UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

I assume you’re already familiar with The Transformed Man. If not (or even if so), read on.

Tonight I did something I don’t do very often… certainly, not often enough. I put my entire iTunes library on shuffle: over 13,000 songs from which the computer will select the evening’s soundtrack. After a few real dogs (seriously, don’t bother listening to the 2002 Yes shit sandwich known as Magnification), it unearthed a track I haven’t listened to in ages, William Shatner’s dramatic reading (with even more dramatic musical accompaniment) of the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy from Hamlet, juxtaposed with “It Was a Very Good Year.”

The reading of Hamlet is as overwrought as it gets — vintage Shatner. And yet, the truth must be told: Shakespeare’s words were never imbued with such clear and resonant meaning in my brain as they are with Captain Kirk’s over-the-top performance. I’m not well-versed in the theater, and as much as I’ve enjoyed the various Shakespeare productions I’ve seen over the years (mostly at the Guthrie back in high school and college), I find the language, while melodically poetic, often bewilderingly oblique in meaning. In other words, it sounds nice, but I just don’t get it. And this was just such a case. “To be or not to be…” etc. It never made much sense to me until I heard The Transformed Man, but suddenly I understood what it really meant. Thanks, Bill!

And now, thanks as well to the limitless wonders of YouTube, you can see a live performance of the piece from The Mike Douglas Show. How friggin’ awesome is that? Well, it could be a little more awesome — the sound is way off in this video clip, and it’s not because he’s lip-syncing. He’s not. And I think the performance on the album is much better. Still, it’s worth watching, if for no other reason than the groovy title cards and stage set, which I vaguely remember from the very earliest days of my youth.

And finally, in case you’re scratching your head over my enthusiasm here, you may want to consider my judgment in entertainment options by the fact that I also enjoy this. And for anyone who is not terrified by it within 10 seconds (in other words, you’re also a Magma fan), I have to ask: do you also think the “Da Zeuhl Wortz Mekanik” part that starts at 4:46 sounds like some of the incidental music that used to be in the Road Runner cartoons? I’ve always thought that.

Even I have limits though. This Magma-inspired Japanese band goes too far (but I do own one of their albums) and even Christian Vander himself can go too far, especially when he steps out from behind the kit.

P.S. What’s up with the collar?

Working from home definitely has its advantages. No commute, no oppressive cubicles, no annoying coworkers. But it does have its downsides, too. The worst, without a doubt, is the temptation to turn on the TV during the day. Not only is TV programming on weekdays unimaginably uninspired and uninteresting, but the commercials are truly painful. Most target the elderly (LifeAlert, Metamucil, etc.), but then you have the local commercials, which fall into two camps: law firms appealing to those who are at home due to injury or illness, and local businesses too cheap to spring for airtime at a decent hour. The latter category is without a doubt the worst of the bunch. And I just saw the single worst commercial ever in the history of this worst category. Luckily enough (for me, not for you, since now you’re going to have to see it too), I actually found it on YouTube. Enjoy…

Read for yourself that the Anchorage Daily News, which (apparently) has historically treated the governor favorably, is calling her out for claiming vindication in the scandal over the firing of her state trooper ex-brother-in-law. To wit:

She claims the report “vindicates” her. She said that the investigation found “no unlawful or unethical activity on my part.”

Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian.

Page 8, Finding Number One of the report says: “I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.”

In plain English, she did something “unlawful.” She broke the state ethics law.

I have felt from the beginning that we could best learn about Sarah Palin by studying the statements of Alaskans who are far more familiar with her policies and actions than most of us in the “lower 48” are. And what I’ve gotten from that has been almost unanimously negative.

Not my words.

Now we’re speaking close to my heart. Granted, I’m a freeloader in the open source world. I have yet to contribute a single line of code to an open source project. (OK, I guess that’s not entirely true: I did write a WordPress plugin. Sweet. I’m in the club! Sort of.) But I have wholly embraced open source software in my work. PHP FTW, baby! (Uh yeah… whatever.)

These days the only thing I’m a more enthusiastic and outspoken proponent of than open source software is Barack Obama. So I’m surprised it took me so long to research what he’s running his website on.

