Chess is a battle; Go is a war.

In the first presidential debate last night, I think Obama made an excellent point about the difference between a strategy and a tactic. Perhaps it's sometimes hard to tell the difference; it's a matter of scope.

If you compare: invading Iraq verses the troop surge, then the invasion is the strategy and the troop surge is the tactic.

If you compare the troop surge verses force dispersal then the troop surge is a strategy and the force dispersal is a tactic.

Some might say that if you compare the games of chess and checkers, that checkers is the tactical game and chess is the strategic game.

Then again if you compare chess with the game of Go, you might think, as has been said many times, that "Chess is a battle and Go is a war."

Near the end of the debate, Obama made a huge point about strategy verses tactics, that the strength of our military is dependent on the strength of our economy.

Here's a very paraphrased version of what he said. I've trimmed for coherence in writing verses speaking I've cut out things that aren't relevant to my point. Since I've changed it so much, I won't even put quotes around it. See the transcript for exactly what Obama said:

China is active in regions like Latin America, and Asia, and Africa. The conspicuousness of their presence is only matched by our absence, because we've been focused on Iraq.

There has never been a country on Earth that saw its economy decline and yet maintained its military superiority.

The troop surge might have turned out to be a fine tactic in the context of a bad strategy. It's penny wise, pound foolish. So it's not a matter of making the right moves, it's the game you choose to play. Obama is right about the strategy, and Obama is right about which table we're sitting at, who we are sitting across from, and about the size of the board and the shape of the pieces.

Google's new web browser, Chrome sounds like it's been nicely designed with security in mind, but their announcement and cute comic book don't say anything about mashups security. There are some interesting browser-side approaches to making javascript mashups less scary. I hope they've considered mashups in the design of their separation system.

If anyone has pointers to this topic, let me know.

I've been pretty impressed with Ubiquity, a Firefox extension that combines web APIs with the command-line and some natural language processing, so you can compose together applications using javascript in a very unix-y way.

As an experiment and a weekend hack, I wanted to create an interface to Drupal, the awesome software that I run my blog on. I have something pretty cool working, but sadly, I can't really recommend using it, because the REST API that I integrated with has some serious problems. Maybe I'll get around to re-implementing this with the Services API system, but it's late Sunday and I haven't gotten around to that yet, so I thought I'd post. Anyone is welcome to pick this up and make it work for real :)

Read on for a screenshot and the source code.

Folks often ask me for bike buying advice, mostly for commuting, so I thought I'd drop in a few links here to bikes that look good to me for commuting on. Not that I've tried them all, but if you try them and like them, and they're in your price range, I think you'd be just fine buying them :)

You definitely have to test ride a few bikes to see what you like. Try a bike with flat handlebars and a bike with road handlebars.

Commuter bikes sorted by price:

For our first anniversary, and our honeymoon, Anna & I went to Costa Rica. We just got back on Wednesday. It was an incredible time. Costa Rica is a beautiful country, and everyone we met was very friendly and outgoing. I think my favorite thing was all of the cute or amazing animals. Also, lots of the restaurants were hardly even "inside". They were mostly open to the air, although covered, so sometimes frogs or kittens would be hanging out with you while you were eating.

I had heard a lot of good things about Costa Rica, and I can wholeheartedly echo them all! Here are some photos below, but there are lots more, so check out the gallery. Don't worry, we've already taken out repetitive pictures and cropped them :)

We went during the rainy season, but it actually didn't rain on us except when it didn't really matter. When we were in the hot springs, it started pouring, but it was really warm rain, and it just made the experience of the hot waterfalls all the more intense. On the colder side of things, we also went whitewater rafting, and that was the only other time it rained while we were actually doing anything, so again it didn't really matter. We did get kinda lucky that it didn't rain while we were on the beach and stuff.

Some random surprising facts about Costa Rica: Intel's microprocessor facility in Costa Rica is responsible for 20% of Costa Rican exports and 4.9% of the country's GDP. They actually make a lot of money from high tech and from tourism.

