I’ve read the first four chapters of Grok 1.0 Web Development, and so far there’s a lot to like. It’s the sort of documentation I wish I’d had when I ported the Creative Commons license chooser to Grok¹. I’m looking forward to reading the rest, and will post a proper review when I return from Nairobi. In the mean time, check out Grok, Zope 3 for cavemen.

You can download a preview from Grok 1.0 Web Development, Chapter 5: Forms.

¹ The CC license chooser has evolved a lot over the years; shortly after Grok was launched we adopted many of its features as a way to streamline the code. Grok’s simplified support for custom traversal, in particular, was worth the effort.

I’ve always loved reading. In middle school, I’d sit with a novel in my lap, trying to read during class without getting caught. Going into this year, I wanted to try things that I hypothesized would make me a better writer. One of these things is reading, specifically reading and thinking about what makes a book or story work or not for me. Another of the things is blogging¹, so it made sense to me that I would start to blog what I read. I also wanted to keep track of what I read a little better. Instead of using this as another excuse to build a tool that I’m not sure I’ll actually use, I’m just using tags on the posts: sfpl for books I check-out from the the San Francisco Public Library, fiction for works of fiction, etc. I’d like to use something more structured for this (probably RDFa), but right now I have enough half finished software projects, so tags it is.

And that’s why my blog seems like a book report lately.

¹ I see blogging as a practice: something that I do with regularity, which has immediate and cumulative benefits.

Part of this awkwardness is probably the impedance mismatch of the framework and the toolchain: Django applications are Python packages. The Python tools for packaging and installing (distutils, setuptools, distribute, and pip, I think, although I have the least experience with it) work on “module distributions“¹: some chunk of code with a setup.py. This is as much a “social” issue as a technology one: the documentation and tools don’t encourage the “right” kind of behavior, so talk of re-usable applications is often just hand waving or, at best, reinvention².

In both cases we consciously chose Django for what I consider its killer app: the admin interface. But there have been re-use headaches. [NB: What follows is based on our experience, which is setuptools and buildout based] The first one you encounter is that not every developer of a reusable app has made it available on PyPI. If they’re using Subversion you can still use it with setuptools, but when re-using with git, we have some additional work (a submodule or another buildout recipe). I understand pip just works with the most commons [D]VCS, but haven’t used it myself. Additionally, they aren’t all structured as projects, and those that are don’t always declare their dependencies properly³. And finally there’s the “real” issues of templates, URL integration, etc.

I’m not exactly sure what the answer is, but it’s probably 80% human (as opposed to technology). Part of it is practicing good hygiene: writing your apps with relocatable URLs, using proper URL reversal when generating intra-applications URLs, and making sure your templates are somewhat self-contained. But even that only gets you so far. Right now I have to work if I want to make my app easily consumable by others; work, frankly, sucks.

Reuse is one area where I think Zope 3 (and it’s derived frameworks, Grok and repoze.bfg) have an advantage: if you’re re-using an application that provides a particular type of model, for example, all you need to do is register a view for it to get a customized template. The liberal use of interfaces to determine context also helps smooth over some of the URL issues⁴. Just as, or more, importantly, they have a strong culture of writing code as small “projects” and using tools like buildout to assemble the final product.

Code reuse matters, and truth in advertising matters just as much or more. If we want to encourage people to write reusable applications, the tools need to support that, and we need to be explicit about what the benefits we expect to reap from reuse are.

¹ Of course you never actually see these referred to as module distributions; always projects, packages, eggs, or something else.

² Note that I’m not saying that Pylons gets the re-use story much better; the author admits choosing Django at least in part because of the perceived “vibrant community of people writing apps” but found himself more productive with Pylons. Perhaps he entered into that with different expectations? I think it’s worth noting that we chose Django for a project, in part, for the same reason, but with different expectations: not that the vibrant community writing apps would generate reusable code, but that they would education developers we could hire when the time came.

³ This is partially due to the current state of Python packaging: setuptools and distribute expect the dependency information to be included in setup.py; pip specifies it in a requirements file.

⁴ At least when dealing with graph-based traversal; it could be true in other circumstances, I just haven’t thought about it enough.

Spooner, Pete Dexter’s latest novel, is not as consistent as The Paperboy, but that does not make it inferior. Spooner tells the story of a boy, Spooner, and his step-father, Calmer. Spooner is not smart, is not handsome, and is primarily talented at causing trouble for others. Pissing in the shoes of others, rolling cars down the hill, and throwing eggs at cars: these are the things Spooner is good at. Calmer, a former Navy man, is good at just about everything, and is particularly good at being patient and trying to rescue those in need of redemption. Like Spooner’s mother, Lily, who sees the world first as a personal affront to her.

