Ryan's Journal

I watched The Book of Eli. Here's what I saw: Oakley, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Anheuser-Busch, J. Crew. The movie was made decently, though it's a bit too much like Children of Men, down to a doomed, bleeding man rowing a boat, but with Theo being the black one and bearing the metaphorical child. Children of Men was much better.

As inappropriate product placement central and pale mimicry may indicate, this movie was designed by marketers. It's meant to beg for repeated viewing (to increase ticket sales), and it's aimed straight at the sizable crowd that thinks stamping their faith phrases and concepts on something suddenly makes it celebratory and worth blindly supporting, no matter (or especially because of?) how violent it is (to increase ticket sales).

It's a bit like putting Bible verses on military weapons with the additional goal of selling more of them.

Just in case that's too opaque: this movie was terrible. Please offset the cost of my seeing it by not seeing it.

Typical government. Late and hypocritical to the extreme.

Edit: let me amend this slightly and note that despite the ruinous behavior of past administrations towards Haiti, including President Clinton's, people can change. Neither of these figureheads have the power to negatively impact Haiti now as private individuals as they had as president, so perhaps some good can come from this policy about face. Still - it's not the ground they occupied when they had the chance to make a difference.

As Haiti and the international community begin the long, complicated recovery process in the aftermath of a severe earthquake, those of us nowhere near the epicenter have limited venues for rendering aid, mostly in the way of materials and money. We don't have the specialized training, the time to lend our inexperienced thoughts or actual hands, neither do we have materials that would be of use during a disaster in a Caribbean climate - and so we look to our wallets.

And again the evergreen problem of giving. To whom? To a clearinghouse of good repute? But those have necessary administrative overheads and a potential remove from knowing which actual needs to fund. A specific organization with a narrow focus? They may not be all that useful in an earthquake ravaged Haiti. They may not know enough about Haiti or have any staff or partners who can communicate fluently in Haitian Creole. And disaster relief is something of a specialty, not everyone can bring their skill into a high stress region where what modern infrastructure existed before has been severely strained and broken.

How do you choose? For all the charity watchers like GuideStar and the all-too-weighty recommendations of mass media, how can you be sure their recommendations are really trustworthy? How would you know, for instance, that Partners in Health has decades of experience and reputation in Haiti along with medical facilities outside of Port-au-Prince?

Before I leap into an overly tech idea, I will note that the best way to assist in disaster relief is to help ensure the foundations are laid down during times of peace, and that some of the best options for assisting a charity involve regular donations.

Onwards. It's been interesting to note that at each major natural disaster, a lot of activity springs up on the internet as wired folks stamp in frustration at their own remove and try to formulate ways in which technology can help. I'd like to see some charities start to publish their own lifecycle assessment data - information on how much money they take in and on what - and most importantly - to whom it goes on its way out, along with some sense of what happens to it in the hands of its partners. In addition, some concrete measure of their accomplishments in light of organizational goals. I'd find that level of transparency in a charity attractive. Given independent auditing and good indicators, it would definitely help me to assess where a donation would go, and I'm guessing it would be of use to others. A major weakness, it probably takes more work than it's worth. If a charity doesn't already go to such lengths to quantify its activities, and I'm guessing most don't want to spend any more overhead on such a task, there just won't be that much data out there. Well, I can dream.

Starting in 2005 and continuing into subsequent years, I went to the trouble of gathering and visualizing what was happening in my mail universe. After getting to a point where I can now stream data into an online graph, I got less interested. I found out what I needed to know to configure the system properly. Spam management has reached a nearly optimal point for me. I see it rarely, I need to pull out false positives from the garbage even more rarely, not anywhere nearly enough to invest more energy into infrastructure. I'm sure the spam world will continue to evolve and cost us overmuch in resource expenditures, and I'm glad there are folks out there who still want to fight this battle, but because it now consumes so little of my own time, I pay a lot less attention, and it would be ever so nice if the trend continued.

The graph has some interesting things to show with the highest spike in my own spam, ever, coming in early May, and for once, the daily volume at the end of the year appears to be on a downward trend to a level comparable to the beginning of the year. There was a lot of variability; I thought I heard rumblings of culpable ISPs being shut down and the like. I didn't listen much.

I guess that's kind of where that hobby lies now. The major concerns for my realms of responsibility are how to interact with big players like Google and Yahoo without running afoul of their own spam prevention measures. So long as fools keep making the operations of spammers a profitable one, our open communications system will slowly gather more hairballs and dust bunnies, clouding its original open nature. I do hope the wondrous future brings us something better. In the meantime, down with spammers, and three cheers for the hard work of anti-spammers everywhere.

Maybe one of the drawbacks of open source software you can modify into behaving the way you want is an extra drag of keeping those modifications up to date. At the beginning of the month, Thunderbird, my mail client of choice, released version 3.0, two and three-quarters years after version 2.0 was first released. I believe their plan is to release more often, but hopefully the long interim between 2.0 and 3.0 brought the API to a stable point that doesn't require quite as much change on developers' parts with each release.

I keep most of my extensions available on addons.mozilla.org, which tells me I have around 40,000 downloads for the software, not counting downloads from my site and from other third-party re-publishers. Four are now up to date, though not all have been editorially reviewed and published to that effect:

• FolderFlags to modify settings on folders
• ConfirmFolderMove to prompt the user in case a folder is dragged as if to make an expensive change in its location
• Spamness to view SpamAssassin scoring
• ManualJunkAction to redirect user marked spam to a separate custom folder

And now there's a new one to join the ranks: SortPref, to allow changing defaults regarding message sorting. I prefer to sort chronologically so the newest message is at the top; this helps me accomplish that and allows me to change my mind easily later.

The most technical part for the end. Here's how to extract any entities from a XUL file and prepare a blank DTD for filling in strings that correspond to the entities from the command line:

% cat FILE | grep '\&' |perl -pe '/^.*(&.*;).*$/; print $1 . "\n";'|egrep -v ' '|sed -e 's/&//' -e 's/;//' |xargs -I% echo \<\!ENTITY % \"\"\> > FILE.dtd