You may have noticed the introduction of tags here at bitterpill.org. I spent a few hours this weekend moving over to a new weblog tool. I know that many will exclaim, "Why have you discarded that crappy piece of software that you piecemealed together and have basically abandoned for the past two years?" Why indeed. Yet, with so many mature software packages out there to allow easy blogging, and me with so little resources (read: no desire) to add any new functionality to the old system, it seemed logical to move on...to let the old system go. It's me blogging software, not you. We've grown apart, and we just don't seem to communicate anymore. Not to mention the sexy little blog software that works at the dry cleaner down the street. She understands me.

With the new wares we get tagging...ain't it a peach. I've been tagging old posts when the mood hits me, and someday soon, or maybe never, I'll have tagged up the whole pill. In light of this new tagging functionality, I hacked up a little add-on code to display all tags in a format I like to describe as a "Tag Smog" (disclaimer, graphing idea stole shamelessly [maybe a bit of shame] from jason).

With my superior qualities so obvious, it was an intolerable hardship to have to suffer fools gladly. So I rarely did. All their resistance to my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views proved was that they possessed an inferior intellect and a weaker character than God had blessed me with, and I felt it was my clear duty to so inform them.

- John McCain (-via nro)

Some have their blogs in a bit of a bunch over McCain's statement. Of course, this is by no means overshadowed by the fact that McCain was speaking at Liberty University, or as I like to call it, "Holy crap, that evil bastard has his own university!"

Mind you, McCain's statement should in no way lead you to the conclusion that my brilliantly conceived and cogently argued views are any less brilliant or cogent, nor should it distract from the fact that Jerry Falwell is indeed the anti-christ.

Andrea launches keyword cartoons.

All she could think was, "I'm so over me" as her nose bled down her pretty dress. - asbestos cancer

brilliant...

With over 100,000 posts, the gawker database is taking a bit to update to MT 3.2.

been running for about 30 minutes now...

update: finished in about 40 minutes. And yes, this is what qualifies as content around here now-a-days

warning: technical rant follows. NSFPWL (not safe for people with a life).

When I worked at techies.com back in the day, the developers had this habit of describing the code base as "very OO" (oh, oh). Deciphered as very object oriented. The techies code base was bloated and slow and completely unstable. As a system administrator I had written a script to loop and wait until the main java servlet process crashed, and then it would start it again. This happened about every ten minutes or so. If you would ask the developers about the development methodologies of the techies application they would inevitable say, "It is all very OO."

Saying something is very OO when asked about the inner workings of an application is like a mechanic answering "We made it go fast" when asked about the engine of a stock car. This answer is so general and vague it is like saying, "Well, we used a combustion engine in this car, cause, well, combustion engines are the new exciting engines, and they make the car go forward."

This leads me to Movable Type(MT). I have helped implement a few systems with MT, and helped manage and maintain a high volume web site that is published using MT. From a users perspective MT is a clean and nicely designed weblog publishing system. It is fairly easy to install, and has a decent feature set to get a weblog off the ground and running. It also provides a plugin API, and there are a wealth of plugins out there that extend the app in many interesting ways. It is easy to understand why end users like MT.

When I first started hearing about MT people would mention how great the code base was. "It's clean Object Oriented Perl." they would say. When I questioned why MT wasn't open source I was told by one user that the main developer was concerned about accepting any code into his pristine code base (note: I am fairly sure that this was inaccurate, but I mentione it to note people's perception of the MT code). When a company I contract for was discussing moving to Wordpress (another weblog publishing tool) a concern of one of the adminstrators was that it wasn't truly "OO" like MT.

To be clear, I will draw a line in the sand. These are all perceptions of end users and people who have not done much development with object oriented languages, or with MT proper. These are comments from people who have used, and are using, MT.

After working with MT for a while I started to peek in under the covers to see what was what. Most MT installations run as perl CGI, and if you have had any experience running a high traffic site you will understand what that implies. CGI is not very scalable, and perl CGIs add even more overhead to the problem. Add some OO (very OO) perl on top, and you have built yourself a three-toed sloth for a web application. Mind you, MT was built primary for personal publishing (I am assuming here), so for most, this isn't an issue.

This leads me to a "very OO" aspect of MT, MT's CMS class. This class implements a very basic anti-pattern, the god class. It is over five thousand lines of perl code with over 100 methods. CMS handles much of the core content management calls for the web application, at least I assume it does as I didn't read through all of the five thousand lines of code. It is a behemoth of a class, and bloated is a nice way to describe it. It is a grand example of a god class.

[mark@louis App]$ wc -l CMS.pm
   5203 CMS.pm

I have written a god class (a few to be honest), every developer does at some point. Being a good developer is about learning from mistakes, and improving on your design the next time. Do I fault the developers at techies for their badly written code? I do not. I eventually became a developer at techies and helped introduce my share of badly designed code. They key is, of course, not repeating the past, learning from your mistakes. This is what, in my mind, makes a good developer.

I don't write this to bash the MT developers. They have done a lot of interesting work, and we all implement bad designs along the way. It is all part of the process of being a developer.

So why the rant about MT? When people tout a bad design as an elegant design it is a misdirection, a lie. People who do not know better will accept it as good, and will propagate it. Movable Type is an acceptable weblog publishing tool for some users, but as an example of good object oriented design and implementation it falls far short.