Dexter uses language in a way that lets you feel the words in your mouth and taste the idiom and “flavor”; in his hands, the language of the South (Spooner begins in Georgia; The Paperboy in Florida) does not feel impersonated or propped up, but real and present. Spooner contains exposition that made me almost giddy with pleasure, re-reading paragraphs out loud on the bus, looking like a crazy person, I’m sure. For example,

There was in every sport Spooner ever played, on every team he ever joined, an outcast. Some kid who had been plucked from the safety of home and homeroom and tossed, often at the insistence of his own father, out into the world. Unprotected. Often this kid was the fattest, dopiest kid in school, someone who had been it every day of his life on the playgrounds, shunned or insulted one day, beaten up the next, and was now introduced to the rest of his life, which was more of the same except better organized, with the degree of abuse he suffered depending mostly on the mercies of the adults in charge.

I don’t know if I was exactly that kid on the team, but I could certainly pick him out a mile away, and knew enough to keep my distance.

Spooner is told in the third person, but Dexter manages to convey the mental confusion and uncertainty the characters express in a way that reminded me of Paul Auster. Characters try to look at themselves and figure out what really happened: Did they really see what they think they saw? Where was the moment things went wrong? Could they have found another way through that situation? That ability to convey the introspection, uncertainty, and inner monologue of a character gives the story a depth: coming to the end of a paragraph is like coming up from under water, and you’re not really sure where you’ve wound up.

Spooner is not perfect; one section, in particular, doesn’t feel like it “fits” with the rest. As a whole it’s a great story about two characters who care a great deal for each other, an original, expansive rendering of the father-son relationship.

Fordlandia is really three, interwoven stories. The surface story is about Ford’s efforts to push the limits of his autonomous, vertically integrated manufacturing by establishing a stable source of rubber in the Amazon, along the Tapajós River. Rubber was one of the few raw materials that Ford did not own or control production of, and was concerned that a British-initiated cabal could raise prices in the American market. Grandin gives the reader context in the form of Ford’s previous success with Fordism in the US, which is particularly interesting given the decline of the automobile industry of late.

Below the surface of the main story are two others: the story of the people of the Brazilian Amazon, and their exploitation during Brazil’s rubber boom and bust, and the story of Henry Ford’s personal evolution from industrialist to agriculturalist to paternalistic social engineer. As Fordlândia failed to produce rubber, it increasingly became a social experiment, attempting to export an idealized midwestern social structure to the Amazon. Ford and his managers attempted to impose what they believed to be the optimal structure — both social and corporate — on the workers. The results seem to have been directly, inversely proportional to the amount of control they tried to exert. Ford believed he was saving workers from the exploitative system of indentured servitude pervasive during Brazil’s rubber boom, but failed to understand the social dynamics that would dictate whether his new system was actually a success.

I found Ford’s evolution to be a particularly compelling part of the story. His massively integrated manufacturing system helped move people out of small towns and into urban centers. Despite this and his seeming contempt for the past, he idealized Puritan, small town America in the extreme. This story of trying to re-establish something he was responsible for weakening was one of the more compelling parts of the book.

Grandin concludes with an epilogue, “Still Waiting for Henry Ford.” In it he sounds a cautionary note about ongoing attempts to “modernize” the Amazon. The engaging, insightful chapters preceding this allow it to avoid any hints of panic or exaggeration. The Amazon is still waiting for the promises of Henry Ford to come true.

^† While Grandin wisely does not attempt sweeping moral interpretation, it does seem that Ford truly believed he was helping the residents of the Brazilian Amazon. Unfortunately a complete disinterest in understanding their social and economic structure led to sub-optimal results.

I wasn’t aware of Chris’s previous advice, but had I read it when first published, I would have nodded my head vigorously; after all, that’s how we did it. Er, that’s how we, uh, do it. And we’re not really in a position to change that at the moment, although we’ve certainly looked pretty hard at the issue.

A bit of background: One of the core pieces of technology we’ve built at Creative Commons is the license chooser. It’s a relatively simple application, with a few wrinkles that make it interesting. It manages a lot of requests, a lot of languages, and has to spit out the right license (type, version, and jurisdiction) based on what the user provides. The really interesting thing it generates is some XHTML with RDFa that includes the license badge, name, and any additional information the user gives us; it’s this metadata that we use to generate the copy and paste attribution HTML on the deed. So what does this have to do with internationalization? The HTML is internationalized. And it contains substitutions. Yikes.

To follow in the excellent example of AMO and Gnome, we’d start using English as our msgids, leaving behind the current symbolic keys of the past. Unfortunately it’s not quite so easy. Every time we look at this issue (and for my first year as CTO we really looked; Asheesh can atest we looked at it again and again) and think we’ve got it figured out, we realize there’s another corner case that doesn’t quite work.

