January 31, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

At the moment, reading a fair quantity of the web chatter regarding the newly running Democratic presidential candidates, I’m picking up on a disturbing thread going around. Equal marriage rights (often framed as “gay marriage”) is a “wedge” issue exploited by Republicans to shock people away from voting for Democrats. Therefore, Democratic candidates should avoid taking a position on that issue. After all it’s an issue that only affects a small minority compared to health care or the Iraq War.

Or is it?

I suggest that equal marriage rights is a wedge issue in more ways than one. The “wedge strategy” was admitted by groups advocating Intelligent Design instruction in schools. Once the tip of the wedge, intelligent design, created a crack in public education, it would be easier to press more faith-based curriculum into public schools. ID advocacy groups have neither been adept at hiding this agenda, nor shy about it either.

Likewise, the goal of legislation and constitutional amendments ostensibly intended to hold the line at “gay marriage,” is to open a wedge for challenging a wide variety of case law and policy regarding families, privacy, medical care and insurance. It is foolish to believe that constitutional language that privileges heterosexual marriage will not be used in court cases regarding divorce, private sexual behavior, child custody, contraception and discrimination. Non-discrimination laws and policies could come under attack, as well as education and support services at public schools and universities. Just at with ID advocacy, “marriage defenders” have not been shy about having a more sweeping agenda.

The pressure to roll the clock back is not going to go away, and the effects of these initiatives on family and privacy law are too sweeping to ignore. I don’t expect Democratic candidates to have the moral courage to take on the irrational knee-jerk reactions that surround the word “marriage.” If Edwards, Clinton or Obama want to use “unions not marriage” language, I’m willing to compromise. I do expect Democrats to stand fast against legislation and constitutional initiatives that have the potential to undermine current rights for all families, gay and straight. I do expect the Democrats to stand fast against initiatives that could hinder private and public institutions from setting their own non-discrimination, benefit, and support policies.

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January 26, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

A while ago I switched my email over to Apple’s creatively named Mail.app to take advantage of applescript integration with other software packages. One of my frustrations with it though was the poor performance of the default junk mail filter. Over the last two weeks, JunkMatcher has proven to be an effective bit of software for catching those unwanted spam messages. I am also interested in the fact that it’s developed using PyObjC which builds applications with the Macintosh look and feel in Python. I’ve been wanting to get into Macintosh GUI programming but have not wanted to learn yet another language to do it.

Another bit of freeware/donationware I’m experimenting with is RPN Calculator which is purely a geek thing. It is a nicely well-designed cross-platform Reverse Polish Notation calculator which will probably be very handy when I start my taxes.

Posted in software, geekstuff | No Comments »

January 17, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

I’ve not been watching too many movies lately, primarily because of lack of funds, but also a lack of interest in what’s been playing.

But, I needed to get out of the house, so Curse of the Golden Flower worked its way to the top of the heap. Curse can be called a melodrama or tragedy. It’s fairly obvious that like a good Shakespeare play, all but a few characters will die as a result of their own machinations and failings in a creative orgy of blood and schadenfreude. And throughout much of this movie, I was left wondering if I didn’t miss something in translation.

The film opens shortly before the annual Chrysanthemum festival celebrating the stability of the Imperial family. The Empress resentfully takes the medication mandated by her husband every two hours. Her stepson, Crown Prince Xiang resents the liberties she takes with him. Meanwhile, the Emperor challenges his warrior son Jie to a duel. The Emperor prophetically warns, “Do not attempt to take by force, what I do not offer to you.” Third son Cheng cheerfully interrupts quietly whispered plots.

The Imperial family are seething cauldrons of chaos in the midst of a vast human machine played by a literal cast of thousands. The film opens not on the main characters, but on dozens of female servants dressing with drill team precision led by supervisors marking time with percussive blows on a woodblock. Outside of the forbidden city, a slightly less organized but still disciplined group of soldiers rides to their destination. Four servants deliver the medicine that becomes a symbol for the conflict within the court. That conflict involves maintaining the orderly function of the court, ves the demands of justice.

The court and army of China exist to serve the whims of the Imperial family. But there is a sense that the family are also cogs in the machine. Unlike Marie Antoinette the movie offers no hint of impending revolution. The cataclysm triggered by the family involves thousands of solders, but is quickly cleaned up by thousands of servants in a scene that is even more ominous than the preceding violence.

Director Yimou Zhang’s trademark use of color deeply saturates the court in iridescent golds, reds, and purples, and then contrasts that with the greys of the outside world. The opulence of the Imperial apartments borders on gaudy, and the overal saturation of the film might turn some people off.

But as I said earlier, I wonder if I missed something in translation. To me, the scale of the film came at the expense of intimacy and empathy with the characters. The script telegraphs the “big reveal” so far in advance that it didn’t shock, and the reactions of key characters seemed unintentionally funny as a result. I found it a really beautiful film, a really stunning film, but not so much an emotionally effective film for me.

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January 17, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

…like APA citations with 10 co-authors.

I really can’t claim much credit for this. But a book chapter based on a presentation from a few years ago is certainly welcome. This is mostly Sasha, Hakan and Taylor’s show.

Barab, S., Dodge, T., Tuzun, H., Job-Sluder, K., Jackson, C., Arici, A., Job-Sluder, L., Carteaux, R., Jr., Gilbertson, J., & Heiselt, C. (in press). The Quest Atlantis Project: A socially-responsive play space for learning. In B. E. Shelton & D. Wiley (Eds.), The Educational Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

The Quest Atlantis Project: A Socially Responsive Play Space for Learning (604KB pdf)

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January 8, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

My complaints about Microsoft Word are rather legendary among my friends. I use Microsoft Word when required by clients or contacts. But I find it doesn’t well support my needs as a writer, often gets in my way, produces documents in formats that are unusable by the rest of my system, and is overkill for many of my needs.

About once a year, I go looking for a possible alternative or replacement. For compatibility openoffice.org and the OS X version NeoOffice provide the ability to import and export many MSWord documents and also export to the OASIS open document format (ODF). However, the openoffice and NeoOffice writing environment brings with it much of the frustrations I have with MSWord. NeoOffice also opens and runs sluggish on every system I have used it.

I craft my dissertation using LaTeX. LaTeX supports a number of critical itches I have. First, focus on the words and structure of a document rather than the appearance. Second, push off the final decisions about appearance to the stylesheet. Third, offer rich support for bibliographic citations, endnotes, indexing, floating diagrams and cross references. Fourth, output beautiful well-formatted PDF.

LaTeX fails though when it comes to the ability to convert between different document types. Existing document conversion tools such as tex4ht cannot handle the stylesheet I use for my dissertation, and the conversion process of LaTeX to MSWord or ODF is going to be painful. Ideally, something like DocBook is going to be a good solution but it’s not quite there either.

Once upon a time, I was a big fan of Nisus. Nisus just announced Nisus Writer Pro which might be worth trying when it is released. Another alternative I look at now and then is Mellel which offers better structured writing support.

Still however, it seems that the best workflow for now is to use a text editor such as emacs and deal with the formatting later.

Posted in creative process, geekstuff | 1 Comment »

January 8, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

One of the problems with reading Usenet is that I find myself tracking down the solutions to problems. It must be my experience working on an email helpdesk. But the problem of the other day is how do you import words from an article into an aspell personal dictionary. Here is my command-line solution.

#back up your dictionary
cp .aspell.en.pws .aspell.en.pws.old
#dump new words onto the end of your personal dictionary
aspell -H list < Article.html >> ~/.aspell.en.pws

This does of course assume that you trust the copy-editor of the article.

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