Live from Austin!

Hi, I’m mathew, and this is my web site. Jakob Nielsen believes that omitting a photo of the author is one of the top 10 mistakes in weblog usability, so who am I to argue?

I started using the Internet around 1987; I remember Jakob’s Hypercard stack, as it was one of the first cool things I downloaded. I was introduced to Unix the following year, accidentally typed rn instead of rm one day (true story), and the rest is history.

I’ve been doing my best to gather together the worthwhile content I’ve written since then. It’s an ongoing process, but the archives genuinely go back to 1988. Of course, what I consider worthwhile may look like crap to you, but it’s all categorized and searchable so hopefully you can find something of interest.

Over the years I’ve done all kinds of work, most of it involving computers in some way—telephone technical support, data recovery, system administration, a bit of sales and marketing, application development, hardware maintenance, networking, web design, and so on. I’ve written code in well over a dozen different programming languages. I’m something of a generalist, a term I borrow from Ted Nelson, inventor of hypertext. His ideas inspired my choice of career—I built a primitive network hypertext system around 1985, wrote a browser in 1989, and wrote my first web page back in the days of HTML 1.0. I was rather startled when the rest of the world suddenly took an interest.

I currently live in Austin, Texas. Since being opinionated on the web hasn’t led to fame and riches, I work for IBM as a web architect.

Outside of computers, I’m interested in electronic music, photography, politics, design, video, and small fluffy animals. I also find physics and mathematics very interesting, but because my knowledge is broad rather than deep I tend to get lost soon after integrals get involved.

Do pages work at all?

Rails 1.1 broke typo. My web host suggested a fix to freeze the Rails version at 1.0, but that didn’t fix the problem. It did, however, break rake so I couldn’t un-freeze.

I decided to migrate to the trunk version of typo, which works with Rails 1.1. So I downloaded that using svn, and set it up with a clean database to reduce the number of possible sources of error. It didn’t work, but creating a new blank rails app and copying over the dispatch scripts and .htaccess file fixed it.

Next problem was to migrate my data. There’s a rake migrate command which is supposed to do this. Hey, guess what, it didn’t work! So, I ended up typing in raw SQL directly to psql to update the schema of the old database to something compatible with the new one.

That done, I dumped the old data with pg_sql --attribute-inserts, and imported it back into the new database.

After learning how to reset serial numbers, I was up and running again.

Sentiment: sorrow
SF savant Stanisław
so sadly silent

Guardian:

Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, is to be banned from travelling to the EU and US after riot police in Minsk arrested hundreds of opposition activists protesting against the results of last weekend’s elections.

Meanwhile on Newsday:

“We are concerned that false police statements may have tainted hundreds of cases of people arrested at the two largest mass arrests during the convention,” NYCLU attorney Christopher Dunn wrote to New York Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.

City law officials have said the arrests were justified.

The accusations stem from the tense standoff in 2004 between the nation’s largest police department and the tens of thousands of demonstrators at the GOP convention at Madison Square Garden, where President Bush accepted his party’s nomination for a second term in office. While anti-war and other demonstrations were mostly peaceful, sporadic clashes between police and protesters resulted in more than 1,800 arrests, mostly on misdemeanor charges like obstructing governmental administration.

Can’t…maintain…doublethink…

Here we are in 2006, and Intel still feels the need to engage in sexist advertising—on their home page, even.

Yes, a Centrino Duo will make a hot babe suddenly appear and sit on your lap, boys. “I’d Core her Duo! Eh? Eh?”

On a not unrelated note, Sony have a banner advert for Daxter running on Penny Arcade. At the end, a cartoon squirrel explains that it wants to hump the PSP.

I’m not sure how that’s supposed to make me want to buy one, but I suppose it’s no worse than McDonalds advertising a kid wanting to go all American Pie on one of their burgers.

An interesting article in NY Magazine discusses conspiracy theories and the secret history of 9/11.

As well as mentioning a few of the suspicious facts about what happened that day, it cites a score to categorize just how far along the conspiracy theory path you are: the HOP level.

