Hm, I think I am starting to see some of the pipes I’d like to lay between this blog and other, newer online self-publication and social media services. I’m not quite ready to lay back upon my imperial ottoman and issue forth a series of feature requirements but I might be formulating some online goals for the first time since before we moved.

Every year, as Osiris Claus prepares to take his chariot to the skies in celebration of his birth, it’s helpful to understand how and why we celebrate the birth of the undying lord on December 25th.

Originally, Osiris ruled the world we live in as a king. He was the great-grandson (some say son) of Ra, the great sun-lord from whom all blessings flow. Set, Osiris’ brother, was unhappy with this brother, and killed him by crafting a fantastic trap – a box that may very well have looked like a beautifully wrapped gift box. When Osiris opened the box, Set was able to capture him inside with no hope of escape. Setting the box adrift upon the Nile, Set claimed the throne for himself.

Unsurprisingly, the murderer proved a hard lord and was not favored by his great-grandfather or other relatives. However, Osiris’ wife, Isis, had been busy searching for the box among the river reeds, and found it one day.

The box had become lodged in the roots of a bush which had grown and grown until it resembled a mighty forest tree, a cedar or redwood, an evergreen in the desert. Pouncing upon the gaily decorated box nestled in the base of the green tree, she tore it open to find the dessicated corpse of her husband, the once-mighty Osiris. Weeping (for it can be hard to see relatives at this time of year), she carried it home.

In time, the spirit of Osiris passed within Isis and together they conceived a child, Horus, and his mother hid him from the gaze of his jealous and bloody uncle.

Given hope by this, Isis sought out Thoth, a great wizard, and together they spoke to the spirit of Osiris, hoping to call his spirit into his empty flesh. However, Set struck without warning or mercy and dismembered and shredded the body into uncountable fragments, flinging them far and wide over the fertile delta of the Nile. After bitter struggle, Isis and Anubis were able to reassemble the body, sewing it together again with only the sharpest needle and only the finest thread. It is this tradition we enact when we hang our stockings by the chimney with care. The row of disembodied feet echoes both Osiris’ discorporation and the many trampings to and fro of Anubis and Isis. The fact that they are sewn things, made with needle and thread, provides a reminder of the careful reassembly of the body once gathered.

The spell was cast and Osiris rose again from the dead to join the living. Yet his sojourn here was short and he passed on to the land beyond this one, where the dead pass when it is their time. There he stands in judgment over the souls of the dead. He commends the just to the Blessed Land, but the wicked he condemns to be devoured by Ammit.

On his birthday, some say December 25 (others differ, but place it in late December), he can be seen in the northern sky, riding out in his chariot over all the Earth to survey it. He is said, also, to take our measure in life over the night of his birth; coming in spirit down the chimney, to review our houses and weigh our souls in preparation for the day or night he may meet us.

We erect a tree and mock the hollow anger of Set with our gaily wrapped presents, nestled beneath the branches in token of the immortal world and fate which awaits us.

It’s possible you may have heard some aspect of these traditions as deriving from other religions. Do not be fooled. Osiris Claus is the One True Claus, and from his workshop at the North Pole, he knows when you are sleeping. He knows when you awake. He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so, be good, for the Nile harvest’s sake.

A few fiddly bits are missing, as this move has taken place in slow motion. I am cleaning up the old database and will port the awol material when I do so.

New digital digs a brewin’

Looks like something went awry in a recent site rebuild and mike.whybark.com is not rendering in-browser. None of the other sites are down so I take it to be some sort of PHP error. This post is an experiment to see if it can be self-healed or if I have to crawl around under the hood.

Update: Looks like something’s a bit off base at blogrolling.com, and the version of Firefox I’m using hangs the whole pagebuild while waiting on the remote server. Stupid free software. Stupid free remote-hosting service providers.

GROUNDLESS SPECULATION BASED UPON A PERSONAL SEA OF IGNORANCE

In all seriousness, Firefox is really beginning to drive me nuts under OSX. It’s molasses-slow even using G4-optimized rebuilds, and gets slower and slower over time as it’s left open (as Safari once did). That slowness is the sort of performance degradation I associate with memory leaks, exactly the kind of bug that gets shuffled down to the bottom of to-do lists in a feature-driven development environment. Feature-driven development is a firm test-case for marketing-oriented goal setting, and a signal event in the fatal turn toward bloatware. It often means that the managerial folks who provide direction to the dev groups have lost control of their bailiwick in a power struggle with marketers.

