Category: MovableType 3.0

NPR : A State’s Battle Against Obesity:

A State’s Battle Against Obesity
Arkansas Takes a Frank Look at its Weight Problem

Interesting piece on NPR this morning about Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and his campaign to fight obesity in the deep-fried South.

Interestingly, he’s framing this as an issue of personal choice and responsibility, not as the fault of the evil fast food purveyors: he’s even opposed to forcing restaurants to disclose their nutritional information. While I commend his for taking the high road on this, especially given the unhealthful regional cuisine, I quibble with that: I don’t know that you can ask people to take responsibility for their choices if they don’t have the information they need. But perhaps the food outlets will take the initiative and release this information themselves, to demonstrate that they don’t have to be forced to do the right thing.

I also like the reference to the new physical fitness in a related piece: this is in full swing at my kids’ school and it’s all about individual achievement and personal goals, rather than team sports and competition. They compete against themselves on a variety of skills and activities and no one loses: with young kids, I think it really helps to avoid the issues that physical differences can bring into it. There can be almost a year’s difference in age in the same classroom, and the different sizes and growth rates can distort that even more.

Family Research Council: Legislation: Capwiz:

Elected politicians in Washington need to hear from you every day on the importance of passing an amendment that defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Or if you prefer, you can tell them that you favor an expansion of the definition of marriage to encompass any two committed people, regardless of their sex.

Given the hash straight people have made of “the sanctity of marriage” it seems unreasonable to claim we’re the only ones whose marriages are recognized.

Feel free to fill out the Family Research Council’s helpful email form and let your representatives know what you think.

Don’t these people have anything else to do?

Shakespeare understood the temptations of power: interesting how little has changed.

The New Yorker:

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. “Remember Henry II[1]—‘Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?'”[2] the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. “Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much.”

fn1. was war inevitable?

fn2. parsing

Brad Choate: Movable Type 3.0:

This means that if you are 1 author and you use 11 different weblogs to power your 1 web site, or even 300 weblogs to power your 3 web sites, you can use the free version. It doesn’t cost you $600. It doesn’t cost $1.

I have read over the stuff at SixApart, read over the comments and criticisms from both their defenders and the unloved masses, and I have not seen a simple distillation like this anywhere.

Again, I’m struck by the reiteration of how this license took months to develop, but only a day to remove stuff like the single CPU restriction. How do you miss that?

On the other hand . . . .
Freedom 0 [dive into mark]:

This site now runs WordPress. Thanks to the wonderful people on the #wordpress IRC channel, I was able to migrate almost all of my complex Movable Type configuration, including custom URLs (so permalinks shouldn’t break, and you won’t need to resubscribe to my syndicated feeds).

And I found his thoughts on where SixApart and MT worked well and not so well echoed my own:

It hit a certain sweet spot which is difficult to define but easy to recognize when it works. Also, it was light years ahead of its competition.

However, Movable Type stagnated while Six Apart grew and focused on other priorities, like TypePad. The limitations of Movable Type 2.6 were increasingly irritating, and I evaluated all of the available open source alternatives. I came away severely unimpressed. I decided to wait patiently for Movable Type 3.0.

I set up a test installation of WordPress last night on my iBook and the 5-minute install is pretty accurately described. I was able to set it up and import 1800+ entries and 1000+ comments in a minute or two. Looks great.

I haven’t decided to move yet: it’s not an easy decision to make. It’s not obvious to me what “MovableType-isms” I’ve become dependent on. I think dropping the css stuff that I have been using would be the Right Thing to Do, since it’s stock MT stuff.

ecto works just fine with WordPress (thanks, Adriaan): one less thing to worry about.

The bottom line hasn’t changed. I can stay with 2.661 awhile longer, evaluate 3.0 and WordPress side by side, and then see what works for me.

The end of free (kottke.org)

Jason Kottke provides a post I can’t make any sense of whatsoever. He agrees with Dave Winer that people complaining about the new MovableType price structure are whiners. Then he makes reference to the fact that Six Apart is going to provide the same free software as they always have (eh? I need to re-read the announcement. I also saw a posting that you could still download 2.661, but I couldn’t find it and the poster hasn’t told me how he knows that).

Then he wanders into his own gripes about the pricing strategy . . . he has 10 weblogs and 22 authors, but “[b]y my reckoning, I’m one person using MT in a exclusively personal manner to maintain one Web site.”

He also suggests some counter-proposals: doesn’t that make him a whiner just like the rest of us?

I do have to give him credit for mentioning the community goodwill that seems to be where the whiners are feeling unhappy. And he suggests that 6A could have done/could still do a better job at finding how people use their stuff. That would be a good first step to building out a revenue model.

As I reflected on this tempest in a teapot today, it breaks down to how well 6A can build a company and serve a community or if they have to choose. My guess is they can do both — if they want to.

The Collective Deep Breath

Jay Allen, as ever, has much wisdom on l’affair du Type Movable. Those who strop and sigh should read his essay on The Collective Deep Breath.

[Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent]

I read through it. He suggests that there will be a user release similar to the 2.x product in the future.

Gee, do you think it would make any more sense for that to come from the company than from a developer?
Continue reading “when is a new release not a new release?”

tima thinking outloud > O’Reilly: MT3 and a Balanced Diet.:

“To all of this, I can only say, they are a young company and are bound to make mistakes. I know that they are also razor sharp and have the good of this community at heart, so it won’t take them long to make these things clear.”

Agreed, which is why I think all of this outcry is a bit over the top.

Since this post links back to a comment made on my earlier post, I think some clarification is in order.

I’m not sure why the folks defending the MT3.0 payware decision are so surprised at the reaction of 2.x users who have been kept in the dark in 6A’s plans and now find that, after waiting for a feature release that would address some longstanding problems, they have formed expectations that 6A wasn’t prepared to meet.
Continue reading “the MovableType 3 imbroglio”

Optimism

From the Washington Post today, Donald Rumsfeld: “… I look at Iraq, and all I can say is I hope it comes out well.” That’s reassuring.

[John & Belle Have A Blog]

This is a pretty well-known bug and it, in all cases but just now, doesn’t really do anything.

What appears to happens is that Safari will appear to display the wrong text in a form’s text box. In MovableType [not to say this is a bug in MT: it’s just really easy to see it there ] this is easily reproducible: if you delete a comment, the comment’s text is displayed as the original entry text, but I have never seen it save that as the entry. Until just now.

Bad karma, I suppose, since I was so snarky about Timothy Appnel’s double-post: his duped comment was the one I deleted, and that put his comment text in place of my entry text.

Fortunately, since I compose posts in ecto, I could republish the original post. What a nuisance.

So far today, 2700 requests for information on the Nick Berg execution video, more than 1/3 of my page views for the day. I don’t have it, never did, and don’t even want to see it: I referenced another site that referenced it, and Google took it from there.

Yuck.
Continue reading “violence and voyeurism”