My hosting company is setting up a new server and will be restoring this site from backups that are a few days old. Hopefully I’ll be able to update the database (no affected) to include episodes (like this one) and comments that have happened since the hack.

I assumed at first that the brand-new version of WordPress might have a security exploit, but then I discovered that jerssoftwarehut.com and all the sub-sites I have on that server (except paseeger.com, for reasons I can’t figure), were hacked. Then I tried to get into the control panel and it was hacked. That takes more access than even I have; the control panel code is off in some other place. No, my Web host was hacked.

I do not yet know whether the credit card fraud protection kicked in at about that time as a result of actual fraud or because I was traveling and some robot flagged the behavior as suspicious. It looks like there might be some bogus charges, but I won’t know for sure until I can talk to an actual human tomorrow. (I did talk to a human in India, but she was unable to access the information I need.

So now I have no credit card, and the ATM powers of the same card seem to be suspended as well (that or I’m misremembering my PIN). All the cash My sweetie thrust upon me for the trip, more than I would have taken otherwise, has proven a lifesaver.

Once I had a glowing recommendation for MM Hosting on this site. I really liked them at first; their service and responsiveness was fantastic. Things have been going downhill with them for a while, and I had already been investigating other options that gave me more control. Inertia has kept me here for the most part. No longer. Goodbye, MMHosting. I’ll be asking for a refund for the remainder of my contract.

I was only out for a quick errand...

Yep, it’s my first automotive-related sunburn of the year! I made it almost halfway through June this year — not bad.

She’s OK now.

public function sendCommunication($oCommunication)
{
    if (self::emailMode != EMAIL_TEST_MODE_NONE) {
        if (self::emailMode == EMAIL_TEST_MODE_LOGGED_IN_ONLY) {
            // DO NOT COMMENT OUT THE FOLLOWING LINES
            // EVER
            // FOR ANY REASON
            // INSTEAD CHECK THE TEST MODE AND SET THE ADDRESS FIELDS ACCORDINGLY
            $oCommunication->to = $oCommunication->from;
            $oCommunication->cc = '';
        }

Now, I ask you, even if you’re not a programmer, you know there’s one thing you would never, ever, do to the above code. Right? Now let’s say you are a programmer, a professional, being paid because of your ability to find solutions to problems and express them in an abstract language.

Now further imagine that changing the above code can lead to the customers of the people paying for this work getting spammed with confusing emails with our client’s name on them.

Yeah, you guessed it.

The crudely-crafted Web site at jerssoftwarehut.com no longer accepts payment for Jer’s Novel Writer software licenses, and bears the following statement:

Well, it’s happened; I have a regular job. As I slave away working for the man I often wonder if things might have been different had I only worked harder at making Jer’s Software Hut a business rather than a hobby. Probably now we will never know. It was a good run but it’s time to ackowledge that development is stalled and customer service around here has been really awful.

That pretty much says it all; despite thousands of happy users, some of whom even paid for the software, when it came time to have a steady income again I took the safer path of working for someone else. (The ironic twist to this narrative I will leave for another time.)

It was a good run, and as I get my work life under control I hope soon to at least return to using Jer’s Novel Writer for its intended purpose – as a writing tool that helps me create fiction. Until I do that I can’t even consider opening the shutters on the Hut and throwing the big switch that raises the lightning rod into the violent midnight thunderstorm, while sparks fly and the turbines spin faster and faster, the needles on their gauges creeping ominously into the red. Maybe someday, though. Maybe someday.

I don’t mind writing software; I’m pretty good at it and I can make pretty decent money doing it. I would much rather write code than dig ditches, for instance, and luckily for me the world has decided that making Web sites is worth more than roadside drainage. (Before you go and say, “that’s because it takes skill and training to make a Web site, but anyone could dig a ditch’, ask yourself – could you dig ditches for a living? If the economy were turned upside-down, that ditch-digger living in his nice house would say, ‘anyone can make a living sitting on their ass in front of a computer, but I dig ditches. I’m glad things are the way they are, is all I’m saying.)

My current job sends me dangerously into territory I don’t much like, however, and that’s the area known as Information Technology. It’s not really a good name for the job, which is about setting up computers and keeping them running. It’s less about making things and more about making things work.

