chuggnutt.com

When it comes to dining in Bend, Oregon, few places compare to The Pine Tavern. Located in Downtown Bend, just off Mirror Pond and the Deschutes River, the Pine Tavern Restaurant is one of the signature establishments of this town and one of the best places to eat, period.

Good food, good drinks and good service. I've never had a bad meal there. And inside is one of the most unique features you'll find anywhere around here: the restaurant is built around a large, live ponderosa pine tree that is the centerpiece of the dining area; the trunk dominates the room and rises through the ceiling with the top of the tree high above the building. Windows in the ceiling afford the full view. It's quite amazing.

If you happen to be visiting Bend, you should definitely consider having dinner at the Pine Tavern a requirement. Even my in-laws, who are notoriously picky about what and where they can eat, love the place and have at least one meal there every trip. On the other hand, if you live in Bend and haven't been, then I'm seriously thinking about revoking your Bend card.

About a week back Andrei Zmievski blogged about taking linguistics classes and on the fluid nature of languages, and got me thinking about them. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree in French with the equivalent of a minor in Russian (and yet I work in the computer industry... funny, eh?), but I'm far from fluent in either language, even though I'd like to be. And I'd like to learn other languages, too, if I had the time.

I think every American should learn a second, maybe even a third language. Especially when a good part of the educated world beyond our country is multi-lingual; I think it puts us at a definite disadvantage.

Yes, I know there's always someone who will disagree with me on this point. English is quite the lingua franca, and will continue to be, so it's easy to argue that there's no need to learn another language in today's world. Not so. I'll touch on this in a future post.

And of course, this always brings to mind one of my favorite rants from Dennis Miller, about the English language:

I understand that English is a protean, evolving language that must constantly change in order to remain relevant. But let's not go out of our way to appropriate words from other cultures simply to justify making something more expensive. Hey, you can add all the Italian suffixes you want, you're not fooling anybody over there at Starbucks—it's still just coffee. Now ring me the fuck up, you frappaloser.

Doing some further testing on the new CMS. There should be a "MORE" link below if you're viewing this from the front page. If you click on it, you'll get the extended body text and as a treat I'll throw in some of the things I'm doing behind the scenes.

More...

So the spam problem finally got to be a little overwhelming on our BendCable email account, and we opted in to use BendCable's anti-spam software/service, Spam Pounder. But here's the catch: you don't actually get this anti-spam service on your regular bendcable.com email, no—instead they change your email to a bendbroadband.com address because that's where they have the actual anti-spam software running. (In order to preserve your bendcable.com address—which you may have had for years, as we have, and don't want it gone—they set up a forward that shunts everything from your bendcable.com address to the bendbroadband.com one.)

I mean, what the hell is that? Sure changing your email address is a solution for spam, but that's not the point. I don't have a lot of confidence in an ISP that can't even set up spam filtering software on their main mail server, fer chrissakes.

And what the hell is with that name ("Spam Pounder") and logo?? The images I'm associating with it are not good ones...

Now, having said all that, I will concede that so far it's doing the job: almost all of the spam is now being caught, I'd give it a 98-99% effectiveness rating so far. The technology seems to work.

But why can't BendCable integrate this into their main email server like everyone else?

I'm flipping switches on my blog tonight, and going live with my new CMS I'm working on. Hopefully, all will work as planned; consider this entry a test message.

Okay, yes, so I didn't write anything here last night, the first time since the beginning of the year that I missed a night. I actually felt a little guilty about that. Keeps me honest, I guess. Anyway, I'm back tonight with some links.

The first is Topix.net, courtesy of ongoing. On the front page, Topix appears to be a news site that aggregates the news from umpteen online sources. Ho-hum, Google News anyone? But the cool thing happens when you give it your zipcode to get local news; BAM! suddenly you get a page devoted to your city/region, and I have to say, the Bend, Oregon News page is one of the best local news pages I've seen online. Not just news, either; local weather, sports, resources, even Amazon bestsellers for Bend. Color me impressed.

And call me crazy, but I'd swear Topix was developed in PHP.