In a non-corporate development environment, the theory is that the developers are free of the pressure to succumb to featuritis and can concentrate on fixing bugs that serve the needs of the extant user base. I have not been following Mozilla politics for years, and don’t really need to get up to speed on the intricacies, but my assumption is that the organization behind the browser now has a substantial source of corporate funding and that the funding is at least partially dependent on reorienting development practices to align with the rest of the crap-driven industry’s bloatware boogie. Getting a major open-source development group to drop user-oriented development in favor of marketing-oriented development would clearly be in the interest of the paid-software industry as a whole.

If I had to guess, I’d finger Google as the funder (based on the well-written, practically indispensable FF-Google plugins that I have enjoyed adding to the browser over the past year or so). It would clearly be in Google’s interest to capture Firefox by controlling the management practices and goals of the browser’s development. It would be less in Google’s interest to allow the enforcement of corporate software development practices to drive users such as me away.

I would guess, however, that if my hypothetical corporate funding source has an internal goal of capturing the development of the browser, the shift toward crudware might be inevitable, as the corporate funder’s least-valuable managerial assets would gravitate toward the external management tasks in order to minimize accountability and challenge. Feature-oriented goal-setting is the lowest common denominator in managing the software development process and strongly tends to dominate development processes where excellence is denigrated in favor of marketing and speed.

In conclusion, I guess, this probably means that if I’m right about big bucks coming into Mozilla, I can expect Firefox to suck more and more until I eventually abandon it entirely. Of course, by two years from now I’ll be on a new computer and that can have a very significant effect on the way that software behaves. For the moment, though, it looks as if I will be playing the field.

See ya, Firefox; it’s been good to know ya. Hope you kick that nasty habit someday. In the meantime, I won’t be lending you any money.

Well, the first Monday of the iPhone era’s come and gone. AT&T’s data network went down, inconveniencing me while seated in the smallest room in the house, and MacWorld has run the most in-depth review of the gadget to date (although I do look forward to the inevitable Ars Technica nitty-gritty). Apple appears to have kept up with initial demand, for once in my lifetime, and while tonight the Apple store iPhone-availability indicator is flashing red for the Pacific Northwest, I am sure it will shortly regreen.

(Update: it did not. A sellout!)

We’re still a solid week out from hackster info, which will really uncover what the device can do (just how ‘locked down’ is ‘locked down’ anyway?). By my estimate we’re about two-to-three weeks out from the first reports of real issues, if any (can you say ‘exploding laptops?’).

The biggest issue the reviewers – and, by the evidence, the news – cites is the slow AT&T network. Seattle is the city that gave birth to the modern American cellular market , in the corporate person of McCaw Cellular. McCaw was bought out by AT&T (the old baby bell) which in turn went belly up after a disastrous, consultant-driven attempt at a customer-service database unification project, or so I have heard. Cingular picked up the wreckage and has rebranded as AT&T (goes the short version).

For Seattle, that means that while we still have the old hardware in service, we also have very good coverage in the metro area, unlike most of the rest of the country under CingulAT&T. As a certified non-traveling fuddy-duddy, I do not care how good AT&T coverage is in, say, Dallas. So for my needs, unlike yours, AT&T actually is likely to provide me the most comprehensive geographic coverage of all the major cell-phone providers.

Now, regarding the sluggishness of the data network. For all I know, the carpers are right on. But again, as a consequence of being a long-time Cingular data customer, I wouldn’t know. And as my workplace is beyond the reach of both DSL and cable data and my home is at the very edge of DSL, I live in a heartily pre-YouTube 256k up or down world. I don’t see that big a differinterferenceface between my cell’s internet access and my wired access portals. So for me, the apparently slow online access out of Wifi for the iPhone is a non-issue.

So far so good, if underwhelming. Alas, thus far I’ve seen no clear answers to my key questions:

1. can I just slap in my extant SIM and go?

