Baltimore Squirrels

Enterprisy:

A system that, with the right tools and considerable effort, can be made to do just about anything, but cannot do any one thing well, with any simplicity or with any elegance. Java and Windows are common examples of enterprisy systems.

Via Dark Roasted Blend

From the WSJ

But Gov. Palin’s claim comes with a serious caveat. She endorsed the multimillion dollar project during her gubernatorial race in 2006. And while she did take part in stopping the project after it became a national scandal, she did not return the federal money. She just allocated it elsewhere.

A reader response to the TPM story I just linked to:

The McCain campaign wanted to frame this election on experience, but had to abandon that when the polls didn’t move. The surge issue has likewise attracted no great interest. Although McCain continues to discuss it, as a theme, he has ditched it in favor of this murky “change/reform” theme. (By selecting Sarah Palin, the campaign has officially ceded the point.) This all works to Obama’s advantage because if the discussion becomes one of change, it must necessarily shift to policy–the last place McCain wants to go. But he’s backed himself into a corner.

Good points…

Primal Scream

Polls aside though, I continue to see a campaign in which the McCain camp has a consistent and aggressive message. They’re constantly on the attack and largely defining the debate. The Obama campaign is largely reactive, parrying the attacks — sometimes rapid response, sometimes slower response, but defined largely by response. It seemed that way to me in July, in August and it seems that way to me now.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

This worked well for the GOP in 2004 as well, and I fear it may continue to work this year. These Rove-esque tactics basically boil down to constructing an artificial reality based around a few talking points, and repeating those points until everyone either believes your reality or has heard about it enough to understand how it works.

Two quick hacking projects today:

1. A plugin for Ubiquity (which I mentioned previously) that allows you to interface with Todoist. At the moment you have to hand-code your account token and a project id from the Todoist site, but you can already create quick notes by typing todo reorganize office in Ubiquity.

1. ExtraHead, a tiny plugin for Wordpress. I’m sure this functionality exists elsewhere in the Wordpress world, but I couldn’t find it after 10 minutes of Googling so I wrote a plugin. ExtraHead just makes it easy to insert arbitrary code into a page header, on a page-by-page basis. Just add a custom field with the key extrahead and whatever code you want in the header as the value.

I’m stuck somewhere between “poignant” and “funny”.

(via Sharon.)

Providing direct ways for non-technical content creators to edit web pages has been a dilemma since the dawn of the web. Indeed the larger problem, exposing powerful formatting and layout abilities without also exposing complex and cryptic presentation formulas, must realistically occupy a reasonably large percentage of everything we task personal computers for. The problem is complex, and a complete solution has not yet been found, but there are a number of powerful and elegant alternatives at our disposal. I’m going briefly discuss two options, embedded rich text editors and lightweight markup languages.

Embedded Rich Text Editors

The technologies the web relies upon have steadily advanced, new more powerful tools have been created, and thanks to the ever-enduring Moore’s law we can squeeze a great deal of functionality into a web page. There was a time when embedding a rich text editor in a page was an excessive and extravagant feat, yet today there are a plethora of simple ways to do it. TinyMCE and FCKEditor are the most popular, but many others exist (including the impressive YUI editor which I did not know about until today).

Embedded rich text editors are great tools but they may not be suitable for the discerning geek. In general these editors have a reputation for creating messy and verbose source code. How important this really is has been and will be a subject of debate for some time, but there is no question that clean, standards-compliant code is a good thing to have. When it comes down to it, I tend to think that if you can do something the right way with a reasonable amount of effort, why sacrifice correctness for a little bit of convenience?

Lightweight Markup Languages

When HTML is too verbose or complex for what you really need to accomplish, and rich text editors don’t give you the quality of code you’re looking for, you’re left with lightweight markup languages.

There are a number of different approaches to lightweight markup, in fact if you follow the Wikipedia link above you’ll possibly find more than you really care to know about, but there are only two that have emerged as the preferred choices among the current generation of web developers: Textile and Markdown. Markdown is great, but for the sake of this article I’m going to focus my attention on Textile, which is currently my favorite.

Textile relies on simple markup that is easy to edit in a plain text editor, or a simple textarea on a web form. A major benefit of Textile is that it is also easy to read in it’s unprocessed form, so editing it is relatively painless and not nearly as confusing as editing raw HTML. The syntax is easy to pick up, and new users can typically start authoring comment with very little introduction.

Here is a quick example of Textile code:

h3. Sample

This is a sample paragraph, complete with *bold* text, _italic_ text,
+underlined+ text and even a "link to google":http://google.com/.

For kicks, here is a second paragraph.

And this is what it looks like when displayed:

For a complete list of Textile samples view the example-based reference.

One of it’s greatest strengths, Textile adds a great deal in the way of proper typography. For most of the web, trademark symbols are left as TM, hyphens are substituted for en-dashes and “dumb” quotes are used instead of smart quotes. With Textile these nuances of type are easy to handle with very little effort. A (TM) is automatically converted to ™, a single hyphen is converted to an en-dash (two hyphens for an em-dash), and straight quotes around phrases are converted to smart quotes. With minimal effort you get a significantly more professional result.

Conclusion

Lightweight markup is not without it’s shortcomings. Rich text editors often provide enough visual aides to get people going with little or no introduction, and as I stated before the value of clean HTML in a web page is sometimes debated. In addition, the nature of rich text editors leaves the door open for more powerful features, such as built-in flickr browser or point-and-click YouTube video embedding. All the same, for most tasks, for most sites, I believe that lightweight markup languages are the best option.

Links of Interest

• Textile:
  • Wikipedia entry
  • Homepage and playground
  • Example-based reference
• Textile Alternatives
  • Markdown
  • reStructuredText
• Embedded Rich Text Editors
  • Kupu
  • TinyMCE
  • FCKEditor
  • YUI Rich Text Editor

I’ve decided I need to make a video game, probably for the iPhone, of my little bumble bee. I’m going to call it Clumsy Bumble and gameplay will consist of tilting the phone around to navigate a bumble bee through a series of poorly drawn obstacles. There will be a faint but constant buzzing sound, not real buzzing mind you, more of a little buzzy song, something along the lines of “buzz buzzy buzz buzz buzzzzzzzz buzzy buzzy” (lyrics not finalized). The buzzing will stop when the bumble hits something, replaced by a pathetic shriek and the end of the bumble.

That’s one option. Another is to have a side-scroller (also with a buzz song and pathetic bumble bee shrieks) that requires tapping on enemies (creepy bugs, drawn by Jess on a napkin some booze-inspired evening a while back) at which point the bumble will destroy the target with laser beams from it’s eyes. As targets are destroyed, the bumble will emit a little giggle or if something goes wrong, a sad sound of disappointment.

I think the bumble will be named Claude, Claude the Clumsy Bumble. There will be merchandise too, plush Claudes, coffee mugs and toddler onesies.

That’s the plan anyway…

Jon Stewart held an informal breakfast chat with some of the biggest names in journalism a few days ago, the theme more-or-less summed up in the title of this post. The Indecision 2008 blog has it covered in three parts (click, click and click). Pity the event wasn’t recorded…