The next link is to BlogBinders, courtesy of Adam Curry. It's a site/service that will turn your blog into a bound book. Interesting. I remember quite a while ago reading an article on blogging where this idea was suggested, and I thought it was eye-opening. I wonder, though, that a lot of blog entries revolve around linking to other sites—I can't imagine this translates well to a book. Nor would I really want to read all my blog entries in book format—some are simply throw-away.

Third link is to A Californian's Conception of the Continental United States, courtesy of Utterly Boring. I just thought this was funny.

Gadgetopia has a good rant on content management that I'm just getting around to posting about. (CMS's Should Manage Content, Not Display It)

My solution was to write a function library to make raw database calls to get everything out in a nice, big, nested PHP array. I essentially built an API for the CMS to make pulling content easy, but I do all the HTML processing in PHP, abandoning completely the display side of this CMS. I still use it for administration, workflow, etc. (which it excels at), but when PHP is such a fantastic, mature language, why reinvent the wheel?

I really don't have anything to add to this, other than that this is largely why I favor developing my own PHP software rather than using pre-built systems—I have absolute control over the way the software works and I don't have to rely on clunky, awkward front-end architecture and programming that I disagree with. Give me the data, and let me decide what to do with it.

I was looking at a cookbook over at my parents' house this evening and came across a general primer on making cheese. I was under the impression that making cheese was a rather complicated procedure, but it turns out it's not, really; only time-consuming.

Basically you separate milk into whey and curds, and then drain and age the curds until they become cheese. Well, okay, it's slightly more complicated than that, but still.

While making cheese at home may seem like some to be some kind of insane throwback rustic hobby, it appeals to me in the same way that brewing beer or making wine does—it's a way to recapture some of the old skills that seem to get lost sometimes in our mass-production-consumerism society. And, it's reflective on the way I was raised; growing up in rural Central Oregon, I'm just more used to the idea of growing and raising your own food. Move along now.

Anyway, here's a link to a Google search for "how to make cheese".

After all the hubbub over Google the last few days, I thought it was pretty interesting when my issue of Wired came today, with "Googlemania!" on the cover. Timely.

Here's a good link for anyone who's trying to be a writer: Learn Writing with Uncle Jim. It's a series of posts on a message board on the topic of writing commercial novels, from a professional writer. It's also an insane 27 pages long, with 21 (is that right? I counted twice...) posts per page. It's good stuff, what I've read so far.

From katu.com, Big-time movie director holding open casting call in Portland: Gus Van Sant is looking for people for his next movie:

...show up on Sunday, Feb. 29, for an open casting call for Portland writer-director Gus Van Sant's latest movie, a story about rock 'n' roll in the Northwest grunge heyday.

The casting call will be from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. February 29 at the Child Services Center of the Portland Public Schools located at 531 S.E. 14th Avenue at Stark.

Elsewhere on this site I've stated that I love Google. That still mostly holds true, but there's been some things about Google lately that are making me pause a bit.

The first concerns Google's apparent abandonment of RSS for (exclusively) the still-incubating Atom syndication format/API. I won't bother rehashing the situation here; if you want more details, check out this wonderfully recursive-ironic Google search for "google atom" to get all the gory details. To me this seems like a highly questionable/irresponsible move for Google to make, frankly rather surprising. Hopefully they'll come to their senses over there.

The other thing deals with their AdWords program. I think it's broken. Here's the deal: We've been toying with AdWords to run ads on a new project we're working on, to see how the system worked and if it would be worth it to ramp it up. (Side note: very cool. You can get a nice in-depth look at Google's internal keyword rankings without ever putting any money down.) Well, it worked for a while, we were very impressed, but then suddenly, over the weekend sometime (I think), it stopped working.

Completely. Our ad never shows up on the exact same searches that it was previously showing up under before. In fact—and here's the biggest clue that something is seriously broken—as you page through the results, the exact same ads that appeared on the first page of results appears on every subsequent page of results.

WTF?

This did not happen before and should not be happening now. Something is broken. Period. For at least a week. Could it have something to do with Google doubling their index to over 6 billion items (4 billion web pages)? Maybe.

Ideas?

There's an interesting article in the February issue of Discover Magazine on the Big Bang theory—or rather, an alternative to the Big Bang theory. (No good link to the article itself, sorry; Discover only allows registered Discover subscribers to read the full article online.)

