Sportus interruptus

Sportus interruptus: Three miles from the finish, the leader in the men's marathon was knocked to the ground by a spectator and was subsequently passed by two runners. The attacker has attempted similar stunts at other events to promote his apocalyptic religious books.

Sports · 2004/08/29 · Comment · Link

Weblog Hosting Priced to Move

Sept. 18 marks the day that free hosting is scheduled to end on Buzzword.Com, the server that houses 3,000 weblogs formerly published at Weblogs.Com.

After learning about the costs required to host the sites and the amount of activity on the server, I have changed those plans: All existing weblogs will be hosted for free, as long as they've been updated at least once in 2004. Defunct sites also can stay at the request of their publishers, and I'll be allowing new sites to join the server soon.

During the Weblogs.Com outage, dozens of people on the Web had strong opinions on free weblog hosting and the expenses related to such a deal. Here's some fodder for that debate.

The costs are lower than I anticipated and UserLand Software has made an extremely generous offer to become a sponsor of the server.

Buzzword.Com runs on a dedicated Super Celeron 2.4 Windows 2000 server at ServerMatrix that has been alloted 1200 gigabytes per month in bandwidth.

So far, the server's expenses have been $400 in one-time setup charges and $79 a month for hosting and backups, a monthly price so low I get verklempt thinking about it.

Buzzword.Com consumes around 40-50 gigabytes per month in bandwidth at present, so there's no costs related to usage. A yearly Frontier Manila license costs $1,099, putting the anticipated cost at $171 per month to keep the virtual lights on, excluding the costs of my time running the server.

Each site on Buzzword.Com will have a sponsor blogroll containing four links: Workbench, Buzzword News, Scripting News, and UserLand Software. I may sell a fifth link, hoping to bring my costs down to $0.

If some users don't like the sponsor links or outgrow the free server, which may happen as it becomes more active, I'm approaching Weblogger.Com about offering a deal that would allow users to keep their Buzzword.Com address, move their weblog data automatically to one of its servers, and take advantage of its added features.

Manila · 2004/08/27 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Swift Boat Veterans for Slander

In a history of political dirty tricks, Dick Meyer of CBS News reveals something new about the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 Bush/Dukakis race:

Historical footnote: Horton actually went by William, not Willie, and is referred as William in all legal documents; the ad makers thought Willie sounded scarier and blacker.

A 1992 essay by Kathleen Hall Jamieson provides additional background on the name switch:

... his given name is William, he calls himself William, court records cite him as William, a July 1988 Reader's Digest article identifies him as William J. Horton, Jr., and press reports prior to the Republican ad and speech blitz name him "William," the Bush campaign and its supporting PACs identified the furloughed convict as "Willie" Horton. Even the crusading anti-Dukakis newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize for its expose on the furlough program consistently identifies Horton as William Horton or William Horton, Jr. When the Maryland man who was stabbed by the furloughed convict contacted the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, he too referred to Horton as William Horton.

So William became Willie to feed racist white fears of black criminals, just as "I served with John Kerry" in the Swift Boat ads turns out to mean "I served with him in Vietnam, but wasn't in his boat so I'm talking out my ass about his medals."

The American public should recognize that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a fundamentally dishonest effort by the Bush re-election campaign to win this election by denying Sen. John Kerry's well-documented war heroism.

Even in the conservative Weekly Standard, senior editor Andrew Ferguson acknowledges that it's a "transparently desperate" tactic.

There are plenty of areas in which Kerry could be legitimately criticized for actions during a 30-year career in public life. The lies about his combat valor -- one of his most singularly admirable traits -- could be employed against any veteran who seeks public life at any time.

There has to come a time in this country when politicians face a backlash for engaging in win-at-any-cost, blatantly false gutter politics. Sixty seven days from now is a good place to start.

Politics · 2004/08/27 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Elegant Solution to Non-Existent Problem

An article by Mark Pilgrim in XML.Com states that "Really Simple Syndication is really only simple if you're doing it incorrectly," using the guid element as an example.

That's a bogus claim to make about guid, a globally unique string that serves a simple purpose: Making sure that an RSS reader doesn't show the same item twice.

Pilgrim's article provides a nice tutorial on how to normalize URLs for use as guid values, but he neglects to mention a salient fact: This solves a problem that no one is having.

URLs can be expressed in multiple ways and still reach the same place: Note how python.org/%7eguido and python.org/~guido both load the home page of Guido van Rossum.

I'm not aware of any RSS producing software that creates guid URLs in multiple formats -- in other words, using example.com/~rogers/111 in one item and example.com/%7erogers/112 in the next.

That's the only problem that might be solved by forcing an RSS producer to normalize a URL (text replacements to change things like "%7e" to "~"), and even then, most feed readers are unlikely to need the help.

In RSS, all you need for the guid element is a globally unique string, which could be a URL or another naming scheme such as TAG URIs. You can make up your own -- as long as feed producing software is self-consistent in how it creates unique strings, any will work fine as a guid.

One of the best reasons for the simplicity of RSS is to avoid creating unnecessary work for implementors. Any guid will be treated by feed-reading software as a string, regardless of whether it's a URL or not, so there's no benefit to the knowledge that a URL has been normalized.

