Today I’ve decided to embed this video here so that more people could see it. Both the music and the video are very soothing. If you like that kind of thing…
I saw it first on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, where they explain everything astronomical and meteorological going on. You can tell that it’s been filmed at a high latitude, the way the sun and moon come in at such a shallow angle all the time. I was also a bit shocked by how persistent the jet airplane condensation trails were - they indicate that the sky is moving too when you’re not waiting around to watch it.
Sorry if you’ve been keeping up here, and expected to see more writing - normally I would have had the time to write, but I had a distinct difficulty logging in to work on it over the past couple days.
Server Moved
My hosting company - they’re great and all, but - moved my account to a different server. That by itself didn’t cause the problem. The problem had to do with a mismatch and resulting incompatibility with Ruby, Rails, and Typo. Upsetting. And difficult to diagnose at first.
Once in a while, scripts have a server’s IP address hard coded: At Olsson’s the database server was separate from the web server, and it didn’t have a domain name, so one day when it moved, all the dynamic pages with database calls in their scripts broke. But, I could rule that out right away since my database is on the same machine so, I can just call it at ‘localhost’. Plus, I didn’t have any other ideas.
A quick look at the error logs showed the dispatcher script failing repeatedly. Without scrutinizing the error log and the access log side by side, it would be hard to say if all calls to the dispatcher were failing, or just some calls. I wasn’t prepared to apply that kind of scrutiny just yet.
I logged in to a command line session to see if running the dispatcher directly would give me any diagnostics. Ruby in the “verbose” mode ought to say something useful… And, boy, did it. It was way too much information. I had to redirect standard error to a file and browse that. I didn’t understand much.
I went through some user forums for possible causes… Instead of a login screen, I was getting the message “Application Error, Typo Could Not Be Reached”. That usually happens to people who have manually configured Typo, but made a mistake. That didn’t happen to me: I installed Typo directly from the package.
So I broke down and asked for help - knowing that it would take some back and forth before we could home in on the proper degree of my ignorance…
Such as: “Did you freeze Rails?”
“What does that entail?”
“We tell everyone to use Rake to freeze their version of Rails - here’s a link to instructions…”
“Yeah, um… Those instructions gave me an error.”
The upshot is: Somebody eventually fixed it for me. How sweet.
But it forced me to go through a lot of textbooks, websites, and commentary. I do resent slightly that I don’t understand the system and its interactions fully. But who does? Maybe I’ll offer a recap of that soon.
I looted a scanner from my old workplace when it closed. Let me explain how I rationalize that action.
The thing is a combination printer/scanner - At first it was thought that I would be scanning a lot of artwork for the website so I got one. But eventually, they started sprouting up around the office like toadstools - we had network gear, so it might have made more sense to have one really good printer and scanner networked, but that’s not what happened. Stuff got bought in dribs and drabs. The purchasing mavens waited until my department got a new PC (I think it may have been for my desk…) to get a new printer.
I never really used the scanner part that much for work - I wound up getting most of what I needed online. But, on the other hand, it was really annoying to have to go down the hall to use the vintage Mac in the advertising office every time I needed to scan something.
One day I had a serious paper jam. That was when I discovered how hermetic the printer mechanism was. With the exception of a couple flaps, there was no access. I believe that to access the printer mechanism would require dismantling the scanner part - removing it from above the printer. Or something like that. Nevertheless, I managed to pull the diagonal wad of copy paper out. But I caused some subtle damage with the shuttle - that carriage for the ink cartridges that rode back and forth on a rod. From then on, there was a point near one end of the rod where the cartridges would stutter, leaving a vertical line running down the left edge of the paper. It would leave a rainbow from the narrow gaps where C, M, and Y never printed from the stutter. Black, begin further to the left had its stutter outside of the printing range. I had all the clues I needed, but no reliable way to fix it. And it was bargain basement junk anyway.
It worked that way for months and months. Not exactly production quality, but I didn’t do production.
Then one day it died completely.
I drew that face on post-it note, stuck it to the printer and started sending my print jobs somewhere else.
