Are You Ready for Some Race Mixing?

Samuel Francis, a newspaper columnist distributed by Creators Syndicate, believes the Terrell Owens/Nicolette Sheridan skit on Monday Night Football was an insidious effort to promote interracial sex:

If only morals and taste had been the targets, the producers could easily have found white actresses who are less obviously Nordic than the golden-locked Sheridan, but Nordic is what the ad's producers no doubt wanted. For that matter, if you only wanted to take a swipe at morals and taste, you could find a black woman to rip her towel off or replace Owens with a famous white athlete (there are still a few).

But that wasn't the point, was it? The point was not just to hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste, but also of white racial and cultural identity. The message of the ad was that white women are eager to have sex with black men, that they should be eager and that black men should take them up on it.

... the ad's message also was that interracial sex is normal and legitimate, a fairly radical concept for both the dominant media as well as its audience. Nevertheless, for decades, interracial couples of different sexes have been sneaked into advertising, movies and television series, and almost certainly not because of popular demand from either race. The Owens-Sheridan match is only the most notorious to date.

There are 1.1 million interracial marriages in the U.S., by the most recent U.S. Census. I wasn't aware that the normality of these relationships was still an unsettled question in the mainstream press.

Surely there can't be another syndicated columnist in the U.S. fulminating publicly against race mixing. I don't know whether to applaud Creators Syndicate for publishing such an offensive commentator or picket their offices.

Sports · Publishing · Politics · Journalism · 2004/12/04 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Before you install MT-Workbench to close old Movable Type entries to feedback, take a look at Conversation Killer, the plug-in I wish I knew about before I did all of that coding.

Movable Type · 2004/12/04 · Comment · Link

Naptime for Buzzword.Com

I'm planning to take Buzzword.Com down for maintenance on Sunday morning. The Manila databases have to be compacted, a process that cleans out deleted data and improves performance, and I'm also working on the Manila customer support board to fix some problems plaguing a few users.

Manila · 2004/12/04 · Comment · Link

New Movable Type Tool: MT-Workbench

I have released beta version 0.1 of MT-Workbench, a PHP class library that can close all weblog entries to comments and trackback after they become one week old.

The open source library was written for a Movable Type weblog that uses a MySQL database. The library's closefeedback.php script can be run daily as a cronjob, closing old discussions so they can't be abused by comment spammers trying to boost their Google PageRank.

So far, the results have been heartening on the Drudge Retort, which used to receive 5-10 spams for every 100 visitor comments. In several skims this week, I haven't been able to find any spam.

Movable Type · 2004/12/03 · Comment · Link

Secure Linux Practically a State Secret

In my mailbox: a review copy of O'Reilly's SELinux: NSA's Open Source Security Enhanced Linux, a new book by Bill McCarty on a Linux enhancement developed for the National Security Agency.

I wasn't familiar with this project, but the book makes it tempting to carve off a hard drive partition this afternoon and try it out. SELinux offers role-based access control and privilege escalation baked into the kernel, as described by the NSA:

This work is not intended as a complete security solution for Linux. Security-enhanced Linux is not an attempt to correct any flaws that may currently exist in Linux. Instead, it is simply an example of how mandatory access controls that can confine the actions of any process, including a superuser process, can be added into Linux. The focus of this work has not been on system assurance or other security features such as security auditing, although these elements are also important for a secure system.

One of my goals for Workbench is to offer more software and computer book reviews. If you're a publisher or author scouring the Web for press opportunities, let me know how to get on your PR mailing list.

Linux · Publishing · 2004/12/03 · Comment · Link

Rebuilding Movable Type Entries by Cronjob

Thanks to a tip from Richard Eriksson, I've completed the Movable Type utility to close comments and trackback on all weblog entries after they become a week old. I will be releasing it tomorrow under the GPL, assuming it runs properly as a cronjob and closes these seven-day-old entries to new feedback.

I couldn't get the script to work until I used Timothy Appnel's mt-rebuild utility to republish individual entries after they have been closed.

I tried to use Ed Dumbill's excellent XML-RPC for PHP library to rebuild entries, calling the mt.publishPost method for each entry, but couldn't get the calls to work.

I run mt-rebuild from PHP with the language's system function:

system("$this->perl_path $this->mt_rebuild_path -mode="entry" -blog_id=$entry_blog_id -entry_id=$entry_id");

The $this->perl_path and $this->mt_rebuild_path references are object variables that hold the locations of Perl and mt-rebuild.

Movable Type · 2004/12/02 · 1 COMMENT · Link

New: Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition

Hot off the presses: Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition, my new 410-page book on the current edition of the weblog publishing software. I wrote the book to encourage Movable Type webloggers to get into the advanced publishing capabilities of the software, such as template design, plug-in programming, and XML syndication with Atom and RSS.

For the book, I spent six months combing over the Movable Type documentation, support forums, source code, and database. I stalked several coders who use the software avidly -- Richard Eriksson, Brad Choate, and Jay Allen could have gotten restraining orders -- to see how people were taking the software beyond the basic publishing capabilities that users master quickly on their own.

This is my first book for Wiley, which crams 102,000 words into an edition small enough to carry around. I have never singlehandedly written a longer book that sells for less: at a price of $16.49 on Amazon, you're getting 60 words per penny.

To mark the occasion, I'm giving away five of my author's copies this week. If you'd like to be eligible to win, post a comment on this entry or write about it on your weblog, linking to its permalink so I don't overlook it. I'll also pay the postage to anywhere that I can send it for under $10.

Amazon top-1,000 reviewer Jack Harrington covered the book last week:

Anyone who uses Movable Type on a regular basis needed the book. It covers all of the basics around installation, setting up blogs and writing entries. But then it goes into more advanced topics like alternating the template and adding plugins. And even more advanced topics like RSS, Atom, and writing your own plugins. This is thorough book that is well written and will cover everything you need to know to blog with Movable Type.

You can read the first chapter on Wiley's Web site.

Movable Type · 2004/11/30 · 19 COMMENTS · Link

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