Author: Sandy Smith

China — Kyoto’s Dirty Big Secret

/ Sandy Smith / 2 Comments

The Adam Smith Institute has a good summary of China’s role in your pain at the pump. In even more brief, China’s increasing energy usage is outstripping supply, and will continue to drive up fossil fuel prices.

Unfortunately, China is not using that oil as efficiently as large Western countries. However, the Kyoto protocol, which Western countries (infamously save the US) signed, doesn’t let Western countries get credit for emissions reduction in developing countries like China. This is profoundly stupid.

The largest growth in raw material consumption will be in the less-developed countries, as they have further to go to achieve the state of the art in development. So if they are going to be burning more oil for the same kilowatt hour of electricity, doesn’t it make sense to make them more efficient as they grow, rather than trying to limit consumption in the West which is much closer to the theoretical maximum of efficiency?

If you redirect pollution reduction efforts to areas where they can be done most cost-effectively, everybody wins—assuming you’re dead-set on making the reductions. China gets more efficient plants and reduces energy expenditures, and the West doesn’t have to pay as much per ton of carbon eliminated from the atmosphere.

However, I suspect that vision would enrage many environmental activists who are more interested in economic hairshirt practices and ideological purity than actual reductions in pollution.

Plus setting targets for pollution reduction in developing countries scares the bejebus out of them, as they instinctively know what the EU claims not to know: any distortion of the market results in lower overall wealth creation. Their legitimacy is now tied to how well they sustain their rates of growth, and they fear any measure that might mitigate that. At the same time, there is an overall lack of trust in true market mechanisms to distribute pollution reduction more efficiently than bureaucrats.

To tie this all together, if Kyoto had allowed reductions in developing countries, the US would have likely signed. If the US had signed and started making reductions in China, Chinese demand might be slightly reduced, and projections of its future demand would definitely be reduced. In all likelihood, you’d pay less at the pump.

In the meantime, enjoy the last few years you can use your SUV without taking out a third mortgage.

A Guy Goes Into a Housebuilder’s Office…

/ Sandy Smith / 4 Comments

…and the housebuilder says, “Hey, your new house is just about done, here are some pictures from the construction. We just need to finish painting and everything will be ready.”

The customer says, “That’s great, but I think we need more windows. Can we put in some more windows? And instead of 3 bedrooms I’d like 4, but we can take out one of the baths and some of the yard so it should even out. Can you do that by next Thursday?”

The homebuilder is aghast. “Well, I could make those changes, but certainly not by next Thursday. I’ll get with the architect and my suppliers and see if we can present you with a design and an estimate, then we can talk schedule.”

The customer stares at the homebuilder quizzically. “What do you mean, estimate? I’ve already agreed to pay you $450,000 for the house, and the contract was for a house. Now, if I could just show your guys kind of what I want out at the site, I’m sure they could build it. If you don’t do it, I’m afraid I’m going to withhold payment and find a new contractor.”

Crazy, right? But this happens in software development projects many, many times per day, just in the USA. You can’t redesign a house at the last second without bad things happening to the architecture. A Web application is no different.

You certainly can’t expect to get more house for the same money just because you claim you didn’t understand the plans. Yet clients continually ask for more despite the fact they’ve never paid for it and have signed a contract stating exactly what they’ll get.

The only thing that’s different is that in software, there are no materials costs, just labor. But if you think it’s materials that make houses so expensive, you must rent.

It’s sometimes a wonder to me that we managed to climb out of the primordial ooze, let alone evolve opposable thumbs.

And Now, a Word from My Sponsor: Syntax

/ Sandy Smith

Work-related news: My company just officially released Syntax CMS to the world as open source.

It took rather a bit of effort to clean it up and get it to the point we thought it releaseworthy. It’s still not perfect, but it does a few things that low-end open source CMSes don’t do, or don’t do very easily. I’ll leave the rest of it for the blog we have about it, but thought I’d point it out here.

