Death threats and rotten apples in the blogosphere

Via Slashdot, a horrifying story. I’ve never heard of Kathy Sierra before, but now I know that she’s a respected author of books about Java. Apparently that frightens people. Yeah, I can’t figure that out either. So on a couple of blogs that have now been taken down, and on her own blog, she started receiving death threats. Vile, disgusting, horrifying threats. Apparently some of the people on those sites have in other places been crying, “But it’s free speech, man!” Sorry, threatening or suggesting that someone die ain’t protected.

I don’t know who the “siftee” person, or the “Joey” person, or the “Rev ED” people are, but I hope that they get what they have coming. See, there are lots of places that this kind of stuff falls into the “making terroristic threats” domain, and that’s big trouble.

Kathy has had to cancel speaking engagements because of the fear that has fallen upon her. Whether it was a person or people who thought they were being funny or that they had some right to speak this way though they didn’t really mean it, or it was someone who really intended her harm, the fear she feels is still just as real.

What saddens me most is that apparently any idea of civility has completely left at least a part of the blogosphere. Chris Locke, one of the people wound up in this mess, seems to be truly puzzled as to why people might consider him “acerbic and misogynistic” but I offer this: Apparently he was let go as the person helping get the Kat Herding blog up (caution, annoying embedded music player). The post on Kat Herding is relatively mild, the strongest being that he was “sort of an oddball and quite difficult to work with.” Locke’s response on his site was, “the bitch fired me! can you believe it? Of all the low down dirty stinking moves. That little crack whore fired me!”

He later disingenuously says to a journalist, in relation to the threats against Sierra, “Surely I've seen hateful stuff about women online, and when it is directed at women *because they are women,* I am disgusted by it. I have a 17-year-old daughter whom I love very much and I would not ever want to see her subjected to such Neanderthal views and behavior.”

What if said behavior is on your very own blog, Mr. Locke? Is it different because it’s all “just in fun?” How would people, like me, who have never been to your blog know that?

“What Barry Says” — Four years later and just as scary

Though it seems, from random readings on the net, that the neocons have lost considerable power with the huge disapproval of the American public for the current administration, it bears keeping in mind that the same ideas presented here are still very much in play. Corporatism in its worst incarnation, in my opinion, continues to drive our current involvement in Iraq. It ain’t about WMDs, it ain’t about bringing “freedom” to the Iraqi people. It’s oil profits and defense spending.

This video was made in 2003, and I downloaded a copy in 2004. In those years, it seems much of what Barry McNamera warns about is much more common knowledge — Bush is a figurehead, and corporate interests are calling the shots through Dick Cheney. As a commenter at StumbleUpon said just yesterday, “Watch out world.”

WestHost Rails application deployment — What I’ve learned

After many days of frustration, my Rails app is up and running on our WestHost server. Getting the app uploaded was not so bad, but it appears that you simply can’t do it with Capistrano because SVN is not one of the installable applications on WestHost. I really didn’t want to load up gcc and install SVN by hand. But when I did try out Capistrano, it did partially upload my app — it populated the database!

What do you need to know to get your rails app running on WestHost? Here’s what I learned:

Just FTP it

Since Capistrano was looking like it would be an ordeal, I just decided to roll up the app in a tarball and upload it to the host by ftp. That worked well, and I added an Alias in httpd.conf so that the server would see the new Rails directory. I also updated the .htaccess in the apps Public folder, all as described in the Rails wiki entry HowtoDeployMoreThanOneRailsAppOnOneMachine.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby in the scripts doesn’t work

WestHost doesn’t have a copy of env in /usr/bin, so that little bit of portability is broken. I had to go through and change all the scripts to start with #!/usr/local/ruby/bin/ruby instead. I tried creating a symlink to env in /usr/bin, but it didn’t work. I probably did it wrong (prolly shoulda been a hard link), but didn’t feel like messing around with it any more, and I had already changed the scripts to use the new shebang.

Basic HTTP Authentication is different for Apache

I followed The Teenage Mutant Ninja Hero Coders method to get basic authentication in my app. When I was first doing development on my Mac with lighttpd, all was swell. Then after deploying, I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t log in. Well, it was my ignorance of the part on the above page that says “If you are using Apache and mod_fastcgi, this method will likely not work out of the box.” After playing around, I edited my httpd.conf to look like this:

<IfDefine HAVE_FASTCGI>
AddModule mod_fastcgi.c
# Added the following line to allow
# passing of http headers to fcgi
FastCgiConfig -pass-header Authorization
</IfDefine>


Ta da! Authentication works!

Still to do

I think I have some routing issues. I have to access the app by doing http://www.server.com/appname/appname/. Actually, I think I need to play with the RewriteBase or something. And, if I leave off the trailing slash, the images used by the app don’t load.

Other than that, the app appears to be working well. I can do all the things with this basic app that I’m supposed to be able to do. All the CRUD stuff is working. All the goodies I put in, since it was so easy, are working too, like webcal:// calendar subscription and CSV export of the data.

