Go Mark Go! 

I've known Mark Bernstein for over 15 years ago and he's always been a straight shooter.  He's also been a tireless advocate for publishing in hypertextual form.  So I have no doubts as to the veracity of this letter he just wrote:

The Electronic Literature Organization, of which I have been a director since its foundation, has ceased to make any positive contribution to the field and has, instead, become an active impediment and a continuing embarrassment.

No qualities are more essential to scholarship and research than accuracy and truthfulness. The ELO has repeatedly failed to adhere to these demands, upon which research ultimately depends.

More...

Good job.  We all need to take stands more in these types of situations.

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I Come In Defense of CSS -- No, Really !

Given my recent positions on CSS, this is probably going to be a bit surprising to some.  But yesterday morning, as I exited the shower, it all became clear to me why all too many of us have issues with CSS.  CSS isn't formatting -- CSS is really programming.  I mean what if we thought of CSS as Postscript, Lisp or Forth i.e. a language which is considered hard to learn?  Would we bitch about CSS so much if we just admitted to ourselves that we need to sit down and actually code ?

I mean when I look at my CSS books, they're easily as long (or longer) than most programming books.  And given that when you have to work in a specialized language, you often hire an expert, perhaps that's the approach we should all be taking -- hire a "CSS Consultant" on a project basis.  I know that it would probably have been cheaper for me to do that for Feedster.

So I'm just starting to admit that CSS is a real programming language and I'll have to either spend the time to learn it well like you do any language or just plain avoid it where possible.  And while some languages can be worked on casually pulling code in from libraries, some cannot -- and that's been my CSS experience so far.

So am I nuts ?

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New Feedster Feature: Translation

Thanks to Kalsey helping me out with the right url, I added a "Translate" link at the bottom of each post which will call up the english language version of a post as translated by Google.

Example: Go here and click on Translate on the blog titled " Brodo Primordiale ".  And if you can't find this, bear in mind that new results come in and push things around.

Notes:

• I know there are issues here with "am I allowed to do this" and I'm looking into this.  Given that Feedster is still non-commercial, I don't see an immediate issue but I do need to look at the Google TOS. 
• Ideally this would be done ONLY for non-English posts but blogs have such incorrect language tags, I'm just putting it in globally until I do some batch processing of the database and calculate the language tag correctly.  If you click on an english language post then you just get the english language versyion back again. I know this works for Italian but I'm not certain about other languages (I believe Dutch is problematic).
• I'd like to give Google more credit for this assistance than the "Translate with Google" link but there doesn't seem to be a way to do it.  I need to see if I have the right url.

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Engineering "Single Guy Style" => "Code Fear" => "Getting Naked"

I've written a bunch recently about the nature of solo engineering -- and any engineers out there know the drill.  We always have intentions of doing things perfectly, but life just intervenes*.  You get dirty, you get hacky and then you sprawl over a set of directories as if you were [Big_Foreign_Country] invading [Little_Third_World_Nation].  And then you realize that other people are someday going to look at this.  **Zing**  So now I'm dealing with a dash of "Code Fear".  Even though no one else is looking at the Feedster code base, I'm starting to accept that it is a very real thing in the near future -- and that's scary.

Now for non-engineers, you're probably thinking "Oh Scott, that's just a load of absolute hooey".  Well here's an analogy for you -- I'm dealing with the mental equivalent of taking my clothes off with a new lover for the first time.  Does that make it more clear to you?  Now for an engineer who takes an awful lot of pride in his work, this is a big deal.  And just as one might go to the gym or dress up before a new lover, I'm doing the same.  Of course my work isn't going to the gym -- it deals with "dress up" routines like:

• Commenting
• Clean up
• Re-organization
• Re-factoring

But you know what?  Its pretty much the same thing.  Oh and in case you are wondering, yes, I can relate most technical issues to the male / female interaction.  Not sure what that says about me (and no comments on that one).

I wonder if Silicon Valley therapists do big business with respect to code fear when little companies are bought out by big companies.  Hm......

*This is also close to my core belief in life -- people have the best intentions but they're busy, they get distracted, they just have lives.  I do honestly think people are mostly good.

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