Chaos Magnet

Why 'Chaos Magnet'?

I've come to realize that the name of this blog can be somewhat misleading. I mean, most of the time I'm talking about politics in some way, so with a name like that, it may seem like I'm an anarchist or something, but I'm really not.

The name, Chaos Magnet, really refers to the progression of my life. Nothing, but nothing, ever goes smoothly. Not that I have a terrible life, of course. Quite the contrary. I have a wonderful wife, a great son, and a nice house. I'm employed, and reasonably healthy. And I'm extraordinarily grateful for all of those things.

But I am a walking example of the Pauli Effect.

The Pauli Effect was named after physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli had an interesting tendency to adversely effect experiments and machinery in the vicinity. Well, maybe "adversely" is the wrong word, but whenever he was around, the results were always strange. Once, a scientist friend wrote to him to say that he was thinking of him that afternoon because an experiment has gone awry for no discernable reason. It turned out that Pauli had been passing by on a train at that exact moment.

That, in a nutshell, is my life.

Making of MetroSphere, Part 24: Giving the user control - the ultimate portal theme

Now on developerWorks: Making of MetroSphere, Part 24: Giving the user control - the ultimate portal theme: The heart of the MetroSphere site is the community weblog, but we also want to give users the ability to create pages that reflect their own personalities. Portal enables an administrator to add a new theme to the site, but because allowing users to add a new theme involves unacceptable security risks, built-in capabilities limit user control to selecting from available themes. This tutorial explains how to give users much of the same power they would have by creating a new theme without actually creating one.

The making of MetroSphere, Part 23: Send messages between portlets

Now on developerWorks: The making of MetroSphere, Part 23: Send messages between portlets: Sometimes, in the development of a portal, you need two portlets to talk to each other. For example, on MetroSphere, when the user clicks a topic in the Topic List portlet, the team needs the information to be sent not only to the Topic List portlet, but also to the Show Blog portlet. This portlet describes the process for sending messages between portlets and recording the information in the PortletSession object.

The world is a scary place

I spent the weekend at powwow, which was absolutely fantastic, but I'm a little bit freaked out by some things I heard regarding the government. I mean, if you read this journal you know that I'm not a big fan of Team Bush, but this was much more scary.

I was "treated" to a disertation on the financial structure of the US by a government employee getting ready to retire. The gist of it was that the Federal Reserve is not a part of the federal government but rather an independant corporation, which I knew, and that essentially, the "national debt" was a debt to the Federal Reserve, and that if the US were to default on that debt, that corporation would own all of the buildings, parks, and other properties that are currently under Federal control. Gotta check that one out.

He also provided me a little more information on this idea that there is no law actually authorizing income taxes. I knew that income taxes first arose in the early 1900's, but the claim from this guy was that they were supposedly to pay for WWI, and that they were supposed to "sunset" after 6 months. (You know, the same way that key provisions of the Patriot Act are supposed to expire in a year or two.) Allegedly, Congress never removed the sunset provision, but the IRS continues to collect taxes. He pointed out that when people are charged with tax fraud, they're actually charged with perjury, and not with violating any particular tax law, since there isn't one. Gotta check that one out too, 'cause it sounds pretty fishy to me.

I'll let you know what I find out, when I look into it.

The making of MetroSphere, Part 22: Set topics -- custom attributes and user sessions

Now on developerWorks: The making of MetroSphere, Part 22: Set topics -- custom attributes and user sessions: In Part 21 of this series, Nick showed you how to add a custom attribute to users' information that represented their preferred topics. In this article, he shows you how to use that custom attribute as well as session information to enable users to choose between showing all topics and showing only their preferred topics.

Crush the Connectors

Clay Shirky's latest, Shirky: File-sharing Goes Social is an interesting look at the RIAA's strategy of going after big file sharers and the evolution of file sharing networks into more private spaces. Interesting as always.

I love the 80's

I have never really felt a "part" of the surrounding culture. Even when I was a teenager, I felt "outside" of it all. Apparently I was right. I'm sitting here watching VH1's I Love the 80s and being amazed how just how much I either missed or completely ignored. Yes, I was the world's biggest Star Wars fan, but I never saw Flashdance, Vacation, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Scarface, or just about any of the other movies that they're holding up as icons of the era. Some of the music they're mentioning, yes. Duran Duran, Flock of Seagulls, and so on. The TV, too. The A-Team, and so on. (But not, I should mention, Dukes of Hazard.)

So how out of touch was I, really?

This is really weird, actually. Because when I was a teenager, I was sure that music was the area in which I was least cool. My parents raised me on swing music, and I never, ever, seemed to be liking what everybody else was liking. And yet just about ever song they're mentioning is one of my favorites.

Eolas tries to stop IE

Eolas is trying to enjoin Microsoft to stop distributing Internet Explorer. Yeah, right. On the other hand, wouldn't that be a boost for Mozilla.

The making of MetroSphere, Part 21: Create custom user attributes

I can't believe that this is only part 21 of this series. Feels like I've done a hundred of them. And this one was done months ago!

The making of MetroSphere, Part 21: Create custom user attributes: There comes a time in every portal's life when it needs to know something specific about its users in order to provide the best possible user experience. On the MetroSphere site, that point came when the team needed to determine the topics in which a particular user was interested so they could use them to "narrow down" the blog entries with which he or she was presented. This article explains how to create custom user attributes for the user to enter during registration and how to use them from within a portlet.