The gist of the alternative theory is that rather than having space and time starting at zero with the Big Bang, there is instead an eternal cycle of universal creation as our three-dimensional universe is actually part of a much larger reality (having up to 10 dimensions). Every so often ("so often" being a trillion years or more), our universe collides with another universe in this multi-dimensional reality and the resulting explosive reaction is essentially a Big Bang that expands, cools, condenses into matter and stars and galaxies, and eventually expands into near emptiness... only to start over again.

I like it as a theory, largely because it provides a simpler and more elegant explanation for the origin of the universe than the Big Bang theory has lately been providing. (Caveat: I'm not nearly as fluent in my physics and cosmology as I probably should be to discuss this.) I mean, dark energy—what is that? It's like some kind of ugly, complicated kludge shoehorned into current thinking because no one understands why the universe's expansion appears to be accelerating. From the article:

Theorists invoked another unknown energy field, called dark energy, to account for that cosmic acceleration. "This wasn't really predicted at all," says Steinhardt. "We can fit it into the model, but we don't know what this so-called dark energy is. The standard model is definitely becoming more encumbered with time. It may still be valid, but the fact that we have to keep adding things is a bad sign."

This alternate theory actually accounts for this expansion force as a by-product, without having to invoke dark energy. Elegance.

Interestingly, I see this analogous to programming. Ever tackled a programming problem with a solution that seemed to start out simple, maybe even obvious? Then, as certain situations come up, you start applying fixes, conditions, adding complexity until basically the "solution" to the problem has become a kludge. (Or maybe you started out with a kludge. Either way.) Then, one day you have a moment of clarity—either you stepped back from the problem for a bit, or maybe a coworker suggested something way too obvious, and then Bang!—you suddenly have a simple, elegant solution that solves the problem entirely.

Yeah. It's kind of like that.

Bend made the national headlines last week (CNN: Rush minute becomes rush hour) because it's the largest city in the west without a public transit system. And we're not going to get one anytime soon, unfortunately. From the CNN article:

Public transportation advocates in the city are up against a steadfast car culture reinforced by the influx of Californians, plus a wealthy population that probably wouldn't ride the bus even if one existed.

"If they are getting around town in their Lexus, they are not too concerned about the next bus stop," said Brian Shetterly, the town's chief planner.

All too true. Bend's traffic is one of the big drawbacks to living here; I've watched it steadily get worse over the last decade, as more people have moved into the area but the infrastructure hasn't scaled accordingly. I sometimes think Bend is a city with a small town mentality: people don't want to accept that they are living in a city and therefore can't or won't deal with the issues that growth inevitably brings—like gridlock. Classic denial: "Hey, we live in a small town, we can't possibly have traffic problems that need fixing."

I'd love it if Bend got a mass transit system, I've thought we've needed one for years. I'd ride a bus, if one was available, and I think a lot of other people would, too, despite the picture the article paints. Here's a hint: Not everyone who lives here is wealthy and tools around in a Lexus.

They wouldn't need to start big, at first: maybe two or three routes in Bend, covering downtown, west up to the college, north to the malls and back down east along 27th and Knott Road, swinging south and back up Country Club maybe. Then a route to Redmond, maybe Sisters, and one to Sunriver/Lapine, but those extended routes could come later.

Oh, well. It's nice to dream.

Gah. I almost wrote a blog post at the end of the year ranting about the most overused phrases showing up in the blogsphere. ("Blogosphere" itself is definitely an overused word, but I can't help it. It's succint.) The phrase at the top of my list for 2003 was "drinking the kool aid." The new overused phrase for 2004? Rising sharply over the last week, and will continue gaining momentum: "echo chamber."

One of the big online stories over the past couple of days is Amazon.com's weeklong glitch that "suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews" (New York Times article here). Turns out a lot of what was revealed was that authors were anonymously writing glowing reviews of their own books, and getting family and friends to do so too—and conversely, anonymously panning rivals' books. This "glitch" exposed a bigger issue:

...many people say Amazon's pages have turned into what one writer called "a rhetorical war," where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.

