April 2004 Archives

It worked at home on my non-firewalled system. Different network access, also (WiFi at home, Bluetooth at work). Who knows what's wrong? I don't, but I'll try again tomorrow.

Joan Ryan has a very interesting article in the Chron about the California Youth Authority (California's prison system for those under 18). One bit stood out for me. The CYA has a 90% recidivism rate. Let me repeat that so it really sinks in - 9 in 10 of the children sentenced to jail time at CYA commit another crime. It's almost unbelievable. There can only be two possible reasons for this. The first is that kids sentenced to CYA are already career criminals. The second is that CYA at best has no impact on the youths and at worst actually pushes them to become lifelong criminals. I think it's closer to the latter, and here's why.

CYA is prison for kids. Up to 23 hours of each day are spent in lockdown, in cells. No attempt is made to understand why the child committed the crime or to in any way rehabilitate the child. Missouri's youth prison program is the polar opposite. They focus on intensive individual and family counseling, academic and vocational education, and behavior modification. The recidivism rate in Missouri is 30%.

It's the same story everywhere. It's shortsighted to punish, rather than teach. True, while they are locked up these kids won't be committing any crimes, but the same is true under Missouri's system.

It's like the old saying, "Give a man a fish, and you've fed him for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." We need to teach these kid s how to behave, how to be productive members of society. By doing this, we are protecting ourselves. Punishment alone cannot do this.

Why is there any question about renewing the assault weapons ban? Private citizens shouldn't have those types of weapons, neither for that matter, should anyone other than soldiers.

Assault weapons have one use - to kill many people quickly. When, besides in war, is that ever a true need?

Some claim that any regulation of firearms leads us down the path of over regulation, contravening the second amendment. That's clearly not a real issue. Speech, while protected by the first amendment, is regulated in many ways,yet we still haven't lost our rights to free speech.

Perhaps we could look to drunk driving as an analogy. Just like the typical gun owner, a driver has a dangerous instrument (43,220 people died in car accidents in 2003). When someone drinks, and then drives,he is a danger to himself and others, so we have made drunk driving a crime. Now, even if you have not hurt someone, you can be charged with the crime of driving under the influence. The same should be true of assault rifles - since they are more dangerous than other guns, they should be regulated.

I take BART everyday back and forth to work. Some days I work, some days I read, some days I write, and some days I sleep. Today I slept because I stayed up too late and had to get up early.

Think back to the last time you did that and had to drive to work. Remember the extra large coffee you drank? Remember yelling at someone else in traffic? I do.

I love mass transit.

As I noted last week, I'm evaluating mo:Blog as a tool to help me blog on my PDA.

I took it home over the weekend, intent to try to use it on my home network. I set it up, including removing the proxy setting that I need to sync from work. I never tried to use it, though.

Also, sometime in the last week I upgraded to the most recent mo:Blog, version 1.4.

Today, when I tried to sync, it failed, giving me a very obtuse error "Error: HTTP-(-1,3)". So, there are two possibilities - the first, the update to mo:Blog hosed something. Second, I haven't gotten my network settings properly configured.

I'm willing to bet that it's my fault, but without a better error message, or documentation about error messages, I can't figure out what the problem is. If I don't get a response to my email about this problem, I'll probably stop using mo:Blog.

For those of you that, like me, work in software, remember this - help users recover from errors! Software is complex, and people are more complex. Things are going to go wrong. Prepare for them.

HaloScan offers a free tool that enables bloggers to have feedback and trackbacks on their blogs. I'm trying it out. Let me know what you think.

PostgreSQL works like a charm with JDeveloper. There is only one trick.

When starting postmaster, make sure you use the -i options. The JDBC driver requires this.

The Examiner had an opinion piece on the effect of Gay marriage that was well written, but fundamentally flawed (I couldn't find the piece online, but I found a similar, longer one written by the same author for the Weekly Standard). The writer, Stanley Kurtz, says that we should look at the effect Gay marriage has had in Scandinavia to see what effect it may have on the US. Kurtz lists many things facts about the changes in families in Norway, but they all boil down to one point - there are more couples having children before they get married , especially in the more conservative areas of Norway.