Last night, for instance, I moved the Web product I’m working on to a different server and it didn’t work. Naturally I assumed the problem was in my code (it had worked on that server in the past), so it was several hours later that I discovered that for reasons I still don’t know, the server failed when it tried to compress very large messages. Just *poof* no response beyond the number 500 (something went wrong). To make things more fun the server was specifically set up to not write out a lot of error messages to its log. I turned off the compression feature (with a hammer) and things worked again. Five hours or so spent to add seven characters to a PHP file, to make things work the same way they already did on other servers. Welcome to the world of IT.

I think the original intention of the phrase information technology referred to the the information that would be stored, manipulated, and distributed by machines. What the I really stands for is the vast store of arcane crap you have to know to do that job well. What line of the php.ini file to modify if you want zlib output buffering and utf-8 character encoding. How to set up all the computers in an office to use a local domain name server first. That’s the information in IT.

The worst thing about having an IT job is this, however: When you’re doing a good job, no one notices. When a company is running smoothly, that’s a sign that the IT department can be downsized. There are no problems! What are those guys doing all day? Having things not happen as part of your job description makes for tricky times when you do your job well. Of course, when something does go wrong people know just where to find you.

So if you work in a company that has people on payroll working to keep your technology humming along, cut them a little slack. Someone’s got to do that stuff; be glad it’s not you. I do enough IT now to know that I’d rather let someone else have the pleasure.

Sincerely,
Jerry

It vanished.

Well, mostly vanished. The title was there, as was the little blurb at the top. Everything else was gone. “Poop!” I said (or something like that).

I use ecto to compose my larger blog episodes; the offline editor is much nicer than any in-browser editor I’ve encountered, especially on my 8-year-old laptop. I don’t call it Ol’ Pokey for nothing. Plus there are times I want to write an episode but the Internet is nowhere in sight. ecto has been working very well for me. Except when it loses my work. This is the second time, but somehow this one hurt more. Also, ecto was recently bought from the original developer and seems to be stagnating.

“Looks like it’s time to give MarsEdit a serious look,” I said, and downloaded the latest. I fired it up and was greeted with “Your trial period has expired.” Dang. I’d launched it once when comparing ecto and MarsEdit back in the day. MarsEdit was missing a particular feature (don’t remember exactly what) and that made ecto the winner. Before it started losing my work.

Lots of people like MarsEdit (lots of people like ecto, too), but am I willing to pay for it without writing a single episode with it? That’s hard to justify. I’m downloading a program called Qumana to rewrite the book review with. We’ll see how that goes.

Edited to add: Nope. Qumana didn’t work. At all. I checked the system requirements, and it should work. But it doesn’t.

The culprit? The ball and chain that modern technology has dragged along despite its obvious flaws? Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML.

First, let’s start with the name. HTML is not a language. Not even close. It is a document format. That its inventors did not recognize the difference tells you that the wrong guys were doing it.

Second, it’s not a very good document format. At its heart, the inventors wanted a format that did three things: connect related documents, embed external resources (like images) and contain standard formatting information that would be interpreted by viewing software consistently. They were not the only ones developing systems like this; Josten’s Learning invented a similar system when they built the first multimedia encyclopedia for Compton’s New Media. Where Berners-Lee and friends had URL’s, Josten’s engineers created BRU’s, but beyond the initials the function was the same.

I don’t want to be too harsh on Berners-Lee, Cailliau, and the others who grew HTML, but I wish they’d been a little more far-sighted. I say ‘grew’ rather than ‘invented’ because it’s clear that they never sat back and asked themselves “What is a tag? What roles do they perform?” Even now, XHTML, the supposedly more rigorous (if still misnamed) descendant of HTML has fundamental inconsistencies.

For a simple example, take the <br /> tag. It exists because in HTML all whitespace (tabs, spaces, and returns) are mushed together and presented on the screen as a single space. Thus

<p>this markup</p>

and

<p>this
 
        markup</p>

come out the same on the screen. That’s fine if you know what’s going on. But what if you want to put in a line break or a space? Well, for a space you add a special character code &nbsp; and for break you add a tag <br />. Why is one a character and one a tag? Because on the day HTML’s inventors decided they needed line breaks, a tag seemed like a good way to go, even though semantically it had nothing to do with the roles of other tags. It could just as easily been &br; or something like that. That’s how HTML grew up. And thus the World Wide Web was born.

Another fundamental flaw is that the content (what to display) is all mixed up with the presentation (how to display it). What if you want to show the same document in different formats? Nope. While some tags were geared toward identifying the type of content that they enclosed (like the <p> tag), others were direct formatting instructions (like the <i> tag). This inconsistency in the role of tags in a document is a reflection of the organic (and sloppy) way that HTML was grown.

