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I saw that AppFuse was a top project on java.net. It turns out so is WebWork! It got ranked as #4 in most mail traffic on java.net. Except, something is a bit weird with these stats. The #1 project, xlsql, has only had 4 messages to its mailing list.
WebWork had 527 messages in September and 473 in October. So I'll just assume that WebWork is even higher ranked than it shows here ;)
(Note: I decided that between now and 11/2, I'm going to write once a day about the issues that are at stake locally and nationally. This is my first entry.)
So I was in LA this week on business. I spent much of my time in traffic to and from work, listening to ultra conservative AM talk radio. Much to my chagrin, when I got home I found the paper version of this in my mail box. Yay.
Curious I decided to watch the video that shows young, hip, diverse men and women explaining why they are voting Yes on Oregon State Proposition 36. Here is an overview of the video with the most interesting quotes I found (there are a LOT of them):
Open with cool rock music playing and a graphic design that looks frighteningly similar to the old Napster.com layout
"Is No really the way to show that we care?"
"A vote of No is not going to show to people that we care"
Of course not. Instead, let's show all those gays we care by saying they can't have what they so desperately want. Since we really care about them, maybe we should even try to force them to be straight.
"It spanned across 5,000 years of human history... you have to go back to Genesis..."
"Marriage is the most incredible thing that God ever created -- it's awesome"
Yes, and everyone knows that God should totally dictate political policy. Thomas Jefferson clearly doesn't know what he's talking about. It's not like he helped create the longest running democracy in the world.
"Gay marriages will be put on the same platform as heterosexual marriages and taught as equal to our children"
Gasp! You mean we would have to teach tolerance and equal rights to your... children???
"... 3 years old, she's going to be asked to make decisions, and understand concepts, and understand things that are probably beyond her... we want every opportunity to point her in the right direction"
Honestly though -- since when did "gay marriage" turn in to "let's teach three year olds what anal sex is"? This issue is about gay marriage, not about sex education laws. Feel free to propose a law that restricts that -- I'd probably even vote for it (sex ed was a waste of time). I can just see it now:
3 year old girl: "Daddy, why do Tom and Rick kiss on the mouth?"
Girl's father: "Well, honey, you see, Tom likes to put his erect penis in to Rick's anus and rub it back and forth vigorously. Now that gay marriage is legal, I am forced to propose this lifestyle an alternative option for you, dear. And since sexuality is nurture and not nature, you obviously will now become a homosexual"
"Homosexuals are subject to the exact same restrictions as heterosexuals"
Yes, but are heterosexuals subject to the exact same restrictions as homosexuals? Think about that one, Sherlock.
"They can do whatever they want -- they have equal rights. Don't let them tell you they don't have equal rights"
Wow. I didn't know that. The pamphlet I got that pointed me to this awesome website actually says: "There are legal ways gay and lesbian couples can get benefits married couples have. They're available through a will, medical power of attorney, insurance policies, etc. Even married people have to jump through hoops to get benefits." Exactly! That pesky marriage hoop. I'm sure gays would much rather get power of attorney when their partner just got run over by a semi-truck and a doctor needs a medical decision made immediately.
Fade out from rock music in to slow acoustic guitar, as some dillweed explains that this is not a civil rights issue
"Sexual preference is not something that you're born with"
"The idea of the gay gene has been totally rejected by the public. So you can't be born gay. This isn't a civil rights issue like the color of your skin."
Since when? Last I heard the issue was not medically decided either way. But I do know that all my friends that are gay never woke up one day and swore off the opposite sex. Rather, it was a feeling they had in them all their life and finally got the courage to be open with it. I guess they are liars.
Pan to black woman, explaining that her parents are appalled this is called a civil rights issue
"He grew up at a time when there was a lot of segregation... when they hear that this is being used as a civil rights issue... you can't compare the two"
I really liked the touch of not only using a black person, but a black woman to contrast the difference between being sexuality and skin color. I must admit, very smooth.