Accepting for the moment Kurtz's premise that being the child of a cohabitating but unmarried couple is a less desirable than being the child of a married couple, he in no way shows a connection between gay marriage and this change. He does make the point that there are probably multiple causes, but dismisses them saying those factors are in effect throughout the West, but that's faulty logic. Correlation does not equal causation.

Let's use gun violence as an analogy. The US has many more gun deaths, per capita, than Canada. On average it is warmer in the US than Canada, therefore global warming would lead to more gun deaths in Canada.

Since there are many other possble causes for the changes in marriage rates (one very solid study said "Recent historical variations in housing prices and programs are likely to explain much of the decline observed in entry into marriage between the late 1960s and early 1990s.") Unless Kurtz can show some direct connection between Gay marriage and worse child care, and that connection shows true in other countries that have Gay marriage (like the Netherlands), his argument holds no water.

I'm trying out a new blogging tool for my PDA called mo:Blog. So far, it works well. As you can see, though, my blogging needs aren't very hard to meet.

Here's what it does give me, though - I can write, post, and publish from my PDA using either my cell phone, my Bluetooth connection to my laptop at work, or my WiFi router at home. In other words, no longer do I

1. write a memo,
   
2. sync,
   
3. open the memo on the computer,
   
4. select all the text,
   
5. copy it,
   
6. open blogger.com in my web browser,
   
7. log in,
   
8. paste the text,
   
9. press post and publish.

Now I write in mo:Blog and publish.

It's not perfect, though. Interaction with my PDA's web browser would be nice so that I could check my blog and my links. Spell checking isn't built in. A lot of HTML tags aren't supported. Title's don't go into the title field, they are displayed in a <b> .

I read the response of the San Francisco police department leaders to the decision by the DA not to seek the death penalty against a man accused of killing a police officer. It sickened me.

To boil it down, the police want the DA to seek the death penalty because "Our sense of justice cries out for this."

It's not justice they are seeking, they are crying out for revenge, and revenge should never be part of a police department's policy.

I could quote statistics to you all day about the death penalty that show how unfair and unsuccessful it is as a means of punishment, but I'd like to take a different tack, and instead focus on the police response and why it's so wrong headed.

This response is a perfect example of the old method of resolving disputes "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". In other words, when someone wrongs you, they deserve to suffer the same punishment as you. Wise leaders throughout history have taught us that this is not the best way to deal with injustice.

Jesus was asked about this philosophy and he turned it on its head by saying if someone slaps your cheek, offer them the other, i.e., turn the other cheek. We've changed the meaning of this in America to mean "if someone hurts you, turn away from them". That's not what it means. What Christ meant was that you should not let those who hurt you turn you into them by committing the same crime. Instead, turn your other cheek, offer yourself up, in love, to them again. Only by doing that can the pain be salved.

The Buddha, Mohammad, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many other great and wise leaders had similar ideas. They knew, and taught, that violence begets violence.

When the police respond to problems with vengeance, it leads to all kinds of problems that we've seen in the past. If a police officer is manning the lines at a demonstration that is at the edge of becoming a riot, and someone insults him, or throws water or something worse on or at him, if he accepts that revenge is justice, he'll respond in kind. The demonstrator is wrong for assaulting the police officer, but the police officer has to know, in the core of his being, that responding in kind can only make a bad situation worse. Seeing his superiors crying out for revenge only encourages him to be like them and rather than keeping the situation in check, he becomes the spark that starts the riot.