Lately I have been noticing more and more a collection of people with similar interests, ideas or ideology are being referred to as "folks". And most of the time this reference is not made in a positive light. I see it often on political blogs such as humunga-pundit.com, but it has started to creep its way into the normal blog world as well (if there is such a thing).

Mind you, its not just in the domain of weblogs that this terminology has taken hold. It has long been rooted in the political realm to use "folks" in reference to groups of people, sometimes in a positive light, "These folk have been working hard to make a decent living wage.", and sometimes in a less favorable light, "If those folks down in washington could only see beyond partisan lines." Yet, it seems in the realm of political blogs of profuse punditry the term is used mainly in a negative light. I'm not sure if it is a reflection of our "working the ranch", folksy President, or maybe its a way to refer to someone you think is an asshole but the public forum forces a gentler terminology, or maybe its just a expression that has slowly evolved over time into our common consciousness. What I do know is that it has become quite prevalent in the world of weblogs, and frankly, I don't like the folks who are doing it.

There are, of course, variations on the theme. 'Group', 'Crowd' and 'Gang' are readily interchangeable with 'folks'. "I imagine the anti-war gang will readily agree", or "The pro-gun group will surely disagree." are examples of common use. However, I think "folks" is by far the most commonly used, and it takes the most derogatory turn, "If those pro something folks could only...bla bla..." Of course, most of the time its the politics they are expounding that turn my favor, but the "folks" reference is the icing on the cake. If the pro "folks" crowd could only see it my way...

Maybe its the down home folksy nature of these United States that lends itself to referring to people in this manner, adding a John Wayne swagger to the collective lexicon. We're all just a bunch of folks riding out on the great plains of life, punching doggies and writing weblogs on the side. Or maybe, its just the sour taste that people in the poli-blog-o-sphere (that hurt more to write than it took to read, trust me) have for other people's views, and "folks" is just a simple childish way of expressing it. Lets try an example:

A pro gun NRA member writing a post about a person who advocates stricter gun laws.

the poli-blog way: "if we leave it up to the anti-gun folks, we will lose our right to own guns."

non-bloggy discourse: if we leave it up to the people who want stricter gun laws, we will lose our right to own guns."

Which do you prefer. If you prefer selection one, than you most likely have a blogspot weblog with a name like "prophetic punditry", "rationales for the irrational" or "medium sized red rugby balls". I suggest doing a google search on your site for "gang", "group", "crowd" or "folks", the results are predictable.

So I am making a plea to all the poli-blogs out there, lets refer to people as people, and organizations by their names. I'll still go on disagreeing with pretty much everything you say, but it'll make it that much easier for me.

Intuitive readers might imply that this entire rant is a thinly veiled attempt at calling the people that use the phrase "folks" folks, but those folks would be sadly mistaken.

warning: incoherent and mind numbingly boring technology rant follows:

The comment form here at bitterpill.org is set up to send me an email when, in the rare occurrence, someone posts a comment. However, the email functionality has been broken for some time. Why? To be honest, I have been too lazy to figure it out, and frankly, this wasn't a bug high on my list of bugs to fix. Today I gathered up the gumption to sort it out. It turns out that the least likely of culprits was to blame. I imagine many a reader now pondering, "You mean it wasn't your crappie code or your even crappier system configuration that was causing your mail problems?" On most days this thought would be right on the money, but today my dear friends my incompetence was not to blame. It turns out it was was those Stanford brianiacs at google.

Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided to bundle the java.mail API in their google API jar, and in the process broke my mailing code. The java.mail API doesn't take too kindly to having multiple instances of its self in the class path, it's selfish that way. It took me forever to figure out why it was failing, and only after Nick pushed me in the right direction by convincing me to look through all the java APIs in the bitter pill webapp to see if some dope had bundled the mail APIs in their code. Google was the culprit, those bastards!

For posterity, a quick glance at some saving grace bash scripting:

for file in `ls`; do
    echo $file; jar -tf $file | grep mail;
done


Team Pill has been hard at work on a new look and/or feel. After 48 months of development, we have finally launched the new design. I'd like to take a moment to thank the team for all their hard work.

Andrea, you put your heart into this project. I can only offer my thanx, in lue of pay.

Philip, your emotional and financial support helped make this project a reality. I am happy to call you friend, even if I barely know and mostly dislike you.

Rueben, You lost your leg when rendering HTML on an old Mac IIci. Sure, your performance suffered greatly after the accident, but we kept you on so not to get sued. Your diligent QA and tech support was barely completed in time.

Klaus, you quit in the last month, the home stretch, and for that I will never forgive you. This is the last time anyone on Team Pill will speak of you.

The development group in Building C, you did nothing, but we stole your soda and went through your stuff on many a late night, so thanx.

My ex wives and many children, your love and devotion has made me a richer man. This project would have never been possible if I didn't slack a bit in paying your alimony and child support, so thank you.

And finally, most thanks go to me, for whom without this project wouldn't have been possible. My vision and intelligence made it all come together. How can I thank me enough.

A bit of a tweaking to the design (no laughing in the back, please) here at the pill. A tightening of a CSS screw here, and a calibration of some XHTML there. For the better? Well, can it get any worse?