As part of my new-found photography hobby, I was exploring the Riverwalk in Naperville, Illinois. It's a nice little park with lots of interesting walkways, bridges, and gazebos. It would make a great background for some outdoor portraits.

Just before I left, I spotted, across the river, what looked like a whole wall with faces carved on it. I thought that might make a nice background for some pictures, so I snapped a shot of it to remind myself it was a possible shooting location.

When I reviewed the pictures a few days later, I noticed something in one small area of the photo:

Face Wall Detail

Is that an eternal flame? If this was a memorial of some kind, it would be disrespectful to use it as a background for a whimsical portrait.

A few days later, I went back to the Riverwalk and made a point of visiting the wall of faces. It was in fact a memorial, inscribed as follows:

Wall of Faces

Faces created by Naperville school children and molded by local artists to represent the casualties of September 11, 2001.

Here's a better shot of most of the monument area:

9/11 Monument

You can see the wall of faces, the eternal flame, and the central jumble of granite and steel representing the crumbled buildings.

I didn't pay much attention to the central figure of steel and granite, except to note several pieces of debris enclosed in glass:

Debris Protected by Glass

The was apparently the real thing, some part of the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. I don't know if you can tell in this picture, but the scarred granite is clearly carved to look that way: It's not a piece of any of the real damaged buildings.

I then took a look at the twisted girder. An artist had bent it and cut jagged edges on it and leaned it against the carved granite to represent the fallen buildings. Pretty standard modern sculpture.

Until I stumbled on a detail that made me have to sit down:

Unknown Broken Part

This was no artist's detail. Artists add things to a sculpture because they have meaning. The warp of the beam, the jagged edges, the dings and dents, all these could be explained as an artist's representation of the battered building.

But why this? Why have this tiny, complicated, meaningless thing attached to the side of the sculpture? Unless it's not a sculpture.

This was the real thing. A piece of steel that was once part of the World Trade Center, then part of the burning pile. Consecrated by heroism and death, cut loose, and brought to this peaceful place in the quiet suburbs of Chicago to remind us all of the events of that day.

I found a sign that explained it. The beam is from the World Trade Center and the small debris fragments are from the Pentagon. That granite is quarried from Pennsylvania, "symbolizing the freedom fighters of Flight 93," which crashed in Pennsylvania.

There is also a placard, inscribed as follows:

Freedom Isn't Free

In memory of Commander Dan F. Shanower and the thousands of others who died in the attack on America on September 11, 2001.

Dan Shanower grew up in Naperville, attended Disctrict 203 schools and graduated from Naperville Central High School in 1979. He was commissioned a naval officer in 1985. He was killed at his Pentagon post, serving as chief of the Intelligence Plot for the Chief of U.S. Naval Operations.

These are his words: "...Those of us in the military are expected to make the ultimate sacrifice when called...the military loses scores of personnel every year...Each one risked and lost his or her life in something they believed in, leaving behind friends, family and shipmates to bear the burden and celebrate their devotion to our country...Freedom isn't free." (Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1997)

If you'd like more information:

• Cmdr. Shanower's full speech at the Naval Institute's web site.
• Shanower's page at Arlington National Cemetary.
• Messages from people who knew Dan Shanower.
• More about the creation of the Naperville Memorial.
• More about the dedication of the Naperville Memorial.
• A much better picture of the Naperville Memorial.

Eric Zorn has an article about Richard Sherman who was almost hired to teach science in High School District 211 in Palatine. Last Monday, however, the officials at the District changed their minds and decided that they weren't going to hire Sherman to teach there after all.

Eric Zorn:

It couldn't be--could it?--that officials at High School District 211 in Palatine yanked a job offer away from a prospective teacher this week simply because administrators don't like the religious views of that teacher's father?

...

Sherman, 23, is the son of civil rights activist and atheist leader Rob Sherman of Buffalo Grove, whose relentless crusades of the last 20 years, most over church-state issues, have alienated many who don't share his interpretation of the Constitution or God.

