It Doesn’t Rank

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You won’t hear about it on Digg. It’s not on Newsvine. Good luck trying to find relevant links on del.icio.us. It’s nowhere to be found on popurls, or OriginalSignal. It’s not being talked about on the blogs Memeorandum, Megite or TailRank track. There isn’t a page on Wikipedia. And little reference on WikiNews. On Topix.com or Netscape.com, nary a peep.

Even the regional online community I help host, Philly Future has little posted.

Philadelphia’s larger community of aggregated local bloggers are talking, but maybe not with each other, and mostly to their own independent communities.

On Flickr there are over 70 photos, a few powerfully relevant. On YouTube much the same, and this offers hope.

What am I talking about? The rising tide of gun violence that is taking innocent lives by the day in Philadelphia.

You would think the obscene loss of life in our city would merit a few links, a few mentions, a few drops of interest.

But no. Not a whit. It doesn’t register. It doesn’t rank.

You could argue that there has been no ‘defining event’ to draw interest – like a mass murder.

Or that the national mainstream media (damn I hate that term) has largely ignored it as well.

But those excuses don’t detract from the fact that what’s happening here – and elsewhere in other urban centers across this nation – is news.

And that for some reason – our current social media environment – just looks the other way.

Mathew Ingram, when looking at Pew’s latest research on who is using participatory media, wonders if the Web is half full or half empty? Greg Searling at search engine land and Jordan McCollum answer, although not as bluntly as I.

We have a long way to go.

A long way to go for those who are weak and powerless to be given a voice here.

A long way to go for those who have no influence a representation here.

A long way to go for those who have no visibility a means to communicate their importance here.

A long way to go for the news that affects our *daily* lives, the kind that percolates slowly, needs context to be understood, and is about subject matter we may not care to know about, but should, to be produced and distributed here.

This may lead to a place that elites find so distasteful, so raw, so low brow, so mundane and reflective of *all* of human society, they go off to establish something shiny and new.

Maybe so.

But until then there is work to do.

Related: Anil Dash: “Those of you who are defending this status quo are defending a culture of failure”

Star Blazers: “There are only 364 days left”

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It used to be life or death to make it home in time to tune in to Star Blazers after school. It still resonates with me on some deep levels I have a hard time putting to words.

Looking back, I’m surprised it made it to the air the way it did. Certainly today, it would be far more censored than it already was. The plot had so much death. So much horror. So much pain.

So much that hinged on faith, honor, and ultimately love, overcoming fear.

Watch the following six videos in their entirety, with an open mind. Then imagine yourself as an eight year old doing so. Pretty profound for a “just a cartoon”.



Star Blazers links:

This post was inspired by a post at Metafilter about 80s Cartoon Intros.

Chris Gardner’s “The Pursuit of Happyness”

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Chris Gardner’s autobiography, “The Pursuit of Happyness”, is worth your time to read, front to back. In it, Chris Gardner records his journey, from his fatherless, poor working class upbringing in Milwaukee, to his stint in the Navy, to his first marriage, his second marriage and the birth of his son, to the breakup of his second marriage, his climb from the the streets of San Francisco with his son, through the establishment of his career as a big time stock broker and investor. Along the way he doesn’t flinch from documenting the bad decisions he may have made or emotions that haunted his heart.

It’s an inspiring story, and one I bet many can relate to, even if they did not face the kinds of trials and tribulations that he did on his way to achieving success and purpose in life.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. – Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) – my favorite quotes page

I avoided seeing the movie based upon the book (my manager, Anandhan, has a great in-depth review on his blog), because I was afraid that the story would paint *too* positive a picture of him. From what I’ve read, the movie glosses over much of what the book provides you – a deeper look into a man driven by hopes, dreams, and beginnings. Sadly it seems the movie attributes genius as a major factor to his success (the Rubik’s cube scene is not in the book – just a small example) – where the book makes clear – it was persistence and heart that defined it. I plan on renting it and giving it a gander, nevertheless.

While I may not be a multi-millionaire, I most definitely can relate to Chris Gardner’s story and his perspectives on many aspects of life.

I almost want to say that if you want to know more about me personally – read this book.

Almost.

Forgiveness, fear, understanding, and rubber chickens

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Five completely unrelated posts. Well sorta. Damn I love software engineering….

Coding Horror: JavaScript and HTML: Forgiveness by Default:

…The lesson here, it seems to me, is that forgiveness by default is absolutely required for the kind of large-scale, worldwide adoption that the web enjoys.

The permissive, flexible tolerance designed into HTML and JavaScript is alien to programmers who grew up being regularly flagellated by their compiler for the tiniest of mistakes. Some of us were punished so much so that we actually started to like it. We point and laugh at the all the awful HTML and JavaScript on the web that barely functions. We scratch our heads and wonder why the browser can’t give us the punishment we so richly deserve for our terrible, terrible mistakes.

Even though programmers have learned to like draconian strictness, forgiveness by default is what works.

Shelley Powers: Accessibility, Microformats, and RDF as the Bezoar Stone:

…Here I was, tripping along on a well presented argument defining a tricky problem when, bammo: it could have been worse, it could have been RDF.