Paul Crowley Youngstown Ohio
This photo is a remarkably good one considering. It belongs to a collection of very crappy photos from the 1980’s. When I lived in Gaithersburg, I used to ride my bike down to the railroad tracks. As a teenager, I wasn’t particularly sure what I wanted to take photos of. I was just scanning around for something interesting. And, what looks interesting to the eye is not necessarily interesting printed. Any marginally good photographer has learned to compensate for this. I’m tempted to call it “pre-emphasis”. All image creation has to be artificial. Viewers won’t see what is there if it is simply recorded - they have to be shown something emblematic to see truth, but they can just as easily be manipulated into seeing something false in the process. Photos are no substitute for ‘being there’, and to think that they can be is clearly naive. But it’s also possible that you haven’t discovered that for yourself yet.
So here we have the young, naive me, snapping away at railroad tracks, trains passing by, track-maintenance equipment, and the extremely nondescript track-side architecture… Then one day I take an actual portrait. Albeit a corporate logo, ‘signed’ by a bystander three states away. Was he even in Ohio when he made his mark? Or was he tramping the rails like some depression-era hobo? I have no doubt that the graffiti struck me that day as particularly literate and legible. It is indistinguishable in mode from an artist’s signature, as if Paul here was taking credit for the thing. Did they fabricate those rail cars in Youngstown somewhere? Did Paul do this at the factory. I doubt it, but it’s a poetic thought. The mark is fresher than the paint job, that much is easy to see.
Maybe this isn’t the first good photograph I ever took, but I think there is a good chance that it is. I recognize it as a photo I would take today, given the opportunity. It shows the industrial decay that I forget even interested me that long ago. If anything, I’m not so different now because I haven’t been paying close attention.
Aside from the obvious adding of more photos… Wait: Adding more photos is the problem.
Vanessa remarked “Finally some organization for the photos…”, but I don’t see that at all. I see my folder of ~3500 photos, and I don’t think of organization. But, there are an astronomical number of different ways such a collection could be organized. I won’t consider them all, it’s a waste of time.
I’ve also been looking at a lot of photographer’s sites on the web for inspiration - both in the taking of photographs and in the presentation. A lot of these sites are flash-heavy, which is always a bit discouraging to me. If you’ve got the resources, then hey - knock yourself out - but, that kind of excitement is probably just going to overheat my computer.
This is one of my favorites so far: Zeynep Öztayinci - I’m a fan of the print textures there in particular, whereas I might expect to find them annoying in other images.
I wouldn’t look for such a total solution, since I’m not only a photographer - but it might not be so bad under a different domain name to call more attention the photos specifically.
XML
Although I abandoned an attempt at using XML the first time around, I can see it out there on the horizon, beckoning me. And, this is why: Hierarchy, plain and simple. There are going to be themed sets. As I add more photos, I am going to benefit from having a sensible framework.
The XML option serves two masters well: The Interface and the Database. What you see today on the gallery page was simply an expedient. I simply haven’t prepared very many photos yet for that format. I need a system to annotate the photos, perhaps with category tags - that suggests a database. I’m tired of naming the image files, but I don’t want to leave them with the original filenames the camera assigns - that also suggests a database.
I knew why I wanted to index the pictures in an XML file - because I can write scripts to dump the database to an XML file, and with a small collection I can write the file by hand as I pin down the finer points of the design. Unfortunately, the Javascript code to read the little file I wrote wasn’t working - and I couldn’t see why not.
So the current direction is to rewrite what I have and pin down that XML format. Books on my shelf like “Document Design” or “Service Oriented Architecture” might help. We’ll see…
I went looking to crib some slideshow javascript code, but I wasn’t happy with anything I found. After a while it just seemed like I was wasting a perfectly good opportunity to reinvent my own wheel by spending all day reading about wheel theory.
First, I had to start a collection of photos in a medium-sized format. That was fun: I recorded some macros to resize and matte portrait and landscape aspects to a square. Choosing from among thousands of my photographs was not as easy. That will be the continuing struggle.
Next, with a few photos prepared, I went to work on stylesheets: A page title banner, a container for the current photo, and left & right navigation buttons. I tweaked the positions until I thought it looked good. Then, it was back to photoshop to craft some images for the banner and navigation. Every so often, I would make a small change that would wreck everything, and sometimes it was a minor keystroke error - like “i” for “l”, which is a bit hard to distinguish in the screen font I’m using.