"Scripture can become illegal and outlawed"
"The next thing that is going to happen is that portions of the bible will be declared as hate literature"
Yes. Fortunately we can still read Catcher in the Rye to our three year olds. This wouldn't be the first time that historic documents were banned by those crazy liberals. Oh wait, yes it would.
"It's going to affect how we preach the bible and whether or not if I have to marry two homosexuals and maybe I could go to jail someday if I don't"
Well, if you're a state officer, then yes you'd have to marry them. But...
"If Measure 36 doesn't pass and your pastor refuses to marry a gay or lesbian couple, he could be setting himself up for a major lawsuit"
Oh!? A pastor??? Yeah, you'd totally get arrested or sued for that. Remember: in the US we don't respect your freedom to practice religion how you want.
"The opposition knows that if they can win in Oregon, it's likely they can win in other states"
Actually, on a serious note: this is true. Due to some wacky commerce supreme court decision like ten thousand years ago. Basically, it is quite possible that once one state allows it, others will have to recognize it.
"The opposition has recruited young adults to drop out of college and spend their time and energy to get people registered to vote"
BLAST those gays for forcing adults to drop out of college and throw away their lives for the pursuit of an obvious abomination. If only college students were adults that could make up their own minds...
"We cannot let 2% of the population redefine marriage"
Exactly. And it's a good thing we didn't let 15% of the population redefine what a whole person was a few years back, right?
Fade in to American flag with male vocals in the background proclaiming "I can believe", and then a whole section on how we can all make a difference
I actually want to talk about two things:
Activist Judges
The phrase "activist judges" really pisses me off. Somehow it became a Republican talking point and has spread like wildfire to the point where people actually think we live in a Democracy where the people's voice matters.
Hello? McFly? We live in a representative democracy, and a particularly good one at that. It is designed with a very complex and strict set of checks and balances between three branches of government.
To say that there are "activist judges" who would rather do politics than listen to the voice of the people is just stupid. The whole point of a judge, in the perspective of our checks and balances, is to overturn laws when they deem them to be unconstitutional or otherwise harmful for American citizens.
Fortunately for us, Mr Jefferson and his pals once again saved us from these evil activist judges by constructing a system in which our president can choose who the judges are (and our next President most certainly will!), and our elected congress can enact constitutional amendments that will tie the hands of those pesky judges.
Enough said. If you believe in activist judges, you need to take a civics class. Now, about activist mayors (Gavin Newsom, for instance)... that's another story.
On to point number 2:
Definition of Marriage
The other big claim going on with this whole issue is that gays and liberals are trying to redefine marriage. Well first of all, any language expert will tell you that languages, including the almighty English language, evolve over time. But more to the point, words have multiple definitions. Mr Webster tells me that...
Now isn't that interesting. The first thing that springs to mind is that link I placed earlier in this post about the separation of church and state. Specifically, the "Lemon Test" requires that:
a law involving religion is constitutional if it has a secular (non-religious) purpose, is neutral toward religion (neither for or against it), and does not result in "excessive entanglements" between government and religion.
Specifically, laws must not be put in place that are neither for nor against a particular religion over another. Since there are clearly some religions that allow gay marriage, we already are restricting certain religions from practicing their beliefs. On top of that, I think it is pretty clear there is now "excessive entanglements" around this issue.
So clearly marriage, in terms of the state definition of it, has nothing to do with Adam and Eve right? Because if it did, that wouldn't be very "neutral", right? If that were the case, some judge might try to rule as unconstitutional or something silly like that.
OK, enough. For those of you who feel that gay marriage detracts from "the real thing" (a quote I read recently by some ultra conservatives in response to Mr. Bush's claim that civil unions might be OK), I suggest you learn to not let the private actions of others bother you so much. I mean, this is a free country after all, and people are going to do things that annoy you. So you better learn now to live with it, or, as many conservatives love to shout out: Love it out leave it.
Pretty much the only place I keep track of the presidential race is at the Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004. This site is great: non-partisian news and tracking of individual state polls. I highly recommend everyone check it out.
