Month: September 2005

Web Apps

Daring Fireball: The Location Field Is the New Command Line is a few months old, but I just got around to reading it.

Web apps are really great for cross-computer compatibility. Now that I work on my linbox during the day and just use my mac for my own computing at home, I appreciate being able to use, say, del.icio.us (or reddit) to move bookmarks back and forth. I have fastmail.fm for my mail, but I mostly use Mail.app or Thunderbird to access it — the magic of imap means I don’t have to use a web app to get cross-computer access to my mail.

I am a bit stymied by my own lack of knowledge of how to program web apps. I’ve dabbled a tiny bit in Ruby On Rails, but I can tell I’m not going to really “get” it till I buy the book. I’ve played a little with what they now call “ajax” — javascript which communicates with the server and modifies a page directly without reloading it — heck, I even helped Topher put something together for a real live page using it — but I haven’t done anything with it for my own sake.

My web design skills, both in terms of presentation and in terms of javascript wizardry, are so sadly lacking. I’d really like to beef them up.

I had a lot of fun recently putting together a shopping cart for a small local web-based business. I was at first trying to adapt an open source cart to their needs, but their needs were very well defined and peculiar, and I was spending more time taking unwanted features *out* of the carts I was looking at than it would have taken me to write a new one, so I trashed it and wrote a new one. Perl/MySQL. Pretty simple. I didn’t touch the frontend at all, I did it all using HTML::Template and handed the templates over to the site owners to customize. It worked out great.

I enjoyed designing that web app, and it’s not that hard. Maybe I’ll try and think of a project I want to work on of my own that I can do some neat stuff with.

Not that John Gruber is Nostradamus, but I think it’s true that there is still a big future in hot web apps, and I’d like to have more skill with that than I have.

Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’

Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’ | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source — the Onion’s most disturbingly prescient article ever, now available again since the Onion opened their archives.

“You better believe we’re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,” said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. “Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?”…

“Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to a close,” House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters. “Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton’s America.”

Paradox

OK, something just hit me tonight. I was thinking about a post at Talking Points Memo, which I was reading because it was linked to from somewhere I read regularly…

At first the evidence was scattered and anecdotal. But now it’s pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration’s takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access to report the story […]

Take a moment to note what’s happening here: these are the marks of repressive government, which mixes inefficiency with authoritarianism. The crew that couldn’t get key aid on the scene in time last week is coming in in force now. And one of the key missions appears to be cutting off public information about what’s happening in the city.

As it happens things have changed since that post — see here…”I talked to Bob a few minutes ago. And he said that there seemed to be a sea change in the treatment of reporters trying to get access to the city from yesterday to today. Today he reported that he and his colleagues were able to get through without any problem.”

So that problem is fixed for now, for reasons unclear. But I was thinking about the idea of “becoming a repressive authoritarian government.” And it occurred to me that people generally behave in an authoritarian, violent manner out of fear. They’re afraid of someone.

People who attack each other generally fear each other, and each believes they have good reason. And it’s irrelevant, in terms of ending the violence, who is right and who is wrong. Both sides are human. That’s what matters.

I’ve heard it said that rebellion and submission equally reinforce authoritarianism, because they are the two responses which authoritarianism foresees, and is prepared to handle. They don’t break the cycle, call the whole structure into question, wake people up. That’s why revolutions against tyranny have a sad tendency to turn into new tyrannies. Rebellion as such changes nothing fundamental.

And I was thinking about this “authoritarian crackdown on the media” thing and was thinking about how that is fueled by fear; how despite the fact that the people calling bullshit on the Bush administration are right, they are feeding the system by playing its own game even as they rebel. If they’re cracking down on the media, that’s because they’re afraid of it. They may be afraid of it because they’re afraid of the consequences of their own hurtful actions coming to light, because they’re afraid of being punished for them.

And I think about how you don’t move past a terrible situation by punishing the guilty; but you do move past it by speaking the truth. In South Africa, after apartheid, you had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, whose mission was not to punish the guilty but to prevent the recurrence of the abuses and to heal the injuries and restore the losses. I don’t know how that all worked out but I’ll bet it worked out a damn sight better than acts of revenge.

It occurs to me that that kind of transcendence, that kind of unheard-of humanity, is what would be needed to break a cycle of degenerating authority structures. It is the natural result of nonviolent action as opposed to ordinary rebellion. Ordinary, violent rebellion makes the degeneration worse in the long run. Its victories are Pyrrhic.

If it is true that Bush and company essentially killed thousands in New Orleans through willful negligence and mismanagement of the nation, then they are horribly wounded by that as well. Killing destroys the soul of the killer as it does the body of the victim. If they did these things they are victims too. Nobody ever victimizes another person without victimizing themselves as well. Healing has to take place on both sides.

And I sure wish I knew better how to live these highfalutin’ ideas I have.