I enjoy watching Pilgrim dive into this stuff, because there's no one on Earth who loves Internet specs more than he does, but I wish he'd abandon the Swift Boat Veterans for Atom approach and spend less time blasting RSS.

The simplicity of RSS has been proven by the popularity of the format, which can be bent but rarely broken. There wouldn't be 119,000 RSS feeds and counting if it was as complicated as he makes it out to be.

Though I've been working with RSS for several years and my hair is prematurely gray, I believe the two are completely unrelated.

Rss · 2004/08/23 · 35 COMMENTS · Link

Becoming Part of the Entourage

I don't catch much series television these days, but I'm making an exception for Entourage, the new HBO comedy about a hunky simpleton making it big in Hollywood and bringing his childhood friends from Queens along for the ride.

The show has a sly, unforced style that works really well -- no laugh track, no short scenes that exist just to deliver a joke a la Friends, no hurry to tell a story -- and a premise that's naturally funny. Three feckless hangers-on make a living sponging off their pal, fending off challenges to their authority in the form of agents, managers, and a procession of blisteringly hot girlfriends.

There's also a killer cast led by Jeremy Piven as Ari, a ruthless, verbally aggressive agent who gets all the best lines. (One, "let's hug it out, bitch," is becoming a catch phrase.)

Watching this show makes me long for my own posse.

2004/08/21 · Comment · Link

Moral Decay and the National Review

Deal Hudson, the editor of the Catholic publication Crisis and an advisor to President Bush on bringing socially conservative Catholics into the GOP, may be abandoning his work as an outspoken moral scold.

While a tenured professor at Fordham University in 1994, Hudson took sexual advantage of a troubled 18-year-old female student from one of his classes, according to a story that broke yesterday in the National Catholic Reporter.

By her account of the incident, for which Hudson later paid a $30,000 legal settlement, he brought the woman out drinking and she became staggeringly intoxicated. Hudson, a married 44-year-old, dragged the student to his office rather than her dorm room, chivalrously laid his coat on the floor, then had sex with the semi-coherent teen. The next day, he told her not to tell anyone.

Knowing that this story was about to break, Hudson wrote a prebuttal in the National Review that attempts a rare feat: Defending an egregious mistake while refusing to tell anyone what he did.

Hudson, who once wrote an article asking "Are your kids safe at a Catholic college?," betrays himself completely in his carefully parsed response, revealing the kind of person who the Review would scathingly describe as Clintonian under other circumstances.

Describing himself as "happily married," Hudson mentions his 15-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son, managing to work in a mention that the boy was adopted from Romania.

Hudson puts the unspecified offense into the category of past mistakes that "played in my conversion and the grace and the forgiveness I have found only through the Catholic Church," which he documented in the memoir An American Conversion.

There's no explanation of how an incident in 1994 prompted his conversion in 1983 (as dated in the introduction to his book).

The next time the holy rollers of the National Review go on a tear about liberals, Bill Clinton, and America's demagnetized moral compass, remember how quickly and completely they leapt to the defense of Deal Hudson.

2004/08/20 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Walter Cronkite Spit in My Web

For several generations of Americans, Walter Cronkite was the face of television news and is still one of the most respected journalists in the country after anchoring CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1981.

Cronkite may be establishing another legacy with Americans under 40: He's the journalism legend who hates the Internet.

After writing his last syndicated newspaper column, Cronkite used the opportunity to return to one of his favorite themes in recent years -- his desire to see online journalists sued more often:

I am dumbfounded that there hasn't been a crackdown with the libel and slander laws on some of these would-be writers and reporters on the Internet. I expect that to develop in the fairly near future.

Cronkite's grudge against the Internet began with Walter Cronkite Spit in My Food, a parody Web site that claimed the newsman hocked a loogie in another diner's meal at Disney World Epcot.

The site, published in the mid-'90s, combined an actual snapshot of Cronkite dining at a Disney World restaurant table with an obviously false story. Tim Hughes thought it would be funny to turn his chance sighting of the celebrity into comedy gold. One reader's description:

It was an unbelievable account of a drunken Walter Cronkite raging at a honeymooning couple in a restaurant. It included an obviously faked video clip of Walter Cronkite spitting and a fuzzy photograph of a man who looked vaguely like Cronkite. The whole thing was pretty distasteful, but I didn't believe for a second that it that it was anything but fiction.

How did Cronkite take the joke? Not well:

I favor legislation that requires people to stand by their words by identifying themselves on the Internet. They should not be permitted to operate anonymously.

Even though Hughes was never anonymous, publishing the page from his personal Web space, Cronkite has been fulminating ever since for the Internet to be the first mass medium that requires its writers to fully identify themselves.

Someone who has his own School for Journalism ought to recognize the role of anonymous journalists in our history, going all the way back to the pamphleteers hectoring the British crown during the American Revolution.

As a J-school grad and participant in the Online Journalism Awards, I'm disappointed that one of the icons of the business shows so little respect for the online practice of his craft.

The Web represents a great opportunity for journalism to escape the avaricious TV conglomerates that are giving up on the business, replacing real news with endless scandalmongering and infotainment.

As a 37-year-old who may be one of the youngest people to have watched and idolized Cronkite, I think it's a shame that today's news junkies -- who depend a lot more on the Web than the 6 o'clock news -- may come to know him best for this crotchety crusade.

And you can put my name on that.

2004/08/17 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

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