One of Zorn's readers, Andy, responds:

Richard Sherman doesn't have a God-given right (pun intended) to work at District 211. The district can hire whomever they determine is the best candidate for the job. All they are guilty of is poor judgment in even considering hiring this guy. There are enough liberal wackos attempting to poison the minds of our youth working in the public schools already...

Well, Andy is right that Richard Sherman may not have a God-given right to work at the District, but he certainly has a Congress-given right. Employment descrimination against an applicant on the basis of his beliefs about religion has long been against the law.

Good and thoughtful people sometimes disagree about whether the proper response to discrimination by private employers is government regulation. Some people feel that getting the government involved interferes with the natural progression towards tolerance, or that it causes problems that are worse than the problem of intolerance, or that the private employment decision simply isn't a proper matter for government scrutiny.

But this isn't a private employment decision. High School District 211 is the goverment. Maybe the government shouldn't force other people to be tolerant, but the government damned well ought to be religiously tolerant itself. The establishment clause is in the constitution for very good reasons.

Oh, and one more thing. By all accounts, Richard Sherman isn't an atheist like his father.

I did some more exploration of the local electrical power situation I outlined in my previous two postings. (Part 1 and Part 2.)

I drove to another block fed by a different phase of the same three-phase distribution lines that feed my building. After a couple of times around the block, I spotted an apartment building with an outdoor outlet, so I parked and walked up to test it. Unlike the night before, this one had power: at almost exactly 120 volts too. So not all phases were affected.

I drove around the remaining block on the third phase until I spotted a guy watering his front lawn. I wasn't looking forward to trying to explain my purpose—this is serious geek territory—but I got out of the car and walked up.

"Excuse me. I...I live in the next block, and we're having trouble with our electricity. Are you having any trouble with yours?" If he was, or even suspected he was, I'd have an easier time getting his cooperation.

"No."

"Well, I'm trying to figure out how far it spread...how many people are affected." I pulled out my digital multimeter; I had already spotted an outdoor outlet. "Do you have an outlet where I could check the voltage?"

"Go right ahead," he said waving to the outlet. "We usually get 127 volts."

Thank you, brother.

"Well," I responded, "I've been getting 137."

I walked up and plugged in.

"122 volts," I read off. "So you're fine."

He suggested it was a problemn with the transformer, and I explained why I didn't think so. We spent a few more minutes discussing it, then I thanked him and left.

So, it's only my block. That means it will be harder to rally a crowd to pester ComEd to fix this.

On the other hand, maybe they'll fix it this weekend, when the down time won't bother people as much. We'll see.

Google just released the next version of their Keyhole software. It's called Google Earth, and of course it's a beta release.

(Update: All I got was a message from a Google email address saying that they were making the beta available to current Keyhole subscribers, which I am. The message included a download URL that has a parameter that looks like some random key that probably links it to my keyhole license. Otherwise, I would have posted the link. More about the release here, and here's a link to the original Keyhole software.)

I first heard about Keyhole last October when Google bought Keyhole Corporation. I use Keyhole LT—the non-professional version of the Keyhole software—and it's a fascinating piece of software that allows you to view satellite imagery in an intuitive way.

Although it seems likely that the satellite images in Google Maps use some of this technology, Keyhole takes it a few steps further. For one thing, Keyhole is a whole lot smoother than Google Maps imagery because it's an application that runs on your PC and renders the images locally, essentially distributing this task out to the end-user's computer.

The application starts with view of the whole Earth floating in space.

You can use your mouse to drag it around in any direction, and then you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. There are also controls to rotate the image and to tilt the camera up toward the horizon.

The program downloads images from the database in the background, leaving the user interface to run smoothly: Zoom in on a city and the display reacts immediately. The initial image is blurry, but as Keyhole downloads updates from the server, it makes the image progressively smoother. Naturally, it caches the images so that the next time you zoom in on the same place it's clear all the way.

There's nothing quite like the feel of zooming from the whole earth down to my condo building. I can even see my car in the parking lot.