Me, I’m about a Level 3.5. Everyone has to have a theory, and here’s mine:

Consider the October surprise conspiracy. Whether that conspiracy is true or not, the Iran-Contra scandal is at the level of documented fact, and it’s hard to deny that the sudden freeing of the hostages immediately after Reagan took office was a vital popularity boost for an otherwise unpopular president.

Wind the clock forward to 2000, and we have an unelected President, so unpopular that he had to skip the usual inaugural parade to avoid being pelted with projectiles. He’s making a routine PR visit to a school, reading The Pet Goat to the kids, when someone tells him that some planes have been hijacked.

I think it was news to him. To me, he looks like he’s worrying about it as he continues to sit there. But I think he’s been told that it’s under control.

I think that one or more people high up in the chain of command decided it would be best to let the hijackings go ahead, then send in the Marines to kick ass, and get a cheap PR victory for the new administration.

That’s why US air defenses weren’t scrambled; that’s why the plane was allowed to get so close to the Pentagon. The expectation was that it would be like every other hijacking and hostage taking, and that the only people in danger were a few hundred civilians. The planes would land somewhere, there would be negotiations, troops would be sent in, Bush’s approval rating from handling the difficult challenge would rocket no matter what happened or how long it took.

I think that those people high up who made the decision to let the hijackers get away with whatever they wanted, were as horrified as the rest of us when they saw what happened next. They had been prepared to risk a few lives, but nothing on the scale of 9/11. If their decision ever became public knowledge, they would be lynched.

Hence, the general level of secrecy and coverup, and the eventual whitewash of the 9/11 Commission Report.

I think my conspiracy theory is better than the Reichstag Fire kind, because it’s a conspiracy of dunces. Remember Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.

Is it really plausible that there was a conspiracy over the course of several years, spanning several countries, started long before the election, and that the people now in the Bush administration managed to keep it totally quiet?

I think not. Cheney, Rumsfeld and friends didn’t manage to keep arms sales to Iran and Iraq quiet, so there’s not a hope they could pull off 9/11 as a deliberate act. Look at their performance at running the economy and dealing with Iraq—they’re not evil geniuses, they’re naïve idiots who value blind faith over reality.

And even if I believed they had the skills, ultimately I just don’t believe Republicans are that evil. They might want to run Social Security into the ground and rip up the Bill of Rights, but I don’t think they’d kill thousands of Americans just to boost Bush’s popularity and get a few spying laws passed. That’s just unrealistic.

The Economist has plotted the number of blades in disposable razors against time, and if current trends continue, it looks like we’ll be shaving with 8 blades by 2010.

Or rather, you might, but I’ll be shaving with 1. As mentioned previously, I switched to a classic double-edge safety razor. Many shaves on, I remain enthusiastic about it. Definitely better than even the Mach 3, and cheaper per blade too.

We just filled 7× 110 liter paper sacks with fallen leaves from the back yard. We still have plenty of leaves, but we ran out of sacks.

On Saturday it rained. I’m not sure if it was that or SXSW, but for whatever reason the squirrels all came out to play. We had all 5 of the regulars feeding at once. Chasing and comical feeding antics ensued.

The high point was when one squirrel was sitting on the squirrel-a-whirl, looking over the hub and down at the corn below. Another squirrel rushed up from behind and gave him a shove, and suddenly he was a flying squirrel.

Blacktip seems to have ceded his position of Alpha Squirrel to Tiny, our squirrel ninja whose leaps of over a meter put the others to shame. Tiny is feared by all the other squirrels—except Frida, who is apparently too psycho to give in.

The squirrels also fought off a blue jay and some grackles. It was like an urban wildlife documentary out there.

No squirrelfest photos, I’m afraid. I need a telephoto lens, but that’ll have to wait until I can sell the film SLR.

So, back yards with trees have pluses as well as minuses.

[P.S.: Cool squirrel T-shirt reprinted at Threadless, and on sale.]

I went back and added subjects to all the LJ-era postings that were missing them. I also deleted a bunch of postings that were basically just links to interesting web sites, many of which had disappeared.

From now on, I’m using del.icio.us for things which are just interesting links, even if there are witty one-liners associated with them. You can subscribe via RSS to my link feed if you like, one-liners and all, or keep an eye on the box on the main web page. I’m going to try and use articles only for actual writing.