Then it was on to the Javascript. If there were one way to do it, I’d be in luck, but as the design took shape in my head (what, did you think I planned it out in advance? such a small thing? well - you’re right - I should have), I kept contradicting myself and combining incompatible strategies. Every great new idea meant backtracking to redo much of what I had completed… only do discover that my new idea didn’t work. It almost sounds like the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. I would commit myself to an idea until it proved absurd, then finally admit defeat and start working on a different idea.
The data is part of the problem: Somewhere in the middle of the process, I tried rolling my own XML file and writing and AJAX call into the Javascript, but I lost control over the ability to verify what I was doing - in other words, I would be flying blind. When it didn’t work, I didn’t have much recourse to debug the thing… So, I was back to storing the filenames and captions in an Array. This could still be pulled out into a separate file: It’s always nice to tease these things apart for editing - but this particular strength becomes something of a weakness when you need to do a lot of cross referencing among associated files.
Well, I think the results look pretty good. Any changes I make to it now can be little cosmetic stylesheet alterations. The best part about a slideshow is that not all the photos must be loaded immediately with the page. The size of the page is minuscule, and each photo is of modest size.
Now it’s back to preparing some good photos. From out of about four thousand. Don’t worry: most of those are duds.
I was once very happy with Typo, the program that this blog runs on. Now, I’m not so sure. It installed nicely, I loaded a design template I liked from their menu, and daily operations are straightforward… I even teased apart the template and made some modifications.
Typo is written in Ruby on Rails. It’s not plain old Ruby - it’s Ruby with a whole lot of predefined extras. I heard it was supposed to be powerful and easy. I’ll admit that it’s powerful. When I first went to the bookstore to look at Ruby books, they practically all covered Ruby on Rails. And when I looked inside the books, the code samples were complete gibberish. It seemed like a lot of overhead. We’re no longer talking about a little handy scripting.
Imagine rock climbing. Looking for hand holds, working your way up inch by inch. That’s learning for you.
But now, imagine trying to climb a wall of polished marble. Hmmm…. You don’t learn much staring at that glossy surface.
Ahem… now, I have what seems to be a very simple change to make. But, I’m feeling… fettered. My ideas run right into that polished marble.
Sidebar
All of these pages have the tools on the right side. Right now that includes categories, my photo, the book basket, hyperlinks, and the monthly archives. This masks a complicated system of ‘widgets’ that I can choose to include. One of these widgets is a block of static text. That’s a bit strange: I thought for sure that I would be able to arrange multiple chunks of static text - It might be nice to shuffle those chunks into the pre-fab widgets.
My idea is to have the ‘book basket’ tie into a book database. Clearly there is a way to do this. But when I look at the page template - which is very abstract, by the way - there is a single line to render that sidebar:
Isn’t that just a thing of beauty? this ‘render component’ function expects to see an associative array with a ‘controller’ and a corresponding ‘action’. This is the part that I understand.
The problem is that it’s basically meaningless. I have no idea where any of these associations are defined. The concept is clear, but the implementation is a complete mystery. It probably associates to another embedded ruby page. With yet another function call. Marvelous. I hunt through the server directories and find very little to go on.
When I look at the Typo web site, I don’t see any documentation for the structure. That’s disconcerting. A manual that I can’t read is marginally better than no manual at all.
Today I met my librarian friend Elizabeth for lunch in Dupont Circle. She works in the library at The Society of the Cincinnati. Elizabeth is one of the nicest and kindest people I know. Yeah, I’ve seen her get angry or frustrated plenty of times - she worked for a stretch in the old bookstore, then with us in the office doing data entry - but she hardly has a mean bone in her body. She grasped quite quickly who I was and what my talents were, and she also connected naturally with the idea that most of us had the bookstore as a safe haven. With the loss of that safe haven, one of her first thoughts was to worry about me, and what I would do next. This sort of consideration is like bright sunshine for me after working for years in a dark basement at a computer screen.