Google Earth adds a bunch of improvements to Keyhole. The most visually interesting is the 3D buildings available in 39 cities. Here's what Chicago's lakefront looks like from the southeast with 3D buildings enabled:

If you want, take a look at the whole Google Earth user interface. It's prettier than the old one, and does some more stuff.

The most interesting new trick is the integration of Google's Local Search and Driving Directions services directly into the application. You can search for local businesses or type in addresses and then generate a driving route between them. Here's a simple route between two Wendy's restaurants on the northwest side of Chicago:

There are lots of other tweaks and changes. In particular, the program is faster now because it has been modified to make efficient use of Google's servers to provide the images.

I've been waiting for this for a long time. It's pretty cool.

Update: You can now add lines and polygons to your map markup, in addition to the point placemarkers it's always had. Here's the site of the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 on May 25, 1979, the worst single-plane crash in U.S. history:

Update: Nope. Got that wrong. According to the NTSB report, the actual site is the field just to the left of the marked area.

Here's the complete list of new features from the Release Notes:

People driving between downtown Chicago and northwestern Indiana have for several decades now had the option of taking the Chicago Skyway. This is a toll road built and operated by the City of Chicago, and it's the only toll road not operated by the Illinois Toll Highway Authority. That's a bit of a problem, because it doesn't participate in the I-Pass electronic toll collection system: You hand your money to the people in the toll booths.

Actually, it's not so much a toll road as a toll bridge over the Calumet river, plus a few miles of feeder ramp. The river is active with shipping, so the bridge has to rise up 125 feet. It's a substantial structure. It's priced that way too. For the last decade or so, Illinois tolls have been 40 cents, but the 8-mile Skyway costs 2 bucks.

It's a shortcut in terms of driving distance, but during busy times it hasn't always been a time saver. It gets pretty congested. A few months ago, the Skyway decided to try to improve driving times with congestion pricing, as shown here:

Skyway Congestion Pricing

Congestion pricing is an economically sound approach to fighting highway congestion by increasing the prices during normally congested times. With enough of an increase, some drivers will choose to start their trips earlier or later, and congestion will be reduced.

It almost worked. The only problem is that the Skyway combined congestion pricing with an across-the-board price increase for cars from $2.00 to $2.50. Suddenly, thousands of cars an hour needed change at the toll booths. The result was predictable:

Skyway Congestion

The previously efficient toll plazas started having long lines of vehicles.

It looks like it's going to work out for the better, however. The City has responded to the congestion by doing something I've been wanting them to do for years. Starting June 17th, the Chicago Skyway will start accepting I-Pass transponders for electronic toll payment.

As I mentioned in my last entry, we're having a few electrical problems at our house. ComEd is supposed to supply voltage at 120VAC (Volts Alternating Current). That's just a nominal value, it can vary a bit. ANSI standards supposedly permit 5% variation, from 114 volts to 126 volts. ComEd's rule book says they may have 5.8% variation, from 113 volts to 127 volts. This past week, I'm measuring anything from 133 volts to 139 volts. The speakers attached to my wife's PC blew out last week, and one of the 300W quartz-halogen lamps burnt out a few days ago.

I've called ComEd twice, and they haven't fixed it. On Monday a truck came by and they took a look at the transformer drum mounted on the pole in the alley behind our house. (Here's a few pictures of a transformer drum at HowStuffWorks.) However, since then nothing has happened. I've been compulsively checking the line voltage ever since with my DMM (Digital MultiMeter). It was 137 volts just a few minutes ago.

There must be tens of thousands of transformer drums in the city of Chicago alone, so ComEd must be replacing them all the time. I've been wondering why they haven't replaced ours yet. The rule book says that voltage shall not exceed 127 volts for more than one minute, but it's been more than that for a whole week.

I think I've now got it figured out. I was restless tonight (this morning) and couldn't get to sleep, so I took a walk. I took my DMM with me. I was looking for outdoor outlets. I wanted one right on the side of the building, so I could get to it without entering anybody's backyard.

Down at the end of the block is a small apartment building that has an outdoor outlet in their parking lot. I flipped on the DMM, turned on the backlight for the display, flipped up the cap on the outlet, and stuck in the probes. 138 volts AC. Bingo.