Amazon called this "an unfortunate error." Yeah, right.

Consider: these "anonymous" reviewers are not anonymous at all, Amazon clearly tracks who they really are and can, at any given time, follow exactly who is saying what about any book. Confronted with the questionable antics of these reviewers and the growing "rhetorical war," I know what I would do to try to put a stop to it. (Here's a hint: it's basically the same thing that happened to Amazon.)

It's a little late in the evening, I know, but better late than never, I figure:

Happy Valentine's Day!

Last night I got my first bonafide blog comment spam! Two comments showed up four minutes apart on an older post (the post titled, "Not Your Father's Sesame Street") that have nothing to do with that post—in fact, it's kind of disturbing that they would show up on that particular one, since it's about kids' television. I haven't yet decided what to do with the comments, whether to delete them, or let them stand for posterity but kill the links, or what. At any rate, I was looking into where they came from today, and thought I'd post the details here. Kind of a Transparent Society type of thing to do.

Both comments originated from the same IP address: 24.195.207.220. Checking the Apache server logs, I found that they got to my site (directly to that post, in fact) from a Google search for "adult weblog", offset 370 (meaning that they had paged through at least 370 results—37-ish pages—before finding the link to me). Other than that, though, there's not much to report. I just thought it was noteworthy (to me, at least) that I managed to garner some comment spam.

Since the beginning of the year, I set a personal goal for myself to write and publish something on my weblog here at least once a day, and I've actually stuck to it. (Yeah, there's some gaps on the calendar there, but if you look closely, it's because the post didn't get done until something like 12:07 a.m.—so while I didn't technically get it in on the calendar day, I still count it because it was still part of the day I had, before going to bed.) The trick, of course, is coming up with something to write everyday—or rather, as I've been finding, something to write that I have time to do.

(This is the point where other writers, upon hearing my complaint about not having the time to write, scoff and insist that if I truly was a writer, I would make the time. I know. Fair enough.)

I've got several ideas for longer articles that I want to (eventually) write and post, but by the time I'm at the point in my evening where I can sit down to write, it's late and I don't really want to stay up much past midnight most of the time, so what I'm stuck with is trying to come up with shorter items to blog about. And see, that's actually harder for me sometimes than in coming up with longer items to write about. What I could do is start longer articles in draft mode and work on them as time permits, and post them when ready—and I do, sometimes—but that doesn't really mesh with my goal of blogging something everyday.

Anyway, I'm rambling a bit, but it felt like something to get off my chest. I actually spent a good part of my time this evening working on a long article that I'll publish here soon, but since that's not ready for prime time I wanted to get this out of my system, too.

Any other bloggers out there with similar thoughts?

Interesting PHP benchmark of parsing XML showed up on PHP Everywhere. In High Speed XML Parsing is Not Intuitive, John Lim tested five methods of extracting the title element from an XML RSS feed. Surprising results; the regular expression match was by far the fastest, and I would have thought the SAX parsing (based on libxpat, I believe) would have scored significantly faster than the DOM or XPath parsing—but it came in last.

Of course, the regular expression matching in this case was a bit simplistic—typically if you're going to parse XML files, you're looking for more than one element. But it's a good technique to keep in mind.

Here's how it works (in case you didn't know). Find a calculator—a single line LCD display one, not a fancy thousand-button monster or the Windows calculator (!). Turn the calculator upside down. When you punch in the numbers, they will look like crappy LCD versions of letters. The challenge is to spell words using those letters; 3045, for example, will read "ShOE" when it's upside down.

Yeah, it's lame, and yeah, it's old school. But back in the days before the Internet, we'd amuse ourselves by typing in such choice numbers as 7734 or 5318008 and snickering over the results.

Ah, good times.

And just for fun, here's some links related to calculator spelling:

• Calculator Haikus
• Calculators at Nostalgia Central
• Definition of 71011345 at UrbanDictionary.com—if you search for other numbers that spell calculator words, Urban Dictionary might have a definition for them

From UtterlyBoring I picked up this link to Oregon SWAP, which looks like an interesting experiment.

SWAP is designed to promote reuse of materials in Central Oregon. It is a free and convenient way for individuals and businesses to exchange reusable or surplus products and prevent them from ending up in the dump.