I have no desire to stop working, or indulge in leisure. I also hardly have the savings for that. People who guess at my situation and predict that I should take a break are misreading me. The best tonic for me is to redouble my efforts on the kinds of work I enjoy. I ought to have more of a puritan work ethic, and I would prefer to focus that ethic on a new set of things. But it is first necessary to survey the landscape: I build on my skills relentlessly. I have always been adventurous in my mind, if not out in the world. Elizabeth and I agreed that now is the time for optimism. All along, with the bookstore or without it, we are living in a turbulent time. It can seem a weird coincidence that one small business should fail at this moment in macroeconomic history, but I say it is simply emblematic: The people spending money on books are the same ones now facing their own uncertainties. Their reluctance to spend is no accident, and it chokes every retailer stretched to the limit, counting on that revenue. If you believe in Schumpeter’s “Creative Destruction”, this is both tragedy and opportunity: Isn’t this the world’s way of communicating, invisible-handily, that it doesn’t want those bookstores? And, so it raises the question of what: What does the world want instead? To those of us who love books - and it’s a bit more complicated than that for me - it feels like a personal insult, but there must be beautiful worlds we may now create instead. For Elizabeth it’s a library, for me it’s also something to do with how people share what they know - the Internet, obviously. But, more than the tubes themselves, a way of balancing our lives and sharing the best of what we know. One of the simple things I can do right away is lend my services in web programming. And step one is to make new contacts. If I can support myself on freelance work, I can continue building my portfolio and work to my own peculiar tastes.
So we sat down together to eat pizza…
We were both mildly hampered by our hangovers. She had a story about a date last night with a French guy and wine with his rowdy friends. I had another night of watching presidential debates - the vices this time - over Oktoberfest beer at the Reef. Elizabeth had not seen either of the debates and wanted my opinion. They have trained Palin well: I didn’t notice a rout. There were times when a grin came across Biden’s face in reaction to something Palin said, and it pained him to have to wait for his turn to rebut her. But I didn’t find her nearly as ridiculous as she is accused of being.
Elizabeth didn’t know about the testimonials page on the Olsson’s web site, and when I mentioned it, she was curious about what people were saying. I was happy to report that it was mostly positive. There was a lot of outrage over the general economic climate threaded through many of the comments. I feel proud to be part of something that would give so many people such good memories.
Once lunch was over, Elizabeth suggested I come back to see her library. It is quite a place: The Society is housed in one of Dupont Circle’s great mansions - the home of Lars Anderson, Harvard Graduate and career diplomat. The library is very nice: Down a narrow flight of stairs I wasn’t sure what I would encounter, but it was ultra-modern. I got a the round of introductions and we talked more about the demise of Olsson’s with the library’s director. But, more importantly, we talked about the possibility of freelance work for me - I got the sense that web site maintenance is not Elizabeth’s primary responsibility, and that there must be ways to help her streamline her maintenance tasks. This is exactly what I was just doing in my old job. She was adding photo gallery pages from recent events, but they are all full sized high resolution images. Those pages take a long time to load. Clearly, they need to be resized - and a slide-show script wouldn’t hurt either. And, finally, a representative thumbnail for each event in the list would do wonders. I got a sense of her workflow, then tried to set her up with a different ftp client, but we couldn’t get a login on the first try. Eventually, I had to let her get on with doing it the hard way so she could have any hope of finishing it in a day.
So then I took a guided tour of the mansion. It is opulent to say the least. One double staircase was measured to fit an enormous painting of the crowning of a Venetian Doge (hmmm… actually it was the Doge’s wife who was being crowned…). There were Billiard rooms, Music halls, Drawing rooms in French and English styles. There were paintings, tapestries, sculpture and curio cases. Enough Japanese screens for their own exhibit - and an expert is coming to give a talk about them next month. Wherever walls were bare of art objects, the walls themselves were painted with allegories. The breakfast room with a replica of the view of the garden from their house in Brookline, Massachusetts. Every room had a distinctive marble patterned floor, and I’ve never seen so much carved wood all in one place. Members stay in the bedroom suites - there is one for each of the thirteen original colonies - but the Georgia room was unoccupied and we got to take a look.
So all told, it was a wonderful excursion. Hopefully a rejuvenating experience.
I can’t pinpoint the reason for it, but communication is often painfully time consuming. I have spent so much time listening to voicemail messages, talking on the phone and reading or writing emails over the past few days. It is hard for me to imagine being any more in-touch than I am now: When would I have time to DO anything?
