Blog: 2006-12

John Nash, etc., and Dating

xkcd, "Nash"

Bank of America dropping Celebrity Series

The move means the Celebrity Series, which puts on roughly 50 classical music and dance performances a year in Symphony Hall, Jordan Hall, and a host of other sites, will lose about $600,000 of its $7 million annual operating budget. The bank's name will be dropped from the title of the series.

—Geoff Edgers, "Celebrity Series loses Bank of America's chief sponsorship," Boston Globe, 2006-12-14

Unfortunate. I wonder how much more revenue Celebrity Series could generate by increasing the attendance at its performances. When we saw Alvin Ailey at the Wang Center last spring (see 2006-05-01), it was gorgeous and had broad appeal, but hundreds of seats at the Saturday performance were empty.

Nokia E61 and Pair.com IMAP SSL Certificate

A week or two ago, my domain-hoster, Pair.com switched the SSL certificate it was using for IMAP SSL access to my email. The new certificate was untrusted by the E61 because the certificate authority was UTN-USERFirst-Hardware.

I grabbed /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/UTN_USERFirst_Hardware_Root_CA.crt from the Debian ca-certificates. Nokia's documentation is vague, and my first half-dozen different approaches to get the E61 to accept the certificate failed. The trick, pointed out by Kevin Henrikson's 2006-06-18 blog entry is that the CA certificate needs to be in DER format. So on a Linux box I did:

openssl x509 -outform DER \
    -in  UTN_USERFirst_Hardware_Root_CA.crt \
    -out UTN_USERFirst_Hardware_Root_CA.der

I then emailed the DER file as an attachment to myself, opened the email attachment on my E61, and accepted the E61's offer to install it. IMAP SSL once again works for me.

Usability-wise -- and therefore, security-wise -- this is a mess. But at least in my case I've thwarted casual email snoopers from public WiFi access points. I think.

The A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science

Union of Concerned Scientists, "The A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science"

Credit Reporting, Identity Theft, and Conflict of Interest

"Identity theft has essentially become a business -- not just for bad guys but for good guys, too," said Robert Gellman, a privacy consultant in Washington. "A lot of the people that are involved in profiting legally from identity theft are direct participants in the whole credit system that doesn't have the protections in place to prevent identity theft in the first place." [...] In the meantime, measures that could stem fraud from identity theft -- like legislation empowering consumers to block access to their credit records, making it impossible to extend new credit -- have faced stiff resistance from industry groups.

—Eric Dash, "Protectors, Too, Gather Profits From ID Theft," New York Times, 2006-12-12

Credit reporting services didn't start out as an extortion racket, but I think they're in danger of becoming one, at least as a billion-dollar side-business.

This is almost funny:

"I am not about to risk something I have worked so hard on," said Ms. Barrington, who pays about $15 a month for TransUnion's credit-monitoring service. "All it takes is one person stealing your information and you are in a world of hurt."

Blogging Software and RELAX NG XML Schema

Over the weekend I played with the RELAX NG XML Schema language in the course of refining my new blog model and software. I'm prioritizing this on my projects list as I really don't want to wait any longer for permalinks, RSS, and fancy image handling.

One of the features of the new software will be structured support for draft, committed, and deleted states of blog entries, as well as separate updates. The original motivation behind this support was to have a short second-thoughting period within the relative ephemerality of my Web site, before an entry is committed and then pushed out via RSS. (Incidentally, this also makes my Web site a bit stickier, in theory, since Web site readers get an early preview of blog entries, minutes or hours before RSS readers do. In theory; in practice, the content isn't all that urgent or important.) When part of an entry is in draft state, that fact is disclosed to the reader.

When an entry is first committed, the main title and text of the blog entry becomes immutable, and a timestamp of the last modification time is disclosed to the reader. The only way to modify a committed entry is to add a separate update or to flag part of the entry as deleted. Both forms of ammending are disclosed to the reader, with timestamps. Similar to the main title and text of an entry, these updates themselves have draft, committed, and deleted states.

In the initial version of the software, the blog will be written by editing a large XML source file. Timestamp attributes will be updated in the XML source programmatically. This makes a lot of sense for my target user (me).