I do want to change my report printing from just javascript prints to using PDF::Writer for more control over pagination. That shouldn’t be too hard now that the basic app is running.

The only big issue is normalizing the app so that it’s the same on the production server and the Mac I’m developing on. I think the biggest problem is the shebangs in the scripts folder. I think the best thing is to get env in /usr/bin so I can use that portable method of invoking Ruby.

As I get farther, I’ll post updates. I hope this helps anyone who comes across this, and who is deploying to WestHost.

My First Buddhist Pilgrimage — to Atlanta

This past weekend, I was in Atlanta to visit my boyfriend, and before the visit had mentioned to another friend that I would be up, and was hoping we could get together. In trying to arrange our mutually conflicting schedules, I mentioned that my boyfriend and I were planning on one morning to go to the Atlanta Zen Center. That sparked a recollection for my friend, that a friend of his had described seeing “some kind of Buddhist Temple or something” near the junction of I-675 and I-285. This obviously piqued my interest, so when I arrived at the boyfriend’s house Friday evening, I mentioned that I’d like to go look for this place.

Saturday afternoon we piled into the car to run some errands, find some food, and wend our way up to Midtown for maybe some good food and nightlife. After getting the errands out of the way, we headed out to find this temple thing. Being on the Jonesboro for the errands, we then took I-75 up to 285, then east to 675, and headed south. We drove and never saw anything remotely looking like a temple. Myself, I was looking for a chedi (the bell-shaped monuments common in some parts of Asia). We finally decided we’d gone far enough, and turned around.

A few moments later, from the northbound lane of 675, I spotted the temple on the west side of the interstate. How we missed it was a puzzle, because it was big and up high overlooking the highway. We resolved then that we wanted to get closer.

Since it was on the west side of 675, we headed back to 285 west, and took the first exit, Moreland Ave. The first major intersection came upon us pretty quickly, and we thought we needed to go a little further south. The second light was in just the right location it seemed, but there was a train running parallel to Moreland, blocking us from turning left back towards 675. We went a little farther, deciding we were too far (and still blocked by the train). We went back to where we originally wanted to turn, and waited for a very slow train to finally pass.

As we drove on, the boyfriend asked where I thought the temple was. Just as we were about to pass under 675, I said, “There it is!” We made a quick left turn, and up the hill was the grand temple

The sign read, “Wat Lao Buddha Phothisaram.”

At the bottom of the hill was what appeared to be a house converted into worship space — the roof fascias had been adorned with plywood cut in the traditional shapes found on Thai temples. It looked a bit disheveled overall, and though there was an SUV in the carport, it appeared no one was there. Up the hill a sort was was a steel building, then just below the crest of the hill was the temple. We drove up, and got out.

It looked like the temple was being enhanced with new landscaping — there were flats of pansies waiting to be planted, and stacks of inexpensive hollowed facing brick, some of which had already been placed as pavers around the temple. It definitely looked to be a labor of love, not one with a deep pocketbook. Behind the temple was a chedi made of plywood, and behind that what looked like a performance stage.

All of this was completely deserted, and the temple was padlocked. I wanted badly to see a monk come out of one of the buildings, offering to show us inside. Alas, it didn’t happen. We took a few pictures, one of which you see above, and after a few minutes headed further towards downtown Atlanta. We both felt a warmth knowing that a beautiful Buddhist temple is relatively close at hand — one that almost appears to have been transported magically from southeast Asia.

Since the picture from the cameraphone isn’t so good, here are some others I found:

This one is from Annie at Metroblogging Atlanta, who has been wondering about the temple since last year, and just got an answer last week!

That last one is from dennysmagicland’s flikr photostream.

WestHost Rails application deployment — Why is this hard?

I’ve written a tidy little app in Rails for work, and need to deploy it to our server. It’s really a basic program so using svn and Capistrano and all that seems like overkill. I just want to upload the folder where I did development locally on my Mac, and have it run on WestHost’s Rails installation. I do, however, want it to be in it’s own separate path, because I anticipate more programs coming along in the future.

I’ve been trying to get this to work for a week, and nothing is working the way it should be. I’ve added the Alias directive in httpd.conf to get it to see the new application directory, but after that, things just fall apart. Why is this so hard? Why does it seem that each hosting provider does this in a different way? This is frustrating.

So, in the full OSS spirit, as soon as I get this figured out, I’ll post my discoveries here to the blog. I hope that it will spare others some of the pain I’m going through at the moment.

Wish me luck!

Some Advertisers Showing Up on Ann Coulter’s Site Again

The grass-roots goodness over at the Daily Kos keeps on rolling, as people fed up with Ann Coulter’s mouth continue to push for advertisers to pull their ads. I endured another trip to the conservative Republican’s distasteful site, and noted (and got screen caps of) ING, LoanWeb, and Circuit City.

I immediately went to Circuit City’s site and hit the tiny little “Contact Us” link at the very bottom of the page, and got a big fat Error 404--Not Found.

