[libcat] was out of service for a bit this afternoon while I upgraded to version 2.0 of the WordPress software it runs on, but everything should be back to normal now.

Er, everything should be properly functional now.

(visitors to the site will have noticed i put a new theme up while i was mucking around in the site. whadday’all think?)

On the Friday morning before Halloween, 10 to 15 students, all of whom are residents of the Fox Chapel area’s most affluent neighborhoods, marched into school dressed as students from Sharpsburg, a less wealthy neighborhood [in] which a minority of Fox Chapel Area High School students live.

… And it was tolerated by the administration.

— Fox Chapel High: Where it’s OK to dress as an alien(ator)

CNN’s “Game Over” column reviews the new Xbox.

Meanwhile, the American Heart Association suggests that Drinking decaffeinated coffee may be harmful to heart health.

Decaffeinated — not caffeinated — coffee may cause an increase in harmful LDL cholesterol by increasing a specific type of blood fat linked to the metabolic syndrome, hints a new study presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2005.

(both via slashdot.org)

If television’s a babysitter, the internet’s a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.

LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day, President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. “We will stay the course,” he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean we, white man?

—Frank Rich rocks. (NYT)

Work has been so boring the last three days, I’ve done almost nothing but read Goats. I’ve now made it through three years of the archives—only five and a half years left to catch up. . . .

Don’t miss the Litany of Beer.

Excerpt from an e-mail message I received today (emphasis added):

We recently reviewed your account, and suspect that your Bank Of America Internet Banking account may have been accessed by an unauthorized third party. Protecting the security of your account and of the Washington Mutual network is our primary concern. . . . .

Another message advertising an impotence drug carried the subject line Reviving the sex lives or millions—which in fact sounded kinda accurate. After all, how much money does the government spend providing sex drugs to old soldiers and medicare recipients, and what could we be doing with it instead?

Kat on SpamCop, which processes junk e-mail and sends letters to the ISP for me: “Aw, it’s like nastygram-o-matic!”

Some spammers’ names just cry out to be made into band members’ alter egos, and/or to be names for the bands themselves. “Underscoring T. Willa” and “Marauding H. Indispensibles” (and their cousin, “Marauding Unmentionables”). “Canvasing V. Scarifies”. (Not surprisingly, all of them Chinese in origin.) “Multifariousness S. Tyndall”. “Disable H. Delineate”. “Subcontracted B. Hairstylists”. (The middle initials are a nice touch. . . .)

Message received this morning from “your manager, Selma” (one of those things I always wanted, and never knew I already had….):

You forgot to take this nice bagatelle!
We have the best prices for all things every boy needs!
Its possible to take it on-line!
Youll get it immediately!
The super quality is guaranteed!
[1][web address redacted]
You deserve the best. All is pay less.
Be deleted:
[2][web address redacted]
Best, Regards,
Selma

Most of these come from LISNews:

• CAIR: Explore the Quran:
  

  In today’s climate of heightened religious sensitivities and apparent cultural clashes, now is the time for people of all faiths to better acquaint themselves with Islam’s sacred text, the Holy Quran.

  The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is proud to announce a new campaign intended to promote understanding of the Quran by distributing complimentary copies to any interested member of the American public. This campaign, titled Explore the Qur’an, serves as a response to those who would defame and desecrate the holy book of Muslims without full knowledge of its teachings.

  The mission of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.

• Religion News Service is a secular news and photo service devoted to unbiased coverage of religion and ethics. They appear to be primarily a e-mail and wire based service, as they’ve only got a sentence with each headline on the main page, and none of them are linked. But there are links to “Search RNS Now!“

  But if you’re using Opera, you get the page mirrored here: Your Browser is Not Allowed at this site, in very large type. Period.

  Well, fuck you, too.

  The “Browser Wars” were over nearly 7 years ago. We were supposed to be done with that “best viewed in [Browser X]” crap years ago (Well, except for trying to convince people to drop Netscape 4, the 8-year-old dinosaur so far decayed it’s starting to turn to petroleum….). As World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wrote 9 years ago,

  Anyone who slaps a ‘this page is best viewed with Browser X’ label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network. (Technology Review, July 1996)

  Besides all which… that’s just rude. “Your Browser is Not Allowed”. You Have Not Said the Magic Word. You Have Been Denied.

  

   

  Anyway, now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, more library stories:

• According to the International Herald-Tribune, a group of German publishers, especially smaller- and medium-sized houses, are considering creating a Google Print-like project for a digital index of their books.
  