All the buildings on that end of the block are fed by a different drum transformer than our building. That means the problem is not in the transformers in our alley. The problem is further upstream in the distribution grid, at some substation nearby. It's a bigger problem that's taking longer to fix.

The drum transformers tap into three-phase lines running high up on the utility poles. Both transformers I tested are attached to the same phase. I walked down the street in the other direction to where the buildings were on a different phase and found an outside outlet I could get to, but it wasn't turned on. I wonder if all the phases are affected?

Anyway, now I have a plan.

This high voltage is against the rules for electrical service in Illinois. It damages delicate equipment, strains motors, and causes light bulbs to burn out faster. It also raises peoples' electric bills.

Maybe tomorrow I'll follow the power lines a little further and find a few people who will let me check their voltage, especially in some of the businesses on Milwaukee Avenue. If enough of us bitch to ComEd about the problem, maybe they'll hurry up and fix it.

Here's a question that's turning out to be harder to answer than I would have thought: What's the acceptable voltage range for your house?

A few days ago the lights flickered and the speakers on one of my computers started making funny noises. Turns out they're fried. That computer system wasn't on a UPS, so I went out and bought an APC Back-UPS 800 for it.

When I plugged it in, it wouldn't go on-line. It would provide power from the internal battery, but it refused to pass through the power from the wall outlet. Reading through the troubleshooting materials, I decided either the UPS was busted or there was something wrong with the household power. This latter possibility made some sense, as my other UPS had started switching to battery several times an hour.

I don't know much about electricity, and I have no real idea how to evaluate electrical noise, so I checked the only thing I know how to check: Voltage. Household power is supposed to be at 120 volts and when I've checked the wiring on outlets, I've usually seen something close to that.

When I check now, however, I get a reading of 135 volts, give or take a volt. I figured out how to hook two of the UPS boxes up to my computer, and they are reporting about 137 volts.

That's high, but is it too high?

I assume ComEd has a commitment to provide electrical power of a certain quality. Somewhere there's a spec that says what voltage range is acceptable. For example, if voltage is allowed to vary 5%, then ComEd would have to deliver household power at somewhere between 114 and 126 VAC.

I've tried to find out what this is, to see if I would be justified in calling and complaining, but I can't find it anywhere. The ComEd website has all kinds of information about bill payment, energy prices, and safety, but nothing about the specifications of their product. They invite me to report blackouts or downed wires, but they don't tell me what to do if the voltage gets out of spec.

The local Citizen's Utility Board website is also useless. Lots of stuff about regulation and pricing, but nothing about the quality of ComEd's product.

Well, I've had equipment damage, my UPS rejects line power, and the voltage is measurably high, so I decided to call the blackout report number on Friday and complain. I called again on Monday. On Monday evening a couple of trucks were parked next to the pole with our transformer on it. They were there at least half an hour. However, nothing has changed: I still measure 135 volts.

Also, one of the quartz-halogen lights just burnt out. Was it about due, or was it hurried to its demise by the high voltage?

So, am I getting poor products and customer service from a big corporation that has a monopoly? Or am I the crazy guy who keeps calling to complain about the voltage? And even if I'm crazy, what do I do about the UPS that won't work in my house?

Update: In something called The Information and Requirements For The Supply of Electric Service provided by Exelon (ComEd's parent company) section 1.051(a) says:

On the Company's 120V standard, the range of acceptable voltage is 127 volts maximum and 113 volts minimum.

So I'm right. The power supplied to my house doesn't meet spec.

Now the trick is getting them to fix it...

...The Royal Dragoon Guards now carries with it the traditions and history of four of the finest regiments in the British Cavalry; the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards, the 5th Dragoon Guards, the 7th Dragoon Guards and the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons. All four were raised between 1685 and 1689, during the protracted contest between James II and William of Orange for the English throne.

—History note on the website of the Royal Dragoon Guards.

Now go here and watch the video.

I think the American military might frown on that sort of thing. Those Brits have been stuck on that island of theirs way too long.

