Octopodial Chrome

I've been rewriting the website for the Metropolis of Denver (warning: the current site is bad) and having an interesting time of it. I just spent an hour or so converting the M$-HTML front page into real, standards-compliant HTML and CSS. Not only does it look better and load faster, as well as play well with others, it is also ¾ the size of the old page.

I don't know why more folks don't write valid web pages. Well, I know why: they are ignorant, or lazy, or evil. But the advantages are many: one's pages render well in any browser; one's pages are forward-compatible; one's pages waste less bandwidth; one is Doing the Right Thing. There's such a feeling of accomplishment when one pens proper pages.

Due in part to the federa;l Supreme Court's (IMHO correct, although possibly for the wrong reasons) decision that states may not ban homosexual sodomy, and to a case currently before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the issue of homosexual marriage has come to the fore. It's argued that it's not right that heterosexual couples may have their unions blessed by the State and thereby receive many benefits, and thus that homosexual couples should have the same ability.

The antecedent is true enough, but the consequent doesn't follow: the argument is a non sequitur. Really, the State has no business interfering in consensual religious matters—and what can be more a religious affair than the union of a man and a woman? Why must every minister of every religion be compelled to become an officer of the State in order to perform marriages? The legal and moral realms are and must be separated: the law deals with what is permissible (all conduct which does not interfere with another's rights), while morality deals with what is right—they are overlapping but disjoint sets.

One can easily imagine activities which should be legal and are moral, e.g. eating lettuce, and activities which should be illegal and are immoral, e.g. rape. Likewise activities which should be legal but are immoral, e.g. extramarital sex. It's hard to imagine activities which should not be legal but are moral, but one could argue that hunting down and killing the murderer of one's children, while a moral act, should be illegal. We simply cannot agree on what is right; each of us has his own definition thereof. To attempt to impose a regimen of rectitude would lead to the injustices of the Wars of Religion in Europe and of sharia rule in the Mohammedan countries. OTOH, we can mostly agree on what infringes upon the rights of others: harm to one's physical person; harm to one's property; fraud &c. There are grey areas such as endangerment—while most of us would agree that firing a weapon into a crowd can be legitimately termed a crime, not nearly so many would agree that, say, storing explosives on one's property is (think a propane grill…).

Rather than enforcing a régime of homosexual marriage, the State should get out of the marriage business together. Marriage is a union of husband and wife—that's a religious matter. It's a contract between a man and a woman—that's a civil matter, dealt with reasonably enough by contract law. What it is not is a legal matter. The state should not care if a woman marries a man or a woman marries a woman any more than it cares if the Bashi-bazook of Indianapolis wears purple vestments for the Festival of Much Wailing or not.

I should note that I believe that homosexuality is sinful, unnatural and grotesque. How could any man not love women? It's quite baffling. In my view, that affliction probably a kind of congenital mental illness. But the simple fact that Bob Uhl does not approve of a behaviour does not mean that it should be punished—I don't approve of men who wear shorts, people who use Window™, suntans, rap music and teetotallers, either. The only things which should be punished by the State are violations of others. The State should only regulate those things which are related thereto. To argue otherwise is, in the end, to argue for a tyranny of the majority, in which any behaviour sufficiently disapproved of becomes forbidden and any behaviour sufficiently approved of becomes de rigeur. If we ban something we dislike which infringes no-one's rights, how can we castigate the Arabs for forbidding the Bible? If we mandate something we like, how can we castigate the Africans for their barbaric and evil practise of mutilating girls? The answer is that we could not, for it would simply be an argument of one worldview against another—and while we could win the day, we might not.

We need to get the State out of people's private lives entirely. Private life is not suitable matter for public legislation.

Was reading an article on cloning & the New England Journal of Medicine in the National Review, and was once again struck by the oddness of the cloning debate.

For some reason, the leftist view is that it is wrong to clone a human being and let him be born (so-called reproductive cloning—really, all cloning is necessarily reproductive, as it's the reproduction of a particular person). This, although in-vitro fertilisation is alright. But OTOH, they argue for the necessity of what they euphemistically call therapeutic cloning: the cloning and subsequent destruction of a person. It's a wonderfully Orwellian turn of phrase, that: to give life and then take it is therapeutic; war is peace; freedom is slavery. Nothing any Nazi, Communist or socialist every came up with was so grotesque, so evil, so intellectually illegitimate.

Of course, the root cause of this disconnect is the current refusal to recognise the embryo as a true person, albeit one which is not fully developed (much like an infant, toddler or teenager is a person, but hardly at the height of competency). Interestingly enough, it was medical men in the 19^th century who discovered that the embryo was an individual, pushing for laws against that form of infanticide commonly called abortion. In the 20^th century many physicians supported the doing-away of those laws; in the 21^st, they are wanting to create children specifically to destroy them. What next?

The National Review has a great article on the failed Policy Analysis Market proposal. It's much better written than my own screed. Well worth reading.

Saw the film This is My Father Tuesday. Like many films, it's well made, but is lacking. The essential plot is that a fellow goes to Ireland to find out who his father was. He discovers that his mother had gotten pregnant by a slightly older farmer who went on to commit suicide. It had the typical anti-Catholic bias one might expect in such a film: the lovers' behaviour was portrayed as acceptable and that church's ministers were portrayed as fire-and-brimstone types (which rings false—I've never thought of Irish Catholics as being particularly dour). There's a bit of disapproval over the fact that the suicide is not allowed a church burial—but his death is exactly a choice of despair and lack of faith in God; how could the church allow a burial?

Not really worth seeing, I'm afraid. Some pretty girls in it, though, which is never a bad thing.

