Caliban - Opinion and Righteous Anger

Well, not quite new management, but I thought I'd try something new. I'm using Dave Thomas's RubLog to give the site a bit of a new look. All of the old pages are still active. The main links that used to form the footer of the front page can now be found in the This Site sidebar, which is off to the left of the page.

I've also changed the way I add content to the site. I'm still using vim as my editor, but I no longer enter HTML directly. Instead, I use Markdown, which is a simplified mark-up language, run through a Ruby library called BlueCloth. Thanks to RubLog's converters, this is all extremely easy and automatic.

Sarah's currently away in England and Ireland, so I'm all on my Todd. I get to live the bachelor lifestyle for about 12 days, at which time I fly home to Amsterdam, where we'll meet up again. I can't wait to get back home for a few days and escape the madness of the US.

Sarah and I are off to Amsterdam for a week at the end of April. This will be her first Koninginnedag, so we're hoping for mooi weer.

Sarah and I will be making our second trip to Iceland in August. Rather than touring the whole country, this time we'll be spending just a few days in the capital of Reykjavík and then a few more in the town of Heimaey on the island of Vestmannaeyjar, located just off the south coast of the country. The latter destination will allow us to enjoy the unique thrill of the first flight of the year's pufflings from the cliffs above Heimaey.

Punctuating those two excursions will be ten or so days on the Faroe Islands, or Føroyar as their inhabitants know them, one of the lesser visited European countries. If you've never heard of the place and have no idea what the islands are like, have a look at these photos.

A friend of mine directed me to the following quote this evening:

...it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

The particular political pundit that first uttered these words was none other than Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, the second man in the Third Reich.

George Bush knows the truth of these words, even if he did have to be spoon-fed this wisdom by his more intelligent and even more cynical advisors. In the climate of fear that is the USA, it's very easy to lead people by the nose. All you need to do is distract the populace by making them afraid, even if what they are supposed to fear is an intangible entity, with no face, no defined beginning or end. All it needs is a name, so that the media can make sensationalistic use of it to strike terror into the hearts of all those who can't even locate a European country on a map of the world.

Of course, this cynical ploy has the added benefit of allowing its perpetrators to wage a war without end, since nobody is able to quantify when victory has or has not been achieved. Having ill-defined objectives can yield big dividends when your so-called political opposition shows typical bipartisan complicity and your populace has been numbed over time to the point that they can no longer even perceive scandal.

And how they buy into the myth in droves, petrified as they are that the enemies of peace from far away places and even further away cultures are just itching to deprive them of their petrol-guzzling four-wheel drive vehicles, their all-American burger and fries and their daily cathode ray fix.

And people wonder why I'm sick of this fucking place. "It's not that bad, right?" Fuck, yes, it is.

Postfix 2.1 is finally out and has a bunch of new features, ranging from the potentially very evil ability to match mail on the usual range of header and body checks and then auto-Bcc extra recipients (imagine your company's paranoid security personnel Bcc'ing themselves a copy of every outgoing mail that contains a word like, say, IPO), all the way to weapons to prevent evil in the form of address verification.

Address verification is a great new feature. In short, this takes the RCPT FROM from each incoming connection, obtains the MX for the reported domain, and connects back in real-time with a probe to determine whether the reported sender address is actually deliverable. If it is, the incoming e-mail is allowed through. Otherwise, it gets a 550. A cache of both positive and negative results is built up, otherwise this would be horribly expensive on all but the lowest traffic sites.

Exim has had this for a while (under a different name), but that MTA's monolithic design doesn't appeal to me. An MTA is too complex a piece of software to have a monolithic design these days, especially if it runs as root. That's a liability I don't need.

Don't turn on address verification unless you have a relatively low traffic site. Those probes are expensive, even with caching.

The IPO speculation continues.

Meanwhile, some people are starting to actually write some sane things about Gmail.

Interestingly, not one of my friends have even asked me for a Gmail account. I don't know what conclusion, if any, to infer from that. On the other hand, Sarah's colleagues have been going crazy to get an invitation from me.

PragDave's RubLog is a nice piece of software, but is missing advanced features, such as trackback and comments. On the other hand, it's written in Ruby, so adding features is relatively easy.