As always, if you choose to use it, report bugs and contribute patches at the project source page on Tigris.

Update: Of course I mean “sponsor” in the sense that Forum One pays me the paycheck whence the scratch to maintain this blog and keep body and soul together comes from. Others will doubtless point out that I don’t have a soul. They may well be right. But the company, rightly so, has nothing to do officially with this blog and all opinions are mine…and I think the company is very happy that this is so.

Beer Trials

/ Sandy Smith / 1 Comment

I’ve been on a beer exploration binge trend recently–a beer every couple of days or so.

So far:

Young’s Double Chocolate Stout: Tasty, though a bit rich and sugary (for a beer). Dessert beer, if such a thing can exist.

Leffe Blonde: Belgian ale. Kind of bitter to my taste, but sophisticated. However, it gave me a headache. I’m vulnerable to that, so this one is out of my repertoire.

Young’s Oatmeal Porter: Rich and fairly smooth. A good alternative, but not something I could drink nightly.

Samuel Smith’s Triple Stout: A trifle flat–I wonder if the bottle was too old. A little syrupy. Still, pretty smooth and rich. I’d like to try it from the cask.

That’s the first few. Three more to go, plus any others I may encounter–such as Smithwick, which I tried a taste of last night and vaguely remember as being relatively smooth and complex. But I need to be more sober to give it a fair tasting. 😛

NEARFest: Progressive Rock in Pennsylvania

/ Sandy Smith / 3 Comments

I went to NEARFest again this year, and it was overall more pleasant than last year, though attenuated in every sense.

It wasn’t as loud (good), the seating wasn’t even close to as uncomfortable (good), the food wasn’t as good (bad), and I didn’t hate or love the acts as extremely (good and bad). The lighting, if possible, was even better–really good when the bands used NEARFest’s own crew, that is.

Read on for the full blow-by-blow, if you care about that sort of thing.

Continue reading →

Vacation-type Behavior

/ Sandy Smith / Leave a comment

I’m back. Miss me? Me neither.

I did a couple of things, such as go to a prog rock festival and to the mountains of North Carolina. I’ll cover each in their own post, but this is mainly to announce my semireturn to blogging. I seem to have comments from people I don’t know, so some posts must be linked from somewhere. Certainly the comment spammers have found me a useful idiot.

Hopefully, with some assistance from Jason and this page, I should get less of that in the future.

Group Pizza Behavior

/ Sandy Smith / 6 Comments

I can’t count the number of times this scenario has happened to me in a group lunch setting.

Random Person: “Let’s get Pizza! What would everybody like?”

Me: “Just a plain pepperoni is fine.”

Significant Majority of Group Who are Posers, All Together, As If I’d Just Suggested A Dog Feces Plus Small Baby Limbs Pizza: “EWWW!”

Vegetarian Poser: “I know! Let’s get a pizza with Arugula, Capers, Endives, Shiitake Mushrooms, and Tofu!”

Remaining Posers Who Wish to be Seen as Veggie Friendly: “YUM!”

One Meat Eater: “I don’t care if it has mushrooms and onions, as long as there’s one with sausage or something.”

Me: “I really don’t like veggies on my pizza, can we just have one plain cheese or something?”

Head Poser, Sighing Exasperatedly: “Fine. We’ll get the baby his Pepperoni.”

Time Passes and People Get Hungry. The pizzas arrive, with the pepperoni on top. Everyone crowds around, blocking me from getting to them. All demolish the first pizza and proceed to eat. I open the second pizza.

Me: “WTF? This is that Arugula and Crap, and the other is the Veggies Plus Token Meat. What happened to the Pepperoni and the plain cheese?”

Vegetarian Posers: “Oh, really? This is pepperoni? We were just hungry. You can have all the others, though, we’re full. Yum, this is good pizza!”

The moral of this story is: Everybody just likes pepperoni pizzas, no matter how much they make claims to the contrary, and even vegans just eat plain cheese and leave the veggie shit for last. Nobody really likes veggies on their pizza, but everybody thinks they do. Except me.