(Hat tip: Stillettos and Sneakers)

Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau should be celebrating their wedding night by now.

I think the whole situation is a bit disturbing. After all, they first had sex when he was in sixth grade and she was his teacher. She went to prison for that. I think they're both a bit crazy.

My opinion doesn't matter, however, nor should it: Now that they're both adults they can do whatever they want. Apparently the State of Washington agrees with me, because even though she is convicted of raping him, nothing in the law prevents them from getting married.

Now can someone please explain to me how a same-sex marriage would destroy the sanctity of marriage when a rapist marrying the victim does not?

I have nothing but admiration for the concept:

Geek Fantasies

(Hat tip: Google Blogoscoped)

I've been slowly working my way through Choice: The Best of Reason, edited by Nick Gillespie, Reason's Editor-in-Chief. I subscribe to Reason, and I normally read through each issue over a period of a couple of hours. Then I have to wait a month to do it all over again. Choice, however, is a collection of very meaty material, so I've been waiting after each article to let it soak in a bit.

I just finished the fourth article in the collection, Glenn Garvin's "No Fruits, No Shirts, No Service: The real-world consequences of closed borders." The title of the piece is a way of pointing out that immigrants do a lot of work in this country, and that if we kept the immigrants out, we'd have to find americans to do the work...and Americans don't like that kind of work.

Here's my favorite passage:

Study after study shows that immigrants are at worst a break-even proposition in terms of creating jobs and paying for the government services they consume.

Perhaps the most dramatic was a study by Princeton economist David Card, who looked at the impact of the 1980 Mariel boatlift on Miami employment. That was the year Castro, in an ill-considered fit of pique, briefly opened Cuba's doors to permit free emigration. In just a couple of months, 125,000 refugees flooded into Miami, boosting the city's work force 7 percent overnight.

Card tracked Miami's unemployment statistics for six years after the boatlift, comparing them with those of half a dozen Sunbelt cities with similar economies. What he found was--nothing. Miami's economy swallowed the newcomers without a trace, like a boa constrictor gulping down a pig.

That's a classic piece of Reason writing. It's an amazing fact, it proves the author's point, and nobody else is talking about it.

Here's another passage I like, just a few paragraphs later:

"When I read letters to the editor, it's plain that most people seem to think that the number of jobs is fixed," he says. "So, in their view, if you add one more worker to the population of a city, it just means that that guy will have to fight with somebody else for an existing job. It's an extremely narrow and very non-economic view of the world....If you look across cities, the number of jobs is proportional to the number of people in the city. The fact that more people have moved to New York than to Atlanta does not mean that a lot of people have been thrown out of work in New York. What it means is that there are 10 times more jobs in New York than there are in Atlanta."

Of course. How obvious. The number of jobs is proportional to the number of people in the city. The populations of America's cities have been fluctuating for years, sometimes shrinking, mostly growing. Although some growth is due to people having children, much growth also occurs because people are moving there. And yet cities that experience sudden growth aren't giant pits of unemployment; more often they're boom towns. Why would it matter if the people come from inside our borders or out? From Atlanta or Guadalajara?

Nick Gillespie sent me a free copy of Choice: The Best of Reason, edited by Nick Gillespie, Reason's Editor-in-Chief. I'll be posting reviews of anything I find that's interesting.

I use 2MHost for this blog. I like the service I get, and I recommend them. If you follow the link in the bar on the left, I'll make money if you sign up. Thought you should know.

The busybodies in the Chicago city council have banned the use cell phones while driving. I don't use the cell phone all that much, but my wife is going to be really pissed-off.

They say you can use hands-free phones, but since the State of Illinois banned headsets, I'm not sure what that leaves. So if you want to make a call, you have to pull over. I guess I could get used to that.

But what if you receive a call? You can't control what you're doing when that happens. I guess I could try to pull over real quickly, but wouldn't that be dangerous? How many accidents are caused by people suddenly slowing down to pull over?

Or what if you're stuck in heavy expressway traffic during rush hour and the cell phone rings? What do you do? Pull onto the shoulder, potentially creating a hazard? Wait until you reach an exit, leave the expressway, and find a place to pull over in a neighborhood you've never been in and which might be dangerous?