I set up an account on Twitter a few months back, so I could leave ‘tweets’ online about what I was doing at any given moment. It’d be nice if I were say… locked up in an Egyptian prison. But without a web-enabled phone, I’d be stuck typing on my laptop at all times. That’d be all the tweets, with the self-referentiality of:
"Still at home. Still writing tweets."
"Wi-Fi went down, walked to kitchen, cycled power to the router, drank a swig of Pepsi."
How are these people still productive? They are not like me.
It’s been a frantic day today, my nose to the virtual grindstone. I had a lot of impending work hanging over me, and when I couldn’t move on any other task, I worked on the PHP code for my event schedule editor - I’m trying to anticipate all the things that could go wrong.
The office move is postponed, but that’s okay - we hadn’t planned it out yet anyway. Now maybe we will. Regardless of planning, the Verizon tech arrived downtown to wire up the new phone jacks. But, really, it looks like I’ll need a dialup line or two for EDI ordering, faxes, modem call in for the shut-instelecommuters without a Telnet setup. All in good time.
Somehow through it all, I was able to read two good articles on-line:
Here comes $500 oil - Is it irresponsible of Fortune to pick that title? Come now, it’s downright panic-inducing. I wasn’t driven to panic, since I’ve been reading about Peak Oil for years now. At least this guy is part of the Oil Industry. He doesn’t get off topic like a lot of people I read on this subject, so that’s refreshing. Here’s some sober advice:
“…as a society, we don’t have the ability to actually come to grips with a crisis until it’s hit us in the face. I am discouraged enough now to think that we’re going to have to have a really nasty shock before we wake people up.”
He also said the Senator McCain is clueless on energy policy.
The End: Have We Reached The End of Book Publishing As We Know It? - I just love reading about the demise of publishing. But seriously folks, there is some nostalgia for the past paired with at least one imprint that is trying to change the rules and adapt. I was happy about the theme of huge corporations rushing in to buy everything only to be disappointed at the results. They catch a whiff of money and come running.
One of my regular customers wanted a book I can’t get anymore. It might be back in stock soon, but who can tell? My distributor shows it “on order”, but that sometimes masks a title that is effectively Out of Print. Publishers won’t easily declare a book Out of Print - and I assume the rumors I have heard are true - because the rights will revert, the contract expire. Maybe the author can shop it around at that point - I just don’t know. Maybe soon I’ll be trying to get my books published. (Whoa… Hang on there, tough guy - gotta write ‘em first!)
But, this customer forgot whether she asked me to cancel the order. I’ve been wanting to draft something to send out the whole group - those who order on line for store pickup - to let them know that I’ve abandoned the old search system on the web site, but haven’t been able to replace it with anything yet. When I sent the link to the title in question on Amazon, she replied “To me, there is no Amazon!”. Now, that’s the spirit… But, although it runs counter to my organization, I have to insist that Amazon does in fact exist, and that there may be the occasional item that you know you want but just can’t obtain it at your favorite local store. By all means, shop in real stores, but when the tine is right, rely on all your available resources.
In other dead-tree news: I finished “Simplexity”, and I’m almost finished with “The Drunkard’s Walk”. DW has a pretty good explanation of Randomness, and I might try to push it on a non-mathematical friend. In the meantime, it made me covet O’Reilly’s new statistics book even more: “Statistics in a Nutshell”, or however those nutshell guides’ titles go.
I’ve got stacks more to read, and I’m feeling guilty for not reading more new books. I’ve really got my work cut out for me…
The design and operation of the Olsson’s Website has been all mine for some time now. I believe that I probably have the skills to streamline it, but there is one important reason why I have not done so: The inner workings of the site are too often practical expedients, reflecting how management handed me one directive after another.
That website is a major item in my portfolio. And yet it is deeply flawed because we never attempted to clean house and give it the sense of purpose it deserved - that it might have had if things were different. Several times I figured out how to enforce a new rubric on stylesheets, or form validation, or server scripting, but it was never a top-down realignment. Just a grab bag of techniques that I was able to teach myself.
I have come to believe that it makes perfect sense to have a vague website when you’re trying to represent a vague business. There’s nothing terribly wrong with the business model, but as the years have gone by, “business as usual” became gradually more precarious. My dream for the place - which has been pushed too far back in my head by the ‘powers that be’ - is that tools like the website are not a passive reflection of the business, but a lever to actively propagate clarity back into the core of that business.
