Zeta Woof

If you can read this, my blog editor can now publish new posts to this blog all by its lonesome.

Tomorrow: screenshots! It's ugly as sin, but it works.

Another amazing column by Stanley Fish, last noticed here reviewing a book by Sarah Palin.

I assume he's a liberal since he writes for The New York Times, but, if so, he's that rare commodity, a liberal with a clue.

Join the revolt.

It's kind of cute, really. They're using Google maps to create a virtual march on Washington. You enter your name, email, zip code, choose a persona (I'm a Working Professional, portrayed as a guy in shorts and a T-shirt), and select a team (I joined the Reagan Tax Revolt Team), and click the Submit button (ooh, that's rather poorly named). Your personal appears on the map at a location corresponding to your zip code. Hover over it and your name appears: Gordon from Gold Hill, OR.

I assume the little personae will begin drifting toward Foggy Bottom along about April 15th. I hope we pick up some pitchforks or flintlocks along the way. Comin' ta gitcha, Barry!

I wasted an hour this evening twiddling with the libraries from Apache Commons. FTP works fine, but my server doesn't support FTPS (FTP over SSL). Plain old FTP is dangerous because the bad guys can intercept your transmissions, steal your passwords, and load nasty stuff onto your server. You don't want to use it unless you change your password on a daily basis, which of course makes it a nuisance.

SFTP is different from FTPS but I can't find an open source for it. SCP, or Secure Copy, is what I really need.

Unfortunately I didn't come to that conclusion until 10:30 PM, so it's going to have to wait until tomorrow. This post I'll have to upload the hard way.

You might think of The Wall Street Journal as a business paper with a conservative editorial slant. It's more than that.

The Weekend Journal, a special section of the Saturday issue, has Arts & Entertainment, Books, Style, Sports, and even Food & Drink. I especially like the last part.

As I said last month, the charming folks at Blogger informed those who keep blogs on their own servers that they had until March 27th to move their blogs to the Google server farm, or else.

I chose else.

I figured I had until mid-March to cobble together some sort of publishing system of my own, at which point I could toss Blogger over the transom. I was right about the system but wrong about the deadline.

Starting last week Blogger became increasingly reluctant to publish by FTP. It got to the point where I had to click the Publish button a dozen times over the course of a couple hours before my post ended up on my blog. Finally on Wednesday it quit working altogether.

It took from Thursday evening until Sunday afternoon, working in my spare time, to produce a basic post editor. It lacks features, but it basically works. This is the first result.

Now it's time to Keel Da Google.

By way of Are We Lumberjacks?, by way of Oregon Guy, an interesting TED talk by Temple Grandin, who was featured in the Weekend Interview Saturday before last. I understand HBO has also released a biopic. Wonder if it's on Netflix?

In the Daily Mail (via Lucianne).

A seven-month-old baby girl survived three days alone with a bullet in her chest beside the bodies of her parents and toddler brother.

Argentines Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about global warming....

The youngster is recovering in hospital in the town of Goya in the northern Argentine province of Corrientes, where doctors say she is out of danger.

Her parents said they feared the effects of global warming in a suicide note

I'm not a religious man but at times like this I fervently hope that Hell exists.

Edward Shorter, Why Psychiatry Needs Therapy in the Weekend Journal.

This is exactly the sort of article I never would have plowed through online, but I enjoyed it thoroughly as I carried it from room to room today, reading a bit at a time.

Now, theoretically at least, you could do that with a laptop or iPad, but not really. Eric Raymond explains why.

I spent an hour yesterday morning at the dining room table reading The Wall Street Journal before I even bothered to check my email. During that time I skimmed and absorbed probably twice the volume of information that I might have found in the same time from the internet. Only then did I log in and check the links in my sidebar.

There are pros and cons to both media. The paper presents a more balanced diet of news stories than, say, Lucianne. It presents a dozen stories on a single page and my eye jumps around and serendipitously discovers articles and ideas I almost certainly would have missed on the internet. The paper has more screen space and requires less scrolling. The paper is portable; I can carry it into the smallest room in my house.

On the other hand, I also need to wear glasses to read it. There's a 12 to 48 hour time lag on breaking stories, although this is not always bad. Yesterday I wasted an hour watching live streaming video from Hilo Bay, waiting for a tsunami that never arrived. This morning the paper covered the non-event in four sentences.

Neither can you google up information in a pile of dead trees. But boy is that paper durable. If I clip an article and put it in a box it will still be there twenty years from now. Not so the links on this blog.

All this has implications for Zeta Woof. My subscription will last at least a year, and that means that I will spend probably 500 fewer hours in front of this computer. I will continue to try to post at least daily, but more of the articles I link to will be on wsj.com and some of those will be behind a pay wall. I won't always check before I link.

One thing I promise. I will let you know how this experiment goes, and whether the dead-tree version of The Wall Street Journal is worth the money. Right now I think probably yes. But let's see if I renew a year from now at the non-discounted rate.