goal: to create a tracking system so that, given any set of coordinates (or streaming set of coordinates), a position can be tracked on top of a map and dynamically generated on a web page. uses? say...tracking metro cars on a metro system map, etc.

First Step: dynamically generate image using php.

Second Step: map target onto map using coordinates.

Third Step: map moving target using refreshed image or svg.

Time magazine's year-end double issue, on newsstands until Monday, is bursting with praise for the White House, and specifically Vice President Dick Cheney, who receives the red-carpet treatment from the newsweekly. In the loving hands of Time writers, the reclusive V.P. even manages to upstage Cynthia Cooper, Sherron Watkins, and Coleen Rowley, the trio of whistle-blowers who appear on the issue's cover.

The 9,700-word avalanche of Cheney puffery is composed of one long essay, another biographical profile, and a chat with his wife. (Despite the big-time rollout, Time writers didn't land any on-the-record face time with Cheney.) There's also a nifty photo essay at Time.com chronicling Cheney's all-American life: There he is as a Little Leaguer, attending his high school prom, etc.

The centerpiece of Time's package is an essay by Nancy Gibbs that trumpets the Bush-Cheney relationship as "Partnership of the Year." A gauzy, heroic painting of the two men takes up almost a full two-page spread: below it, the lead runs, "This war has two faces, one a promise, one a growl." You'd think the Time editors and writers had collectively stumbled into a time machine set for 1944. The theme of the package, put together by no fewer than 12 magazine writers and reporters, is that Cheney, with his hard work, discipline, smarts and loyalty ("steady and stalwart") has become "the most powerful deputy ever" -- and has transformed our president into a much more effective leader.

Here's the poll itself, which seems to contradict the puffery. The explanation wasn't revealed until today, when the Washington City Paper exposed it right here. From that work:

The distinction of being Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2002 fell to three persons who were unknowns in 2001: whistle-blowers Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Coleen Rowley of the FBI, and Sherron Watkins of Enron. "Who are these women?" the introduction to their profiles asked. "For starters, they aren't people looking to hog the limelight."

The same apparently can't be said of a more familiar figure who'd been a leading contender for a spot on the front of that issue: President George W. Bush.

According to four Time sources, the magazine had prepared a Person of the Year cover commemorating the partnership between Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. But it fell through after the White House balked at giving the magazine access for such a presentation. Bush aides reportedly preferred that their boss appear alone on the cover.

That's right: the reason the piece exists was that Bush & Cheney were supposed to be on the cover until the administration balked in highlighting their relationship instead of just highlighting Bush himself, resulting in a ready-to-go softball article with no hard hits inserted into the magazine. The poll? Probably TIME was miffed over their treatment, and some staffer said "Hey, why don't we stick this little poll end at the end which invalidates our entire article?" Or, perhaps, TIME commissioned the poll and then realized that it would be inappropriate to put the dynamic duo on the cover when a whopping 51% of Americans don't trust Dick Cheney. Or that 48% don't trust the President. The most telling explanation would be that somehow the White House saw the piece before it was finished, including the poll which indicates that 55% of people believe Bush's success is mainly due to his advisors. Nothing like an article highlighting the Bush/Cheney relationship to push that number even higher, right?

First, I just posted a review of Joe Millionaire on the site. I thought it was mildly enjoyable, if only because of the absurd premise. One thing I'm always confused about is the amount of time and energy spent decrying shows of this nature, when they seem less egregious than their reality-school cousins. I can't stand the premise of shows like the Bachelor, mainly because they tend to gloss over the competition laden premise with a whole bunch of nonsense like "we were meant for each other". At least FOX has the good grace to frame such a tawdy show as the slop it so richly is.

In other news, we're now locatable via GeoURL. It's fairly cool...test out looking for our physical neighbors with this link Neat, eh?

werkz advice: worth watching, though not every week.

Imagine a character who's desperate to keep his personal wealth a secret in the interest of finding true love. In order to achieve this (somewhat laudable) goal, he engages in a fairly large lie. No, I'm not talking about Joe Fox from the Nora Ephron chick-flick You've Got Mail. I'm referring to FOX's newest reality show: Joe Millionaire. The premise is simple: an average Joe is taken from his low-paying construction job, given a crash-course in how the top .001% live, and told to lie to 20 women about a supposed inheritance of $50 million. Oh, and to weed out the women, Survivor-style, until only one remains, at which point he'll have to expose the lie.

Sound perverse? You bet! Although I'm not a big fan of reality tv shows, I have always admired FOX's ability to showcase these programs for what they are: cheap sensationalism. What is running under the surface of 'The Bachelor' simply gets aired in the open in 'Joe Millionaire', which makes me glad because no one can pretend that true love is anywhere near this sordid idea. Joe's faux butler, who organizes almost everything on the show, gets to delight in telling women they've been rejected, or in showing Joe how to behave as a uber-wealthy person.

But by far, the show is best because it is so ordinary. Joe can't ride a horse well. The women manage to break an expensive lamp as soon as they arrive at the chateau. Joe almost loses his cool when a woman asks him his last name. The women (most, not all!) show up to the house dressed as inappropriately as possible, as if they could seduce him in the first five minutes. Joe agonizes about the lie. Oh, the humanity! All of these are traits which regular people exhibit, not those on television. The contestants, and Joe himself, are simply regular people, which makes their humiliation somewhat bearable.