After fighting and winning a civil war, a rebel force abolished the army elected an assembly, wrote a constitution, gave Blacks and women the right to vote, and then the rebel junta stepped out of power and Costa Rica became a democracy. Wow.

On our first few days, we were in La Fortuna exploring the rain forest, relaxing by the pool, watching the live volcano erupt, and riding some ziplines. We also visited some hot springs which were awesomely beautiful and relaxing.

Our first day in San Jose, we went to a butterfly garden. The tour guide seemed very into the butterflies. When she would pick one up, she would gently blow on it, and when Anna asked, she said it was just to say "hi" and to relax the butterfly.

We flew out of San Jose to La Fortuna on this little airplane. No security, no bar codes on the boarding passes. No flight attendants.

Here's me with some Iguanas. This tree was covered with them. Costa Ricans call them "Tree Chickens" because they taste like chicken. By the way they love telling you this, I must have heard that joke like 5 times. They don't eat them anymore because they're protected, and the population is therefore increasing again.

In La Fortuna, we went on a boat on the Rio Frio and saw lots of animals, including several howler monkeys, this cayman alligator, as well as lizards who could walk on water, lots of birds, etc. Check out all our pictures.

The howler monkeys make a really cool, really loud noise that sounds like a huge gorilla or something, but they're really pretty small. Wikipedia says they are the loudest land mammal.

La Fortuna has a big, active volcano, and we got to watch it erupting a bit, especially while we were doing these zipline rides. By the way, the ziplines were fun, but I wouldn't recommend them as being particularly interesting. They were billed as a kind of canopy tour, but really they were more like an amusement park ride.

A pair of Macaw parrots lived in our hotel and this one beat me at foosball. Apparently they mate for life, according to wikipedia. These two were never apart whenever we saw them. Also, one of our cab drivers lived nearby and said he is in a battle with those parrots and they hate him. They did have a LOT of attitude.

After La Fortuna, we flew back to San Jose, and then drove to Manuel Antonio where we toured the national park. This was the most amazing animal viewing we did. Our guide had this tripod-mounted monocular or telescope or something, and he would spot tiny or distant animals and set up the telescope to let us view them.

Most of the time, we would try to spot whatever it was, a tiny frog or group of bats or something with the naked eye, and we couldn't see it because these animals all have great camouflage. Several of these pictures were taken through that lens, which is why they have such high resolution.

This is a three-toed sloth, which are hard to spot and very slow moving. Anna actually spotted one on her own at our hotel one day. Mostly, they look like a ball of fur, but with the telescope, we could actually get a look at its face. I still can't actually figure out what a sloth looks like altogether because all of the photos of them just looked photoshopped to me. Like, where is that arm coming from?!

This frog was tiny and hard to see :)

Lounging Lizard:

One of my favorite animals was the capuchin monkey. They were so cute and curious, and they were kleptomaniacs, but they didn't steal anything from me. A few days later, we got to watch an entire troupe move through the forest while we were kayaking, and they came over to check us out, so we got to see them really close. It was really fun to watch them jump around between the trees and run across the ground. We also saw a little baby all alone following the big group, but a minute later, mom came over and baby climbed up on mom and they zoomed off. You need to see the high resolution version of this picture too :)

Their faces look so old and wise and mysterious, but then they act like little kids. Some stupid tourist was feeding some of them (which is really bad for them) and she was teasing them with a banana. When he didn't get the treat, one of the monkeys ran over to someone's backpack and reached into the pocket and tried to grab something, but someone chased him away.

This was while we were on the beach, and there are all kinds of things trying to get you and your stuff. We saw that monkey try to grab something, we saw a raccoon trying to get into a bag, not to mention the thieves that we didn't see but were warned about approximately 100 times. Also, there was a poisonous tree on the beach with a sign saying not to sit under it. In Spanish, this tree is called manzanilla de la muerte, or "little apple of death". The Iguanas can actually eat the fruits, though.

Here's a beach photo. We swam in the warm waters a lot. This was on the pacific side, by the way, not the Caribbean.