The real issue with the HTML is the HTML: zope.i18n, our XSLT selectors^†, the ZPT parse tree: none of them really play all that well with HTML msgids. The obvious solution would be to get rid of the HTML in translation, and we’ve tried doing that, although we keep coming back to our current approach. I guess we’re always seduced by keeping all the substitution in one place, and traumatized by the time we tried assembling the sentences from smaller pieces^‡.

So if we accept that we’re stuck with the symbolic identifiers, what do we do? Build tools, of course. This wasn’t actually an issue until we started using a “real” translation tool — Pootle, to be specific. Pootle is pretty powerful, but some of the features depend on having “English” msgids. Luckily it has no qualms about HTML in those msgids, it has decent VCS support, and we know how to write post-commit hooks.

To support Pootle and provide a better experience for our translators, we maintain two sets of PO files: the “CC style” symbolic msgid files, and the “normal” English msgid files. We keep a separate “master” PO file where the msgid is the “CC style” msgid, and the “translation” is the English msgid. It’s this file that we update when we need to make changes, and luckily using that format actually makes the extraction work the way it’s supposed to. Or close. And when a user commits their work from Pootle (to the “normal” PO file), a post-commit hook keeps the other version in sync.

While we’ve gotten a lot better at this and have learned to live with this system, it’s far from perfect. The biggest imperfection is its custom nature: I’m still the “expert”, so when things go wrong, I get called first. And when people want to work on the code, it takes some extra indoctrination before they’re productive. My goal is still to get to a single set of PO files, but for now, this is what we’ve got. Bring the pain.

^† For a while, at least. We’re working on a new version of the chooser driven by our the license RDF. This will be better for re-use, but not really an improvement in this area.

^‡ This works great in English, but in languages where gender is more strongly expressed in the word forms, uh, not so much.

The Paperboy could be described as a newspaper procedural: on the surface it tells the story about getting a story; in this case a story exploring the trial of man convicted of murdering a local, racist sheriff, a trial which was, well, irregular. I suppose it makes sense: Dexter was a newspaper man before he was a novelist and screenwriter^‡. But if The Paperboy were only about the news business, I doubt it would have kept my attention.

Throughout the book there are questions as theme: How well do you know the people you love? How well do you really want to? As the story progresses, Jack sees his brother working for what seems like the first time, he initially wonders what’s going on inside his head, and eventually decides that he really doesn’t need to know. That even if he did know, he probably wouldn’t understand. Ward’s approach to the story and to life stands in contrast: his need to get the story “right” goes beyond accuracy, to a compulsive desire for truth and completeness. These two characters drive the story forward in a way I found believable, engaging, and enjoyable.

^‡ Dexter [co-]wrote both Michael and Mulholland Falls; interesting combination.

The guidelines are simple: First, hyphenated words may count as one or two words. Second, include your name and class year. Don’t libel anyone, get too personal, or try to get revenge. Rather than saying “ All A’s except for Mrs. Hancock” say, “All A’s except for English 9”. The plan is to pick the best six-word memoirs and use them on the calendar’s monthly picture page.

It seems to me that the point of a memoir is to get personal, contemplate revenge, and come as close to libel as you can while remaining emotionally honest. I suppose that doesn’t play well on a calendar, though. So thinking about what high school feels like in retrospect, I offer my six word memoir of high school:

Alleged wish frustratingly fulfilled: left alone.

You can follow my (likely intermittent) progress at thedutchdelight.com. And because this is, you know, social, you can follow the progress on identi.ca or twitter, as well.

California law states that landlords have 21 days after you move out to refund your deposit, or provide you with an itemized statement listing deductions. As I might have expected, Citi did neither. Luckily for me, I date someone who deserves an honorary post graduate degree in information retrieval. He found the California Courts’ self help page, which includes a tool for writing deposit demand letters for your landlord.

Armed with that generated letter, I emailed my building accountant and Ed Singer, general counsel of the Lembi Group (the parent corporation of the many, varied LLCs that actually own the buildings; email him to say “I love you” at esinger@lembigroup.com). Less than an hour later, I received a reply promising my check would be cut that week. My cautious optimism turned to near giddy relief when I received the check on Thursday. On Friday I walked to their bank to cash the check¹, and then nervously walked two blocks to my bank to deposit the take. Walking away from my bank, my hands were shaking as I held the deposit receipt: the sense of relief at being done was palpable.

It’s clear that I’m one of the lucky ones. Sure, the math on the statement doesn’t make any sense at all, but I only lost $30 of my deposit — and actually got them to credit the interest to my last month’s rent. But the contrast between my experience and Richard’s — he received his refund check less than a week after moving out — is dramatic and telling.

Take away lesson: renting from CitiApartments, First Apartments, or Greg Apartments is probably not in your best interest. Unless you have money to burn. In which case, I can help with that.

¹ There were reports on SF Appeal of checks bouncing; the last thing I wanted to do was add a returned check fee to the tally.