The major flaw, of course, is that the entire appeal of the show rests on a small lie. Episodes in which Joe acts rich and the women buy it wholeheartedly are sure to be boring. Episodes (like the opener with Joe almost falling off his horse) where Joe flubs or the women suspect, will be great. With that caveat, I'm sure the entire run will provide plenty of fodder for both sides. Unlike those 'nice' shows, Joe will deliver what it promises: tawdry entertainment.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'm an interventionist. That means dealing with problems the world over before they turn into huge problems that have no easy solution in sight. Being an interventionist means avoiding the ostrich in the sand/pure isolationism scenario, but it doesn't mean renouncing diplomacy, as the current administration would have you believe. The moment that the tiny equation of "negotiation = appeasement" became ingrained in White House heads, something good was lost. It's like the slashdot hitler effect: the longer a conversation continues, the more likely that someone will compare another person to Hitler or the Nazis in a pathetic attempt to reduce their argument to moral clarity. Say it with me, conservative kids: President Clinton's State Department did not give the Sudetenland to Germany, er...nuclear weapons to North Korea. And the current administration, not the last one, sought to portray diplomatic measures with failure. Hence the current situation, which is spiraling out of control.

Oh, and there's a new movie review up. Check it out!

werkz advice: go see it!

One of those rare movies that manages to isolate audiences into those who "get it" and those who "don't get it", Adaptation is a great flick. The story is simple: it follows the path a book takes to become a screenplay, if the book in question can't be adapted normally. Think, Being John Malkovich meets Last Action Hero: all of the traditional Hollywood screenplay cliches are stomped on by this film, something that should have been done long ago. So go see it today!

With the New Year just getting started, I'd like to look back and offer some thoughts about the website that I feel have been coming for a long time. First, to cover the most commonly voiced sugggestion that the site needs images, or rather, better content, I'd like to offer this thought: you're wrong. The site can be resized down to an absurd size, or expanded to a huge monitor with no ill effects. It can be viewed in web browsers from the mid nineties or the latest versions and still retains all the useful information. Only a few web browsers with faulty standards (Netscape 4, anyone?) manage to mangle it. As for the content itself, I feel that the pieces on the website reflect things well. Reviews have become shorter and more useful, so that a quick (should I go or not?) decision can be made. Blog pieces cover a wide spectrum, but always try to be thought provoking. And I'm pleased with the work over on the advice side.

Is there room for improvement? Sure. I want a better system to allow people to customize how the site looks. I want the origins side to be fully complete, so that any possible question will have an answer. I want some cool things to show up on the icing side that aren't purely theoretical in nature. I'd like SVG to mature to the point where the main logo could be redesigned. I'd like more article and blog pieces from my comrades-in-arms. But overall I'm happy.

Why, you ask? Well, one thing I've noticed about the vast majority of websites out there, especially on the blog side, is that they are pre-made. Joe Blow goes out, picks up a copy of moveable type, and goes to town. Imagine if computers became so cheap that they were virtually free. Say, around fifty bucks for the whole deal. Obviously, tons of people would purchase computers who had never dealt with them before, simply because they were so low-priced and the peer-pressure to be like everyone else. Now, there'd still be computer manufacturers, so computers could vary in features and speed. But in the end, Joe Blow would have a nice computer and might be able to watch movies on it, play cds and send e-mail.

But what happens when the cd-player breaks? Joe has no idea how the thing works: he just paid a Grant to get one. If I can go out and assemble the same machine for a simple Hamilton, the distinction is lost on Joe because the cost is already so low. But if my cd-player breaks, I can repair it, unlike Mr. Blow. So even though I may not install the latest cool-looking screensaver (because it uses up memory and doesn't add any value) my computer is still good at what I need it to do. And herein lies the twist: if I want to turn my computer into a device capable of turning all the lights on and off throughout the house, or telling whether the fridge is low on soda, perhaps I can. Joe, of course, cannot. I'm limited only by my desire to put the time in to add new features to me website. Joe is limited to the features that came with his pre-rolled website. Sure, some companies may attempt to allow him to do almost everything, but they're just slapping a fancy skin on top of some complicated innards, and you'd be foolish to think that knowledge of one (when I click this, it blinks!) translates into a knowledge of the core. Imagine studying to be a doctor and never opening a cadaver or seeing an image of what lay inside a person. Then imagine the same doctor trying to operate. Bad idea, right? Likewise, an ignorance of how a website works can lead to all sort of bad design ideas. Consider the following url: http://gnxp.blogspot.com/2002_06_01_gnxp_archive.html#85205606. Yeah, that's intuitive, right? There's no way to guess what such an article is about, or whether the url will remain constant, or anything. It's certainly not easy to write down, is it? What would the next article be titled...who knows?When I designed the archive system here, I wanted two things to be true: one, that you didn't need to every actually use an "archive" link to get there ...if you typed in the section, subsection and articleid you'd get any article. (Although you can reach articles by going through the archive section, you don't need to as long as you know the articleid.) That way, links inserted months ago would always be relative; two, that the archive system itself would be intuitive enough for anyone to use: it would show how the website looked like on a particular date, rather than simply having a list of all the articles in one spot. I think I managed to achieve both, while keeping the url as short as possible. I also managed to keep the navigation system the same, so if you type in http://dredwerkz.com/archive:03-01-03/00:00:00/origins/site/ you get the same effect as http://dredwerkz.com/origins/site/ . No new interface to relearn or get used to. Ultimately, I'm sure, simple things like this will be integrated into pre-rolled solutions. But I hope to be ahead of the game by then.