Our hotel in Manuel Antonio was so beautiful. Definitely the nicest place we've ever stayed in. The room even had an etched window. Most everywhere we went, except San Jose, looked this lush. Costa Rica is kinda like Portland in that it gives the impression that if you stopped fighting off the plants, they would just take over.

After Manuel Antonio, we drove back to San Jose in a rented car. This was about 200km, and the roads were insane. They were really winding, and everyone wanted to pass everyone all the time. Also there were features like dirt roads, and the roads didn't have names mostly.

Then there were these insane "bridges" that weren't originally meant for cars but for trains, where you'd have to wait for 10 minutes to cross because there were folks crossing in the other direction. To the left, you can see that they're building a new bridge, which is like half done, but it looked better already than the one I was using!

There were lots of school kids out in uniform and lots of people on bikes in all kinds of weather. These two look like they're having a great time.

So that's it! That's just a sampling of all of our pictures, so if you want to see more monkeys, flowers, frogs, and other fun stuff, go check out the gallery.

Lots of love,

isaac & anna

In looking at how my blog does OpenID login and comments, I was really wishing that it did what I would expect: When someone wants to post a comment, all I care about is their identity (which is mostly just to show that they're not impersonating someone else), and whether or not they are a spammer.

The Good

OpenID and Captcha is all you need to comment

So ideally, my blog could just ask for a commenter's OpenID and have them answer a captcha. Unfortunately, Drupal's current OpenID implementation has the same problem as others I've seen, which is the obsession with people having an "account".

A site's OpenID implementation should not require an account, password, confirmation of email, and an OpenID. I was excited when I realized that Blogger has the right interface for commenting; an OpenID login, and a captcha (don't tell any spammers what it says!):

The Bad

I need your Google password to continue
I was all ready to give Blogger all kinds of props when I noticed that their login screen asks me for my Google password. Now, Blogger is actually owned by Google, but not everyone knows that, and so this looks like a phishing attack.

You should not give out your Google password to a third party web site. It's just a bad idea. One simple example why: Email can often be used to reset your password to another web site that has your private information in it. It's bad enough that sites like Twitter ask for your Google password when creating an account. Google shouldn't make people think it's OK to give third party sites your password by using a login screen like this. That's bad.

The Ugly

I have descended into a no-man's land on LiveJournal

I saw that LiveJournal supports OpenID and I thought I'd try it out. Their comment system looks fine, but then the integration with everything else is just a mess. I'm logged in, but I don't have an "account". The first thing I see when I log in is a link that says "Update your Journal" but when I click it, I get an error message saying that I don't have one. I can configure my account, and it says that it has emailed me instructions (I never got them) and gave me a helpfully random URL as my blog, which, when I click it, is just an error. LiveJournal makes OpenID look broken and hard to use :(

I admit, LJ gave me fair warning, "Our OpenID consumer support is very new. That is, external users logging in with their identity here will find some rough edges while we work on smoothing it all out."

This has been the state of affairs for months, though, and I'm surprised that they can't at least give me a link to somehow create the right kind of account.

If you know of any other really elegant uses of OpenID or OpenID design patterns, please email me, and I'll post whatever I collect later. You can also leave a comment on Reddit. You are welcome to leave a comment below, but you'll have to create an account and answer a captcha. Sorry about that ;)

I've just released feed-cli: a Really Simple way to generate RSS feeds from the command line. This program is implemented in Haskell :)

feed-cli generates RSS 2.0 feeds based on command line arguments. Use it to create and update feeds from shell scripts, build scripts, cron jobs, CGIs, or other programs instead of using a library.

Some Examples

./feed-cli new-feed -tTitleOfFeed -d"Feed Description" \
  -o/tmp/feed.xml  -lhttp://www.syntaxpolice.org

./feed-cli new-item -t"entry of the day" -d"This is a description of this feed item." \
   -u/tmp/feed.xml  -lhttp://www.syntaxpolice.org

ls -l | ./feed-cli new-item --pre --pipe-mode -t"directory contents" \
  -u/tmp/feed.xml  -lhttp://www.syntaxpolice.org