Nevertheless, I'm quite new to this blogging thing, so I need some experience with more powerful software, just so that I can come to understand this area of the Web in more detail. Working at a company like Google, home of Blogger, you'd think that I'd know all about blogging, but I'm actually pretty ignorant. I spend most of my time configuring stuff and hacking code. I may know Apache well, for example, but as for what end-users do with it, I don't pay much attention.

Anyway, I'm going to put my few previous entries on-line here and see how well this Movable Type thing works out. One nice thing about RubLog is its simplicity. Using nothing but plain text files, its operation is very transparent. Movable Type is quite a bit different, requiring lots of non-standard Perl modules and writing data away into DBM files. It also has a complex templating and tagging system, which is going to take me some time to get to grips with. For now, I'll just stick with the defaults.

The only adventurous things I'm doing right now are:

• using Markdown for mark-up

• including some Ruby code in my templates between <% %> tags.

  This then gets spat out into .rhtml files, on which Apache invokes eRuby at serving time.

I have to admire the flexibility of this publishing system.

So, with Sarah still over on the Emerald Isle, I went to Chef Chu for dinner tonight. At the end of the meal, the waiter brought me my fortune-cookie. It turned out to be empty.

I'm getting on an aeroplane on Wednesday.

It's a good thing I'm not superstitious.

I stumbled on this nice account of the evolution of writing tonight.

It's amazing to think that the Greeks invented something that was then adopted by the Romans, who refined and bequeathed it to civilisations to come. Here am I, on the west coast of North America, using a language and a script that germinated and matured elsewhere. Each word that I type here tonight is the product of years of linguistic refinement and mutation. How amazing when you consider it. Where will it go from here?

We think ourselves so evolved, too, until you consider that we've only had the written word for a little over two centuries. Compare that to the amount of time that mankind has existed on the planet and you realise that we're really still in the dark ages. What fundamental inventions are yet to come, that people hundreds of years from now will consider us barbaric for having had to live without, in much the same way that many of us today imagine how dull life must have been before television, when people actually had to engage in the art of conversation?

It's a bizarre experience to work at a company about whom a news story appears in the media at least once an hour. Reporters have even been known to hide in our bushes, so we now have security guards in the car park, ready to shoo away anyone who comes poking around.

This is one of the interesting things about living in Silicon Valley. I could move back to The Netherlands and spend the next 500 years working at a couple of hundred fresh, exciting, new companies, but I guarantee you that not one of them would ever come in for the attention that this one does.

How come?

It comes down to the difference in mentality between Americans and the Dutch (but not just the Dutch, of course; substitute any other European country here). In business, Americans -- especially denizens of The Valley as it's called around here -- view the sky as the limit. Ideas that would be dismissed as fantasy elsewhere, receive massive funding here and come to life.

Of course, those ideas are fantasy, but that's not the point. The point is that they can be made into reality by hard work, brilliance and not a small amount of luck. There's one other quality that's required however: sheer, unfettered imagination; and that's where we sober Dutch come a little unstuck. We have good ideas, but immediately consign our more fantastically conceived ones to cloud cuckoo land.

But Silicon Valley is cloud cuckoo land. Here, no idea is too brilliant -- or, as we've seen all too often in recent years, too idiotic -- for its conceiver to dismiss it as not representing a viable business model. Thanks to venture capital funding and a plethora of rich potential angel investors always looking for the next big thing, it's possible to obtain the necessary backing to get your idea off the ground.

In The Netherlands, in contrast, you'd be laughed at.

"It's 1998 and you want to start a search-engine? Er, have you seen Yahoo? Alta Vista? Excite? Search-engines are an established phenomenon and this area is a solved problem."

Being Dutch myself, I thought much the same thing back when I first started using Google, but it just goes to show you what is possible with, yes, that unfettered imagination I spoke of earlier, plus all of the other ingredients I mentioned and probably a few more elements too intangible for me to readily quantify.

That said, there's nothing quite like home. What the Dutch lack in imagination, they make up for socially. The Yanks may be flamboyant in business, but they're ultra-conservative in most other regards and living in the US can be a remarkably remote and stifling experience.

The Dutch are quite the opposite, so whilst I may have trouble finding an interesting job after Google, I'll at least be able to know that my future children will be living in a place where prime-time television doesn't consist of women engaging in expensive plastic surgery in order to become worthy of the moniker The Swan.

I'm leaving now for San Francisco airport to fly to Amsterdam, where I'll reunite with Sarah, who's been flying between England and Ireland for the last couple of weeks.

My next entry will be from The Netherlands.