Looks like the sysadmin got a little tired of being pummelled by angry people, and took down the page. Hopefully he or she has forwarded every one of those emails to the marketing department.

There are plenty of advertisers that are back since the ad rotator code started working again. Head over to the Kos story to find out who’s still advertising, and needs a respectful nudge encouraging them to do the right thing.

Advertising Stripped from Ann Coulter’s Site

Woah... that was fierce!

I checked in at Daily Kos today, and happened upon an entry where people were posting about who was pulling ads from the conservative Republican Anne Coulter’s site. The diary isn’t fully updated, as it shows several companies as still rotating ads, but noted in the comments is that there ain’t crap for ads on the inflamatory pundit’s site. It’s quite an entertaining read.

A check for myself revealed this:

Kinda bare, except for those you would expect. Oooo.... I can get Bill O’Reilley’s Culture Warrior and two other conservative books for only a freakin’ buck? Wow...

Ad code is still in her site’s header, and similar code is in the sidebar, but nothing is getting served:

<!-- Primary ad code ROS, 468x60 Banner (Above Fold) -->
<iframe src="http://www.mercuras.com/0506/ac_468x60_v1.htm" width=468 height=60 hspace=0
vspace=0 frameborder=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0 scrolling=no></iframe>
<!-- Primary ad code ROS, 468x60 Banner (Above Fold) -->
<!-- (c) 2005 INTERMARKETS, INC. -->

So her ad network, Intermarkets, has punted her. There’s also one for Google AdSense, but it isn’t showing anything either. The only one that’s still there is a box of text ads from AdBright.

I’m sure that she’ll just blow all of this off next time she sits down with her bud Sean Hannity. And I bet she’s calling all those advertisers that pulled their ads stuff like ‘wuss’ — except the word probably starts with an F.

I don’t see this as much of a victory, really, since the people that love her hate-mongering haven’t changed their tune. That’s a real problem that calling a few advertisers won’t fix.

Consider the Source: Ann Coulter and the other F-Bomb

Ann Coulter only obliquely calls John Edwards a “faggot” so she does’t have to go into rehab, like other people who have said or done shameful things. You remember Michael Richards using the N-word, and Ted Haggard buying drugs and getting a ‘massage’ from a male prostitute, but I doubt that even if Ms. Coulter ran down K-street, screaming, “John Edwards is a flaming faggot!” that she would feel the need to put herself in rehab.

Being provacative is her thing. Just the other day I saw her blathering on Fox’s Hannity and Colmes — it was an accident, honest! — sparring with Darryl Hannah with all the skill of a 3rd-grade schoolyard bully. In other words, she had no cogent argument, she was merely loud and obnoxious. Her argument against Darryl Hannah’s environmental position was this:

COULTER: To say that we can spend less or that we can use candles is not an energy policy.
[...]
DARYL HANNAH: Nobody has mentioned candles but you, Ann, I'm afraid.

If you watch the whole thing, her position is that environmentalists want people, especially poor people, to not use energy at all, thus threatening the survival of humans on this planet.

I think what she is doing is pandering to the fear that people feel about the current state of energy in the US, with so much of it coming from foreign sources and causing global warming. It seems like she’s trying to make people feel good, that ‘we have to have all this energy to survive, so it’s okay that we go to war to get it.’ She does that by attempting to paint environmentalists as elitists who want poor people to not use energy at all, when in fact environmentalists really want everyone (including Al Gore) to use less energy by using it more efficiently. You know, like compact fluorescent bulbs and hybrid cars and solar panels and all those other upcoming and extant technologies that save energy, and most importantly, money.

(Remind me to write something about how I’ve not been in an office building or hotel recently that hasn’t switched completly to CFL because of one reason — the bottom line.)

All of this, I think, is Ann Coulter pandering to the lowest common denominator, maybe not just because she really feels so strongly, but because she needs the attention (that the news outlets and this and other blogs are giving her). So she’ll say anything to get on a camera somwhere.

It’s like she’s the Paris Hilton of political commentary.

Truthdig: Coulter Calls Edwards a “Faggot” at Right-Wing Meeting (with video)
CNN: Coulter under fire for anti-gay slur

Thanks to Truthdig commenter Robin Ruble for the title of this post

Update

Ann totally proved my school-yard bully point by saying this last night on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes:

Faggot isn’t offensive to gays; it has nothing to do with gays. It’s a schoolyard taunt meaning ‘wuss.’ and unless you’re telling me that John Edwards is gay, it was not applied to a gay person.

Why’d she even bother to try to defend herself? She doesn’t really care about what she says in the first place, and her defense that “faggot” doesn’t refer to gay people is totaly disingenuous.

So, anyway, Verizon, Sallie-Mae, and NetBank are pulling their ads from her site. At least one newspaper has dropped her column. Unfortunately, her syndicator, Universal Press, seems to be thinking they can just ride it out by saying “she did’t say it in our column, so we have no concern.”

More at the Daily Kos.