No wonder the ordinance's sponsor had to use a parliamentary trick to bring it to a vote without warning the opposing aldermen.

Let's see, in Chicago you can't use your cell phone for the reason you bought it, you can't buy anything without paying a higher sales tax, you can't protect your home with a handgun, and you can't even buy a can of spray paint. Sometimes I don't know why we still live in this city. We should sell this place and move to the 'burbs a.k.a. the Illinois Free-Zone.

Mother and Child

These are a couple of the street photographs I've taken lately.

Skater

Larger ImageDozer

I just took this today, and I liked it too much to wait until next week.

My wife and I watch 24 because it's a decent action/suspense show. This season, however, we've noticed that they sure seem to torture a lot of people on the show. And I'm not talking about the bad guys. It's the good people of CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) who do the torturing, because the bad guys have all the information.

So far they've tortured the Secretary of Defense's estranged son (innocent) [Update: not quite], several terrorists (they knew a lot), a mercenary (who knew a thing or two), a CTU employee (innocent), and Jack Bauer's girlfriend's husband (innocent). It's all a bit disturbing.

Columnist Cal Thomas (whose most recent book is, ahem, The Wit and Wisdom of Cal Thomas) thinks that Jack Bauer and the torture-happy agents of CTU have the right idea:

An ACLU-type lawyer shows up at CTU headquarters (he's been tipped off by a Marwan minion) with a court order forbidding torture of the suspect. Jack Bauer concocts a plan and gets the man released. When the lawyer leaves, Bauer grabs the suspect outside CTU and tortures him until he discloses the location of Marwan.

Bauer leads a team and is about to arrest Marwan and save the country from a nuclear attack when the acting president orders the Secret Service to arrest Bauer for violating his and the court's order prohibiting torture. Marwan escapes, and the gripping drama continues.

This was one of the dumbest sequences all season. They've been torturing people left and right for relatively unimportant reasons all season and when they're finally faced with a situation where they literally have to torture someone who knows about nuclear terrorism, the President balks. It's not the same President as earlier in the season (long story), but somebody should have told him that this wouldn't even be the first person they've tortured today.

But I digress. Cal Thomas explains where this fits in:

All of this is relevant to real life and the scarier drama that is being played out by the United States Army, which last week announced it is preparing to issue a new interrogations manual that specifically bars the use of "harsh" techniques of the type used at Abu Ghraib prison.

Thomas goes on to explain the limits the manual sets on interrogations and gets to:

If the Army nabs a person it suspects of knowing the location of a nuclear bomb that is about to wipe out an American city, would the interrogators and their military and civilian superiors refuse to use torture to squeeze the information out of the captive?

That was precisely the scenario on "24." Agent Jack Bauer rightly chose the greater good - saving millions of lives - over the niceties imposed by those whose manual seems inspired by "The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette."

So many of those who want us to torture prisoners for information eventually bring up this scenario—"What if there's a hidden nuclear bomb and..." —as if it was a big flaw in the whole "torture is bad" position. All they've done is proven that there are some hard choices and maybe that the no-torture position isn't an absolute. My response is that if, God forbid, some terrorists have a nuclear bomb and are threatening to kill millions of innocent people then yes, you can go ahead and torture them if it will help save all those people.

Now that I've admitted there are extreme conditions where torture might be permissible, let me ask Cal Thomas a question: There have been several serious incidents of torture at Abu Ghraib. So how many nuclear bombs have we found?

The new Army interrogation manual is about handling real-world prisoners who have information about the locations of ammo dumps, or the latest sacrificial fool to occupy the al-Qa'ida 3rd-in-command position.

Cal Thomas's article has more problems:

We are dealing with people who have repeatedly demonstrated they have no moral constraints and are willing to perpetrate mass murder while practicing their religiously twisted ideology in pursuit of their objectives.

I'm right there with you, Cal. Go on...

These people are evil to the core.

Amen, brother! Speak the truth!