  We have to decide whether distribution is in the hands of a few global distributors and global publishing houses, said [Matthias] Ulmer, who heads Eugen Ulmer Verlag, a medium-size publishing house in Stuttgart. Publishers and booksellers that are involved, he said, feel that if they don’t do this today, they may no longer exist in some years.

• Shortly before Memorial Day, the California Assembly passed a bill that would ban public school districts from purchasing textbooks longer than 200 pages. The bill was sponsored by an Assemblywoman from Los Angeles, the Democratic chair of the Education Committee in the house, who claims that rather than reading specified pages from a manual, the work world students will be graduating to now requires more that personnel be able to find information online, on their own. The bill requires key points and basic ideas to be condensed into the 200 pages, with appendexes listing website addresses suggested as starting points for further research. (AB 756) says don’t give students a predigested version of what U.S. history is, let them explore the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, its sponsor said.

  The executive director of the California School Library Association responded, What we’re finding more and more is that people are saying, ‘Who needs an encyclopedia? Who needs an almanac? Just go to the Internet, it’s all there.’ Well, it’s not all there. Neither the state public schools Superintendent nor the Governor, nor various education groups, have taken positions on the bill, which now goes to the State Senate.

  (Sacramento Bee, via Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, via LISNews.com)

  Although I feel less opposed than when I first read it, there are definitely a number of problems with this idea:

  • First and foremost, access to computers and the internet. There’s still a substantial number of families that don’t have a computer, let alone internet access, in their home, and school and public libraries don’t have the facilities, staff (California’s public schools have the lowest ratio of professional school librarians to students in the country), or open hours to take all those kids. And of course, the areas with the largest numbers of kids who don’t have access to the internet at home will also be the ones where the school libraries are understaffed and underresourced (did i just invent that word?) and the public libraries have short hours and few facilities—if there are any at all.
  • Secondly, math and sciences.

    It’s still very difficult to work with math and sciences, especially post-algebraic math, in HTML. To represent mathematical texts requires one of a number of differently distateful solutions; the most popular are to create images of the equations (lots of files to download, poor quality) and to create PDF or similar files of the text. . . . which not only requires massive downloads (and massive plugins), but pretty much puts us back where we started.

  • Third: standards, community, educational, and political.
    

    [Y]ou’d have to know how aligned the materials are on the Internet with our education standards, said Michael Kirst, a Stanford education professor and co-director of Policy Analysis for Education.

    If we’re giving students a list of sites to visit in the back of the book—according to the bill, books would have to provide a rich appendix with Web sites where students can go for more information—how is that better than just putting the information in the book? Ok, we teach them how to enter an address in an address bar. That should be part of a keyboarding or basic computer skills course.

    On the other hand, they could give kids sites as ’starters’, take-off points, for further research. But then you have to teach kids to recognise what’s real on the web and what’s not. And given the number of people who fall for bank scams, viruses, and worms, are any of us ones to talk? Keeping kids from falling prey to malware and bad information seems like something that will take a hell of a lot more time and energy than it seems like anyone’s got to give in California these days.

Why do people give the same names to different things?

In the wonderful world of Perl modules, there is a Template.pm, the “Template Toolkit”, and there is a Text/Template.pm, or “Text::Template”. One of them is installed on my server, and I only need one of them. Three guesses which is which, and the first one doesn’t count.

As the Chicago Tribune put it: Imagine a government bureaucrat sitting on top of your television set to decide if you can record a television show to watch later. That’s what the Broadcast Flag would have done. The Broadcast Flag rule gave the FCC power to veto new TV technologies, whether created by consumer electronics manufacturers or Saturday hobbyists. By beating the flag, we gave manufacturers and hobbyists the right to build devices they and their customers want, to watch and record TV as they choose.

But Hollywood lobbyists are back in Washington—an appeals court ruling held that the FCC doesn’t have the power to make that kind of rule, only Congress does, so they’re trying to get Congress itself to mandate the Broadcast Flag. Tell your Congressman to say no—after all, these are the same people who tried to kill the VCR 25 years ago. . .

• EFF Deeplinks: Broadcast Flag celebration / Next Step: Congress
• EFF Deeplinks: Victory over the Broadcast Flag
• Chicago Tribune editorial: Congress should think long and hard before telling people they will not be able to use the newest technology at their convenience.