Here's a snapshot of the RELAX NG schema I'm using at the moment (still under construction).

start =
   element blog {
      element entry {
         attribute key { blogEntryKey },
         element main {
            blogEntryTimestamps,
            element title { xsd:string },
            bodyContent
         },
         element update {
            blogEntryTimestamps,
            bodyContent
         }*
      }*
   }

blogEntryKey = xsd:string { minLength = "1" }

dateAndOptionalTOD = xsd:string { minLength = "8" }

blogEntryTimestamps =
   attribute firstT  { dateAndOptionalTOD }?,
   attribute changeT { dateAndOptionalTOD }?,
   attribute commitT { dateAndOptionalTOD }?,
   attribute deleteT { dateAndOptionalTOD }?

bodyContent =
   (  unsectionedBodyElement |
      element section {
         unsectionedBodyElement*,
         element subsection {
            unsectionedBodyElement*,
            element subsubsection { unsectionedBodyElement* }*
         }*
      }*
   )*

unsectionedBodyElement =
   element p         { chunk+ } |
   element codeblock { chunk+ } |
   element ol        { li+    } |
   element ul        { li+    } |
   element quoteblock {
      bodyContent,
      element attribution { chunk+ }?
   }

li = element li { chunk+ }

chunk =
   element br   { empty  } |
   element code { chunk+ } |
   element emph { chunk+ } |
   element blogref {
      attribute key { blogEntryKey },
      ( chunk+ | empty )
   } |
   element blogimg {
      attribute name { xsd:string },
      (  attribute alt         { xsd:string } |
         attribute unimportant { empty      }
      ),
      chunk+
   } |
   element blogimgref {
      attribute entry { blogEntryKey },
      attribute name  { xsd:string   },
      text
   } |
   text

Initial thought on RELAX NG is that it's much easier to use than XSL, even when using the XML syntax of RELAX NG. I started out with the XML syntax and converted to the Compact syntax so that I could use it with James Clark's Emacs nXML mode. The Compact syntax is an additional win for usability.

I'm using David Rosenborg's RNC Emacs Mode to edit the RELAX NG schema. There are a few compatibility issues with GNU Emacs 21 (apparently it was developed with XEmacs), and I sent fixes to David. Let me know if you want a copy of my unofficial version.

Nokia E61 Screen Covers and Hard Shells

After twice breaking the add-on clear plastic shell for my Nokia E61 smartphone (see 2006-11-08) and being dissatisfied with the bulk and weight, I got some LCD protector covers instead. They'll protect the glass from scratching in my jacket pocket, at least.

Boston Housing Bubble

I haven't followed the Boston real estate market; I just noted to myself that that it's been insane the entire 9 years I've lived here. bostonbubble.com looks interesting.

Breakfast and Blogging

For most of my adult life, I wouldn't eat until lunch. One of the good habits I've adopted from the ex-girlfriend is known as "breakfast."

Current breakfast of choice is the gf-inspired granola with fruit and WestSoy Vanilla Rice Beverage. OK granola can be gotten anywhere, including (in Cambridge, MA, USA) Trader Joe's and Harvest. Some good fruits atop granola are strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, bananas, and nectarines. I'm too lazy in the morning to wash and cut strawberries just for myself, so I've been nuking a few on-demand from a bag of frozen strawberries, in the bowl, and then adding the granola and fake milk to the bowl.

Our "winter breakfast" last year was toasted bagels with cream cheese and tomato slices. I've recently discovered that Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese is not bad at all, particularly by the standards of vegetarian-friendly cheese (not to damn it with faint praise).

Now to reluctantly train my body away from midnight snacks. I'm blessed with a better metabolism and build than I deserve, but eating shortly before bed still isn't very healthy.

I blog things like this to contribute in my very small way to the global awareness-raising on health topics. Blog entries aren't necessarily well-planned essays. Oftentimes, I start typing a blog entry without knowing whether I have anything useful to say. As I'm writing the sentences, my brain associates to pertinent information I might include. Sometimes, once some sentences are written, I realize that I didn't have much to say after all. In that case, the effort has already been expended, and the entry might still include a factoid or inspiration that a blog reader or Web searcher finds useful. Were I playing the blog promotion game, rather than simply spewing my personal blatherings, I might have to be more discriminating about what I foist on my dear readers.