Don't Back Down

I don't personally partake in prostitution. I don't personally partake in much that's illegal. I would say I don't partake in anything, but I do speed from time to time. I'm sure there are other things too. But what I don't understand is why so much effort is expended in order to keep consenting adults from doing what interests them.

I am not saying in any way, shape or form that prostitution is a good career, hobby or even investment (though the sex industry does seem to rake in some serious cabbage). What I am saying is that if two people want to get together, and one wants to be paid and the other wants to pay, and the two come to an understanding about an agreeable sum, where is the harm?

Seven people were recently accused of operating a prostitution ring. No word on whether said ring is one of those that helps your stamina during the alleged acts. I would assume not - longer interludes are probably bad for business. In any case, according to at least one article, the indictment lists 53 separate counts, that occured from 1997 to 2001. One of the accused faces 51 separate counts, each of which might result in 5 years in prison. You do the math.

This boggles the mind. First, at least one person has been working on this for the last seven years. Second, what has this person been doing since 2001, when the last of these things happened? Third, why does a crime like making money from prostitution carry the threat of 250 or more years in prison, when the government whines about prison overcrowding, and murderers get out on parole? Fourth, why is the government even spending money on this? And finally, who determines the pronounciation of words like indictment?

I am a Christian. For me, prostitution doesn't work, though only a part of that has to do with my faith. If you come to me and ask me my advice, I'll probably tell you not to do it. Your parents or children or neighbors or bridge club may do the same. But I don't get why the government thinks that things like this are important.

It seems more and more to me that people are apt to get excited about any old thing, thinking that it has to do with terrorism and how they are more and more likely to die because of it. Yet it also seems to me that it would make more sense if people were to become more discerning in their tastes instead of less so. The more experience you have with something, the more discretion you can use in making your decisions. Theoretically, anyway.

Let's look at Jose Padilla - the so called 'dirty bomber'. In previous decades, this would likely refer to someone who liked to create incendiary devices in his underwear - or perhaps naked. With the advent of terrorism in the US, this means instead that he was inclined to produce a device which would dirty the atmosphere in a high-density area, such as Manhattan, specifically with radiation, which would lead to widespread sickness and death.

The radiation was supposed to spread after some form of radioactive material was exploded by more conventional devices. This has been in the news for months. Yet it turns out that Padilla's apparent choice of a source for the radioactive material (uranium) isn't particularly radioactive at all. One researcher claims he uses it as a doorstop. Another that it's like blowing up a chunk of lead. Neither seems especially dangerous.

Maybe Jose Padilla is just a distraction while something truly dangerous is planned.

For the most part, I enjoy getting comments on my entries. Nice to know that people enjoy the content, or that they feel the same - and even to see that some people have differing opinions. Though to be fair, I mostly enjoy the latter when they can at least present their arguments intelligently. Which leads us to the great disruptor of all things intelligent - comment spam.

I receive a fair amount of comment spam, but it's really not a lot, all things considered. I've got one or two that just seem to love my posts - especially the older ones - for their machinations. Luckily, with Movable Type, there are options. Jay has put together MT-Blacklist, which does a fine job of helping out. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with version 3.0D (yet). Plus it does require at least a bit of monitoring, and let's face it - I'm lazy.

I was playing with the new callback functionality of v3.0D and trying to come up with a way to use it, and I decided I could create a tiny little plugin that simply checks the comment as it's posted. The check is trivial - it just looks to see if the entry is older than 7 days. If so, the comment gets moderated. End of plugin.

Not fancy by any means. And it may not even work. I hope it doesn't choke off commenting. Not that there was a bunch - but people do like to see their comments once they've posted them. If they think they are just lost, they might not come back. Have to see how that works out. In the meantime, I caught my first comment spam troll today. He posted on an older entry and sure enough, I didn't have to worry about it showing up online or in my feeds or anywhere. Kinda nice.