It’s as if RDF has become the bezoar stone of metadata–people invoke RDF to draw out all the evil.

“Ohmigod, an asteroid is going to hit the earth and we’re all going to die!”

“It could have been worse. It could have been RDF.”

“You’re right. Whew! I was really worried for a moment.”

Jim Waldo: Jini and OSGi, yet again :

…People would be amazed at how long this discussion has been going on. My first encounter with it happened just before we announced Jini to the world, and was an attempt to make sense of the two technologies with the group that was working on OGSi within Sun. The manager of that group was a guy by the name of Jonathan Schwartz (I wonder what ever became of him?), but the questions were the same that we are seeing now. Jini is a service architecture. OSGi is a service architecture. Both have ways of dealing with services written in Java. So why are their two?

This, of course, is a classic example of what I have called the Highlander Fallacy, which briefly stated is the principle that there can be only one. If any two technologies can be described using the same set of words, then there is no need for both of them, and only one will survive. I call this a fallacy because, to use a technical term, it is total crap. Certainly, there are cases where there are two technologies that are described using the same words where the two technologies actually do the same thing in the same context with the same requirements and the same restrictions. In such cases, having two may be one too many.

But far more often the two technologies are described using the same words because the English language (or any other that I know about) allows very different things to be described using the same terms. Descriptions, after all, have to elide a lot of the detail, and it is often in the detail that the distinctions are to be found. The shorter the description, the more detail is elided. A description like X is a service architecture is so short that almost all of the meaning is elided. There are going to be lots of different technologies that fit this description but that are different enough in the elided parts to make it worthwhile to know, and use, them all.

In fact, OSGi and Jini are service architectures built for completely different contexts. OSGi is a service architecture for services that are in the same address space. It allows you to build programs out of cooperating services. And for that sort of thing, it is pretty good.

Jini is a service architecture for distributed systems that are built out of services that are separated by a network.

James Shore: Continuous Integration on a Dollar a Day:

There’s an easier, cheaper way to do continuous integration than using a build server like CruiseControl. In fact, it’s so easy, you can start doing it right this second and stop feeling bad that IT hasn’t okay’d your request for a build server yet.

(The dirty little secret? What I’m about to tell you is better than using CruiseControl!)

the.codist: All I Need To Know To Be A Better Programmer I Learned In Kindergarten:

Programming is complicated stuff, but a lot of what makes a good programmer isn’t all that different from the earliest learning we did in school.

Herniated Disk Update

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Things have been steadily improving – the pain in my left leg is no longer constant, nor as bad. It still strikes while standing or sitting too long, or when carrying additional weight on the left side of my body.

A few things I still miss however – I can’t play my guitar for any length of time, and the combination of medication and sudden bouts of pain leaves me continuously drained.

I see light at the end of the tunnel now though. There’s no residual pain in my right foot from my fall – it’s completely healed. And they’ve been adding additional exercises at my physical therapy sessions (three times a week) to both strengthen my trunk and my upper body. Shoot – I’ve lost ten pounds over the last two months.

I’m looking forward to keeping exercise a part of my daily routine. Who knows, maybe by the end of all this, I’ll be healthier then ever.

Then again, I better shut up, or I’ll take another spill!

“Miserable comforters are ye all.”

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LATimes: Editorial: Too terrible for words:

IN THE BIBLICAL Book of Job, the anguished hero is visited by three friends who attempt to comfort him by drawing airy and sententious lessons from his agonies. Of course, they end up adding to his troubles; Job endures not only the real pains of grief and sickness but the indignity of having his suffering milked for rhetorical effect.

If only it were true that Monday’s mass murder on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was the kind of tragedy that moves us to quiet reflection. In fact, the shootings that killed more than 30 people and wounded nearly 30 others occasioned a blizzard of hasty conclusions, instant position-taking and the rehashing of old arguments. For the sake of the dead, for the sake of the living, and even for the sake of honoring this grim milestone — the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — we should remember that there are times when silence is the best response.

Events like these are almost impossible to react to sanely. A group of people you don’t know have been killed in a senseless crime. Too young to have established much of a past, they’ve been robbed of present and future; the weight of the offense, the rotten meaninglessness of it, makes it awkward not to have something to say.

So the ghastly death toll — perhaps inflicted by one man with a pair of semiautomatic handguns — becomes an obvious argument for enhanced gun control. Or, conversely, for the right to bear arms because Virginia Tech is a “gun-free zone,” and the Virginia Legislature last year killed a bill that would have allowed students to carry guns on campus.

For those who support universities’ in loco parentis functions, the school’s apparently unconscionable delay in alerting the student body to the presence of a gunman on campus is at the heart of the tragedy. Then there’s the male-violence angle, supported by a shooter’s apparent rage at an ex-girlfriend. Most pernicious of all, perhaps, is the request to put the matter “into perspective.”

“I have heard many such things,” Job says. “Miserable comforters are ye all.” No newspaper is in a position to criticize anybody for capitalizing on tragedy or taking convenient positions. There will be time for both in the days to come. But now is a time to respect, quietly, the tears and the pain of this terrible event.