Not Getting It, Eric Meyer Edition, Plus Sanity from the WaSP

/ Sandy Smith / 3 Comments

Eric Meyer still doesn’t get it. He wants anything that hasn’t been approved out of HTML, or there will be hell to pay!

Of course, the theorist in me is quivering in outrage. The browser-wars veteran isn’t too thrilled either. For years, we heard Microsoft and Netscape say things like “standards are secondary to customer demands” and “standards aren’t as useful as the cool new proprietary features we’re adding”. These things need not be inimical to standards support. They should not require a breaking of standards.

I’m a browser wars veteran, too, and there’s a big difference between supporting standards and implementing only the standards. Fortunately, there’s actually somebody at the usually insane Web Standards Project who Gets It:

Overall, though, it’s not that big a deal. Safari does an excellent (not perfect) job of supporting the various HTML, XHTML, and CSS specs as they’re written and ultimately, that’s what’s most important. If developers don’t want to use the extensions, they don’t have to. The vision that the WaSP has been most adamant about is that developers should be able to build sites that conform to the published specs and have them Just WorkTM in every browser. If browsers want to support additional proprietary extensions on top of that, they’re free to do so and the rest of us are free to ignore them.

Yes! Somebody who actually acts like they built a site between 1996 and 1999! The problem then was twofold: content authors targeting code to one browser and one browser only, and browsers defining the same term in different ways.

The first case was much more annoying from a Web user’s perspective (hello, remember when the Web was for creators and users, not browser makers, user agents, and standards gurus?). That was the source of the dreaded “This site works best in StupidBrowser 4” badges. The problem there was authors who thought their latest trick was more important than letting users read their content. This seems to be a stage people go through when they come to the Web, and most content authors have now gone through it, except for Microsoft-happy CTOs, who are by definition morons. The solution was education about cross-browser compatibility. A tool to achieve that was standards compliance, but the tool was not the be all and end all–it was a means (conform to HTML 4 elements only) to an end (your content works for lots of people).

The second problem was more annoying from a content author’s perspective, particularly if you were trying to be good about cross-browser compatibility. Different browsers treated whitespace, width, and borders differently. Trying to get your site to look the same in multiple browsers was an exercise in frustration.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? That’s because, thanks to innovation in Standards coming from a group of purists and people who want to use HTML for data interchange rather than browser authors and content creators with wide-ranging feedback, standards are hard to implement and ambiguous in application. Even the “reference browser” provided by the W3C can’t keep up.

Ironically, if you code to HTML 4.01 and use the Bad Old Way of doing things, the latter problem is gone from modern browsers. All of them basically support the Netscape 4 way of doing things identically. It’s when you do it the New Good Way that suddenly simple things just fail miserably (try getting side-by-side floating boxes within a larger box that scale in width working in IE 5 through 6 without browser detection, I dare ya–and that’s just one browser).

Simply adding extensions that other browsers don’t support, as long as content authors don’t use them in ways that exclude people from sites, just isn’t a big deal. It never was. IE’s addition of the MARQEE tag never affected me, as few people put important information in it, and I never had to use it. Netscape’s handling of whitespace in table cells affected me far more, and table cells and whitespace are all standard components of HTML documents.

Dave Hyatt has shown the way: innovate in response to developer demand, do so in a way that is easy to implement, consult with other browser makers to make sure you and they have the same definition of “easy”, do so in a way that older browsers can safely ignore, and contribute those innovations back to the standards body for blessing.

We need to get HTML back on course, rather than becoming a weird mishmash of automated data interchange and cataloging librarian nirvana RDF hell. The Right Tool for the Right Job. HTML is the Right Tool for written Web document exchange. It is the Wrong Tool for auto-descriptive frameworks or intelligent agents. Let’s focus on that, and actually make content authors’ and hence Web users’ lives easier.