The National Review has a great article about how Bush has really been a spendthrift. Subtitle: Bush spends like Carter and panders like Clinton. Sadly, it's true. I've been thinking that neither Bush I nor II was all that great, save in comparison to their opponents. Bush I gave us Souter and a tax hike; Bush II gives us more wasted social spending than Clinton!

A promising intelligence-gathering method has been cancelled due to the simple-minded simpering of a gang of acephalic twits, according to the BBC. Am I too strong in my condemnation? I think not—and I daresay you'll agree, after hearing the story.

So what was this idea? Simply put, to establish a literal market for ideas. Traders could purchase shares of overthrow of Jordan or assassination of the Queen; whatever idea-stock they might care to issue. The public, governments and intelligence agencies in general would be able to derive benefit by observing the workings of this market.

Why was this a good idea? We all know how effective markets are in the financial realm: while they do have their weaknesses, they are incredibly accurate and good at what they do. The great mass of the marketplace behaves as analysts expect; what is more, even the common man can make fairly informed decisions, simply my observing the market. Imagine trying to buy 1/1,754,293 of Apple Computer without a market. One would have no idea—or an idea so primitive as not to deserve the name—what that would be worth; one would have no idea where to purchase it; no idea if it's wise to buy Apple Computer instead of General Electric; no idea, really, about anything. Enter the market: a device honed to near-perfection to answer exactly those questions. Looking at today's stock chart, that share of Apple is valued by the market at $4,315.13. You don't need to know who owns it to buy; you just ask your broker to place an order for you. You can look at Apple's information, and see that right now it is valued more highly than it was a time ago, while GE has stayed relatively even.

Imagine the power of this idea applied to ideas: being able to draw on the collective thoughts of thousands of analysts, being able to instantly respond to changing conditions—and being able to make a packet off of it. It was a tremendous opportunity. One under-brained and overfed senator—our very own Daschle—argued that it might encourage folks to commit acts of terrorism. What he didn't note is that they'd be caught: the trades would be public and could be traced. Having made a fortune in Indonesian insurrections would be of little use while rotting in a cell.

Perhaps in a century folks will be bright enough to cotton onto the potential of such a scheme; perhaps they'll apply it to any idea; perhaps our rulers then won't be the morons our rulers now are. I see no reason to expect it, though.

CNN reports that another purported tape of Hussein has been released, this one commenting on the loss of his sons and grand-son. I find it amusing how loony-islamist the guy gets over time. For someone who started out as a great secularist, the armed might of the United States and her allies sure has put the fear of God back into him.

This was a right bear, let me tell you. They don't make it at all easy, although part of the pain may have been due to a less-than-clear idea of what I was trying to attempt.

What's TrackBack?

Essentially, it's a way for you to know who has linked back to you. When someone links to you, he also sends a small message (a TrackBack ping) to a CGI running on your host. You can then use various plugins to retrieve information about linkages. It all sounds pretty simple.

Steps to Install & Configure

TrackBack

You need to download the TrackBack standalone implementation from Movable Type. Note that although Movable Type is not free software, but the standalone TrackBack implementation is (released under the Artistic License). Unpack it somewhere, then edit tb.cgi. I set each of the paths to a full path, but that's not really necessary, I believe. Make sure that both $DataDir and $RSSDir are writable by whichever user or group the CGI runs as (apache:apache with Apache/RedHat Linux 9). Also make sure that you set the password to something complex—you'll need it to delete TrackBacks.

Now copy tb.cgi, footer.txt and header.txt into some CGI directory. I had already defined http://latakia.dyndns.org/bloxsom/ as a CGI directory, so I slapped them in there, and created tb_data & tb_rss there as well. You're all set up on the TrackBack side; now it's time to get Blosxom working with it as well.

Blosxom

This one's fairly simple, actually—what got me was that the docs were inaccurate. Find story.$flavour (e.g. story.html). You're going to put this somewhere sensible therein (I put it just after the title, before the body):

<!--
  <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
              xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
              xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
    <rdf:Description rdf:about="$url$path/$fn.$flavour"
                        dc:title="$title"
                        dc:identifier="$url$path/$fn.$flavour" />
    trackback:ping="http://yourserver.com/cgi-bin/tb.cgi/$path/$fn"
  </rdf:RDF>
-->

To be honest, I don't believe that trackback:ping item really does aught, but it's part of what the docs say to do, and I'm superstitious.

You might also wish to download & install trackback_counts_display, which lets you refer to the number of TrackBacks with a simple $trackback_counts_display::trackback somewhere in story.$flavour. If you wish to be XHTML-valid, you'll need to replace $trackback_url?__mode=list&tb_id=$trackback_id with $trackback_url?__mode=list;tb_id=$trackback_id.

Sending a Ping

So, how do you send your own TrackBack pings? Easy enough—just go to http://yourserver.com/cgi-bin/tb.cgi?__mode=send_form, fill out the form and submit. The TrackBack URL is not the URL of the page, or the permalink, or aught of that sort, but rather the URL known by the TrackBack server, e.g. http://latakia.dyndns.org/blosxom/tb.cgi/comp_trackback. It's not actually a valid URL to reference, which is somewhat interesting.

Anyway, that's all there is to setting up TrackBacks & blosxom.

Well, I finally managed to get blosxom installed and configured. Had more than a slight bit of trouble getting TrackBack links working—they don't make it easy—but they do now, and that's what counts. Tomorrow I hope to find time to document the procedure I followed.

Hopefully I'll be able to use this blog as a good stepping-off point for all sorts of digressions about philosophy, beer, work, computers and beer.