Looks interesting, although the small Comic Sans font is making my eyes bleed. I also notice they seem to be running PHP for their database search. Booyah!

An interesting article today on MSNBC titled "Online search engines lift cover of privacy", and the "InfoPorn" section of February's Wired (can't find a link, sorry) highlighting identity theft motivated me to write about a topic I've been thinking about for a while now: data mining the Web.

The article talks about the absurd amount of information that is freely available on the Web, and how much of it is accessible through Google—and then calls using Google to find this data "Google hacking." I think a more accurate term would be Google mining—there's really no mad hacker v00d00 ski11z involved, and let's face it, being able to run a realtime query against a massive database containing billions of pieces of information is really the essence of data mining.

What got me thinking about mining the Web? Most recently, social networking software, and the data such software collects from its users. As I've written before, what a useful social networking system will do (among other things) is allow you to crawl the relationships among people and be able to drill-down by varying degrees into their data/life/online platform. But you know, you can already essentially do this with nothing more than a Web browser; it all goes back to the fact that there is an absurd amount of information freely and publicly available on the Web—much of it cheerfully self-published by people who should know better.

Example? Resumes. You've all seen them; half the personal sites out there have an online resume page, and you can find at least 45,300 more by searching Google for "resume.doc". On average, they contain a shocking amount of personal information: what schools you went to, and when; who employed you, and when; your address and phone number; your skills; sometimes your Social Security number. Tip of the iceberg.

You can find out a lot about someone simply by reading their blog. My own is no exception, I'm sure, but sometimes even I'm amazed about how much personal detail people will reveal online.

And did you know you can search for wishlists at Amazon.com and often a user's wishlist will also contain their birthday and the city and state in which they live? If that doesn't work, try finding someone's birthday on Anybirthday.com—they boast having over 130 million entries gleaned from public records.

Here's where it gets tricky. The MSNBC article takes an alarmist tone, and in part it's right to do so: companies and people that leave sensitive documents published on a crawler-accessible Web page are in danger of having their privacy violated. However, a lot of the information that's out there is already public information, or information that's freely volunteered by people and becomes public. Google is merely a tool that aggregates this information into one source. And me? Hell, I love Google, I frankly think it's amazing. And I'm an information junkie, I salivate over the data mining possibilities—and I've got ideas rolling around my head on what could be done with this data, ways it can be manipulated, and linked, and so on.

We've barely scratched the surface when it comes to mining the Web—I think the untapped possibilities we're sitting on are enormous, potentially dwarfing anything we've previously encountered. Google is a first step.

What's next?

I've been bootstrapping the code for my Personal Publishing System (nicknamed "Spokane") that I wrote about here and here, and since I had intended this to be an open process that I'd blog about, I'm writing up some of what I'm doing and my thoughts on how to do it.

More...

Here's something interesting: my blog entry on Bend WinterFest is now the number 4 result on Google when searching for "Bend winterfest"—less than two weeks after I posted it. Damn, that's fast.

I love templates. I was able to make some changes to the site formatting in mere minutes thanks to templates. Change two files, and it all propagates throughout the site. Lovely.

I use a modified version of the Template class from the PHP Base Library for just about any PHP programming project I work on any more. I've looked into other, similar classes for PHP but haven't really found anything that comes close to the PHP Base Library Template.

I've never gotten into using Smarty largely because from what I know of it, it doesn't fit my needs—it's overkill for a templating system. (Caveat emptor. I could very well be wrong here.) Here's a hint: not everything you use a template for needs to be/should be/can be compiled into PHP, which is what Smarty does. I can use my hacked Template class to build any kind of files, like my RSS file—not just PHP and HTML. Plus it's very easy to use and it's not burdened down with all the additional template scripting code (yeah, code) that Smarty allows.

For my money, if you're working with Smarty, you might as well just forego it entirely and code in native PHP. But that's just me.

Great rant on Kuro5hin titled "Why your Movable Type blog must die". Made me laugh. Worthy of Dennis Miller during his ranting heyday.

