Author: Tim Jarrett

Preparing for the move

Today is the last day before the packers come. By late Friday all our worldly possessions will be on a truck and I’ll be in Seattle.

Had a really good evening with George, Charlie, Carie, and Jessica last night at the Sunset Grill. I’ll definitely miss hanging out with these folks. But I’m looking forward to the chance to make new memories in Seattle.

Anywhere I lay my head, boys

Ben Hammersley: Whereever I lay my URL. Ben, a writer for O’Reilly, woke up one morning and realized that geography didn’t matter in his job. So he and his wife moved to Florence and cut their cost of living in half. Bastard. 🙂

That’s me, someday, maybe. Then again, moving off the east coast is traumatic enough. Lisa has one of those “geography independent” jobs, but it’s not always that simple. If you’re not a totally independent producer, like a writer or independent software developer, you have to have a really high level of trust with your coworkers to make it happen. I don’t take what Lisa is doing for granted for a second, though I don’t tell her that often enough.

[Thanks for the link, Doc.]
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Almost forgot…

I had a brief but rewarding lunch with my friend and former roommate Greg yesterday. He’s on his way up to Maine (for the first time) to do some legal consulting work for a group up there. It’s funny—it’s been at least two years, maybe more, since I last saw Greg, but we hadn’t changed a bit. Politics, music, edging around talking about life.

I’ve often said Greg needs to get a blog. It looks like he’s come close over the years, with stints at ePinions and various other media, but he’s never bitten the bullet. Now would be the time, Greg.
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Batching it

Lisa is on her way to sign the papers for the house closing. I stay in Boston this week and wait for the packers and movers to come, and run any miscellaneous errands we’ve forgotten about. Yes, I’m batching it. (I follow Martin Amis’s spelling, from The Information, here, because baching it looks too much like I’ll be playing fugues. But then again, you never know.)

Score one for due process

New York Times: Case Against Seven Tied to Group Labeled Terrorist Is Dismissed. The judge ruled that the Justice Department’s case against seven people accused of sending charitable donations to an Iranian military group that the State Department labels “terrorist” is “unconstitutional on its face.” This is a major repudiation of a 1996 antiterrorism law that criminalizes providing “material support” to “any foreign organization that the State Department deems a threat to national security.” Judge Robert M. Takasugi cites erosion of due process as the reason for the ruling:

…the law gives these groups “no notice and no opportunity” to contest their designation as a terrorist organization, a violation of due process, Judge Takasugi ruled.

“I will not abdicate my responsibilities as a district judge and turn a blind eye to the constitutional infirmities” of the law, Judge Takasugi wrote.

Because the government made its list of terrorist organizations in secret, without giving foreign groups a chance to defend themselves, the defendants “are deprived of their liberty based on an unconstitutional designation that they could never challenge,” he said.

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Star-making machinery

Doc Searls really nails what’s wrong with the entertainment industry, aka “the star-making machinery,” and why it’s pulling every string it can to ensure that the web doesn’t walk on its turf, even if it means killing the web:

The entertainment industry is fundamentally about making stars. It isn’t just about entertaining people, except as an effect of the star system, which serves to entertain mass quantities of people. It’s about packaging celebrity as a product, causing appetites for it, and delivering mass quantities of stuff made appealing by it, for as long as any variety of it might last. And doing it over and over and over again.

Nothing wrong with that, by the way. Just something wrong with nothing but that.

Which is why the CARP/LOC ruling is so awful and wrong. It’s about maintaining the incumbent star-making machinery that starts with the recording industry and works its way through commercial broadcasting, mass market advertising, arena performance events and cross-promotion through the whole mess of it.

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Making slow progress

After a long hiatus, I’m starting to get back into Manila Envelope again. I had a minor breakthrough this morning that allowed me to get the message number for newly created news items. This by itself doesn’t do a lot for the user, but when combined with the ability to retrieve a post from the server and change the content of an existing message, it’s laying groundwork for the ability to edit the last post made.

Other work: changing the site tagline from inside Manila Envelope. And still trying valiantly to figure out how to convert italic and bold styled text to HTML tags.

Apple open-sources JavaScript framework

I’m surprised no one has pointed to this yet, but Apple quietly made its core JavaScript framework source code available on June 13, as noted on this mailing list. The source is available for download here.

It looks like they’ve based the core on the kjs JavaScript engine in KDE, which explains why it’s being released back to the community. The announcement also indicates that Apple hopes to get the framework into a public CVS tree soon, to allow other developers to make contributions.

This is pretty significant. If JavaScript becomes a robust system framework like Java and Cocoa (and AppleScript), it will add to the stable of languages that developers can use to write native Mac OS X applications. Of course, developers have had a form of JavaScript access to Windows (using JScript) since Windows 2000…
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To SSL or not to SSL…

Apple appears to have turned off SSL support on the mail.mac.com server again. I wonder if this is deliberate, or if they just don’t have the server configured to turn SSL support back on when something happens. If it weren’t for Webmail, I would have never known—Mail.app doesn’t go offline when the SSL server is down, it just sits there.
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Killer skyscraper database

I love the World’s Tallest Buildings Diagram, though it is inaccurately named. It is in fact an interactive database that allows you to specify which skyscrapers you want to see—by name, city, architect, year, etc.—and produce a chart sorted by year, height, You can generate the Boston skyline with just a click. Even the default search—the world’s tallest buildings in height order—is dizzyingly cool, a quick whip through the architectural fancies of a dozen different countries.

Accustomed to featureless buildings like the Aon Center in Chicago, the Sears Tower, or the late lamented World Trade Center towers, it’s fascinating to see towers like the Taipei Financial Center, Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the T&C Tower in Taiwan, or even the Empire State Building as evidence that tall buildings need not be monoliths out of Kubrick’s 2001. [Hat tip to Cory and Dave for the link.]
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Peaceful morning with Elvis

It’s a beautiful morning here in Boston. I’m lingering over the New York Times and other items in my Radio aggregator, drinking tea, making an omelet, listening to The Juliet Letters.

True confession: I loved this album when it came out. I couldn’t stop playing it. Today I know there’s something a little too arch about the performance, a little too forced in the compromise between pop songwriting and string quartet writing. But still I love the album: the somber wordless opening “Deliver Us,” the melancholic “For Other Eyes,” the gleefully wicked “I Almost Had a Weakness,” the wistful “Who Do You Think You Are?” Perfect early morning reflection music.
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Have a good pilgrimage

It’s “proud of my kid sister” day here at JHN. Esta is taking her church youth group kids on a spiritual pilgrimage to South Dakota starting tomorrow. This is a pretty darned big undertaking and I hope that the trip is everything they hope it will be.

Happy days…

…are here again. Why, you ask? Did I get the homeowners insurance situation straightened out? Did the magical move fairy come along and make all of our stuff spontaneously appear at our new house? Did the mortgage broker throw up her hands and say, “What the heck, no closing costs! I was just kidding”?

Alas, no. But John Allison’s Scary Go Round is, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of these post dot-com times, available for free! Go look.
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