don’t mind paying for quality and expect them to last. I have Tumi and Tenba bags that are 20 years old and still in excellent condition. They’re terribly scuffed and dirty, but all the parts still work. That’s what I expect. Tumi has even sent redesigned replacement parts for two of our bags (wheelie pop-up handles) because they were seeing unusually high rates of failure. That was years ago. So far, only one of the bags needed the new part.

I need a backpack because I want both hands free and I want the weight of my bag distributed as I tend to walk fairly long distances—the enormous University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus (I still can’t believe how much physical space it takes up) is distributed between two campuses about seven miles apart, and the College of Design occupies buildings on both campuses.

Today I bought a Briggs & Riley 17-inch clamshell. It’s as well constructed as any of my Tumi bags and even more thoughtfully designed. I couldn’t decide between the 17-inch clamshell and the Glide. I liked the straps on the Glide better, but I liked the interior design and water-resistant zippers of the clamshell. And the middle section of the Glide didn’t go all the way to the bottom (it’s taken up by a cable compartment at the bottom). And there was a US$50 price difference. The owner of Luggage World (highly recommended; don’t let their website fool you—they have a lot more in stock than they show) offered to give me US$30 off on the clamshell and I bit. He said if I didn’t like it, I could run it over a few times with my car and he’d still take it back with a full refund. And Briggs & Riley comes with a no-questions forever repair warranty, even if the airlines mangle the bag.

I haven’t had it out in the field yet, but so far I like it. Because it’s a clamshell, making my way through airport security will be a breeze (the laptop can stay in the bag; the bag opens like a clam to pass through x-ray). And it holds just as much as the Booq and is a full inch less deep, at 6.5 inches. Most of the other bags I looked at were at least twice as deep. You might think a deeper bag is better (hey, look at all the shit I can put in here), but it’s significantly worse. Just because you can put all that crap in there probably means you will. And then you’re looking at hoisting and carrying 50 pounds of all that crap around. A smaller depth bag forces you to pack thoughtfully.

Business

In the financial reform bill that isn’t, Senate Republicans threatened to block the legislation unless the proposed tax on big banks and hedge funds was removed. Democrats spinelessly obliged. The compromise? Taking about US$11 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to pay for it. So, instead of the banks paying the cost of re-regulation, the US taxpayers will be footing the bill.

As if you had any doubt, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has published a report by Kathy Ruffing and James R. Horney that clearly shows that George W. Bush’s policies are entirely responsible for the deficits the American citizenry will face over the next decade. “Nevertheless, the fact remains: Together with the economic downturn, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire deficit over the next ten years,” write Ruffing and Horney. Included is a neat takedown of the Heritage Foundation’s most recent propaganda. Highly recommended.

Censorship

Instead of complying with Chinese censorship, last March Google began redirecting searches originating in China to servers in Hong Kong. The Chinese have responded by ordering Google to stop the redirection or lose its ability to conduct business in the country. Google blinked and has stopped redirecting its Chinese search traffic. Dan Gillmor, writing for Salon, reports that Google’s Chinese users can “still get the mostly uncensored Hong Kong results, but now they have to do so via hyperlinks rather than automatically.” Sooner or later Google will have to decide to either cease operations in China or continue to make concessions. “Will its fiduciary duty to shareholders outweigh moral concerns,” Gillmor writes. “Right, silly question.” Silly because American law dictates that the sole responsibility of a corporation is to return profit to its shareholders.