But that’d be all too easy.  As it turns out, Wildermuth was a segregationist, an outright racist, who wrote numerous letters to Herman Wells urging him to keep black students from having the same opportunities as white students at IU.  He specifically urged keeping the IU Hoosiers basketball, for instance, white-only.

And so, since the 70’s, there have been brouhahas every few years about the sports building’s name.

It all culminated in the last several days, when the IU board of trustees, after months of bitter conflict with student groups and alumni about the name, finally waved the white flag (well, sort of) and voted to append an additional name to the building, that of William L. Garrett, the first black IU Hoosier basketball player, who joined the team in 1948.  Ironic, right? A segregationist and a black guy on a plaque together, probably for a long, long, long time.  At last, everyone basically gets what they want.

Wait, not so fast!

As it turns out, the board of trustees forgot to ask Garrett’s widow, Betty, if she would be okay with her husband’s name going on the plaque with Wildermuth’s.  Oops, and it looks like she isn’t, because she just contacted the board yesterday and told them they couldn’t put it on there.

Maybe if someone had asked her about this, oh, I don’t know 40 years ago, we wouldn’t have wasted years and years debating it.  For better or for worse, Wildermuth’s name, alone, stays.

As I was watching it I said, ‘wait, did he just say *life is good with turbotax, we keep the money we make*? no, no, that couldn’t have been what he said.

But, alas, it was.  That is exactly what he said.

:‽

BOW BEFORE HIM

• Pandora – Great for listening to Pandora music
• Google – Voice search is amazing.
• Pano – Takes panoramic photos.
• Rooms – IRC client
• FStream – internet radio
• Public Radio – internet radio
• Wikipanion – wikipedia
• Wordpress – Manage a Wordpress blog
• NYTimes – Read the Times
• iSSH – SSH client
• WiFinder – Wi-Fi stumbler
• Tris – Tetris clone
• Galcon – great arcade/strategy game
• Labyrinth – marble game
• iTalk – excellent recording app
• AquaForest – just plain fun physics sandbox

The hacker high life — girls, notoriety, White Russians — can be hard to resist.

—Virginia Heffernan

If you watch Colbert, read the New York Times magazine, Alternet, or the Washington Post, you may have heard of an old acquaintance of mine, Virgil Griffith.  I was sitting at my kitchen table reading the Time magazine and saw an article by Virginia Heffernan about Virgil.  Now if you know anything about Virgil you’ll know he’s been involved in some pretty interesting stuff, not all of it without consequences either.  Now, in my mind, Virgil is your typical atypical guy; a little awkward sometimes, very conscious of his privacy, but still enjoys his media attention.  Basically, much the same as many of us, except he’s way smarter.

Unfortunately, the above summary of Virgil is not enough to write an article about, and this was something that people like Neal Stephenson or the editors of Wired figured out a long time ago.  You can’t describe what the truly interesting details of a system are for the benefit of the top 5% of your readers, such as readers with an actual background in the field.  No; you have to dumb it down for the masses; in the case of the NYTM it’s for the 50+ readership; for Wired it’s for what I like to call the ‘16-’.  Both of these audiences romanticise computer nerdery in the same fashion in which it’s depicted in the movie Hackers.  If you’re a Hacker (with a capital H) on the Inter-Net, you go to clubs and dance with all of your hip friends, before going around back and whistling into a payphone and suddenly the ATM nearby spits out wads of cash, and, on cue, the accompanying girls’ panties mysteriously drop to their ankles.

Nope, sorry Virginia.  There is no Santa.

The fact is, Virginia Heffernan recycles the same predictable crap that most mainstream journalists now do.  From the very beginning she puts complex systems in quotes, as if to say it’s some mysterious, inaccessible science that no one can understand save for people like Virgil (she even uses the word ‘mysterious’ to describe the Santa Fe institute):

Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious Santa Fe Institute, where “complex systems” are studied.

Imagine if Virgil was a marine biologist instead of a hacker.  Would Virginia Heffernan say this?

