My Blogger Pipeline

For the past couple of years, I’ve been uncomfortable with the notion of Google watching my every thought as I type into a draft on the Blogger site. (Since a post whose working title was “VPNs are hard,” apparently.)

As a coder, everything can be solved with the code-hammer, so I wrote 7 KB of PHP. Now, I can write locally in Markdown, then run markup-menu.php.  This is a stupidly simple program that takes a unique filename prefix, finds the matching *.md file, and passes it to the much larger markup.php.

That program takes a file, preprocesses the Markdown a bit for compatibility with Blogger’s “preserve line breaks” setting, and post-processes the resulting HTML to iron out a few more quirks.  That file can be copypasta’d into Blogger.

Once there, it gets Blogger dressing like tags, then I click Preview.  If nothing’s wrong, it gets posted, as if it sprang fully formed from my head into Blogger.

Server Cleanup

Some stuff on sapphirepaw.org has been 404’d into the dustbin of history. Pretty much everything from before 2010 is gone now, much of it ‘unlisted.’ Stuff like bug reports on pre-Blink Opera and PHP 5.2, pictures from events I attended and talks I gave, and my wallpaper section. The latter was built as a demo/learning PHP app, and it turned out to be really timely in 2005. It was something I could point at and say, “I built that in PHP/MySQL,” right when I was looking for my first tech job. But it’s not something I’ve been at all interested in updating since—either code or data—so I removed it.

Along with those changes, the remaining pages are static now. I used to have a tiny little framework that wrapped page content with header, navigation, and footer, configured by a little PHP block in the source, then served the page. But there’s no real need to render that on every request, so I turned the framework into a static site generator. All the links get rewritten, too. The PHP URLs still work, but the server simply issues redirections to the static pages.

There was one hitch to the main process: libxml2 (PHP's DOMDocument->loadHTML()) doesn't recognize HTML5, only HTML 4.0. I had to figure out how to use the Masterminds HTML5 parser instead.

There was one page I wanted to keep (for now) that was dealing with more dynamic content, and that was termitheme’s themes.php page. That had to be converted to SQLite for the site builder to use local data instead of a MySQL connection.

I finally deleted all the old themes and graphics from /css, too, because my sense of design has matured along with the capabilities of CSS over the years. Would I ever resurrect the deep blue theme of years past? It would look dated. I'd have to design a new, modern theme (merely inspired by the old one) anyway.

Just a dream

Last night, I was dreaming that they took all the special variables out of perl because they’re too powerful… everything like $_ and $. and $[.  Basically, all of perlvar was completely removed from the language.

Except, if you knew where to look for it, this one was still there.  You assigned a function to it and it became a handle for modifying Reality itself.  I linked it to tr/[a-z]/[A-Z]/ and pushed the frame of it over the plate-glass window of the bank, and the gold-foil lettering announcing the name of the bank*, indeed, changed to uppercase.

Then I woke up, as I realized that they had left the power in there for their own ends, and would probably kill unauthorized users…


* It was a long, overdone, corporate-flavored name like “Actual Bank of the United States of America, A Global Services Marketplace Group Company” (where "Actual Bank" is the name of a real bank, but not Bank of America.)

iPad vs. Tablet PC

One of them succumbed to death by risk-aversion.

One of them couldn't let go of the tether and fly.

I think Linus said the same of svn: paraphrased, "If you're trying to make 'a better CVS' then you have already lost, because CVS is too broken to fix."

Hey, sapphirepaw: make sure what you do is good on its own, not "an X only different".

Steve Jobs

I'm getting old: if I were to pass on at the same age Jobs did, my life would be more than half over already.

What separates me from Jobs?  There's the matter of leverage, where he could take his vision and coordinate the prototyping and development of it, into the iPod, the iPhone, the Macbook Air, the iPad.  There's also the matter of having vision.

In 2006 or so, I beheld my first iPod in real life, an old (FireWire based) model with a physical click-wheel.  In 2008 I picked up a different, small MP3 player and for the first time, immediately noticed the limitations of digital control.  Without having handled the iPod and getting a feel for the analog response of the wheel, I probably wouldn't have given the buttons a second thought.  Do you want to scroll on the generic?  Click-click-click-click.  Or click-and-hold, guess at how long you need to go (since the screen is slow enough to be unreadable at this scrolling speed, and they don't slow updates to compensate), and release.

The point here is, Jobs saw humans as inherently analog, and adapted all of his machines to analog control.  It's a simple thing, but Jobs was apparently devoted to HCI.  The "vision" simply falls out of that.

It's not like the limitations of digital control weren't apparent in the 1980s.  Compare Rad Racer to a real car's steering wheel.  Anyone focused on "how it feels" could have been Jobs back then, inventing 2010 in the 16-bit era instead of carrying 8-bit paradigms through the 1990s.

In contrast, I seem to lack vision because I'm busy implementing arbitrarily complex business rules at work, and staying away from the bleeding edge of gadgetry.  I'm not in the consumer space; I'm not taking any research toward the consumer space; and I'm not thinking about what's next for it, either (at least, not beyond what turns out to actually be the next thing*.)  But, I'm also having little impact on the wider world, writing code that never leaves the house.  It's important, but after I am gone, will these be the best years of my life?  Will I think college was the best time of my life, forever?

I think it's time to put my free time to better use and do something instead of watching the world slowly develop towards Jobs' vision on its own.


* I have a dead draft which discusses the crazy idea of "having a set-top box inside the remote" in 2006 or so.  It then points out that h.264-over-wifi ought to handle the bandwidth to do exactly that from your iPhone now.  It starts fleshing out what would be necessary to make it happen, then abruptly ends with a note: "Two days after I started writing this, Apple announced AirPlay."

Groupthink

I don't fit in; I never have.  Some of it is by my choice, but in the tech communities that I've found, I still don't fit in, and I've often wondered why.  It seems the short answer is right there in my blog description: "Frequently contrarian and occasionally cynical."