Linux PWS/1.3.28

*Whew* Glad to see it’s Linux. But what the heck is PWS? I was at a loss. Then I found this blog talking about the very same issue. And suddenly it made sense why I didn’t recognize the acronym. I never would have considered Microsoft’s Personal Web Server to be the web server of choice running on a Linux server. I am still scratching my head at it. The whole VM thing seems the only logical explanation, except that there’s no logic to explain it. At least it’s not so transparently ass-backwards as John McCain’s configuration:

Linux Microsoft-IIS/6.0

And the inexplicable:

Linux ECAcc (lhr)

Interestingly, though, a Google search for “ECAcc (lhr)” reveals a link to a Digg post entitled John McCain Owns VoteForTheMILF.com. Stay classy, San Diego.

Let’s be clear: I think the idea of running a web site under Windows in a virtual machine on a Linux box is the most incomprehensible, mind-bogglingly stupid arrangement you’d ever bother with. I’d have to guess that the sites were developed to run in a Windows environment, but when it came time to deal with practical server and network capacity issues, load balancing and whatnot, some sysadmin made the (probably prudent) decision to load balance on Linux boxes instead of Windows, but since the site was tied to some feeble Windows technology, they couldn’t just move it over to Linux wholesale.

But let’s take this a step further. Back in late spring I received an email from Barack Obama’s IT director soliciting applicants for web developer positions with the campaign. Even though the job was in Boston, I figured it would be insane not to apply, so I submitted my resume. (I never heard back, for what it’s worth.) And it’s from this that I happen to know that the campaign was specifically seeking PHP developers. Rock on.

With that in mind, the whole Windows-on-Linux-through-VM arrangement made even less sense. Why would they develop the site in PHP, run it on a Windows server (definitely not the optimal arrangement for a PHP-based app, though it certainly will work), and then VM that Windows environment on a Linux box, instead of just gearing the PHP app for a Linux server in the first place? And that’s when I remembered that just earlier in the day I had been looking at taxcut.barackobama.com. Of course! Separate third-level domains are all over Obama’s site. Let’s check the configuration on that domain. Now that’s much better:

Linux Apache/1.3.34 (Debian) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a AuthMySQL/4.3.9-2 PHP/5.2.0-8+etch10

And I think it explains a lot. Campaigns start off small. Obama had to register barackobama.com and put something up there ages ago, long before he was the Democratic nominee and the hugely successful fundraiser he became along the way. So that original site, www.barackobama.com, was probably developed on a Windows box in someone’s proverbial basement, probably when was running for the U.S. Senate or maybe even the Illinois Senate. But as the campaign has grown, its websites (plural) have grown as well, and in a decidedly open-source direction. There’s some good stuff in there. Debian (which could mean Ubuntu, too… I haven’t checked the signature on Ubuntu’s Apache package to see if it’s split from its Debian roots), PHP (and a reasonably up-to-date version at that), MySQL, etc.

It’s kind of fun to do this kind of research, as long as you don’t mind being distracted along the way, because there are plenty of weird sources of distraction.

Aside from the aforementioned MILF site (classy), and the somewhat interesting fact that searching on “PWS/1.3.28” brings back as its first result a reference to Obama’s hosting, I discovered that for some reason the page title on John McCain’s official store is “Independent Online Stores.” OK. No one looks at title bars. And even fewer web developers look at <title> tags. I know that from experience. But of course that’s just a transitional landing page, announcing that McCain wares are not actually sold by the campaign, but by independent, for-profit companies, and buying these items doesn’t translate into money going back into the campaign. Huh. I can’t quite wrap my brain around that, but I’m a lifelong, union-loving Democrat, so I guess I wasn’t meant to. The only thing that comes to mind is that maybe it has to be that way, legally, now that he’s accepted public campaign financing. Anyway, the first McCain store link I found, which as they state is apparently an independent operation not affiliated with the campaign, is, not surprisingly, running:

Windows Server 2008 Microsoft-IIS/7.0

I also found that the company that hosts some of Obama’s pages also hosts a site for the American Model Yachting Association. Really? Model yachting? That exists?