The other negative side of this is that it re-enforces the idea that the police are separate from their community. Yes, the police have a very difficult, and dangerous job, and I salute them for doing it. However, that doesn't make them better, or more important, then the people they have sworn to protect. Do you think the wife of the slain officer is more distraught than the wife of any other man that is killed? Does the officer, as a man, have more value? No, and so the police should treat the crimes the same. Doing otherwise perpetuates the stereotype that there is one set of justice for us, and another for them (them including not just the police, but all people in a position of power). Is it any wonder that many people have lost their trust in the police, their belief that the police are looking out for them? This type of divisiveness only leads to more work for the police, and less safety for all of us, the police included.

Should we treat crimes against police officers seriously? Yes, of course. Should we respond to them with vengeance and divisiveness? No.

I know I live in one of the most liberal areas in the US, in a city long known for it's liberalism (Berkeley, CA), and I am definitely a liberal. That said, I think I'm pretty open minded when discussing politics, and I understand the appeal of conservatism. However, I cannot understand how anyone could still plan on voting for George Bush in this year's presidential election.

The President, showing rare incompetence in an age of incompetent politicians, has:

• Destroyed the goodwill other countries had for the US both before and after the terrorist attacks on 9/11
• Sped up the economic downturn and prolonged it
• Encouraged legislative actions and law enforcement tactics that have seen the loss of more rights, and caused more fear, than since the height of the McCarthy era
• Shown deep rooted arrogance and ignorance
• Encouraged class, social, and religious division

I'm going to be writing on of each of these points as time goes on. Stay tuned.

Today is my mother-in-law's birthday. Yesterday we had her over to our house to celebrate. She came with her sweetheart. My sister-in-law, her husband, and her 7 year old daughter Holly also came.

Betsy, my wife, was at a birth (remember, she's a doula), so it was me with my in-laws. I know what you are thinking - poor thing! But you're wrong, I had a great time.

We had homemade tea cakes, scones, lasagna, cocktails (including a new drink - Maiden's prayer, 1 shot vodka, a freshly squeezed orange, the juice from half a lime), salad, etc. We played cards, and it was a nice time. Holly and her mom stayed over night.

I missed my family, but I get along with Betsy's family, and for that I'm very happy.

Since I was spending time trying to figure out how the blog template I was using, I figured I'd update it to match the style of the rest of my web site.

The most difficult thing was figuring out what blogger variables do what. Blogger.com's help is good, but they don't have an index page of the variables.

I got caught by depending on someone else's template without understanding it. Since I started this website, the archives links have failed. That's my fault, not the template author's, because I didn't test thoroughly, and I didn't understand the template. I've done a bit of work to make it work, but I haven't done the work of really understanding the template yet. Until I do that, I haven't done my fair share of the work.

I found an interesting article called Why Content Management Fails by Jeffrey Veen.

His basic thesis is that content management fails because the focus is on the technology, not on the actual process. He believes that content creation and content management have to be separated, and that editors, not IT workers, need to manage the process.

I agree, but I don't think he goes far enough.

For CMS to work, we have to rethink the benefit-goal paradigm. CMS systems are usually based on the idea that content creation is like software creation. In software, the person checking in the material is putting it into the system because there is a bug, or a feature, that they want to get fixed or added to the code. That's not the goal of the documentation content creator. In software documentation, content is added to explain or highlight a feature. The feature is still there, even if the content isn't. The documentation is written to help the user when the product doesn't work the way they expect it to behave. Put another way, the content is created to help people avoid, or recover from, trouble. The goal, then, of the content creator is to help the user, not the product.

In the non-business world, the goal of the content creator is unclear. Why would someone write up a web page describing how to install the Oracle database on RedHat 7.2? If they can write the page, they don't need the information anymore because they have already figured it out. Some would say that it's purely philanthropic, a gift to others so they don't have the same problems. I don't think that's a strong enough reason for most people. I think, for most people, their goal is to get rid of that last bit of frustration they felt when they tried to follow the documentation available to them and they weren't successful. In other words, it's cathartic.

The way to maximize the impact of a content creator is to understand why they are trying to do something, what benefit they get from it, and make it easy for them to feel like they have accomplished their goal. Then we need to roll that into the content management process.