I'm sure they'll figure out they can comment on new posts and spread their filth, but the good thing about that is that those posts don't generally have the rank of the older ones - haven't had time to build up a good batch of links pointing to them and the like. So maybe it will help. I sure hope so.

If it works out, and if some other small changes are made to the v3.0D callback interface, I'll release this to the public.

I've finished testing the updated MT-SomeDays. This version is appropriate for both Movable Type v2.6x and v3.0D users. There is only one new tag:

<$MTSDEntryCount$>

This tag will provide you a numeric count of the number of entries for a given day. The rest of the changes are all under the hood. Enjoy!

Announcement. Download.

School is almost out in these parts, so I figured I would throw together another entry about the inanity present in our school's scheduling system.

Our oldest passed his 3rd grade end-of-grade tests a couple of weeks ago. I don't know that he's done anything since. Our youngest had a kindergarten graduation on Thursday, and I'm pretty certain that he hasn't done anything since. To be fair, he didn't do a whole lot prior to that, either. Yet school doesn't let out until Wednesday. It was supposed to be Tuesday, but because of extra snow days, there's another day tacked onto the end of the year.

Look, I understand that certain people say that school must last for a particular number of days. But what I don't understand is why. What exactly are these kids learning by staying in school and not doing anything? That once you've reached a goal, you should just play until the final bell rings? As if we don't have a problem with that already.

I have been testing a bit lately, and somewhere in that process I turned off my comment notifications - so I hadn't realized the junk that was piling up. Terribly sorry for any inconvenience.

I've completed the update to MT-ModCheck so that standalone mode will integrate with the Movable Type 3.0D interface.

This is really the only change, so if you're still using a 2.6x version of Movable Type, there is no reason to upgrade.

Read "MT-ModCheck 2.0.0" »

While it isn't commonly used, the OPML spec allows for recursive data - that is, folders with folders within folders. However, until Version 2.0.0 of MT-Outliner, you couldn't get at this data easily - at least not for displaying it on your Movable Type-powered blog.

Now I've added an MTOutlinerRecurse tag to MT-Outliner. I put together a page with the details on how it works, but at least for me, the subject is difficult to grasp when reading about it - but it does work! Try playing with the tag to see how it can add additional dimensions to your OPML output. You will, of course, need to have these multiple levels in your OPML files!

Many thanks to David Raynes, not only for starting me down the recursion path with his SubCategories plugin, but for responding to my email asking for help!

I ran into a problem the other day where Newsgator's export of OPML data wouldn't parse through MT-Outliner. Not a problem for me - I use Bloglines. But definitely a problem for some. It turned out that the problem was in the data. While XML doesn't really need whitespace, it looks like most everyone includes it in their OPML files, separating each entry into a separate line by using a carriage return or line feed (or both).

Not Newsgator. Their OPML export was just one long string of text. This broke MT-Outliner, as it didn't have anything to break up the data. All that was happening in the plugin was that it split the data and ran some regular expressions to pull out the field info. This was limited, but it was also pretty easy to do. Once the split went away, it meant that there wasn't data where it was expected.

For a while, I've known that MT-Outliner wouldn't really handle multiple levels of recursion - that is to say, folders within folders. It might print them, but it wouldn't be anything folder-like. Which meant I had two reasons to look at updating the code. So I did.

Using XML::Twig, I rewrote MT-Outliner to take advantage of XML parsing. This allowed me to actually pull data even if the line breaks had been left out. It also allowed me to process data hierarchically, and really take advantage of the structure that's always been there in the OPML document.

The problem is that XML::Twig requires XML::Parser, which in turn requires XML::Parser::Expat, which some of you may not have. What's worse is that it's not something you can install into EXTLIB and have it work. It must be compiled. So you may need help from your web host to get this going. If you're not sure, ask them.

For those of you who cannot get XML::Twig operating, the current version (1.3.0) of MT-Outliner will remain available for download, but it will receive no further development.