Grab headlines from a remote RSS feed

When the RSS controversy first surfaced, I couldn't understand why so many people were so gung-ho to jettison RSS. I still don't. Yes, it's good to have a standard. But come on, people, it shouldn't be that big a deal to adapt to new formats. The very first tip I wrote for IBM's developerworks was about reading RSS files (which I mistakenly called RDF files, which is only partially correct) but now that I've been around for a while, I've updated it. The new version, Grab headlines from a remote RSS file shows how to not only grab a file, but also to create a system that converts various versions to a single common format that can then be massaged into the final output. This way, a single XSLT style sheet from, say, Atom to RSS 2.0 could work for everyone, so there was no need to switch, wholesale, to something new and scrap RSS.

One exciting thing is that I wrote to Adam Curry and got his permission to use his blog as an example, and he asked me to let him know when it was published. I don't know whether my not is stuck in his spam filters somewhere or he's just been too swamped to respond -- that's one busy guy! -- but it's still exciting for this MTV-generation boy.

Upcoming changes to IE

Microsoft has released information on what it's doing to Internet Explorer to comply with the half billion dollar lawsuit they just lost. I've commented over at the InformIT XML Reference Guide.

Email frustrations

I've been beating my brains out all day trying to figure out how to retrieve email using Windows Script Host. I can't seem to get it to instantiate CDONTS, and everything else I try seems to lead me nowhere.

Having found it easy to do it using ASP classic, I'm frustrated.

Cartoons, cartoons, cartoons

I love political cartoons. I'm a sucker for 'em. I love the fact that something so simple actually makes you think. I mean, really, you have to actually put out a little brain power to figure out the point a cartoonist is trying to make. Now I've discovered Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index and I'm in heaven. (Cagel also has a great cartooning blog.)

Workspaces instead of email

Phase 2 of the MetroSphere project will center on creating workspaces, but I was wondering exactly how we were going to use them. Ray Ozzie has the answer.

Alarm Bell Phrases

Every once in a while I'm reminded of why I'm so glad to be out of the corporate environment. Alarm Bell Phrases is one of those triggers.

Even more pricing confusion

As if trying to figure out where to buy a book based on online and offline discuounds weren't confusing enough, Borders wants to take prices off books so the retailers can decide what they're worth.

It almost sounds good, when they talk about the ability to lower prices on new authors and such, and the ability to reverse buyer's tendency to buy books only on sale. Then you realize that it also means that retailers in without much competition can raise prices above their already ridiculous level.

TV tie-in books

Apparently music and TV tie-ins are doing well as books.

The Bush credibility gap

It's scary how people listen to the rhetoric but never find out the facts behind it. Can't blame them, though, because the media doesn't make the connection. Check out Caught on Film: The Bush Credibility Gap. Believe it or not, it's at least hosted on the official web server of the House of Representatives. An official committee publication? I don't know, but it's good ammunition for those conservatives in your life who think Bush can do no wrong.

Terrorists steal anti-terrorist computer

It happened in Australia. "On the night of Wednesday, August 27, two men dressed as computer technicians and carrying tool bags entered the cargo processing and intelligence centre at Sydney International Airport. ... After supplying false names and signatures, they were given access to the top-security mainframe room. They knew the room's location and no directions were needed. Inside, they spent two hours disconnecting two computers, which they put on trolleys and wheeled out of the room, past the security desk, into the lift and out of the building."

No word on whether it was really terrorists, and whether any sensistive data was lost.

Cameras, cameras, everywhere

I don't know whether to be intrigued or nervous at the idea of an Internet database of surveilance cameras, including not just the normal shots of the beach, but even jail bookings.

Jargon beware

I had no idea how many technical terms I didn't actually know about until I read the Information Security Glossary.

Why DO we pay taxes, anyway?

I've heard for a long time the argument that because Ohio was the deciding vote in the law that authorized income taxes, the fact that at the time it wasn't actually a state -- something about it not being ratified, or signed off by a judge, or something -- that income taxes aren't really legal.

I've never really bought off on that, but apparently there's a bigger, more direct question. According to WORLD on the Web one Vernice B. Kuglin has been acquited on charges of tax evasion after sending multiple letters to the IRS demanding that it explain to here exactly what Federal statute requires her to pay taxes.

Interesting.

Bowling for truth

I used to be a big Michael Moore fan, based on seeing Roger and Me. Of course, I didn't live anywhere near Flint, Michigan, so I didn't really have any historical context on which to base my judgement. And as a result, I assumed that what I was seeing was the truth. Why? Because it was a documentary.

Or so I thought.

I started to lose my respect for Michael Moore the day after the Academy Awards. As you may or may not remember, he got his fellow documentary nominees up on stage with him and berated Bush for the war.

Now, it's not that I don't agree that we probably shouldn't have gone to war. I do agree with that. But the next day, I read that his fellow nominees had had no idea that that was what he was going to do.

That's just plain wrong, in my view.

But still, I had a lot of respect for Moore and the biting wit I had seen in Roger and Me. Until, that is, I started seeing some disturbing news about Moore's winning film, Bowling For Columbine. And it came from several sources:

Dave Kopel on Michael Moore on National Review Online
Spinsanity - Viewer beware: In "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore once again puts distortions and contradictions before the truth
Rachel Lucas: Michael Moore is a liar Archives
Truth about Bowling for Columbine
Quacking for Columbine

So now I wonder: when is a documentary not a documentary? I mean, isn't a documentary supposed to tell the true story of something or somebody?