If you are interested in the reasons for the change, read the “Experimenting with Pelican” post below.

At some point, I will probably get around to the changing the DNS so that downdb.net points to the new site, but probably won’t happen until I figure out what to do with my archives. It would be a shame to lose eight years(!) worth of posts. In the meantime, I’ll leave this site as is.

Nothing against LAMP-stack stuff, but it’s overkill for my needs (a personal blog that, sadly, does not have much traffic or discussion activity). Additionally, while this statement will sound silly, the GUI-based post creation and management is more than I want to deal with: Go to admin site, log in, create post, preview, publish, log out. Doesn’t seem like much when I type it here, but I find that it introduces enough friction when I have an idea that I never make it all the way through the process.

So, I have been looking into alternatives, mostly flat file-based bloggin engines. My requirements are pretty straightforward:

• Utilize only plain-text/Markdown
• Minimize management overhead
• Post creation and publishing possible should be as low-effort as possible
• I can host it myself

I checked out Obtvse and Nerve, but for a variety of reasons (both feature-related and technical) neither fit the bill. Then I ran across Pelican. It’s basically some Python scripting + templates that take a directory of text files (it supports both Markdown and reStructuredText) and converts them to static HTML.

So, the toolchain I’m using is:

• Text editor that supports Markdown (I use SublimeText, but any will do)
• Dropbox
• incron
• Pelican

The publishing process is:

1. I write a Markdown-formatted post in the text editor on my local machine.
2. I save the post to a “posts” folder in my local Dropbox directory.
3. Dropbox picks up that file and syncs it to a server on EC2.
4. An incron job on the server watches the posts folder there. Whenever there is a change to anything in that folder, incron kicks off the Pelican script to regenerate the site.

So, once the initial setup is done, all I have to do is write the post and save it. That’s it–done.

You can see the results here. I’m still tinkering with the templates and CSS, so it’s not the prettiest thing in the world. That said, assuming I get the various design issues work out (and figure out Pelican’s import process, which on first pass seems… glitchy), I’ll probably look at moving my blogging activities, such as they are, out of WordPress.

For every government law hurriedly passed in response to a current or recent crisis, there will be two or more unintended consequences, which will have equal or greater negative effects then the problem it was designed to fix. A corollary is that unelected institutions are at least as bad and possibly worse than elected governments. A further corollary is that laws passed to appease a particular group, whether voters or a particular industry, will have at least three unintended consequences, most of which will eventually have the opposite effect than the intended outcomes and transfer costs to innocent bystanders.

I have heard various forms of this argument from small-government conservatives and libertarians. The shorter version is “Whatever you think the government should do, either they’ll do it badly, someone else will take advantage of it, or both.” The take-away, apparently, is that, in most cases, the government ought to leave well enough alone.

Two things:

1. While there will undoubtedly be unintended consequences to government actions, there are means of dealing with those consequences. Laws can be changed, and often are.
2. Unintended consequences are not unique to government actions. You might as well insist that no one do anything, lest something bad and unexpected happen.

The guy is a loud-mouthed jerk. The apparently limitless stream of abusive, nonsensical crap that flows from the hole between his bloated, sagging jowls is such that any apology is the equivalent of the high school bully who punches you into a locker and then says “Hah! I’m just messing with you!”

Dennis G. at Balloon Juice, though, has a different take on the whole thing:

So, I thought I would catch the last segment of his show. What I noticed was commercials—a lot of them. And that reminded me how the Limbaugh show was mostly a grift about getting rubes to open their wallets for this, that or the other pitch. Some were legitimate businesses—your mattress companies, your computer software or gadget and the like. Others were multi-level marketing deals with referral kick-backs for anybody who mentions the show when placing an order. And others—most of them it seems—were straight up grifts to fluff up Rushbo’s wallet and fund this or that aspect of the wingnut money machine. The legitimate advertisers are the cover for the grifters. They are the honey pot to attract the rubes to scams to fund the cons funding the CONsevative movement—and Rush is the sideshow barker saying anything to pull the rubes in the door so that their wallets can be relieved of their Dead Presidents.

[...]

Getting the advertiser to separate from Rush is important. It hits him in the wallet, but more than that it removes the cover for all the other grifts he runs on his minions day after day. And it exposes every local radio station that caries the rat bastard to financial pressure and can send a warning flag to any advertiser supporting these stations.

I still could not care less whether Limbaugh apologizes (or if his apology is “enough”), but if this affair provides a means of fracturing his scams, I’m all for keeping the conversation going.

I’m not really sure that this argument helps, though.

What you’re basically saying is “Sure, you’re right about the dirty, dirty sex and the evil loose women who can’t get enough of it, but don’t forget about these other people who have a legitimate need.”

What is missing from all this hype is that, regardless of whose box is connected to the Internet, the cable companies own the delivery channel for data into those homes.

I love my Roku, and I have no need for anything beyond the data-only plan that Verizon happens to be willing to sell me. However, I don’t for one minute think that if they were any sort of widespread adoption of Rokus, AppleTV, or any other “cable-cutting” box, Verizon and the other cable company ISPs wouldn’t come down like a ton of bricks with bandwidth caps and “quality of service” adjustments.

I have heard it said by some fellow liberals that Breitbart was in fact a good person, that his public persona was not the same as his private. This kind of praise is so broadly true of most controversial public figures as to be meaningless. And it is irrelevant. Breitbart may well have been an excellent father and a great friend but that is not why we are talking about him. We are noting his death because of the impact he had on our politics and our conversation. It must be said that that impact was for the worse. Any talk of his private life, is an attempt to change the subject and avoid discomfiting truths.

It is wholly appropriate to be sorry that Andrew Breitbart died. But in the relevant business, it is right to be sorry for how he lived.

The guy was an serial liar who had a widespread, toxic, and corrosive influence on public discourse. While I’m rarely glad to see or hear that anyone has died, it’s a bit much to read the laudatory blogospheric outpouring about what a great and important person Breitbart was, and even moreso the hand-wringing over the fact that not everyone is lining up to sing his praises.

After a somewhat rambling and not entirely unreasonable response from Santorum about good earmarks v. bad earmarks, Romney came back with this gem (from CNN’s transcript of the debate):

ROMNEY: I didn’t follow all of that, but I can tell you this — I would put a ban on earmarks. I think it opens the door to excessive spending, spending on projects that don’t need to be done.

I think there are a lot of projects that have been voted for. You voted to the “Bridge to Nowhere.” I think these earmarks, we’ve had it with them.

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the fact that earmarks are, as John King pointed out before asking his original question, a vanishing small portion of the total federal budget. Let’s also ignore the fact that “earmarks” mostly tend to be money spent on stuff in other people’s Congressional districts, certainly not the obviously necessary funding for your local development project.

No, let’s just focus on this question: How the hell would a President “put a ban on earmarks”? Am I missing something? They are part of legislation considered and voted on by Congress. Is there any option for the President aside from vowing to veto any bill that contained anything he considered an “earmark”?

They YouTube pickings are somewhat thin, but here’s a sample:

Fortunately, Spotify has a better selection, although still not particularly large.