I really can’t blame the inventors of HTML for what came next. Everyone started using it. Everyone. The flaws and inadequacies of the format quickly became apparent. Different document viewers (browsers) rendered things differently. Formatting options were extremely limited. The systems were vulnerable to abuse by unscrupulous people. Right then, there was a chance for people to say, “hold on a second! Let’s take the idea of HTML and apply the lessons we’ve already learned in other branches of computing, and make something that doesn’t suck.”

Rather than scrap HTML, browser makers and others set out to fix it. That was the Big Mistake. After twenty years of tweaking and bickering and incompatible extensions introduced by browser manufacturers and squabbles and lawsuits, HTML has been upgraded from awful to poor. Along the way, companies like Adobe and Macromedia thought to get their technology adopted as a replacement to HTML (the Web in pdf? Interesting…) but those efforts were doomed from the start because they did not provide free, simple tools to create the content.

HTML’s greatest shining virtue (and it’s an awesome one) is that it’s accessible to anyone who can type. Anyone. No special tools required.

So, now we have style sheets to help separate content and presentation, XHTML to fix some of the semantic craziness of HTML, and browsers are finally starting to agree on what all the formatting instructions actually mean. We could have had that fifteen years ago if people had just let go of HTML, but here we are now, with an almost-functional system. There are still plenty of flaws, however. Things that seem so normal now that we don’t even think about how dumb they are.

Take this blog, for instance. It’s a pretty well-built Web application, based on reasonably up-to-date practices. Yet were you to click the comment link at the bottom of this episode, you would go to a new page. On that new page the browser would reload the same header and the same sidebar it just erased. What a waste! Why does it do it? Because that’s how HTML (and HTTP, the underlying part that communicates with servers) works. There have been abortive attempts to fix that over the years, but they have all been flawed. Now, at long last, techniques have been developed to overcome that problem, but they are not quite ready for prime time yet. For one thing, they are very complicated, and for another they rely on browsers working just right. Why was it so hard to implement? Because at its core the Web was not made that way.

Even in the days when almost everyone was on dialup (except the people inventing HTML), no one stopped to say, “hey, let’s make a way to only update the content that changes.” That problem has now been ‘solved’ by adding a new layer of complexity on Web sites. By adding this layer (on top of CSS and so forth), we get sensible Web applications at last, but we take away the one super-cool thing about HTML. It is no longer a simple format that can be harnessed by anyone with a text editor. We have lost the attribute that was the only reason to keep HTML around in the first place.

So now we have a system that is both inaccessibly arcane and flawed. Yay!

On a cruise ship books can make the rounds, passing from one reader to another fairly quickly. Two others in my group read Step on a Crack by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge before I did. They both agreed that the book was not very good (to paraphrase their summaries as gently as possible), so it’s fair to say that my expectations were low when I picked up the book.

My expectations were met. Had I something else to read, I would have put this thing down around chapter four and never looked back. (The chapters are very short). The first sentence is a confused and awkward bit of imagery (the back of a jacket turns away…) and that sets the tone for the whole book. We start with a murder, the untimely demise of one of the finest people the world has ever known. Her highly-trained bodyguards, who have been protecting her for several years now, are apparently unable to respond to what should be a routine medical emergency. It seems no one told them that their charge was deathly allergic to peanuts so they weren’t able to do anything about it. Oops! (The bad guy knew about her allergy, however, well enough to execute a months-long plot to infiltrate a fancy restaurant in order to put peanut oil on her dinner. Wow.) On top of that, somehow on this particular night the woman forgot to pack her own medicine. And so begins the work of the greatest criminal mastermind of the century.

But wait! Before we go any further with tales of murder and mayhem, it’s time to meet a whole bunch of Perfect People. These people do nothing to influence the plot of the story; they’re too busy being perfect. Perfect children. A perfect stranger to take perfect care of the perfect children in the time of crisis. Perfect people everywhere, doing the perfect things with perfect consistency. Bleeargh. Did I mention they have nothing to do with the plot? They are there, in fact, to perfectly NOT encumber the detective we will be following as the threadbare story develops.