Are we not paying attention to the beheading videos? The barbarians are at the gate. In fact, they have broken down the gate.

Bring it on home!

This war won't be won (at least by our side) if we impose on ourselves restrictions that the terrorists do not impose on themselves.

There you go! Cal Thomas wants us to be more like our enemy, the people he's just finished describing as having no moral constraints and willing to commit mass murders, the people who are evil to the core, the beheaders, and the barbarians.

That's not a plan for winning a war. That's a rejection of western civilization.

One of the most interesting technical sites on the web is Philipp Lenssen's Google Blogoscoped. He writes about Google, about search engines in general, and about all the things you can do with them.

The man seems to be that most appealing of geek types, the inquisitive genius. He's Mr. Wizard for the search-engine set. He's always writing about interesting things he's discovered in the world of search engines. Even better, he's always doing interesting things in the world of search engines.

That's why it pisses me off to see him attacked by SEOInc, one of many Search Engine Optimizers out there. SEO's aren't quite the same species as spammers, but they're in the same family of animals. They aren't doing anything good for me.

SEOInc recently suffered a bit of a blow to their business when their Google rank dropped. Lenssen wrote about it, and the geniuses at SEOInc responded by sending him a cease-and-desist order.

Lenssen is just one guy. He can't afford to be sued. So he removed the article from his web site. However, being a faithful follower of the Way Of The Web, he did what any blogger would do: He wrote an article about it and posted the cease-and-desist order on his website. It's the blogger way.

Other people, like me, are now writing about that. None of us, including me, is saying anything nice about SEOInc. In other words, shortly after their own site dropped in the Google rankings, SEOInc took an action which generated a lot of interlinked web pages critical of their firm, all of which mention it by name. Google is indexing them as you read this.

Would you hire these guys to improve your web visibility?

I've joined the Amazon.com affiliate program. If you follow a link from here to Amazon and order something, I make money.

Buffy and Ripley

Not the best picture I've ever taken, but I'll bet my wife is going "Oooooh!"

Ever wonder what happens to all those nail clippers they confiscate at the airport?

Click here to find out.

Ken Lammers demonstrates once again why I'm glad I'm a computer programmer, not a defense lawyer. I spent much of yesterday and today writing code. It was tricky, it used unfamiliar technology, and it involved a lot of thrashing around in frustration. But two days later I'm done and it works. Mission accomplished.

Lammers, meanwhile, was trying to prevent the Commonwealth of Virginia from jailing a guy for being a felon in possession of a gun. The guy bought his gun through legal channels at a gun shop and—I believe this part is uncontested—passed the police background check. Apparently, after telling him he could have a gun, the police turned around and tried to throw him in jail for the mandatory minimum of five years.

And they succeeded. Lammers lost the case.

I haven't heard, and may never hear, why the police didn't just quietly tell the guy what happened and confiscate the gun. Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, the guy had it coming. Maybe he was a really bad dude who got away with a lot of other stuff, so the prosecutor's office felt the need to nail him for something and this came up. It's the only motivation I can think of for why the prosecutor's office would press a case like this, other than simple cruelty.

Let's take a look at a picture of Ripley:

Ripley

The HTML for that looks like this:

<div class="art-photo-l">
<a href="/archives/2005/images/20050401-IntroducingRipley.jpg"
title="Ripley"><img alt="Ripley"
src="/archives/2005/images/20050401-IntroducingRipley-thumb.jpg"
width="400" height="300" />
</a>
<p>Ripley</p>
</div>

(I've simplified the HTML in these examples slightly for readability, so they may not work as shown.)

That's kind of messy, especially when I have to do that for every photo I want to post. I often get it wrong.

Even worse, if I want to do a blog-wide change to something about the photos, I have to edit every entry that has photos. (Unless the change only affects the CSS and not the HTML.)