You are all pretentious twats

Every last one of you. You're all latte-sipping, iMac-using, suburban-living tertiary-industry-working WASPs who offer absolutely no new insights on anything whatsoever apart from maybe one specialist field if we're lucky. Most of you think that you're writing original content and that you're making a contribution by licensing your spewings under Creative Commons "Some Rights Reserved" licences, just because it's the hip thing to do. You think you know all there is to say about blogging because you understand the concept of HTML and CSS, but the horrible truth is that 40% of you are all using the same shitty default layout. Then you take pictures of yourselves looking pensive or making vague allusions to mythology.

Of course, I can't claim to be much better as a blogger than some of the caricature portraits in this rant, but at least I don't use Movable Type. :)

I notice some subtle yet interesting themes cropping up in a couple of the blogs I read in the last couple of days. Joi Ito posted about having lunch with Seth Lloyd and discusses, among other things, entropy and information theory. Over on ongoing, Tim Bray publishes a photo essay on the beauty of decay and entropy.

All the hooplah over Orkut last week got me thinking more about this "social software" phenomenom from sites like Orkut and Friendster. You may remember I've ranted about Friendster before. My conclusions at the time were that I could see some value to it, but didn't know what I could actually do with it.

Several months later, same results. What do I do with this type of software? I don't need a date. I get bored with searching for people I don't know when all I can do is search. They're poor at facilitating communication compared to other technologies. I already have an address book—several, actually—of people that I do know and keep in touch with. So?

So, all of these social networking sites seem to me to be half-baked: they're a framework built upon an interesting idea, but they're not done yet. Honestly, I'm not even sure I can tell what the end goal is—having an interesting idea doesn't guarantee success.

The interesting thing about Orkut is that it's an invitation-only service—meaning, that every user is linked to every other user in one big network—unlike Friendster or the others where there are "pockets" of networks, existing independently. Having everyone linked in some way is inherently more valuable to me; stand-alone networks diminishes the value of the system.

But what system? Still a problem. I suppose it would be interesting to be able to crawl or browse the network of people—the big one, like Orkut does—and be able to drill-down into user data to varying degrees, based on the proximity in the network that user is to you. But there would have to be more than just user data; I'd want to drill-down into their online presence/identity/platform—the blogs, the photo galleries, the web pages and XML files of metadata, their trail of public interactions across the web (like on forums, or weblog comments)... As an example, a user browsing/crawling me would be able to drill-down into chuggnutt.com, which is becoming more and more the platform which defines my online existence. From here they could read my weblog and the archives, follow the links to any projects I'm working on (that I choose to share), see what sites and blogs I read, play with any apps I develop, etc.

(I realize as I write this I'm also envisioning some of the online experience David Brin wrote into his near-future novel, Earth. But I haven't read it in a long time, so I may be way off.)

But, I can accomplish a lot of that now anyway, why another service for it? As far as I'm concerned, the real social software has been around for quite awhile now: BBSes, email, IRC, Usenet, instant messenging, weblogs. There's more, but you get the idea.

This week the office is being rearranged—furniture, computers, phones, etc. The net effect for me is that I get a significantly larger office space all to myself—and all that extra space is kinda freaking me out. :)

Some neat book-related links tonight. First, Locus Online has published a 2003 recommended reading list of science fiction and fantasy novels, novellas, short stories, anthologies, etc. It looks like a good list, I noticed several items coinciding with my reading wishlist.

Next, the big news: Cory Doctorow's new book, Eastern Standard Tribe, is out! And, like his previous two books, he is making the novel free to download from his website. Gotta love this. Which means, over the next couple of days, I'll download the plain text version and convert it to the Palm Reader format for my ebooks page. Don't worry, though—you can still buy the book if you want a paper version. I sure will.

My daughter came home today with pink eye. Apparently it's been going around the preschool and sure enough, she's got it. Should make for an interesting few days as we all try to avoid catching the virus.

Here's an interesting fact: Marvel and DC—the two biggest publishers of comic books—jointly own a trademark on the term "Super Hero" (and its variations). Huh? I picked this up from Newsarama, via Boing Boing.

That seems to me to be just a little bit ludicrous, but it suddenly seems clear why Alan Moore's comic books refer to their protagonists as "science heroes" and not superheroes.

Man that's weird.