Begin the crime of the century. A crime so big and so audacious it must be the work of a criminal genius. How do we know? Because the authors tell us so. With exclamation points! And occasional nonsensical italics! The NYPD is starting to look like a bunch of incompetent fools, and the press is going to have a field day. If hostages are killed, the press will rake our hero over the coals.

Only, hostages die, and for a long time it looks like the bad guys are winning, but the authors can’t be bothered to portray the actual coal-raking. In fact, the stakes for the good guys never escalate. There is no heat. (One reporter does criticize our hero in her paper, but then immediately expresses remorse and stops her persecution — taking her own step toward perfection before she can cause too much trouble for the authors.)

Then there’s the time the detective walks in and finds his grandfather dressed as a priest! (That’s their exclamation point, not mine.) Wow! what a shock! Only, it turns out that Grandpa has been a priest for years, everyone knows it, and seeing him dressed that way was no shock to anyone. The authors were just yanking our chain a bit. Whee.

Meanwhile, most of the hostages experience life-changing revelations. The perfect hostages become perfecter(!). The imperfect ones get better! For instance, the ‘fashionista’ resolves to go to rehab and stop being such a bitch all the time. Once she makes that decision, that’s it for her in this story. She makes a promise to herself to undergo a complete personality realignment and we believe her and move on. Well, the authors seem to believe her. I’m skeptical.

I hate to spoil it for you, but the good guys win in the end. In fact, they don’t have to work very hard to defeat the brilliant criminal mastermind. Sure, the bad guys got away at first, but just a little routine investigating and bam, there you have it. To avoid the authors having to get too clever, the criminals conveniently explain all the loose ends for us.

I finished the book. It didn’t take long; the type is big and there’s about fifty pages worth of blank space between chapters. One-third of what is left is a sentimental parade of sap that does nothing for the story. I set the book aside and decided not to review it here. There’s plenty of awful prose out there; you don’t need my help finding it. Then I read the back cover. “THE STUNNING #1 BESTSELLER” it says right across the top. Then it lists several newspapers who listed the book as a top-seller. What!?! This book?

I’m stunned, anyway. I decided to write a little review after all, not so much to criticize the book as the system that allowed it to attain such stature.

Usually, even with books or authors I don’t like, I can understand at least to a certain degree how they became successful. Dan Brown’s not very good but he has excellent pacing and managed to anger the right people. This book leaves me baffled.

Some guy at Booklist says, “Totally gripping and downright impossible to put down.” Gripping? No. No it isn’t. The characters are boring, there is no escalation of the stakes (unforgivable in a thriller), no character growth, not a breath of humanity anywhere to be found in these pages. The criminal plot depends on the incompetence of the good guys. Potentially gut-wrenching scenes are glossed over so we can get back to the Perfect People for another dose of sentimentality. Not gripping. USA Today chimes in as well, along with Publisher’s Weekly and a handful of book-review Web sites. Did they read a different version? One without so much suck in it? Are these people even literate?

Don’t waste your time with this book. In fact, just to be on the safe side, stay away from Patterson entirely until he proves this was just a fluke. Probably best to stay away from books published by Little, Brown, and Company (responsible for the hardcover version of this fluff) or by Vision. Somewhere there is an editor who approved this book, and I want to make sure I never encounter anything else that crossed her desk. As long as we’re learning from the mistakes of others, it’s time to take Booklist a lot less seriously as well.

The only explanation for the sales that I can come up with is the name: James Patterson. Apparently he’s pretty famous. Bookstores will pre-order a lot of copies, which drives the rankings up, which drives sales by people who won’t even read the first sentence of the story before taking it home. If it weren’t for the big name, not many people would have read the second sentence of this thing. The few that were carried through the first part by the suggestion of sex would have bailed out soon thereafter.

Is Mr. Patterson concerned about protecting his name? It doesn’t look like it. This book can’t be good for his reputation, no matter what the sales were. (I am assuming that at some point he wrote good books to establish his reputation.) He can read, I’d be willing to bet; he must know this novel is junk. Eventually, people are going to hesitate to pick up his next title, after getting insulted by a previous purchase.

Ooo! Or maybe — just maybe, mind you — Michael Ledwidge knows something. Something James Patterson would rather not become public. You see where I’m going with this? Ledwidge wrote the book but somehow coerced Patterson into putting his name on the thing as well. Farfetched? It’s a lot more plausible than the story in Step on a Crack.

And can someone tell me what that title had to do with anything?

Note that as always, if you use the above link to buy the book, I get a kickback.