So I wanted to try replacing those big HTML blocks with something simpler that abstracts away the HTML that implements it. I started by using Brad Choate's MTMacro plugin for Movable Type. It's well documented and easy to use, so within a few minutes I had boiled the text down to something like this:

<MTWpArtPhoto
  image="20050401-IntroducingRipley"
  title="Ripley"
>

And it worked great. I'd type this little bit of code to replace the photo HTML in each blog entry—which made them a lot simpler—and the HTML sent to the browser was the same as before. The only difference is that I don't have to maintain each one separately.

I'd changed about a half-dozen of them when I remembered I also had to change the templates for the various archives. After making the change, I clicked on an individual article link and got this message:

The requested page could not be found.

Smarty error: [in mt:35 line 15]:
syntax error: unrecognized tag 'MTMacroApply' 
(Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 556)

Now archive templates are just like the main template, except that I have all the archives set up for dynamic rebuilding. When a visitor requests one of those pages, Movable Type builds it and serves it on the fly. I do this so I don't have to rebuild all the blog pages whenever I make a template change. The main page, however, is static. That's for efficiency, so it doesn't have to be rebuilt every single time a visitor checks it.

I disabled dynamic content and rebuilt the entire web site, and sure enough, everything worked fine. So MTMacro doesn't work in dynamic mode for some reason. Well, it hasn't been maintained in a while, so perhaps it missed a Movable Type upgrade. Fine. I'll build my own special-purpose Movable Type plugin to implement the MTWpArtPhoto tag.

It took about an hour of tinkering to figure out how plugins worked and to create a dummy plugin to test with. I tried it with dynamic pages and it didn't work at all. The MTWpArtPhoto tag just got copied into the outgoing page. A little more research led me to the Process Tags plugin, which allows you to turn on tag processing in blog content. Try it again...another error message.

What the heck? It's almost like plugins are broken in Movable Type with dynamic content. But that can't be, because all those plugins are such big part of Movable Type...time to do some research.

Well, it turns out SixApart did break plugins in dynamic templates. Plugins that add new tags have to be built with PHP and/or something called SMARTY. I didn't bother to look up what that is. It would be nice if SixApart had documented this.

Movable Type's dynamic publishing mode supports plugins as well. The architecture is different, but should be familiar in some respects.

That's it. That's all they said about plugins. I don't know about the rest of you, but it's not immediately obvious to me that this means that dynamic publishing is implemented in a completely different way from static publishing and all the old plugins won't work.

I wrote a simple dynamic plugin, and it doesn't look too hard, but it only works for the dynamic pages, not the static main page. I'd have to jump through the hoops to make the main page dynamic too, and that will be a bit inefficient. If I want it to work both ways, I'll have to implement both Perl and PHP versions of the tag. And I still haven't tested if PHP plugins work from blog content...

I'm sure there's some reason why the developers did it this way, but the result is frustrating as hell.

UPDATE: I decided to try to implement both versions of the MTWpArtPhoto tag after all. This required me to program in two languages I hardly ever use: Perl and PHP.

The first step was to figure out how to get the new PHP-based plugins to be processed in the blog content. With the Perl plugins, I used the Process Tags plugin from Adam Kalsey. It allows me to do this in the template:

<MTEntryBody process_tags="1">

That's all it takes to get Movable Type to expand tags in the blog content on static pages. However, Kalsey hasn't gotten around to implementing the "process_tags" attribute in PHP yet, so it doesn't work on dynamic pages. I took a look at how the Perl version is implemented and decided to try to implement my own version.

It looks like this:

<?php
function smarty_modifier_process_tags($body,$args) {
    global $mt;
    $ctx =& $mt->context();
    if ($ctx->_compile_source('entry body', $body, $_var_compiled)) {
	    ob_start();
	    $ctx->_eval('?>' . $_var_compiled);
	    $_contents = ob_get_contents();
	    ob_end_clean();
	    return $_contents;
    } else {
        return '<p><strong>Error compiling blog entry'
        . 'with Process Tags.</strong></p>' . $body;
    }
}
?>

I based this on the implementation of the MTInclude tag, and there are parts of it I don't understand that I just put in there because they were in MTInclude. In other words, this is cargo-cult programming. But it seems to work.

I'm now working my way back through all the older blog entries and modifying them to use the new photo tag.