Currently, I have access to four AT&T phones: a Treo 650 with a crushed screen, my current Nokia 6620, a long-term lifesaving loaner Nokia 6600, and a Razr v.1. I can stick my SIM in any of these and accomplish specific tasks. I dearly miss the Treo and may yet go for a 700p or even another 650 (hi-rez on-board stereo recording mics plus a 1GB capacity SD slot: it’s a perfect pocket recorder). If I add an iPhone to the toxicity farm, will it play nice?

(Update: some say yes, some say no, and Pogoe said back on June 28 that it had to do with 32-bit vs 64-bit SIMS. Supposedly, in-network 64-bit sims shoudl be interchangeable, which is more or less the answer I wanted to hear.)

2. Can I use the iPhone as a bluetooth modem for my laptop, if need be?

Friends have noted that Apple’s lit on the BT features in the device features some sublime softshoe action, lacking meaty detail. Given that AT&T deliberately disables the feature on non-iPhone BT handsets that support it, it seems likely not to have made the cut. On the other hand, the geeks and hackers have yet to weigh in in any way that answers this quesition, so who knows.

(Again, Pogue says ‘No.’ I wonder, as that’s the distributor answer if you ask about this feature w/r/t a Treo.)

The other issue – the predictive keyboard – has me concerned but not very. The current version of Movable Type disables remote posting when run as suggested by the distributing company, and moblogging, even from the aggravating SMS-based multimode keypad on the Nokia 6620, has become my primary bloogging method. Thus my recent dearth of posts. So the only application for the phone’s keyboard I really care about is currently disabled. It seems we will be spared, for the nonce, the spectacle of me learning, yet again, just how much I do in fact ‘think different.’

All the above plus no video-capture have me leaning away from the device.

The issues that had me longing for an Apple-developed cell a year ago have largely receded with the switch away from a Palm OS. Now, I just never bother to sync the phone. That kind of sucks, since having a satellite computer is really interesting. Having it run Palm OS is really, really, really aggravating, in different ways than if the device were running a Windows Mobile variant. The aggravation stems not from usability but from instability and sync problems, incomplete and poorly thought out device-mounting protocols, timeouts, and the like.

What I guess I was hoping for was a device that is as flexible and feature-rich on the motherboard as a Treo 650 and as transparent to the user and cusomizable as my current Mac OS X laptop. Instead, I think Apple has released something that adds one key feature the 650 lacked (Wifi) and underperforms a whole slew of things the Treo had from the get go, in exchange for increased stability and a whizzy, but ultimately limiting, new UI.

I may yet change my mind. But for now, exactly like the iPod, I don’t seem to be in the target demographic and that’s just fine with me.

(Of course, there’s an ace up Uncle Steve’s sleeve on this: I will never, ever, ever buy a Windows Mobile device, and Palm carries the unmistakable stench of endgame about it.)

Movable Type 4 Beta: open source, sez Anil. About time, sez I. That and persistent fora threads stands a chance of returning the app its’ former glory.

Item: our plumbing sprung a leak.

Item: over the phone, I got a ballpark figure out of the plumbing company, five to seven hundred bucks.

Item: when the guy presented his quotes, they totaled just over two thousand dollars. What could we do? We okayed it.

Item: when the guy finished, he’d found that one of his line items was not enough to clear the sewer-line blockage.

Net result: two thousand dollars poorer, no working toilet or shower upstairs, and a new quote in hand for about seven thousand dollars, work which will entail a backhoe, a jackhammer, giant trenches in the lawn, and a torn-up expanse of concrete.

BONUS: I have diarrhea this evening and now must attempt to trot up and down the stairs with my own personal plumbing valves held firmly in the off position, no mean feat.

I am a less-than-satisfied homeowner tonight.

Mac <=> PC Font Conversion. Self-explanatory.

FastCGI installed! There is a noticeable speed bump. I did see a server-misconfig error thrown a moment ago on some pagebuild subroutine, though. Hm.

UPDATE: look at that, it happened again. Looks like the entries are getting written out, at least. Odd. Also it appears that editing the entry generated a double post.