The "Votemaster" also has a lot of good advice about the election, including today's important note that the next president will also likely select a few of the next members of our Supreme Court. If it wasn't already clear: this election will be one of the most important in this country's history. So, as P-Diddy told me today when he called my house: Vote or Die
While complaining about MovableType, I realized that 3.0 didn't even have a spell checker. This would have bugged me if I hadn't remembered hearing about the fact that some browsers now include this. Of course, IE and Firefox don't do this... out of the box, at least.
So then I found SpellBound. According to this site, it is:
SpellBound is a port of the spell checker user interface from Mozilla's Composer that enables spell checking in web forms (e.g. html textarea and html input elements - html input password elements are not checked by SpellBound - wysiwyg rich text forms).
I must say, SpellBound combined with JustBlogIt and MT-Textile, gives me a great tool for blogging more frquently. Plus it doesn't help that MT now has a decent machine to run on!
So I found out why MT-Blacklist wouldn't accept my settings. It turns out it has nothing to do with MT-Blacklist, but rather MT 3.12 (and other versions, no doubt), have a bug which prevents plugins from saving data when using Postgres. This really irritates me.
See: http://www.rayners.org/2004/06/getting_postgre.php
For one, it bugs me because MovableType is now commercial software and appears to not be thoroughly tested. But since I didn't pay for it (I'm using the free version, for now), I can't really complain too much about that. If only it was written in Java, then I could fix the crap out of it. My perl hacking days have long passed.
The other reason I'm annoyed is because the open source community (of which MT was part of until recently) continues to rely on MySQL as if it is the only DB in the universe. Look, I am heavily involved in the open source community, as many of you know. But the real world has taught me that not only is MySQL not used everyone, it also really sucks!.
I mean come on -- no foreign key constraints? Are you kidding? And I guess sub-selects were just recently added. People: let's get real and start using some real DBs.
So I finally upgraded lightbody.net. It used to be a Pentium 166 or 266 (I forget) with 256MB of RAM and a 6GB hard drive. Today it is an AMD Athlon 2200, 512MB of RAM, and a 60GB hard drive. Woo hoo.
I mostly did this to make MT-Blacklist run faster. Comment spam is getting ridiculous on this server, and my blacklist was so damn large that my old machine took 20 minutes to apply all the patterns.
So I also upgraded to MT 3.1 and MT-Blacklist 2.0. Unfortunately, it appears that something is busted between those two and the fact that I'm running mod_perl (though turning off mod_perl didn't seem to help). In short, I can't even turn MT-Blacklist on. I click "activate" and then submit the form; then I get a page back saying the settings were saved sucessfully.
Except that none of the settings changed. Grrrrreeeeat.
I don't want to add one of those plugins that requires a "security code", mostly because I feel they are messed up for disabled people (not that I have any blind readers as far as I can tell).
Anyway, so my server is beefy but now I'm getting comment spammed to death. If anyone knows how to fix this, I'd be forever in your debt.
So I installed MT-Textile, but I still can't scode in. I guess scode (the security key comment spam stopper) required the perl GD module, which is quite a pain to install. So much for CPAN always working.
Anyway, at least Textile was easy. Now for some fun:
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As I'm sitting here slogging through the steps needed to release WebWork 2.1.2, I realize that the community is in dire need for an automated release assistant. Basically, I think a tool that could:
Basically, this all the stuff I have to do to make a simple release. It is pretty painful. I have a feeling people are going to point towards Maven as a potential tool to do this, but we still need the plugins that can do the various tasks. Is anyone working on anything like a java.net uploader module, or a TSS news post module? This could be VERY good for the community.
Anyone interested in starting a project to do this? If I did it myself, it wouldn't be in Maven but rather in Ant or maybe even plain old Java. But the language isn't what matters to me -- I just want to make releasing early and releasing often actually feasible.
This is a test of the w.bloggar tool, which I found mentioned at Stuart Ervine's weblog.