Griffith is also a visiting researcher at the mysterious University of Oregon, where “marine biology” is studied.

No, of course not.  Because that would be ridiculous and insane.

Since this was already a PHP site, we could have whipped up some sort of PHP XML parser and then used a PHP include on sidebar.php. The other option was using a minimal amount of PHP and relying more on XSLT so that we could just have the XML file and a stylesheet. Since we were trying to adhere to the ‘the best code is the kind you don’t have to write’ strategy, we decided to try XSLT.

The cool thing about XSLT is that if you know what you’re doing you can easily change XML into HTML since they’re so similar anyway. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to have the same kind of control you would have with PHP. Specifically, I needed to take a value from the XML file (specifically an Amazon ASIN) and then append it to a link’s href.

So why does XML suck at this? Because you can’t have something like:

<a href="http://amazon.com/<xsl:value-of select="asin"/>...

…Because obviously this produces a parsing error. So the solution would appear to be making the entire anchor tag into CDATA so that the xsl could be stuck in the middle. But the problem with this is that when the xml output method is set to html, the < and > characters automatically get turned into HTML entities such as &lt; which then cause the tag to show up on the page, not interpreted as markup.

So of course there is the option of using the plain text output method, but this–surprise!–turns <br /> into carriage returns which, again, are not interpreted by the browser.

The solution I ended up with? Wrap every HTML tag as CDATA.  Yes, that is what it came to.

XML does not solve all the world’s problems, folks.

You surely know of these kinds of people; sometimes I am even one of them. Users hate change, especially major changes without warning. If you knew how to use Word 2.0, you basically knew how to use all future versions, like Word 97 and Word 2003. No matter which version, no matter if it was the Mac or Windows version of Office, the interface was essentially the same. Just look at the difference between Word 2.0 and Word 2003:

Then Office 2007 came along, and suddenly shit hit the fan. The Microsoft Word that people had loved/hated all these years had suddenly vanished from the shelves, replaced by this unfamiliar, sinister impostor.

As it turns out, of course, things weren’t really that bad. Why? Mainly because upgrading from Word 2003 to Word 2007 was a purely optional (and sometimes rather expensive) affair. I doubt if even 10% of users over 30 have upgraded, although I’m sure many have installed the compatibility plug-in (which allows Word 2003 to open the 2007 file format, .docx).

Now let’s switch our focus over to another widely-used application, this time a web application. It hasn’t been around that long, but millions of people use it already: Facebook. Recently, Facebook went through a fairly major redesign that spawned dozens of anti-new-Facebook groups and hundreds of complaints on various forums on various websites and Facebook itself. The cry could be heard over and over again, no matter where one surfed: ‘I hate the new Facebook.’ Sure, there were also a lot of people who loved it, and the ones who hated it were probably more vocal, so in all likelihood, only 1 in 10 users really despised it.

But still, 1 in 10 users is a lot. Facebook has over 100 million users, so there are at least 10 million users who hate a website they use all the time. It’s a strange situation, isn’t it?

What users of web applications are starting to finally figure out is that the convenience and portability of web applications tends to come at a pretty terrible price: being forced into every new version the application vendor releases.

Another, more recent example is that of iGoogle, the configurable portal page service from Google. Google made some changes to the site recently, and immediately it triggered a wave of negative reactions from users. What choice do these users have, after all, if they don’t like the new version of a web application? None, apparently.

Except for one thing, which is to stop using the web application and find an alternative, either a different web application or a desktop application. Some are obvious (Google Docs has Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, Meebo has Pidgin and Adium and Miranda, and just about any webmail service can be used with a desktop email client), but others are less clear. What’s the desktop application alternative to Facebook?

I’ll tell you one thing: if I developed a lot of web applications for a living and a bunch of users complained to me about changes made to one of them, yet they all continued using the site, I probably wouldn’t pay attention to the changes.

And whaddaya know, despite all the ‘I hate the new Facebook’ groups, there’s still no option for the old interface.